a dream

Last night I dreamt that I went to a large, old theater to watch a film with a friend. The theater seemed to be in a former Communist country in Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union. The lobby was grey concrete and glass, but the main hall was baroque, with bright red carpets, chandeliers, and freshly painted white moldings on the ceilings. There were only a few other people there, and they seemed to be Kazakhs. The film was in black and white. All the lights were on and it was bright. At one point I looked up in the balcony and saw Arvo Pärt playing the clarinet, and I took out my clarinet and played along. Next to Arvo Pärt was a woman. Then the film was over and we left the hall. When I entered the lobby, holding the clarinet, I realized that I didn't have the case. I didn't remember having the case, or even taking the clarinet out of it and putting it together, but I went to the hall to look for it, doubting it was there. In the back of the hall, on the bright red carpet, I saw two black wallets. They were both worn and one was very thick. I looked around to see if anyone was looking. No one was. I nervously picked up the wallets and put them in my backpack, which I didn't have before. I went to my seat to look for my clarinet case but couldn't find it. After I left the theater, at some point, I looked in the thick wallet and saw that it was full of many $50 and $100 bills. The bills were fresh and almost stuck to each other. Nervously, I took out a $50 and a $100 bill and threw it in the bag. Then I walked around thinking that I shouldn't take the money and also that I should take more. Outside, in front of the theater were buses waiting for us. We were on the campus of a school. It was a boarding school in New Hampshire called Exeter, the rival school of the boarding school I went to in real life. The buses were on the street at the top of a hill. I walked down the hill and wandered aimlessly. I ended up in the stairway of a modern building. The walls were very white, and there was a large window that looked out onto grassy landscape. There was a water fountain in the stairwell. I looked in the bag at the wallet and the money, not knowing whether I should put the bills back or I should take more. The bills I had taken were folded up small. I had crumpled them up in my hand nervously, but I don't remember when. Somehow, they ended up folded, not crumpled. I left the stairwell and saw an asian girl behind a counter in what looked like a student center. I considered giving the wallets to her, but didn't know whether to put back the money first or take more or just give them as they were. I went outside. Outside I noticed that the landscape was very beautiful. The grass and trees were a lush green. I wanted to get back to the buses but didn't know the way. The roads were very windy and hilly. I walked along one and ended up somewhere that seemed to be the athletic fields. Nearby looked like the buses, but they weren't. I was running as fast as I could but moving very slowly. I walked a different direction along another windy road downhill and suddenly saw that the campus was on a stone cliff. About 100 meters below, I could see waves from the sea crashing against the rocks. I thought that the campus was truly beautiful. I kept walking and, turning the corner, I reminded myself that Exeter wasn't on top of a stone cliff by the sea. When I got around the corner, as if to appease my thought, I saw, about only 50 meters below, a harbor with sailboats which looked like Boston. That seemed to make more sense, although Exeter isn't in Boston. But the harbor satisfied me anyway. I was getting further and further away from any buildings. I felt scared and lost. Then I saw a small back door of a building built into the side of a stone wall on the left side of the road. I went inside. It was a stairwell. I walked upstairs into more open space but then heard someone coming. I became afraid and went back downstairs towards the door. I stood still by the door. The person, who was a girl, an Exeter student with long, reddish, curly hair, came towards me. I became very afraid and wondered whether I should make myself invisible. I knew I could, if I tried hard enough. I tried and became invisible. I tried to remain perfectly still. The girl looked confused because she thought she had heard something. As she got closer to me, I became afraid that she would touch me, so I pushed her away. Surprisingly, she wasn't surprised at being pushed by something she couldn't see. There was more interaction with the girl, but I don't remember anymore exactly what it was. I awoke.

subway

NYC construction site

Beton

So as not to be alone Otto read a book that had been given to him by someone he lived with for two months in a foreign city, where Otto was now. The book was called Beton, and it was about a lonely old man who cannot bring himself to write the first sentence of a book he has been working on for years about Mendelsohn-Bartholdy. The man is a misanthrope and suffers from loneliness. The loneliness he suffers from is not the adolescent kind that is actually a longing for the company of others. It is an illness. The man suddenly dreams of traveling, the one thing he has real passion for, besides Mendelsohn-Bartholdy, he believes, but he is too ill, he says. Otto was surprised, with both pleasure and fear, at how similar he was to the lonely, ill misanthrope, and he felt less alone although he was not any less alone. Otto didn't understand why the book was called Beton, which in German means "concrete," but any book called Concrete Otto would have at least picked up at a bookstore to look through.

The Museum

So as not to be alone Otto went to the museum. He walked through the city in the snow. Walking over the empty fields leading to the main train station, he thought about the war. He thought about the war again walking through the main hall of the museum. The floor was grey stone and exactly level, which he found endlessly beautiful. The long wing attached to the main hall looked like it used to be a slaughter house. It smelled like a horse stall.

Mondays

So as not to be alone Otto went to the bar around the corner, the one that is actually around three corners, with the mauve walls. On Mondays there is a Belgian there cutting hair. The bartender is a woman called Eliot who is French but pronounces Eliot like in English. The last time Otto saw her she was growing her hair. The last time Otto saw her she was eating meat at the Spanish restaurant at the end of the block. Her lips were glistening from the fat. Actually, the walls aren't mauve but more like deep raspberry. That might also be wrong. In any case they aren't blue or green or black or yellow. It's probably not wrong that they are more like deep raspberry, even if they are not actually deep raspberry, if deep raspberry is even a color. It was Monday, and Otto washed his hair in case he decided to have it cut.

France

So as not to be alone Otto thought about the time he was in France. It was sunny, the food was good, and he was young. Being young, his body felt different. He didn't feel it as much as he does now. Sleep came without effort. Too many things came without effort. The things that came only with effort still come that way. Fortunately, Otto learned to enjoy effort, even if only because he had to. That's why Otto isn't in France anymore.

Hello

So as not to be alone Otto decided to call his friend Martin, the one who is always wearing the dark blue shirt. Not feeling much like talking, however, he decided to send him a text message instead. "Dear Martin," Otto wrote. Dissatisfied, he deleted "Dear" and deleted "Martin" in the process. He wrote, "Hello," and then stared at the blinking line where the next letter was to appear. Otto thought, blink - blink - blink. Blink - blink - blink - blink - blink. He began to worry that the screen would go blank from prolonged inactivity, like the great yawn of a visitor signaling it was time to leave. To avoid despair, Otto just sent the message as it was and lay down to wonder whether he would receive a response.

out on the street

So as not to be alone, Otto went out onto the street where there were many people all the time. Sure enough, the street was full of people now as well. Otto didn't know any of them, at least of the ones he saw. Certainly there were some he didn't see but knew. But they just as well could not have been there at all. In fact, they weren't. Somewhere there were always people unseen but known. That seemed just then to be less troubling than the fact that those he could see he didn't know. The distance separating Otto from those he knew was certainly greater than that separating him from those all around him but didn't know. And maybe it was precisely this relative proximity that led Otto to believe he would be less lonely less alone. Who knows.

Hunger

When I asked her whether she was hungry yet, she said because she had just eaten something sweet. When I asked her what it was, she said it was something with something sweet in it. I looked at her, and she said it was like a bread with something sweet inside that was a kind of bean. She said because her English is not so good, I knew that. When I asked her when she would be hungry again, she said why are you always asking me about food. I said I'm not asking her about food, I'm asking about eating. She said what's the difference. I said one is a noun the other is a verb, one is a thing the other is an action. She looked at me as if my face became funny but in a way one could not laugh about. Actually, I said, I was asking about hunger, which is more different than food than eating is. She looked at me again. I said in Africa people are hungry but have no food and cannot eat. She said we're not in Africa. I said that was just an example. She said where she came from eating and food and hunger were all the same, they were all related. Everything is related but not the same, I said. Are you the same as your sister, I asked. No! That's different, she said. See, I said, it's different. She shook her head and went back to her work. It was then that my hunger began to frighten me.

tabula rasa

The best things that happened to Otto were the ones that he had never expected because he had not imagined them. Whether he could have imagined them he wasn't sure. On the one hand, it seemed he indeed could have, since after they happened, he imagined them. On the other hand, just because things are imagined after they happen doesn't mean they were imaginable beforehand.

It was not coincidence. It was Otto. As soon as something entered into his imagination, he picked at it obsessively like an itchy scab until it became a dull scar consisting of layers upon layers of imagining. When the thing he imagined ultimately happened, it touched not him but the scar, and he could hardly feel it.

The only defense mechanism Otto had was to imagine as little as possible what might happen. Thus, except for what was absolutely necessary, he made no plans, followed no schedule, committed himself to nothing. Often he loved waking up with the day before him as a tabula rasa. Sometimes he despaired.

Otto

Otto Malik came to me the other day, as I was sitting at my desk by the window pretending to be working but actually looking out at the windows across the street, or the trees across the field, depending on whether I was at the apartment in the city or the home in the countryside, and said, you know it doesn't really matter where you are, what matters is that I'm here telling you, telling you that it looks as if it's about to rain. Annoyed that he was interrupting me as I was working just to tell me it was about to rain, and not feeling that I had enough patience just then to find out why that would be important, to either him or me, I didn't even look up. I paid him no attention. I paid him too much attention, but I didn't show him that I was paying any attention at all. Of course he knew, though, that I had heard, and even listened, and probably that I was in wonder. Oh to do all that with the most trivialist of statements. But I persisted, and so did he. Finally, I said, are you going anywhere, and he left. That's not what I had meant, but maybe it's not what he had meant either.

Every day is a new day

minimalism

"At its essence, minimalism is about repetition." But an example of extreme minimalism in music would be a single tone, where there is no repetition, and in art a canvas of a single color, where there is no repetition either. Indeed repetition is precisely not minimalistic in that it is almost by nature superfluous, although precisely in nature it is not superfluous; in nature nothing is really superfluous. Repetition may serve as a means of bringing out a work's fundamental features, but that does not make it one of minimalism's fundamental features. Indeed, to the extent that a piece must employ abundant repetition to express its fundamental features, it is not necessarily any less complex than a piece that coats its fundamental features in a rich narrative. In this sense, Steve Reich's music is no more "minimalistic" than Mahler's; it only sounds that way. A better example of minimalism is the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose aesthetic quality is contained and revealed in the skeletal structure itself, i.e., the work's fundamental features. Perfect unity of aesthetics and structure is found only and everywhere in nature, which is full of patterns making up a thing's structure and also consisting of its beauty. It is not repetition that is the essence of minimalism but patterns, which is essential to any structure. The paintings of Agnes Martin, for example, are repetitive only if we start with a single rectangle, but seen as a whole they rather present a pattern. Interestingly, the beauty there is not in the pattern itself or its repetitiveness but in the tonal gradations the pattern reveals, or indeed create. I guess we humans, too, when seen as parts of human kind also simply make up a pattern whose beauty is in the gradations only the pattern itself reveals.

Solidarität

Last night I went to a "soli" party at a squatted housing complex. "Soli" is short for "Solidarität" and means that the proceeds from the party go to some political cause. "Solidarity" means "unity (as of a group or class) that produces or is based on community of interests, objectives, and standards." Indeed, the party was like a herd of sheep, except that one couldn't just piss wherever. While manouvering myself toward the bathroom, or anywere else, I was pushed and shoved the same way I used to be while getting on a crowded bus in Russia, except there the point wasn't to have fun and solidarity was not a cause but a mandatory fact of life. In both places, however, each little push and shove contained the potential to blow up the basis of civilization, I felt. After about an hour, I asked myself, "why am I here," and left. Solidarity is a nice concept but uncomfortable in the flesh.

trains

Yesterday I went to take a train to the woods in the west of the city, but for some reason there were no trains. As I stood on the platform waiting, I read in the book I had taken with me to read on the train about a woman on a train who said that she would like to look longer at the small, abandoned train stations but the train stopped there for only one or at most two minutes. Actually, there were trains, but not to where I wanted to go and despite the schedule as well as the fact that I had taken these trains many times before at the same time. The passage in the book following the one about the woman on the train was about sheep, but I was too distressed about the missing trains to pay attention. In the end, I ended up taking a train back home, wondering if the cellist would be playing at the station near me. He wasn't.

Ich habe schon

A man came into the Vietnamese restaurant on Adalbertstrasse the other evening and went from table to table asking for money. When he got to the table next to mine, the young German man sitting there said, "Ich habe heute schon gespendent" ("I already donated today").

Sing me a song

I recently reread Franny from Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. The first time I read it must have been at least a decade ago. I remember being surprisingly moved by it, but now I'm mostly surprised by how little I actually remembered of it. For example, I didn't remember that Franny went to visit her boyfriend at his college; I thought they were both in New York. I didn't remember that they were eating at a restaurant fancy enough to serve snails and frog legs; I thought they were at a diner. I didn't remember that the occasion for the date was "the Yale game." I didn't remember Franny's love letter, and certainly not the spelling mistakes in them, or that she fainted, or that, as she was lying in the backroom of the restaurant, recovering, the boyfriend basically said to her, "I hope we can still have sex later, it's been so long."

What I do remember was Franny's despair at the smallness and meaninglessness of everything and everyone including, most immediately, the boyfriend she was talking to and the false modesty with which he was telling her about his paper on Flaubert. I also remember being reminded by this scene of my relationship with one of my best friends from boarding school. Unfortunately, the boyfriend reminded me of myself. I had never thought that I could be so male.

Yesterday I wondered where all the people who made Salinger so famous by so closely relating to Franny and Zooey and The Catcher In the Rye were. Then it occurred to me that they're everywhere but closeted. Some part of everyone believes, like Franny or Zooey or Holden Caulfield, that everything is small and meaningless and that everyone is "phony," but it's covered, layer by layer, with the thickening resignation to being phony in order to cope with the mounting evidence that smallness and meaninglessness are inevitable. Those who refuse to cope are either gone from this world or hiding in some dim, dusty corner of it. Even if they found each other, what would there be to communicate but bitter howls and screeches? Better to stay in the world and sing. At least it sounds nice.

"I have nothing to say."

Once, my grandparents visited me at boarding school during "grandparents' weekend." My grandparents only just happened to be visiting from Japan, and at a reception the headmaster, an unshakably cheerful Quaker who always told us students to get "high ON LIFE," noted that there were grandparents visiting "from as far away as Japan!" The grandparents were given a thorough tour of the campus, pictured above, and then gathered at a reception at the headmaster's home. When we were greeted by the headmaster at his front door, my grandfather took his hand and said, slowly and carefully, "I have nothing to say."

It goes on.

I used to admire Wittgenstein's famous quote, "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen." But now I'm beginning to believe just the opposite. What's important is not content or style but constancy. What's so fascinating about the writing of Genazino, for example, is how, without a story, the narrative must dance with the problem of what to say when, in the end, there is really nothing to say at all. At least this has always been a problem for me. One lonely winter in St. Petersburg, I fantasized about lying on the floor next to a friend lying in bed in a tiny room a few hours before dawn, talking. It was dark except for a little moonlight coming in from the tall window at our heads. We were exhausted but in no hurry to sleep. Over the years, I've had that fantasy several times, but it never developed so far as to contain any conversation beyond "Anna?" "Yes?" What we said didn't matter. My fantasy was saying and listening to what's said precisely when there is nothing to say. It seems to me only then there's real communication, the essence of which is that, like life, it goes on.