Learning is something I’ve never figured out. I am a laggard, a loafer, and an idiot.

I want to be dragged across life like a messy paintbrush. Knowing you, you might scoff or smile at my using passive voice there, but I don’t think stars or quarks worry about where they are going in life, and from what I can tell, they’re having a hell of a time.

Some day I’ll have children, and I’ll pray. My hope is that my son will hold an ear of corn all afternoon, turning it over and over in his hands, deciding with every breath to wonder more.

This evening I harbor the suspicion that there are wanderers, and wonderers, and wandering wonders: the widening gyre. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll wake at dawn to discover the first midden heap, the anchor, the memory. But I doubt it.

My mind is open, my lips are parted, but my heart is lost in some deep wood.

Someday I might know why rain makes me feel old. Now, I hide from the knowledge.

The day we understand is the day we die.

In the time leading up to my recent graduation, I’ve been doing landscaping work on weekends in order to pay the bills. I took a few weekends off to graduate, but I’ll be picking it back up this weekend to keep myself afloat economically, until something bigger and better comes along.

There is something unreal about this type of work. Work of the hands. Moving earth. Touching all different types of life and telling them where to go, where they can best be provided for. Although all of this stuff is unquestionably grounded in the real, it goes—for me—beyond the physical form and instills meaning. There is a reason that the gardener is, as a character, a literary device unto itself, and I’m just beginning to understand that.

A few weeks ago, while working in a housing development, mulching beds, an old man came outside to make some special requests. I obliged, and he came out again and tipped me $20. Later, he yet again came outside, and sat down to watch our crew working. He asked me how long I’ve been doing this type of work. I said, oh, I don’t know, that it’s seasonal work and altogether maybe ten years, just over the summers.

He told me a story about how, when he was “my age,” whatever he took that to be, he had a job working a combine harvester. Made a dollar an hour, I’m pretty sure he claimed. He loved that job. But eventually he found a better job in a glass factory, making three times the money, with benefits, too. He took it without hesitation. He worked the new job for three days, then quit and went back to manning the combine.

“So, I understand why you do the work you do.”

He seemed to think there was great wisdom in there somewhere.

I don’t yet pretend to appreciate the depth of what that man was trying to communicate to me, but flavor of the message is still with me. It’s as though I entered the room during the dying fall, and while I don’t have a prayer of knowing on what chord the piece ended, the overtones haunt me. In the old man’s words I heard the memory of still older words:

My words have ancient beginnings.

This was translated from 言有宗, literally “words have ancestors.” I’ve found myself over the past year or two becoming so open-minded and philosophically promiscuous that I think I’ve crossed back over into conservative territory. I seem to believe that at some remote point in history or prehistory, some person, whether mystic or shaman or prophet or scholar, did indeed figure out the nature of reality, or at least came damn close. The odds that I’ll encounter such an individual in my lifetime, face-to-face, are rather slim, though, so I’ve turned to exegesis.

And landscaping.

In spe (και ημέρες)

The title of this post comes from a short essay by Denise Levertov, in which she discusses the process of nurturing belief through the carrying out of good deeds. At least, that’s what I think it’s about—I only read the first page of it. It was enough to inspire me. I suppose you could say I believed it.

What speaks to me about this philosophy is that I genuinely believe that certain types of work will sustain and satisfy, and others will not. Others can even lead one far astray.

Where I’m at right now is the first time I’ve ever really had to decide how I can best interface with the world. Is it wrong that I don’t really care whether Verizon uses Twitter to provide better customer service? Is it illogical that I’d sooner work for a major marketing firm than canvass for Greenpeace? I have substantial misgivings about even the Peace Corps.

It seems the only option left open to me is graduate study. I want to be a professor. To put it quite simply, I can’t imagine any other job allowing me to keep up the ritual of reading and writing I’ve envisioned for myself as necessary for cultivating a healthy soul. So I’ll spend the next year or so piecing together journal articles with the sundry professors who will hire me a month at a time to edit their work.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll even get my hands dirty one of these days.

your praises are better than nicotine. if i ever feel a dire need to quit
I’ll just ask you to send me a haiku whenever I want a cigarette

Singularity
Running from the painted cave
To shellac the soul

Tea reminds us of
Bitter sacrifice. And how
Grass is more humble
More than we will ever be
Ah, the taste of memories!

Art thou that thou art?
Maybe thou art that art thou.
You, synthesize me.

func(identity)
global values don’t exist
know thyself through me

OK, the second example is really a tanka, but that’s awesome. Does seem a little like bringing a gun to a knife fight, though.

I recently learned that one of my role models, upon waking, every single day—or so he claims—writes a sonnet. And these sonnets are often pure gold, from what I’ve read. So maybe I’ll make a habit out of fighting in haiku.

I’ll wake in sonnets, dream in ghazals, hunger in villanelle.

I just wrote the two best papers I’ve ever written. One was a critical take on postmodernism and the future of critical theory. The next was a simple rundown of sociological concepts of my own choosing. A delectable excerpt from the latter paper follows.

Repressive desublimation

Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man made for an interesting read. As I understand it, the perspective Marcuse has crafted is an approximate (read: critical) synthesis of Marxism and Freudianism, a rather timely theory for the age in which it was conceived. (Look, I like Hegel, OK?) The specific concept of repressive desublimation refers to the conflation of freedom and indulgence so rampant in post-war America, and likely even more so today.

The sociological implications of such a theory are the waning prospects of revolution, or, in more contemporary jargon, an erosion of the expressive capacities of the average American. Steeped in stupefying entertainment for all our waking hours, we lucky few in the post-industrialist societies of the world have little hope of breaking out of the mold crafted for us and donning the gauntlets of critical theory to duke it out with the capitalist system—particularly its prize-winning fighting cock, the military-industrial complex. We become dumb mouths above genitals numb with monotonous, unending stimulation, existing only to feed and mutely perpetuate our feeding. Repressive desublimation is the method by which the tyrant constructs delicious complicity. It is the plastic bag we place over our heads to masturbate.

Take that, BDSM imagery of Foucauldian power dynamics!

I daresay it’s never been said better.

Typhoon rain, of course, is safe.

Everywhere around town there are stray dogs. Most look hale and happy, solidly fed on scraps from the nightmarket and trash from college students left around the fields around the dorm. But lately, given the weather, some have taken on a more dour mien. Today I stepped outside with some friends to enjoy some tea and watch the rain out front of our building. When I walked over to what I thought was my friend’s backpack on the ground, resting in the corner of the porch on the front of our building, I realized it was a dog curled up.

His coat was beautiful from the outdoor living: shiny, black, surely soft to the touch. A huge gob of mucus hung from his nose to the ground, spanning the height of one paw. He looked up but did not care to move. He shivered a little, and with eyes at first plaintive, then resigned, waited for me to push him out into the rain. Which of course no man on earth could do.

I don’t want to talk about how my midterm went, I want to help this dog.

American 1: “Well, what can we do for it?”
American 2 (me): “I don’t know, take it to the vet or something. But maybe that would be too expensive?”
American 1: “Maybe a grand [NT] or so? I think I’d rather pay than see a dead dog.”
American 2: “Yeah. We can do this. We can totally do this. Where can we take him?”
Taiwanese friend: “There is no place.”
American 1: “Maybe like a hospital, not for people but for animals. Is there one of those?”
Taiwanese friend: “Yes, I know what you mean, I understand. But no.”
American 2: “There’s nothing like that here?”
Taiwanese friend: “There is, yes. But we shouldn’t bother them.”
American 2: “Shouldn’t bother whom, the dog or the dog doctors?”
Taiwanese friend: “The doctors. They cannot help him.”
American 1: “But it would be more comfortable for him, he would be warm and dry, and they would give him medicine. Right?”
Taiwanese friend: “Yes, they will do that. And then, when no one comes, they will kill him.”

And I know how right he is, I know he is only speaking the truth because he’s never been taught to lie, not even to foreigners. But why?

I would so happily give up a towel or a blanket of mine for this dog. He will be gone by tomorrow and the blanket can be thrown away, having done more in an hour than it ever would have in its lifetime.

But my friend looked at me, and urged me not to offer. He did not want to embarrass me by explaining that I would not be giving a blanket, I would be asking for one. I want, still want, to fool myself into thinking that I will see the dog tomorrow, and he will be OK. Medicine without love. Alms as subscription service to heaven.

American 1: “Do you think he would be happier—would it be better for him if we took him somewhere?”
American 2: “You’d have to ask him that.”

As is routine for our afternoon tea sessions, the three of us discussed English vocabulary. “Shelter” was a word my American friend and I went to great lengths to explain had a literary cast to it.

American 1: “Shelter is the most basic of all things. We don’t say, ‘I’m going home to my shelter now.’ Home is much more, your family is there, and perhaps food, too.”
American 2: “Shelter is like how, in a storm, you want a safe place, where there is no bad weather.”

Later, right before going back inside, we had a small recap session. My Taiwanese friend pointed at the dog and, to show comprehension, said:

“He has no shelter…?”

No, my friend. No, he does not.

And now we go inside.

The street imagery is surely because I worked both as a tour guide on a bike and as a pizza delivery guy on a moped. I got to see a lot of the city.

There are times, walking through the streets of this city I’ll never know, that I notice the height of the doors. I can never decide whether they looked taller hundreds of years ago. It’s quite impossible to say.

They might look taller now because they are made of wood. Because of the goliath wrought-iron finishing which adorns them, knockers you’d need to use two hands on to clap just once.

The streets were cobblestone not long ago, but have in some spots been paved over with asphalt, making an ugly mess. The asphalt breaks away in huge patches, failing to justify its own existence.

The streets are the face of this city I’ll never know. A cobblestone face peers out at the feet and wheels all about it, coldly curious, worn but not broken.

The problem with making things that last is that civilized humans like to marvel at ruins.

If only we could see the ruins of the future.

If only we could bid the stone faces speak, and tell us what it feels like to be foundation.

I am neither wood nor stone.

I am the ruins of the future.

I’m fairly sure that when I wrote it I knew I was ripping off a Borknagar song. I can hope so, anyway.

All I know about prose poetry I learned from Solzhenitsyn, whose Wikipedia article informs me that he’s just passed away. How sad. I’d always assumed he was long dead. I would have written him, had I known he was still alive.

But they always say that.

]]> http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/08/09/data-archaeology-i-found-poetry/feed/ 3 http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/07/01/arts-and-farts-and-crafts-a-joining/ http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/07/01/arts-and-farts-and-crafts-a-joining/#comments Tue, 01 Jul 2008 06:37:53 +0000 Conor http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/?p=576 An old friend of mine, reunited with me via the wonders of the internet, recently had the marvelous idea of organizing an excuse to be artsy-fartsy. Each week there’s a prompt, which one can respond to in absolutely any way at all. I’ve chosen writing because I can handle that at the moment.

I blew off a paper to write this, and will have to try to get that done in the morning. That’s going to be tricky, because I don’t have an alarm, so I have to rely on waking up naturally. (I like this lifestyle.)

The deadline for Arts and Farts and Crafts is Tuesday, so I didn’t want to miss it. Really, I probably should have slept. This was actually difficult to write, which is embarrassing for me, the highly esteemed and accredited author that I am.

Here is the prompt for this week’s entry:

My attempts at reason and quiet diplomacy fell on deaf ears as they began to wrap themselves in toilet paper from head to foot and chant “We want women.” I retreated to the relative quiet of my room and read the writing of a monk who lived alone on a mountaintop for thirty-seven years in search of a deeper understanding of the world. His main conclusion, when he came down, was that you can see very far on top of a mountain unless it is cloudy. Imprisoned for his radical ideas, he died several years later in jail. The only writing from this time period that survived is the line: “There are no clouds in a prison.”

-From The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper:  My Life, My Tapes (as heard by Scott Frost)

And here is the story.

A joining

Otto Gottlieb is a rusty old lamppost of a man. A lit cigarette in the rain. The ash collects like fallen snow in the crevices of his worn leather jacket and the rain sullies it. He stands articulated on a square in a nonexistent European town, waiting for a bus already come and gone.

He doesn’t want to answer his door. Without peering out the window, he knows the jaguars are walking about on two feet again. In the den, a clay sculpture of a Sphinx is pushed off the mantel and dashes itself against the stone beneath. Its head breaks off, rather than just the nose. Yet again, the universe fails to be as poetic as it could, if it cared.

Otto sits before a coffee table, face to face with the bust of a woman he never met. Alabaster? Porphyry? It doesn’t ever matter. He fingers the chisel fondly before dismantling her. The nose is the first to go. As the rock crumbles, he realizes his mistake. He flips the couch over and kicks the wolf hiding beneath it.

Wolves feed on rocks.

The roof splits. Embers breathe deep the new air and the fractured Sphinx writhes.

With an air repugnant of the feigned solemnity of ceremony, Otto lays his hand upon the wall of the fireplace, and dismisses it. Absolved of its comforts, the roof collapses. Rafters festoon the stage like compound fractures. Insanity incarnate.

The fire is placated by the light rain and hates nothing. More knocking at the front door, which is stupid, because the house is no more. Otto doesn’t want to let his son in. But the door is opened—by Otto, presumably—and the bipedal jaguar enters.

So, apple in mouth, Otto clambers onto the coffee table and reclines. The door is still open.

But his son refuses him, and stoops instead to collect the various fragments of rock from the shattered sculptures. He gathers a bit of ash in his paw and rubs it into his chest. After an extended bout of eye contact, he leaves abruptly, and Otto realizes he is naked.

He dismounts the table less than gracefully, paws around in the rubble his life has become, and extricates a Journal of Archaeology. No mention of him in this issue. No mention of anyone. Just a shattered ribcage of a house, rafters skyward in a sickly embrace with the still soft memory of some deity that slunk off during the night, staining the cover. No one remembers.

To meld with the loss of memory, the fire grows stronger. A pillar of desperate dancing smoke looms totemically above everything Otto has ever dreamed up. He sits naked, obscured by flames, and wishes for a Martian invasion. He wishes for a boat and a waterfall, with plenty of jagged rocks amid the crashing water below.

Otto reaches beneath the coffee table and pets the wolf hiding there. The wolf is dead, its skin coarse and hateful from the fire.

The door is still open.

Otto wishes his son would come back and eat him.

First I had to read my feeds. Since I was gone all weekend, this was quite a lot of reading, all utterly inconsequential to my existence. I speak of lolcats and BBC News alike.

Then some friends who have guests from abroad wanted to go to Hofbräuhaus, which I absolutely was not in the mood for. After declining, I reconsidered, reasoning that I only have another week or two left in this country, and I should be spending every conceivable moment of consciousness with my bros. Picture sorting can wait, no?

But instead of beerhall ribaldry, a cake was baked, so the evening was spent unwinding in the kitchen. My metal friend Sascha dropped by, after hearing my persistent cackling from the balcony beneath his room, and we started talking. Opened a few beers. Kept talking. We drank all the beer we could find, so moseyed upstairs quick to scout for more.

We brought a guitar back, and had another beer together. It grew late, and the kitchen gradually disgorged its occupants, leaving Sascha and me out on the balcony, thumbing chords and mumbling about oblique motion.

We played songs to each other long into the night. The guy knows Omerta like the back of his hand, although he doesn’t like the range of the vocalist—which is actually quite comfortable for me. He can play Road Trippin’ immaculately. (His technique on acoustic guitar is far beyond what I can hope to achieve in even the next six months.) We of course played many renditions of Fiddler On The Green, which neither of us can sing, even after tuning down the halfstep that the song demands.

Windows all across the courtyard slammed shut as we sang into the night, and clanked bottles together, and laughed. After several hours, the guitar was set down, and we began to talk faster, yet more slowly. “What are you five favorite things?” I asked. Then he asked me. We argued about whether civilization is fighting against, serving, or merely operating within the grand structure of, biological evolution. We disagreed about the voicing of the G chord in the bridge to Omerta, and whether there’s a resolution for the minor second during that calculatedly laidback solo. Tits or ass? C++ or Java? Clapton or Iommi?

All the same shit as any night, but tonight with someone I deeply, truly respect. I’m not yet tired, but I really should get to bed.

The wisest person I’ve ever personally known, an ex-girlfriend named Julia, used to tell me that I am a “people pleaser.” I concern myself far too much with the happiness of others about whom I care little, and this can interfere with the happiness of those whom I love, perhaps myself included.

The slamming of those windows tonight was the heaviest riff I’ve ever heard. The windows that opened and stayed open were like the smile that creeps across one’s face while listening to the opening chords of Road Trippin’.

Baudolino answered: “Concern with pleasing humans causes the loss of all spiritual growth.”

Is it then too much to wish that the entire world sleeps tonight as smoothly and thickly as I already do?

Last night I’d set an alarm for 10am today, giving me plenty of time to rouse myself, make breakfast, and walk over to the church nearest me, St. Benno’s. The alarm went off, and as usual, I didn’t get up. Except this time I was so tired and confused, I shut the alarm off instead of just snoozing it. Damn. At 11:30am, though, I’m awoken by rolling church bells even through my shut balcony doors, and I realize I’m missing the Easter mass bells. Damn! I roll out of bed, charge my MP3 player (which has a shoddy built-in microphone I must use to make the recording), throw on some warm clothing, and I’m out the door.

On the walk over, I listen to some Technical Death Metal by my favorite band. The air is cold, and even the bakery was shut today, a sign that all things must rest.

And it came bearing gifts
Of pain, frankincense, and her
None had a home here, none but the pain

The church is only about five minutes away by foot, though tucked away on its own plaza behind some apartment buildings, nestled among interlocking streets. I arrive by about ten before noon, and I sit down on a bench outside. It’s snowing softly.

The plaza is still; I assume most everyone who will be attending the mass is already inside. I pause my music to listen to a dove, perched in the hole left by a missing stone on the church’s main facade, indignantly declaring the plaza his own. I resume the music.

The chilling chants of the carcass choir
Rosaries inverted and strung upon the razor wire

I admire the facade of the church, the massive twin towers adorned less than gracefully with a sundial and an ornate clock, hands wrought of gold. Mere minutes remained until noon, so I stopped the music and started recording. Here is the excerpt of that recording which just includes the bells, as well as various other courtyard noises, such as wind, talking passersby, and the clip-clop of high heels.

[audio:stbennosbells.mp3]

I apologize that the quality is not better. As I mentioned, the device I used to record was my ancient iRiver, and the built-in mic is hardly stellar. I spent a considerable amount of time editing out the gusts of wind by normalizing and compressing, but they’re of course still quite audible. In addition, the recording here is a 192kbps MP3 file. For the lossless version in FLAC, please click here. At 17MB, it’s only about twice as large as the MP3 file. Oh, and one noise I absolutely could not remove was the spinning up of my MP3 player’s hard drive in order to dump the buffer to disk.

What I wish I could explain here is how shocking the bells were when they began, even though I’ve heard them literally hundreds of times before. The dove even was awed, or at least recognized the futility of trying to speak over the bells. As I sat and listened, trying to shelter the microphone from wind without muffling the beautiful sound, a child was carried past by his father. The child’s face was contorted in distress, his ears covered by one hand of his own and one of his father’s. The child’s free hand was clutching a small paper cone of roasted almonds.

When the ringing ended, and the last vibrations of the bells moaned on, the birds around the courtyard started to speak again. Not the dove, but others, chirping all around me amid the falling snow. I checked that the recording was still going, then stopped it and put on more music. I walked home with headphones on.

Standing west of God
We are united in regret

A happy Easter to you.

I just walked home in a cold spring rain with freshly baked bread warming my hands, crossed glistening cobblestone streets as the tram clattered by, the church bells splashing down the quiet corridors of shops, trying to remind me why people bake bread at all.

I don’t have any pictures of this, I didn’t record the smells. I failed to capture the warmth of that bakery, made real to me by a few locks of wet hair sticking to my face. My glasses fogged up when I entered. I mumbled something about the weather to the kind lady on the other side of the counter, and she handed me bread.

Everything is more than OK. I don’t mean in my life, I mean in the world. It’s all going to be fine.

Don’t try to save the world, because it doesn’t need it. Save the bakeries. Because once we lose them, all is darkness.

You, neighbor God, if, during these long nights
I should disturb you with loud knocking—
So it goes. Because I rarely hear you breathe
And know: you’re alone in there.
When you need something, and no one’s there
To give you a sip from the cup of water you’re fumbling for:
I am always listening. Give the smallest sign.
I’m right here.

Only this slender wall is between us,
Merely by chance; it very well could be that:
A single cry from you or from me—
And it would crumble
Without so much as a whisper.

The wall is made in your image.

Your images stand before you like names.
And if my light should escape me
And the depths of me thereby recognize you,
Then deflect it with the brilliance of your form.

And my sanity, rapidly waning,
Is without home, broken off from you.

Maddening.

Because I love you, tonight
I came to you, so wild and whispery,
And so you can never forget me,
I robbed you of your soul.

It is now with me and belongs to me completely
Through good times and also bad;
From my wild, burning love
Not even the angels can save you.

Wouldn’t that make a killer metal song?!

Cry My Name!

When I founded this blog (yes, that’s really the best verb to use there), I did it for two reasons. One, I wanted those near to me to be able to remain near to me as I went abroad, to have a connection to my thoughts, during a time when I knew I would be focusing on new social ties, yet not wanting to lose all of my old ones. Two, I wanted to get my thoughts in order before I left, to have something in place where I could chronicle my experiences for my own sake.

Thus the title: Im Voraus, which translates pretty well as “in advance.”

But there was another angle, much more dear to me, and an artist can never choose a name that isn’t complementary to itself. There’s a poem by Rilke commonly known by its first line “Du im Voraus”. It was this poem that I was naming the blog after.

Here is my best translation of it.

You, my lost beloved, who never arrived
I don’t even know which sounds are dear to you.
I don’t try anymore to recognize you
Amid the waves of what comes.
All those grand images in me
That vast traveled landscape,
Cities and towers and bridges and un-
expected turns in the path
And that might of the gods
Pulsating throughout all of this
Rising within me to mean
You, absent.
Oh, you are the gardens
Oh, I saw them with such
Hope. An open window
In the country house—and you almost
Stepped out, thinking of me.
I found streets—
You had just gone down them
And sometimes the windows in the shops
Were still dizzy from you, and gave back, frightened,
My too sudden image. Who knows, whether the same
bird’s call rang through both of us
Yesterday, apart, in the evening?

I am very much in love right now. It hurts, like translating poetry.

She repines that the privileged peoples of the world are squandering their time and resources on those most banal of activities, those pertaining to the internet.

We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.

What has happened to us is an amazing invention – computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: “What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?” In the same way, we never thought to ask, “How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?”

Her cautionary word here obviously got the anthropologist in me salivating.

I completely agree that these paradigm shifts have forever altered human thought, but as a cultural relativist by trade, I cannot believe that these changes are for the worse. Are kids reading less Faulkner these days? Sure they are. Are they spending a bizarre amount of time on YouTube instead? Yeah, you could say that. Are we doomed? Of course not.

Remember that Plato decried the use of writing, as he said it fostered a weak mind. Yet without writing, Plato would not occupy the so highly esteemed pedestal in the Western canon he does. In like stride, Google a while ago implemented Shakespeare Book Search, which lets the user read all of Shakespeare’s plays by sifting through PDFs of scanned library books. Users can of course search through the plays for memorable quotes, contextualizing them, making lines like “Let slip the dogs of war” resonate with brutal vengeance, or properly puncturing a line like “And laugh at gilded butterflies” with horrible, sharp sorrow.

Does the introduction of these ease-of-use tools in a society lower the level of appreciation and understanding people have of great authors? Perhaps the tomes would be better off on a dusty shelf somewhere, clad in cobwebs, suffocating in their own hope of being wrested from the shelf and dashed against a table, their guarded store of millennia-old lore spilling out across the wood to be lapped up by the minds around them, skull by precious, ravenous skull.

I don’t believe that Lessing wants the great works relegated to libraries, but it’s hard to ignore the profusion of classic works all over the internet. She’d be wise to make a case for copyright reform, as that happens to be what’s locking contemporary cultural capital away from the masses. Instead, Lessing paints these technological (and thus psychological) developments in a manner that’s a bit overly portentous, in my opinion, albeit redeemingly replete with moving, commercial-publishing-contract-worthy imagery.

We are a jaded lot, we in our world – our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency.

We have a treasure-house of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come up on it. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be.

We have a bequest of stories, tales from the old storytellers, some of whose names we know, but some not. The storytellers go back and back, to a clearing in the forest where a great fire burns, and the old shamans dance and sing, for our heritage of stories began in fire, magic, the spirit world. And that is where it is held, today.

That’s a breathtaking perspective on the state of the world we live in, but I can’t shake the feeling that Lessing is perhaps looking in the wrong places.

Doors are opening everywhere, and the internet is a big place—bigger than a library, even. So I can’t blame her for missing the new things.

This first one isn’t specifically about sleep, but the imagery is dream-like, and still gives me pause whenever I hear it.

Agalloch – In The Shadow Of Our Pale Companion

Here at the edge of this world
Here I gaze at a pantheon of oak, a citadel of stone
If this grand panorama before me is what you call God…
Then God is not dead

Insomnium – At The Gates Of Sleep

Listen to the night, hearken to the silence
The wind sings in fir trees, forest’s music rings
Rueful is the tune, wailful the soughing
Soothing is the choir, murmur of the trees

Wintersun – Sleeping Stars

My eyes feel so heavy when the stars are calling me:
“Join with us eternally!”
I’m falling in deep trance and my powers are weakening
I’m falling in a world between dreams and reality

And my all-time favorite, the very reason why I cherish old In Flames in a part of my heart I fear no one will ever plunder:

In Flames – Lord Hypnos

So, find me in these grandiose halls
Where long ago summers eternally fall
And tune the strings of truthful longing
To the frozen music of gods

So overbearingly Lovecraftian, so evocative of a lucidity of dreams never actually experienced. It makes me want to dream of dreams.

I rarely remember my dreams upon waking.

For example, if she had been visiting her father in the hospital, how could he have presented her with his life savings on the spot? Had he been keeping it under the mattress of his hospital bed? It’s also so dramatic as to be unbelievable that he delivered his final words of “Then I can die” and did in fact die promptly thereafter.

At the same time, there were inaccuracies and embellishments in my version of her story, too, which I didn’t design to explain because I thought them too tangential to the overall arch of the narrative. I translated my awkward German into confident, clear English. I left out the numerous times I asked her for clarification, the frequency of which would have led the reader to understand why I did not seek more complete information over the blindness and death of the woman’s husband. I rendered her voice in educated, intelligible American English, rather than a thick Southern accent which might better have conveyed her Bavarian dialect.

I do not believe that these modifications to the story altered its original intent. While it was necessary to repackage it in form in order to post here (in English, for example), I did not have to change the content of any of part of the story. Perhaps this is how the old woman felt when telling me all this: a few superficial elements here and there might need to be modified, but the overall feel and purpose of the tale remain intact.

I think the most troublesome question I have even now about the story is whether she married the man she did because she knew he wouldn’t have to go fight in the war.

But does any of this matter at all?

I think that truth in historical accounts is rather inconsequential, for the same reasons it is inconsequential in faith. While the adage “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it” calls for scrutiny of histories in order to afford informed prudence in future generations, and thus for a solid appreciation of what actually did take place at certain junctures in the past, it is easily just as beneficial for one to listen to the synthesis of experience in the form of advice and storytelling. It is indeed rather presumptuous to suppose that more can be learned from analyzing historical events oneself rather than deferring to the opinions and intimations of those who actually experienced them.

Toward this end, I ask you to take my tale of the old lady in the courtyard for what it is, despite its possible shortcomings and curious logical lacunae. Please understand I’ve done the same with her story of her life. After all, what else can one do?

While I was computing on a bench in the courtyard, softly headbanging with my headphones on, an old lady sidled up beside me and began to stare at me, almost imploringly. I popped off my headphones and smiled at her, said, “Good afternoon.” She ambled over to me and began to rebuke me for sitting outside in the cold.

“It’s freezing out here! Don’t you know you’re going to get sick?”
“Well, I wanted the fresh air. It’s a little chilly, but it beats sitting in my room. I’ll probably go back in soon.”
“You’re right you will. You should now. Here, take these.”

She handed me an unopened bag of menthol eucalyptus cough drops.

“Oh! Thank you, that’s really not necessary, I’m fine. I don’t feel sick at all! I’ll go in in just a minute.”
“Young man, take them. If you don’t, you’ll get sick. Go on, take them and then give some to your friends inside, too. I don’t want any of you getting sick this winter.”

I took them. She smiled and explained to me that she always looks out for young people, because they’re so much more interesting than old people. Man, did I have trouble coming up with something to say back to that! She nodded to me, wished me a good day, shushed my thank yous, and caned over to the place where the tree used to be.

I watched her stand there for a while, looking at where there is no tree. I called over to her, “I miss that tree.” She turned to face me. “I know I haven’t lived here long,” I went on, “but I really liked it.”

She walked back over to the bench I was sitting on and stood in front of me, just looking at me.

She began to tell me stories. As I’ve explained, the building complex our dorm is in is also known as a house for the seeing impaired—das Haus der Blinden. She lives here as a widow, her blind husband having died a long time ago. In recent years, the student housing agency in Munich bought out part of the building in order to use it as a dormitory. This meant that, practically overnight, a building whose halls were once draped with the quiet of unspoken sadnesses became bursting with youthful laughter and revelry. The building management repainted the walls.

She told me how the building had looked during the war, when the akido hall was still a massive bakery, which baked every day and shipped the food off to the soldiers, wherever they might have been at that time. There was a podiatrist’s office, too, and a provisions place for the elderly, infirm, or weak. She spoke of these things happily, as if to say she considered herself lucky to be so well taken care of. I’ve often noticed that Bavarians aren’t always looking over their shoulders at the revenant of the war, that they remember instead the cobalt blue of the Alps in the distance on that one day when autumn came so quickly.

How her husband went blind I’m not clear on. She had explained to me that many of the people living in the house were men who had lost their sight due to industrial accidents, working as machinists or some other type of manual labor. Her husband, though, could have been born blind: I know that she married him when he was blind.

Marrying a blind man wasn’t something her parents took lightly. Both were chronically hospitalized, but had remained bright and coherent, never suffering. One day while visiting her father in the hospital, she told him she was going to marry the blind man. “That’s a big decision to make,” her father said. “Marrying a blind man is no small thing. It will change the way you live.” She assured him that she knew that, and understood what it would mean to live with him. Her father began to express his concern that a blind man could not care for his daughter well enough. Apparently, the man didn’t earn very much money, and didn’t appear to be living well. She explained that this meager appearance was due to the fact that they had been saving money together, in order to buy a nice place with a lot of furniture.

The father realized there was no talking her out of it. He went and retrieved his money, his meager savings from what I can only assume had been a long life of rather grueling labor. He took his money and handed it to his daughter, looked her right in the eyes, and asked, “Do you still want to marry this man?” As if having money to call her own would change her mind. “Yes,” she said. “You will live with him and you will be happy?” “Yes,” she said. “Good. Then I can die.”

And he died. She with the money still in hand, her dead father lying next to her, a very lucky blind man waiting somewhere just for her.

She lived a very happy life with her blind husband. She regaled me with tales of his brilliance. In just two and half years, he got degrees in German, French, and Italian from the university. He worked as a telephone operator, and he was great at it. Everyone in the town talked about how smart he was. And he was handsome, too, he was tall, with broad shoulders and light eyes, which were a little differently colored—something to do with the blindness. When they would go out to eat, he would wear the nicest shirt and tie, have perfectly combed hair, brilliantly shining shoes (she was so proud of those shoes). She would get compliments from everyone about how handsomely he always presented himself, how lucky she was to have a husband like him.

She told me all these things with a conviction that bade me understand them and believe them not for her sake, so I would compliment and congratulate her, but so that I could understand her husband as the person he was. So that I would have a sense of how much I should respect him and the memory of him for all that he had been, with or without her.

I could not understand how he died. I think he fell from somewhere, and she was nearby when it happened. The doctor came and told her he was dead. She told me the story so calmly and matter-of-factly that at first I wasn’t even sure I understood the subject matter.

She said, “But that’s life. Here one minute, gone the next.” And she went back to the spot where there is no longer a tree.

I hope you enjoyed your cough drop.