However unbroken many women may seem, they are still apostles of a clinking, brittle love, one I learned only through them.
And so, into every half-meant partaking in the world, there seeps the weeping of a fermenting brokenness.
Maybe I only want to care for women, to look after as my sole greeting, sole means of my healing, of my possibility.
To assemble and give as much strength as I can, in order to experience love through this release. A love that exists beyond the bonds that seek decay.
It’s worse again, that much can be said. That I have a therapy session tomorrow changes little.
On the song I couldn’t bring myself to listen to, one morning in your kitchen.
I bring your pain into the world. Through me it receivs a shape.
Called E because I felt so alone. Love started right back up. And with it, that evocative feeling of distance.
When you’re in a troubled relationship with someone, the closeness you feel is explained not least by the fact that it has to be sought out and made anew, again and again, to smooth over and soothe the pain that keeps arising.
The therapist asked how E reacted when I called her yesterday. I said: She was glad.
Everyone carries Eternal Life within them as a possibility.
What if we had children, formed a family, and this, as an eternal reality, outweighed the calamity outside? Birthing meaning, that is, by disregarding the world.
If we understand the world as eclipsing, as calamity, drought, and so on, and now bring children through, as something that must be brought through, do we negate that outside by their outlasting it? And at any price, and in any splendor?
And then again: in our very possibility of living, in our being fed, we depend on the outer world. Isn’t that the Christian paradox? That on the one hand we want to bring something through inside a proto-reality, even though we rely on, depend on, this world that is to be overcome?
When I speak of martyrdom, it is only real if I do it in public, if I die in public.
If what I do is smarter than I am, and I assume it is, then I have to follow my societal doing and listen to its wisdom.
It is a story of fear, and perhaps one of courage in equal measure.
Time sifts through ideas, lets some fade and keeps others.
In doing so they also drew on a larger, societal stock of the feminine, to bag me up as a man, to defuse me, to mark me off. Or put differently: as long as love holds, I am a person to them, a friend, an ally. But when love fails to settle in, I become that kind of man, a man as such. I lose my direct, individual character.
Most people I know associate themselves to the hilt with the movements of the moment, with their activist struggles. Yet very few read Butler or Fanon closely. People come on and identify as if they had brought all these movements into being themselves, in complete purity and accord with ideas they don’t even know well enough.
When it bothers me that some people don’t read what I’ve written with intense eyes, I notice that they don’t read other things, many other things, with intense eyes either – that perhaps they don’t possess eyes of that intense precision at all.
I have respect for people of faith. People who believe in God have had to look death in the eye in some form. People don’t believe lightly.
Maybe I have to part from people in order to be closer to them again.
I am like a treasure in a currency you can’t pay with anywhere.
Following this German crowd makes the insecurity in me grow.
When you distance yourself. Isn’t that a superior way of practicing critique?
But I can’t manage to live something of my own.
People are fascinating animals when they’re good at something.
That on the one hand masculinity is very destructive and swallows up everything. But then again is able to to span a radius through its power everyone wants to shelter in.
Women working together is a lot of lifting up and empowering. But also enabling and denying together.
But what would really matter more is to live with people.
Feelings of happiness often arise in answer to pain or something negative. I’m facing an eight-hour shift and think, I can’t do this. My body aches and is tired. But once I’ve done it, it’s the greatest happiness.
I even feel as if my fingers were too tired to type on this keyboard.
Her conflicts are mine. Her mental tangle, her protective instinct and suspicion – all of it falls to me. All of it flows into me, all of it I have to bear. Even her friends, whom I thought I could put up with, are suddenly my friends, with their stories and their problems. Isn’t it interesting how everything human blends together? The colors of others stick to us, of the general, of history and time.
My striding toward the world (a specific one) is already a utopian act. If we are so thoroughly determined by our surroundings, then approaching a world is already revolutionary.
Whenever I don’t know how I’m doing, I’m probably doing badly.
People are drawn into what we do and make. They are inscribed in it. They hide in it. In our working, people live.
So work and productivity are not only something that grants us affirmation and recognition for what we’ve achieved. Work also means speaking with people. And perhaps in the most intimate and truest way.
For with them we form a family, a covenant. A shared life. Together we build on our house and on our heart. We secure one another, we recognize one another.
My greatest grief comes (as it did yesterday and today) when I can’t act upon the world. My work is gone. I can’t write, because I don’t know for whom.
When we seek people too much, something is wrong. With us and with the world. But above all with the world. Because it holds no room ready for us, allots us none. Because it cuts us off from relation. It dries out the fields of our activity. Turns them to desert, lets them fall to waste. Where we could be, there is nothing left.
The here and now doesn’t hold enough possibilities ready. Nor, really, enough role models and comrades. We search for the points in time. People who lived the way we do ahead of time. In our image, to our liking.
*
The most powerful lying always happens where something goes unsaid.
When you fail publicly, in the face of injustice. People reach out toward us. They stir. Because that is when help comes. Life is walking into calamity. Like Christ, perhaps. So as to awaken what is right.
The girls take the love and don’t give it back.
I need more humility in my practice. Assume even less, expect even less.
Women, like everyone else, are beings bent to the utmost on their own advantage.
Nobody loves me and I wander darkly.
I’m lying in bed. The August air is cold and blows outside the milky windowpanes.
Much existing (of people) also comes from their tolerating of what I cannot bear.
Art cannot say Thou. Where does it say Thou?
It’s so lovely to hear from you. About you and your life. From the mouth of your shyness. I like your Germanness too. Your extreme reliability. How you pay attention to everything.
And so there I stand. In the wind or on the spot. Depending. In a hole in the ground, pit-like, and, of course: alone.
Believing and loving, for me, is the “making” across a distance. There is a distance: a distance between my situation and my going on living, a distance between two people. And faith, or love, is an ensouled rising, a swimming, a transcending and dissolving of ourselves in that very distance. The distance that threatens our life, this distance that strangles our understanding, this distance becomes, through faith, livable and walkable.
So loving is also the taking hold of and walking the distances of other people. Petitions for death, presented by reality, which they feel. We become part of them. We walk the distance of other people. And in the same move, we also walk our own distance to those very people.
For only this way can love remain, only this way can love go on existing in us. Only this way does love withstand separations. As a capacity to catch people. To grasp them. And ourselves. In this utmost severance and brokenness that calls itself our life.
*
Today there was a girl at Böhmischer Platz selling books. When I mentioned theology, we clicked right away. No love, but I ran off.
Utopia means speechlessness, homelessness. And attached to that: a lack of people, a lack of support, and a lack of the means needed to live.
Those we do not know, who do not speak, who have no place, and who therefore remain unheard and unseen, who can only be sensed in the murmur and in the breaking of the real, they are the ones still becoming, the renewers of our time.
Everything newly touted, as long as it’s in favor, serves the purpose of placing us. A campaign, a book we bought, a teased product. It sets us marveling and promises that under what it promises we will find unity and shelter.
These promises are flat, shallow. They decay with time, and their very substance doesn’t offer much.
But now take the nation-state. What a fantastic invention. Here is a construct made of values and ideas, of notions and images. And it is grounded in region.
Yet unlike the brands of the consumer world, it consists of actual people. Of people we know, who surround us. Of people who, in the end, are like us.
How could this invention not have succeeded?
When I work, when I finish something, showing it is simply part of it. Not doing so feels strange. Because in the end, what I make, I make for the world, for others.
Fear is always something that belongs to us. It is in our possession.
When we read, we also write. Afterwards, meanwhile. Reading means writing.
There’s always talk of being alive, of vibrancy. From me too. From me, of course. Entirely from me.
So what is it?
What if life isn’t all that at all, or not first and foremost?
We probably had in mind the spiritless, the soulless elders of our childhood. The ones gone dead, the uncomprehending, the idea-less, the humorless.
But what if life, beyond humility, is also making friends with a certain mediocrity.
Mediocrity of experience, of the way one lives, of one’s own strength and of the people one knows.
You have to prepare the ground for something great. Only in this attitude of expectation, in this not-expecting, can something happen, can I wait.
Because before you know it, life isn’t so ordinary after all. Once you lose your fear of it.
My parents always wanted me to be different when it came to money. They wanted to press me into something I’m not. All of society did, expected it of me.
I was supposed to be different. And my sister embodies that difference.
I’m tired. So often it comes down to separating expectations from one’s own possibilities.
Seen from a distance, every life is touching.
We really were born into something strange. Flights around the world, health insurance, material prosperity. Founded on the exploitation of nature, of other people and other parts of the earth.
It’s sad with women. They look away, get rained on by sexual harassment and violence. You might think they don’t like men. Many say so, too. But it isn’t true. You have to add in your mind that they do. They are only deeply disappointed and hurt.
I like people who have problems. With themselves. A broken self-confidence. Or simply broken. That awakens love in me.
This is the process that hits me hardest, and the one I suffer from most: this indifference, or incomprehension. As if I were air. As if I didn’t exist. As if what I say weren’t exciting at all, but in some subtle way irrelevant and ungraspable.
We climb into people. That is the biggest mistake I kept making. I thought: She is flawed, but I love her. I love her so much. I can handle it.
But when we are with a person, we become that person. We become part of their reality. Of their madness.
Many women I’ve been with have no shortage of violence.
*
I told her: only with you can one fully say Thou.
She arrived at Boddinstraße and looked different. Her hair, the glasses – older.
I lent her a bike and we rode to my place.
The conversation was tenacious, but her skin still soft.
Is the song of my sorrow sung out? Does longing still haunt my shores?
The closed form of a printed book is perhaps simpler than my ever-unfinished website projecting.
I just have to carry myself through this. (Looking in the mirror and thinking, I’m beautiful.)
E is not made for this world. And neither am I. We are burnt children. And fathers were too hard on us. And our surroundings too.
When we speak, we whisper. And we wait. We give each other room. Each is a daring step. That is our shared experience.
We both stand at fatal crossroads. And we both lack support.
I don’t want to take part in anything that doesn’t correspond to me.
She would be more willing. And yet she doesn’t do it.
I have no money and no people and only the good Lord knows why.
Of course people exist. Or do you have serious and justified doubt that they do?
Hot blood streams through my veins. It wounds me that I knew her.
And her friends, too, or her pull toward the world, were too strong.
We are all free riders of history, or have to be. Otherwise we don’t exist.
I’m drawn to not giving myself over entirely to the illusion of German idealism, the way it has come back into the nursery by way of Foucault and Butler. That we cannot, in fact, be and think everything into existence through our faculty of knowing.
We are bound to traditions, to a course of the world, and surely to a materiality too.
We don’t break free by disavowing normative orders.
We break them by saying: yes, you’ve won. Here I lie now in blood and dirt. Happy? Do you like it? I can’t do otherwise. I’m fat and false and stupid and ugly. But I know that I’m not. I can’t say: I’m beautiful the way I am. Because that wouldn’t be the whole truth.
We (or I, at any rate) exist so decisively through society, through its gaze and the gaze of the people around us. We can’t just wish that away all at once.
I was never there when people said: I don’t care what the others think. Because it isn’t so. For me it isn’t so and never will be.
*
I live through society, through the all-in-common.
What the state thinks is decisive for me.
It is a weave: the state, the family, the language, the economy.
My life flows along these tracks.
Isn’t the way we carry out our lives also quite far from understanding, and by its very nature deeply uncomprehending?
What we do also follows a reciprocal happening in time, shaped by chance and cluelessness.
It’s striking how in my notes I don’t try to write texts, but gnaw incessantly at finding thoughts and ways to somehow be able to live.
I don’t find them.
When I think about my approaching people on the street: I simply want a lot, too.
Often enough I don’t do it. Often enough I don’t go up to people.
But when I do go, or think about going, isn’t that an expression of wanting to be seen, and in a more general sense an expression of wanting as such?
What does a person want? I find that fascinating. Don’t all people want the same amount? I don’t think so.
Are there people who have more dreams and wishes than others? That’s not my point.
What I mean, rather, is that wanting is also tied to the actual possibilities for acting in the world.
Or put differently: you can lose the wanting. I’ve seen it often. The wanting dries up. And that is a sad moment.
But you can substantially raise your exposure to happiness. If you show yourself a lot. You get seen. People fall in love. That’s all.
But is it possible to be shown, and to experience love?
I don’t think so.
Because this is how it is: what one is, is always the twisting and the challenging of what others see in us. That is the great hunt and the great game of people.
Only when we have a conception of ourselves that is superior to outside influence, one that can move through the ring independently of their gazes, are we truly ourselves.
Self is perhaps not so much a static conception as the ability to move, self-determined, within the gazes and the grasp of others.