Fixed in the existence of your gaze.

It is said about Kierkegaard that he cannot be understood without Regine Olsen.

Fate has bent our existences into each other. Steel folds into a mesh of our whispers. We are hermeneutically indeterminately interwoven. Our understanding of the world, and thus all that we are capable of being, clots from the murmuring glimmer of our mutual presence.

We can no longer cut ourselves apart. It is too late. We have already taken hair and skin, speaking and walking, voice and feeling, from each other.

I open the door to Vera’s room, fall into her bed with a crying fit and wait for her to hug me.

[Something happens that I can’t define further. A new rupture, a new, more terrible injury with E.]

I now count the minutes every day.
And I write along my pain.
And I become leathery and bitter.
But I can break it open.

I used to say: breakups are determined by how much you can go.

I wish the feeling I have right now would stay. This openness and acceptance.

For today, the plan was to get by. Overeating is part of it.

Trees also lose their leaves in winter. It is okay to decay as a person.

There is little water in the desert. But there is life in it.

Life in this consecration to death is yours. Because life celebrates on the deceased bodies, and it will dance there forever.

Every adopted sentence of this culture is a tear on me.

I feel uncomfortable when people on the street hear me. Many in Neukölln switch to Turkish when I walk past them.

But the worst Germans speak so superficially, are so not themselves that it doesn’t even matter what they are saying and whether anyone hears them.

It’s hard to show your real self to others.

I am feeling worse than I can admit to myself.
I miss people more than I can admit to myself.

I am actively hiding. If I had always shown myself when I bumped into people, they would know me.

My project is not an academic one, but one of life. I wanted to put flesh on the attempts of theory. I wanted to paint out life. I wanted to show life and thereby live myself. I failed. There is no more life. There is no more self. There is only my failure. And in this inability lies my beginning.

Poetry shouldn’t look and feel like poetry.
Theory shouldn’t look and feel like theory.

With every sentence and every word we create a space.

As soon as you admit something to yourself, a weakness, you have basically already overcome it.

I produce these texts like seeds in the earth, like vines in the hillsides. I collect and harvest every year.

We can only look at ourselves openly when our addictive behavior has become more painful than the reality it suppresses.

I grow out of the injuries, the failure, the incapacity.

They adhere to me. The trunk in which they are cut is my integrity. I can sustain. I can persist.

It means not to flourish, but it means to survive. And no tree blooms all year.

Humankind is a people blessed with miracles. Miracles are part of the nature of their existence.

Because all that troubles us are people. We are hurt and violated constantly. But the miracles also come to us – every day.

Who was seen by their parents? I do not know these people.

We were not seen by our parents, in our childhood, in adult life. We are unseen, unrecognized beings.

Now when we choose sexual partners, love partners, life partners, we touch that realm.

Our sexual partners can see us. We hope to be seen by them. That’s what love and sexuality are about: being seen, being recognized, and being exegated.

Now, if we have been unseen all our lives, we look for partners who can’t see us. There are different expressions of this.

These are people who have not been seen themselves, and who continue this not seeing towards themselves and towards others.

I call them self-distant people.

Love sleeps in these people. We want it to come to us.

We step into self-distant appreciation schemes, and try to satisfy them. We try to please a person, to live up to them, to be loved by them.

But we want, importantly, to be loved not as ourselves, but as self-distant versions of ourselves. We want to be appreciated as something we want to be, but are not.

Because being rejected in a self-distant manner promises to be less hurtful to us than being rejected for who we really are.

For me, it’s about accepting life. And to accept that its “facti” will never change. That one always remains bound to the limitations of one’s own starting conditions. And that one is beautiful in it. That it is not about drafting something, being something, getting somewhere. But as one is, as what one is, shines and is sufficient. Is enough. Is the end point. The equilibrium of existence.

Because in this failure, the opposite side always shone. In this path of failure, in this catastrophic sequence, there has always been life. There was always a shining. That which shone there, the moments of shining, were not only an overcoming, drafting or surmounting. That which shone there was also the magic of survival itself. Of pure being-alive, as one rarely allows oneself to feel.

Self-closeness for me means confronting one’s own fatality. We lie in failure with every fiber. Everything of us is fractured and broken. We are nothing. Not a piece, not a whole, not a sovereign. The best we can do is to gather the shards of what was.

And in this gathering activity there is hope, this gathering activity is hope. The shards of a broken vase that never was. We see our image in the association of the fragments of our failure

Hope is not a step to be taken, it is something in us.

As long as our existence is bearable, our being-alive is already welling up. We do not have to do anything. We are machines of hope. Originality flows insatiably from us. Every gait, every strike, every doing and thinking, is a beacon of our resistance.

To that come the impossibilities for which we have to do nothing but to persevere and show ourselves.

People fall in love with us all the time, we can’t do anything about it. On the street, we are beset by love-congratulations. We don’t have to do anything, and people love us.

The only criterion is the degree to which we show ourselves. We have to give people the opportunity to love us. We have to let people love us.

There is also the criticism, the looking away and the denial. Alienating human experiences. It is about enduring them like rain. We must have a bark and stand in the weathers. This is existence. We stand and outlast time. In it, we are the most beautiful thing. And people and things fall in love with us.

The blossoming and fertilization, the treats of life we enjoy, they are not the normal – they are the impossible. The normal is the persevering, the waiting, the outlasting. The bethinking of our agony. Keeping us warm, caring for us, protecting us. Life is not a fall of red wine. We stand in the wind and endure. Until the moments come when we blossom, when we fly, when we leave our form, change places, and ethuse the world.

Isn’t it, with love and sexuality, that we see a person who has gone through the same as we, who is what we are, with whom we merged before we even knew each other, and with whom we, now, want to unite.

I can only understand myself when I feel my brokenness.

When I speak in videos, I am not real. My social self is a lie.

I find something in my speaking is socially coded. My speaking is so tied to the people I’m speaking to that I can’t speak in any other way than with a certain energetic and cheerfulness.

I sense by knocking and smelling that there is something wrong with this social speaking, this speaking to everyone, to my friends. This speaking wants to cover something up, this speaking can’t stand something. This speaking leaves no room and no space for an abyss. This speaking is attached to a social forward, an ostentatious strength.

But if you don’t want to see things, you run to your death. The abyss does not cease to be abyss when we pretend that it did not exist.

My whole life is permeated with a harmful will to survive. I learned it from society. Denial is woven into it.

Yet life works just the same, and maybe even better, when you stop trying to master it. When you stop trying to be strong, to stand, to be something. When you simply surrender to the waves of existence. When you let yourself drift with the rush of time.

I must speak of brokenness and hope, but both are not sufficiently clear to me.

The brokenness is always to be sought. Whenever we think we are not broken and in shambles, we know something is wrong. Even when we are swimming in happiness and making new friends, we need to be aware of the impossibility that is befalling upon us. How fleeting it will be. We need to respect and enjoy it more because of this. We need to pray to it and appreciate it.

It is not about viewing our whole life as doomed disaster as ina a Schoppenhauerian pessimism. But to understand life from down low, from the rockbottom. From the moment of our greatest brokenness. We have to search and explore this moment again and again, because something in us tries to blur it. And then we become blind and arrogant, and we ask ourselves with the greatest cluelessness what is wrong with us, what our problem is.

We must never forget how broken we are, in what relation to nature we stand, and how unnatural our being here actually is.

And when we are at that point, we also see how broken the people around us are in a good way. We see the hardships in the lines to government assistance, the imperfection of bodies, and the small cracks in form of a pair of sweatpants, the upbeat on the radio, or a new pair of sunglasses to counter the rampant destruction of our existence.

The unapparent people in the pedestrian zones, whom we otherwise hardly register, and even less understand and contextualize, are transformed into monuments of resilience. And even if they are not aware of their human corrosion, failure and a positive will to survive swells from their embodiment.

What makes people unattractive is their denial.

It is not so much because of my age as that my economic and human poverty has lasted too long. I am completely starved and drained.

I am on the wane and time is preying under me.

My father never was available. I knew that he could not offer me a role model after which I could become a man. Does that even matter? Didn’t I perhaps prefer to become a woman on my own, to emulate my mother’s role?

Men were useless. I had friends, was in sports clubs. But to be a man? I did not want that.

But now it has come to me in the same way with women. I am equally disappointed in them. To be a woman is to participate in the shame of the world.

Women were the stronger persons in my life. Persons of wisdom and culturality.

The feminine is wrong, I am disappointed in it.

A child looks up to his father. Thinks he carries within him wisdom and direction. Later it turns out, there is only destruction and forlornness.

A child looks up to his mother. Thinks she is cultural and spiritual. Warm and protective. Later it turns out all that is just a facade. Behind it lies brokenness.

The feminine is a makeshift layer put together to cover despair. A substitute world to settle in the ruins of love. Or more precisely: in the ruins of one’s own desolation.

Yesterday I thought, I can’t trust, can’t let anyone get close to me, am afraid of getting hurt.

I can’t remember. When I needed a hug, and really got one.

This child, what cries there, cries with red cheeks. And the tears burn on the skin. Sadness like a disease. From which no one releases me.

Isn’t the most beautiful thing about people the embodiment they bring us?

Embodiment? What is that?

They embody us? Like a cup the water or like a poem the truth?

Don’t people also embody us in the sense that we embody ourselves for them? We embody ourselves, conceive ourselves, in order to become tangible to them.

This embodying I missed most without the people. I have now found one without them.

There is an independent hermeneutics.

I am a hunter-gatherer of people. But there is the rest.

There is the sitting and pondering, in the evening light of the earth. The echo of the earth, reflected in my calm.

I do not watch the sun set. It relates to my ascendancy.

Human life is directed towards humans. But in the injuries and setbacks we receive from them, we sit by the river – and mend ourselves alone.

There is something like metacommunication. The communication between the exchange of information. Or: how the exchange is organized on a higher level.

An example is lovers. Who communicates how often. Who talks how much, when.

How I hug someone is guided by how often I can hug someone.

I call it communication of attraction.

Ein Beispiel sind die Liebenden. Wer meldet sich wie oft. Wer spricht wie viel, wann.

Wie ich jemanden umarme, wird davon geleitet, wie oft ich jemanden umarmen kann.

Ich nenne sie Kommunikation der Anziehung.

Doing something different than saying. The malady of my interaction with people. It scares me when they do that, I can’t understand it. Now Derrida puts this into the picture as a profoundly emphatic necessity. People are in conflict between the need to conform to tradition and the desire that grips them to say something else.

It’s strange to watch people out on the street coming from work. Effort clings to this image. The effort of conformity.

Absence.

Perhaps it was me in the world.

I was absent because I did not show myself.

Before, there was the theory of the community, the theory of the plural, the theory of the towards-other. That gave me strength. Strength, as it gives many people strength to love.

But now people are gone. My love is gone. Very gone. And when I speak of the self, I mean a very different self than I used to have, or what I used to be able to imagine.

Self here is something that appeared to me as Gebrochung. Brokening in English. A persistent brokenness, something smoldering. An ache. And something that never heals.

It is possible to imagine a life without brokening, but in practice it does not exist.

When the beloved person dies. That is breakage. It breaks us. It causes damage to our human life that cannot be repaired, that does not pass and that does not heal. That is our breaking.

When the beloved person does not love me, cannot love me. They die. Or something dies in me. This is the main brokening of all of us. It is inside of us. The brokening of blatantly not being loved. Also in a societal sense. Or in a natural sense. That the world, as it presents itself to us, seeks our death, our annihilation, and there is nothing but our consoling acknowledgment of that which could protect us from it. We are helpless, we are broken, death awaits us. But the fact that we, through the recognition of that, can think our survival, gives back to us as tears our believe in life.

I wanted so much not to be sad, to make something of my life, as resonated in one of Arendt's words. But to what end? Maybe it is impossible. I am not able to.

It will come, if it may come. I am running on empty. I must throw myself into the floods as a cold body. What carries me is the world, or God. I will not sink.

I am not going through a separation from Esther, but to me comes a pain that I did not want to see for so long, and that I covered up with my relationship with her.

My decline happens in installments.
The body just speaks to itself.

A model was a human as a knotting being, knotting along and between the other beings, the scraps of knowledge and everything that has been handed down to it.

But what is that anyway? It is not enough.

There is a person who is completely finished and stubborn. Unyielding. Who remains for themselves.

A text, a score springs from them. And so this person stands as an appearance.

It is a selfhood where everything falls away. That does not care about references. For all that matters to them is how reality flows into them and remains there.