2023, April

Thought everyone in Berlin is as lost as I am. Whether with people or alone.

At Hamy, then, the most beautiful girl looked at me.

Analogous to a big city, in which one is surrounded by people, and lonely precisely because of it, it can make one especially lonely to have two parents who are physically present, who provide for one materially, and who still do not acknowledge one, do not maintain a nourishing relationship.

And social media too makes one lonely insofar as we see the people but do not interact with them.

I translate philosophical texts. Prose of life fed by them.

The more beautiful a person is, the less it may be to him to seek the affirmation of others. He feels it constantly upon himself.

What is the name of that caste of musicians like Avicii and Bakermat, who bring the music, and the listeners caught in their everydayness, to flight.

To like the Only Thing is the peculiar collaboration project of the German language.

I have given much. It is a pity that you are no longer here. Your words and your listening were everything.

I briefly tasted of ruin and already can’t go on.

Life is either flowing: connections of meaning establish themselves. People join hands. The being does its work.

Or the connections of meaning do not establish themselves. No woman offers me her hand. The world seems somehow cut to pieces.

I cannot connect, I cannot speak.

Withdrawing all trust from the societal realm, only to not find it in the private one, has made me luckless.

A beautiful body that appears before me, and is thereby for me, possesses the structure of a future which, dispensing hope, stands ready to lead all lost salvation back into my life.

With every sentence the place, the real, everything possible, is attained in strides.

Who made me.

Which word, which kiss. Which countenance that looked into me.

The bundling force of a beautiful body that sucks up everything around it into itself.

German lit world: I searched for friends and found my enemies.

People in whose lap I died.

Also, what is described must carry a certain holiness that makes it necessary to type it out.

A good life would not seek to be famous.

I am so furious at the people who do not see, with my white skin and with my affluent parental home, in what broken disgrace I find myself.

The precarity that arises from staying away from institutions weighs heavy. Intellectual decoupling, money problems, and a bitterly tear-drenched farewell from my family.

Those who truly walked through such a valley do not need these explanations. It is the arrogant who, spoiled by worldliness, have not yet had to learn sufficient humility.

The place I am building is not a fortress. It is destroyed by the weather and the people.

Glad to be allowed to be alone in the apartment.

No one attacks me.

A thin body does not captivate through its fleshly characteristics, but through the life it conveys. It speaks. It says: here is the beautiful life I went through. And if you know me, if you are with me, you can become part of it.

One can add a soul to the world and to things, as in cooking.

Was so beautiful for you. You did not take me.

A little younger still, one can dream. If I were 17 now, I would do exactly the same as now, I could set my eye on a university, dream of the great career, and, perhaps, embark on it.

But it is precisely the not-going-to-school, not-going-to-university, the staying away from the institutions (and yes, from settled and stratified knowledge too) that is essential.

There is nothing I have learned as extensively and exactly as this: to what extent my existence rests on the fore-work, on the fore-creating of those who amassed this knowledge and passed it on to me. How dependent I am on the societal interworking of all the people who make a life in this world possible for me. And quite especially, what the world looks like when one steps back from all of it, distances oneself, goes away, thinks one can do it alone, wants it different, entirely different, new, and one’s own. Or when what came before is said to be imperious, annihilating and Nazi-like – what it is like when the people who created me with their accumulated gene pool, their abilities and ways of being precisely did not do that: that what my parents had learned was in its turn so painfully woundingly partial that ocean-wide holes gaped in their existences, leaving a life beyond work and provincial customs unpaved.

What is it, when we are so dependent on the world around us, and we stand hostile to it, it defiles us, or out of spite or injury we cannot turn toward it?

For me there were no islands, or there were, and they passed away again. Islands of philosophy, of the arts, of realms that promised a life. People whose words found my mouth on spoons. Who were there for me and stayed there for me. They existed, in flashes, the way the world, inconstant, or the weather, simply is.

I smell like an Italian hotel.

Partners shift us into the primal state of estrangement, of pain.

All the splendor of a time that is beginning to die.

I learned technology as a child. It took over my life and arranged it to pieces. Then came a pause, and after many years a logic of life that fed on relationships moved into art. No work stood for itself; the point was to include my person, my context, my failings, and to value them.

But now, in a certain sense, a technologization of life or of the body is happening, when I see, for example, Riley Ladd. A body can be altered and assembled like a work. It can be made beautiful and radiate enchanting force like a work of art.

The worst pains that people have inflicted on me came from women.

In recent years I have increasingly defined myself through women or relationships.

One cannot control at all what one defines oneself through.

Depending on whether success arrives or not: one burns and tries to read Hegel, and one does everything so that it works out. And if it works out, one is happy, and if not, totally lost.

As humans we are so deeply dependent on the sexual affection we receive.

The realization that cis girls are terrible holds true for many people my age.

Holding together the brittle mesh that is one’s own life.

Nothing trumps necessity.

In a certain sense I am a child who grew up with, and yet without, parents.

My parents are not capable of love.

With F it is strange. What does this love consist of? Much incomprehension is in it. And also much sex, attraction, and mutual liking.

Every day I must see a person. With a long donkey’s tongue I must lick their face. And then we walk through Anita Berber Park, do a round on the field. Worn-down paths. We band together. Skinned remnants of our youth. Still we go on dreaming of what is not to be and has always been. We want, it throbs, but in ourselves we do not find it.

What decides how much one feels toward a person?

From floe to floe. But endure it I do not.

No love dwells in me. I said that already. Not enough of it came my way. How am I now to »accomplish« it?

I should speak into the nothing and talk only with the nothing. That alone is the right thing.

Most people are lost but they at least do something. They participate in an industry or a subculture.

Loneliness last year around Mother’s Day. Then met F. In the fear of her going away I cave in.

Neukölln holds me up and stretches me heavenward with the strength founded in the fear of rejection.

Topology of loneliness and of death.

Everything about you was beautiful.

These days I thought of a landscape of death. How it lives in us, we do not see it. How can we not see it.

Actually the science of death, the reflections on death, ought to be suited to giving life back to a being that has become utterly expressionless.

The girl comes to me. She is stuffed with Hegel. Speaks with Hegel, is with Hegel, sweats Hegel. Yet she does not know about him.

What is it like to be so separated with her and at the same time so united? We participate in a shared experience, and the simultaneously too-great difference divides us from her.

Everyone has dreams, everyone is alone.

I want to think death. It is not here, after all? I do not see it, do not feel it. No death is with me.

Or is it? Does not its shuddering body live wholly and completely in me. Its face behind mine. And beneath my skin the whole possibility of its going to ruin. How it loses itself, and the devotion that I was,

terribly goes out.

My apartment is a testament to my need for protection.

Beside her bed lies not the Bible but this year’s appointment calendar.

Terrible are: people who don’t face their reality.

I am not enough among the people, in the public realm. Whoever’s fault it may be.

Everything released for negotiation. One needs a school, a church.

You could drink at home too. But you don’t do it. The mood of the bar passes over onto you.

It is a lonely person who writes.

One who misses the institutions and the people. One who squints palely at the others.

A person who does not carry the cast of society within them.

A person who rather hopes, throbbing, that the people might appear to them.

And they conjure them. With calm chants, in a calm voice. Again and again. Until at last they

are to come.

Strength I have none left. Only that of withstanding. Of always going there again, of showing up. I can scream no longer.

Death is hard to describe. It does not want to exist. It has no desire to.

One can also fall asleep in this life. It takes the struggle with the others, with the world, the surprises.

The same could be said of beauty. It does not primarily satisfy the painful need for positive conditions. But it brings one among people, together with them. The women in the subway and in the pharmacy smile at me. People help me. It is better than nothing.

And even if there are restrictions in direct interpersonal relationships, indeed even if these belong to their constituting characteristics, if these restrictions and impossibilities make relationships exciting and thrilling, still the trust could grow, the bond, or the root-like connections that reach out into the space of our shared reality.

The rightness of the time. The girls make themselves beautiful in the mirrors.

Must dig myself in and feel safer.

She too always wanted a beautiful man. I create a space for her as well. We all come to dwell in it.

Old damage still weighs on me. No contacts for lack of university studies. Shyness about making contact. Avoidance of whole disciplines of activity. Money problems etc.

It is as if all these problem-ingredients mutually reinforce and perpetuate one another. Missing people lead to financial and social hardship, which in turn makes making contact harder.

Looking at you on Instagram makes me truly sick.

And these girls with relationship tips (red flag here and there) make me absolutely sick.

Those people develop their thinking because they must. They have no society to fall back on, none that could carry them. They must produce a possibility of life with new answers.

Our union of cells one single revolt against the outer adversities that second by second seek our death.

Every kiss a counter-scream.

I need a confrontation.

The love of being understood.

It is not easy to have too much time in this world.

Much time and few people.

If I do enough, the people will come to dwell in me. It was always so.

There must be a good alternation of effort and reward. It must not be decoupled.

Writing on the laptop in the bathroom. I am so glad about this room. It is like a panic room. No windows. The tiles protect me.