In an attempt to write a personal statement for a grant application, I have recognized my affinity for semantics. Semantics is a stunning word without the associated definition. I feel that I am so drawn to Tom Robbins' novels because they are giant semantic stories. He attempts to give meaning to the facts and stories that we have accepted by recreating them in an erotic way. In Another Roadside Attraction, the sign that advertises the roadside zoo explicitly mentions "the meaning of meaning". I love to discover the reappropriation of words and linguistics. Often I look up the definition of a word and attempt to use it in its most primitive meaning, which sometimes can refer to its Latin roots. (Too bad my four years of High School Latin are unsupportive.) My aside brings me to a dramatic ironic claim. Tom Robbins also includes a number of asides in his stories. I am not sure if I began doing that in my writing after reading Still Life with Woodpecker a year and a half ago (which BTW influenced the title of this blog). I believe that he includes such literary devices to provide another layer of semantics. Robbins frequently uses long discussions amongst characters to make his point. He provides narrative explanation of some of these points by reiterating where a character has substantiated their claim to avoid any incorrect or confounded conclusion by the reader. Not sure where I am going with this post. I think I was just trying to kill time before lunch (to avoid any confusion).
Terra Pyro Flower Pow Wow
I don't even have a good story for these photos. The train to the city is going to be under construction for the rest of the month, and it is raining outside, and it's Sunday..... So, here I am. I need to practice patience with photography. I am too sloppy and lazy. I want to work on taking fewer, better shots. I made a little studio in my apartment with a map of Germany as the backdrop. Some of the nude photos are my favorite, but I will spare my mother in case she looks at this.
Ok, maybe I have a small story. Initially, I wanted to light all of those flowers on fire, but realized that's a terrible idea in a small apartment (I'll save this for a later date). Lighting things on fire, or in the pretty term, "pyrotechnics", has always been an interest of mine. I shared this passion with my brother when we were very young and used to walk into the forest in our backyard to find things to light on fire.... in the forest. Mom wasn't too happy when she found out about that. Jordan and I used to stay up until 10 to watch Courage the Cowardly Dog. We also enjoyed watching Spongebob Squarepants and Myth Busters. Maybe that's where the pyrotechnics ideas came from.
Discontinuities
You're in Southern Germany. It's left on Rossitenstrasse, right on K6167, and the first right down the trail parallel to the highway. There, you'll pass one then two concave walls beneath the highway. Climb up the faint carved path and you'll find the third. The third is the biggest. You might think that the overhang is covered with cracks at a first glance, but walk closer. Those are bullet holes. They are deep in the cement and have gone straight through the rusted support. Imagine the proximity. Imagine the number of Jews that were murdered here.
I'm thirteen again. I'm wearing a pink dress, and I'm the center of attention while we dance in circles, holding hands. I quit going to Hebrew School after that day. Five months later now. You die. A few years later. I've denounced any association with Judaism. I've questioned my convictions.
Today. I cannot deny a connection. A deep rooted intrinsic empathy. I am taking those holes personally.
Duty-Free Feelings
Every once in awhile, I revisit the pain of that day. I remember what it felt like to return to school, putting my head down with my arms across my desk multiple times per day. I pretended to feel ill as an excuse to go home.
Last night, I tossed and turned for hours, teetering between pain and contrition. Contrition came before the pain. I reflected upon a finite set of events in my life which caused me to feel guilt. I am a mental hoarder in a terrifying way. I will punctiliously recall events in my life over and over again, rethinking and dissecting where I went wrong. Did this obsessive behavior begin on that singular day? Maybe it was so unbelievable that I took it upon myself to memorize the details in hopes of making some sort of logical sense.
Lying and guilt are a funny pair of companions as generally the only way to remove the guilt is to come clean. Consequently, the subject of the lie becomes the recipient of this burden and thus is now the carrier of this bag of stones.
In a forlorn and futile attempt to connect these thoughts to my photos, I have found a modicum of a connection. The connection is perhaps, quite indecently, the connection. I look for all of the double exposures of the real world where the main object of focus mimics the details of which it has possession. I am growing quickly bored of this post.
Twice
Two months in Germany marks two shooting stars, one ride in an ultralite, one fortress ruins, too many bug bites to count. I am suddenly running low on poetry, running high on wild berries that taste tart like maracuya. I can recall a yesterday where I might have been happier, more comfortable, less thoughtful, and it's hard to distinguish if it was better. Acceptance comes in the form of sleeping on the couch and waking up to night sweats, eschewing sounds that might strike something too familiar, inhaling new smells in hopes of cancelling out olfactory memories. I am an agnostic at war with my Jewish identity and a scientist who can both identify and wish on shooting stars. On the first one, I wished for something new. Maybe it was a mistake.
Tamara
Photographing new people is always precarious, but Tamara was open to my need to have a subject in my photos. She can identify nearly every tree and bird in Germany in addition to a number of snail species. We have plans to visit a small town in France next weekend and make syrup from some local berries before she leaves at the end of September.
Bees and Beets
I dreamt about my daddy, and I woke up with these lyrics in my head:
And with bees in her breath,
And the rest of her ringing
They'll sting through her chest
With a force hard and beating,
'Till wonderfully wet she will get
Until she's soaked inside her clothes.
Everything lately has been pointing to the theme of death (but what doesn't?). It's not a sadness that I am feeling, but rather a hyper awareness that the state I am currently in is alive. Bees keep appearing to me in various ways. I always imagine them as this anti-Ayn Randian creature who lives solely for altruism and purely as a martyr, sacrificing itself for the sustenance of its species. When a bee releases its stinger, it dies. What can it mean to breathe bees? This song by Neutral Milk Hotel certainly has motifs pointing towards motherhood and childbirth. Perhaps a mother starts breathing bees when she has a child, as now she is to produce sacrifices rather than living just on behalf of herself.
This dream about my dad was related to care taking. I was in pain, and he took me to the hospital. Dreams of this nature are not unfamiliar to me. Perhaps they occur due to one of my fondest memories of him. When I was a child, I dropped pruning shears on my foot, causing a very large amount of beet-red blood to be released. I calmly walked into my home, blood sputtering out of my foot like a water fountain, asked my sister, "where's mommy?", found mommy, and told her that my foot was bleeding. The moment my mom suggested that we go to the hospital was the moment I became aware of what was happening. That's when my dad picked me up and carried me in his arms. I submitted to his care. I needed his care.
Tom Robbins is a firm believer in immortality and is held even more strongly on the conviction that being alive is just one form of "living", so to speak. That death is just a nasty habit of the living who have thus far, morphed the unbroken cycle of right-hand ideas and left-hand ideas like a pendulum. Louie CK jokes about never knowing when we are dead, but that all humans have the same thought just before death which is, "this is probably it." Seeing the white light, having your life flashing before your eyes, and all of that other crap is just a coping mechanism. We want it all to be worth it by summarizing that final moment of life with remembering that it wasn't all bad and that this isn't all that there is.
Death is trivial, in the state of being alive, for those reasons. Yet, somehow, we manage to hate and excoriate those who have an opinion on death that is incongruent with our own. Because ultimately, an opinion on death, is an opinion on how to live. I am speaking on behalf of a generic personal level, all the way to a cultural, societal, global level. It's the reason for everything. Everyone has their own idea of what happens after the state of being alive, and spend most of this portion of their lives dedicated to that belief.
If immortality was attainable and death was a choice, would there come a point when everyone would choose it?
Living in a foreign country is hard. I don't have the photos to show for it.
The Vagrant's Story of Reappropriation
He claims that you've got it all wrong. A home is not stationary, despite popular belief. Rather, it takes the shape of the place that he looks forward to returning to. He finds home to be inextricable, as the vagrant is an atavist being. It is in our human nature to seek comfort, in hopes of returning to a state of pleasure. The vagrant is misunderstood. Home is what he carries. Whether it be a photo of a friend's face, a coloring book of hummingbirds, a streetlight intended to mock the color of the sunrise, or the waking up to the sound of chickadees. When he returns to it, he is happy. He thinks of Barbara Kruger. Home is inextricable.
Roma for 24 Hours
Just Buy a Postcard
How strange is it that people go to these incredibly famous museums and spend so much time capturing it with a cell phone just to let it sit and collect dust in their iPhone gallery or on Instagram, where people could give two shits? I do not claim to be any better than these people; I simply claim to truly have a hard time enjoying museums. I can't stand the phoniness behind appreciation for all of this stuff. People of our generation are so caught up making it known that "I was there" that they lose the actual content of the experience. I wish there was more effort put into bragging about knowledge rather than bragging about being somewhere without knowing of its significance. I couldn't tell you the difference between a $9 bottle of wine and a $30 bottle of wine, and so I only buy from the bottom shelf. Today, I visited the Uffizi and Galileo museums where I spent most of my time photographing people photographing the art. Is this ironic? Sorry to those offended by my lack of appreciation. I search for something to grab my interested rather than resorting to the clichés.
Tuscany
She
"It's toothpaste", she said, knowing that it was not toothpaste.
She recognized her wasted effort without acknowledgement, knowing damn well that the rural Italian cooks could not understand a lick of her Midwest American English. She now wondered if they were even looking at the stain on the collar of her dress, or if she took a glance in her direction too personally, as most interactions seemed to conclude as of late.
The touch of cold that was transferred from the stone floor to her feet became the strongest sensation of sanity that she was able to grasp since arriving in the village. The feeling like a reminder that these days of heat are only temporary, as are these days spent in denial of loneliness and futile distractions from a lack of human intimacy. Slowly, she repeated the action of pushing one heel off the ground until contact was met with the ball of her foot, and thus followed by the next foot, until she reached the edge of the bed. One deep breath. Dirty underwear caught her vision. Glancing just one foot to the right, she noticed her shoes, untouched and unpacked, in a plastic bag. How long had she been walking around barefoot?
One last lift of a heel, push of a ball, and she found herself molded into the curves of the bed, similar to her ribs silently protruding from her torso. Now, intransigent to the thought of a necessity to ever leave this bed, she fell asleep at approximately 4:38 somewhere else's time.
Serendipity
I keep having the feeling that my timing has been on point. I came to Zurich early this morning to stay in the airport hotel before leaving for Italy early tomorrow morning. I am having a hard time writing right now because I just had two glasses of prosecco. Anyway. I walked towards the water, as that typically feels like the destination point of most cities that I visit. I walked on a balcony overlooking the lake, and saw a man approach, in preparation for a performance. Initially, he began what I thought might be a magic show as he pulled two long poles out of a short bucket. To my surprise, he pulled these poles apart to create massive bubbles. Maybe bubbles are trite and cliche, but the rain came as soon as stopped shooting, so to me it was serendipity.
Full
Nils, Tamara, Jolle. We drank beer, considered different time zones, categorized stars/aliens/airplanes, dunked into the warm, black lake water. The moon was full (like a mirror for our bellies). Drying off, with bikes parked in the field, we celebrated Nils' dad's 61st rotation about the sun with this 10 year old (illegal) hot air balloon. The flame grew precariously large.
Gonzo Journalism/Ship of Theusus
I keep waking up to find myself in the same unfamiliar place. Am I a prisoner? In exile? Is this the quantifiable Atlantis? Signs direct me from one to the next. Like the lilies, nearly silhouetted yet outlined in white by the earth's final turn away from the sun, lined up against some shitty orange cloth masking the construction site. Is it too naive to conclude anything from a good night of sleep when it's preceded then followed by a night of terror? Dreams of animals scurrying lead into a slap of reality as defined by 2:30 AM and an alert of an ax murderer some three hours north of here. How can I conclude anything when these horrors are then followed by a gratuitous message permitting information that I had been intentionally avoiding? Now I sit in futile attendance of this golden hour, hopeful that the sun sets on the cloth before the flowers. My skin is itchy and broken and I keep picking and picking just to reopen old scabs. If I continue to replace the scab with a new scab, does it remain the same wound?
Orange, Pink, Yellow, but Mostly Greenhouses
Today I would define as the best day, thus far. I sat on a boat for an hour long trip to Isle Reichenau. Reichenau is a really fun word to pronounce in a German accent. Last weekend, the woman I met told me to go here specifically to visit the church which has well preserved historic paintings due to the fact that they were painted on wet walls. I was surprised to find that this island was predominated by greenhouses and farms of lettuce, pumpkins, squash, etc etc. I could eat up this entire island and feel full for weeks. The absolute highlight was the Salatstube, a salad bar built into a functioning greenhouse. The second highlight was the shokolate hasselnut (chocolate hazelnut) milkshake. Honestly the best milkshake I've ever had. (Maybe it was my state of mind???) By the end of my two hour land excursion, I sat blinded by the sparkling water, slumped against a tree, sleepy and satisfied. The boat ride back home was only but a dream.
Disclaimer: These photos are mediocre, but they serve as evidence that today happened.
Ten Years
Days like today are my personal proof of reality. I can measure days by the placement of my books, can measure months by the diminishing 25 toothpick pack, can measure years by the number of July Fifteenths that have passed since you had. Reality only exists to me if I can count it, quantify it, put it in my pocket, and look at it later. Since you left I have graduated twice. I have left the country four times. I ran 13.1 miles. I have made one friend that will be in my life forever. I have had ten birthdays (that's 185 candles), been in two bike accidents. In three years, I will have lived half of my life without you. I have gone zero days without thinking about you.
Chamomile Cure
These photos are quite boring, and as of lately, I am quite boring. Something I keep telling people is that here, in Germany, I am living the same life (and am still the same person) that I was before I left. I am not changing, only adapting to being alone, walking greater distances, coping with days of silence, falling asleep before the sun sets. Mostly, I feel tired but cannot sleep. I spend most of the day dedicated to exhausting myself by going on runs, walking into town, reading, creating, but the only thing that has worked thus far has been chamomile tea.
Dreams of Being Held Captive and Torschlusspanik
VIctor/Trauma/Slow Down. Exit the bus through the second door. Pull out all of your hair and dream that it grows back. Dream about the wrong bus picking you up from your oppressor. Door close panik. Goal close panik. Wake up to the rain. Three hours to go. Light from a flashlight, seeking your oppressor. Pain in your chest. Panik in your brain. Victor/Trauma/Slow Down. Running for the train.