invisible berlin

There are no pictures from the last few days in Berlin, but it's not because there's nothing to see. When it rained, the puddles -"little seas on the sidewalk" as they were christened at 2 in the morning by a man in a top hat - reflected the defiant old buildings, shimmering with a glaze of mud. When it was sunny the sky stretched wide and blue across a checkerboard of cafe tables, and it was easy to feel that the late afternoon would never end, that coffee could be followed by 2pm breakfast by wine without effort, and that dusk's slow arrival would seem fitting, inevitable, like the start of something and not the end.

There are no pictures because most of what happens in Berlin happens in the dark. Yes, the babies are pushed through the farmers market at 11 on Saturday, and the pretty girls stream down the bike lane on Monday morning. But it's not until around 6 that the city starts to really move and pulse and come alive.

It is a city of layers, a second hand city, a city of double meanings. History's mutations have left their marks, and show through the cracks. A former watertower is now a cylindrical apartment building, a power plant is a throbbing night club, a long stretch of the wall blocks the view of the river though it keeps no one out, no longer insists that a border between people must be kept. Girls on bikes wear remixed flea market finds, the languages are switched depending on what one is trying to say to whom, and if you stop walking for a second and listen for the thump of electro music, you might be able to find the party. Perhaps this is why Berlin is best seen under the cover of night. Half-obscured. Incandescent. Sound winning over sight, echo and shadow winning over the clear light of day.

And when the dawn starts to come, tugging at the corners of the night, and you want to stretch night just a little bit longer, you go to the club. Follow the djs past the long line waiting to get in - the birds are singing - past the tatooed doorman and the lesbian frisker and enter a cavernous cement room where it's night all day. In the center of the dance floor, put your hand on your chest - it's vibrating from the bass - the body also porous, also susceptible, as mutating as the city. You feel it too, don't you.

Current Issues

I've got poems in a few new magazines, plus new work online this week.
Consider this beach reading for the poetry set.

This week I'm the featured poet at No Tell Motel, with new poems daily. Their archives are a lot of fun, too. Dig in.

Issue #8 of A PUBLIC SPACE includes "The dead of winter."



LUNGFULL! #17 is Mr. Yuck green and includes "The line ending forever," a page of its typescript first draft, and a description of the process of writing the poem.



FORKLIFT, OHIO issue #20 includes "Birdsong trumps dumptruck" among its poetry, recipes and industrial safety tips. Better wear a helmet.




MATCHBOOK vol. 2 comes out this month and includes a section from my poem "Stains." This magazine is so cool - the covers are old matchbooks, so it is very small. My copies haven't landed yet (and they're not for sale yet on the SFP website), but Hoa Nguyen got hers and found a dollhouse music stand on which to display it. Savvy.




BONUS FURNITURE ISSUE:
My MATCHBOOK will look even smaller on our new furniture find, which I can't resist posting because it's so HOT. It's the bottom of a 1930s bureau, found as an older man was cleaning out his mother's home.



Two meters long...



Lovely details...



Happy reading!

Before America

Every Thursday and Saturday and sometimes on Tuesdays we buy our vegetables and eggs from The Ladies. The Ladies are the Schminke sisters, who own and run a farm just outside of Kassel in Ihringshausen. Yesterday they invited us to visit.



We biked the 5 kilometers with Eva and Bettina...





and landed at the house, where we were fed smoked fish, grilled speck, brotchen with butter and cheese, and of course, tons of vegetables.





Brigit, who is a big Obama fan, explained to us over lunch that the farm has been in the family since the early 1700s. The early 1700s, people. Before America.





After lunch, the highlight: a tour of the greenhouses and gardens and fields. It was incredible to see everything growing and to learn about how they work. Because they don't spray pesticides, weeds grow up next to the vegetables in the fields. The prettier the fields, Brigit said, the less the taste.

It's an immense amount of work. Every vegetable is picked by hand, and they're not getting rich doing it. "Wenn man mit Körper und Geist zusammen arbeitet, verdeint man immer weniger," said Petra's son Michael, who also works the farm. If you work with the body and mind together, you will always earn less. The dancers and poet knew exactly what he was talking about.

The Duel

As you've probably noticed, Lily's been writing a lot lately. I, on the other hand, have been somewhat empty after a big push in May. Tonight Lily challenged me to a duel.



We met over a table at Ebert's (which we still call Creperie, even though it's now called Ebert's). We each brought a notebook. I also brought a small dictionary and Jose Lezama Lima's selected poems, from which we pulled words or lines as prompts. With these prompts, we had two minutes a round to write something. Then we read the results to each other. We did ten rounds.

I talked loads of trash the entire time.



Everybody won.

Some Samples for you...

4) LIMA quote: "I can't. I mean it."

LILY
"I can't. I mean it."
i won't, you want it
i don't, we had it
i choke, i get it
i wouldn't anyway

FRED

"I can't. I mean it."
I should, I mean
I wanted to, or thought
it would be promising
to offer, that I might
see my way through
any obstacle, the mud,
but I spoke before
I lifted a finger
and that changes
everything.


5) THE REMIX - we took two quotes by Jose Cemí, from his novel Paradisio, read them aloud, shut the book and had to remix the images from memory.

"The president crossed the ballroom like a nicety on the lid of a cigar box."
+
"The house, the candles in their holders, seemed to stress its metals, as if preparing the fireflies of memory for the future."

LILY:
A swarm of fireflies around the President's head. He plucks one out of thin air, cups it in his palm. Flickering flesh. Into a cigar box he drops it, closing the lid, then cracking it, making sure.

FRED:
The president crossed the cigar box like a nicety attached to the back of a butterfly, a candle stressed to its metal, waxing in the glow of a flickered shutter.


9) LIMA quote: "You can erase from the book of life."

FRED
You can erase from the book of life. Dare me. I will replace from the look my wife gave me over tea. Engage another lever. Love a perishing weaver. Tar and feather the elbow leather of an elephant. Recant. Recount.


10) THREE WORDS randomly chosen from the dictionary.

grain introduce nipple

LILY
Let me introduce Miss Daisy Chain, she'll be performing for you tonight on the high wire, the hoops and the crystal jig-a-lig. Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Daisy Chain is a one of a kind wonder, straight from the plains of Indiana to our Windy City. You think you've seen legs? A sassy derierre? A tantalizing glimpse of nip ... (time's up)

The Doc

A little urology humor ...



in honor of the Doc on Father's Day.

The Coach

For Fathers Day, a shout out to the 1975 Senators and their coach.



Needless to say, if anyone can find one of these OG Admiral track tops, I have cash or trade.

See you later

One of the things that I have liked all these years is to be surrounded by people who know no english. It has left me more intensely alone with my eyes and my english. I do not know if it would have been possible to have english be so all to me otherwise. And they none of them could read a word I wrote, most of them did not even know that I did write. No, I like living with so very many people and being all alone with english and myself.

Gertrude Stein, from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

There is the language we use to share information, the language we use to create – ideas, images, imaginings – and the language we hear in our heads. Murmur, mutter, sooth the baby, cry for help, curse in anger. To be alone with one’s language can be the ultimate privacy or the ultimate prison, or it can become, I realized one night watching a performance of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a place to lose ourselves.

It was the first play I saw when I moved to Germany. I went alone. The lights came up on a large elevated, tilted square covered in purple carpet across which hung a metal beaded curtain. The actors entered arguing, and from that point on, I was lost. I watched everything with a vague memory of the plot from the movie, but understood exactly nothing. It was, of course, all in German.

It was an incredibly lonely evening. In a darkened room full of people who understood, I didn’t. It was February 2007, and I had just left behind for the foreseeable future: my husband, my apartment, my books-records-dishes; my friends, family and city; the ability to read my mail or open a bank account, my understanding of state holidays, knowledge of customs and rituals; my language. But how could I resist the temptation to walk out of one life and into another? It was a chance to lose myself. In the process, I thought, maybe I would find something.

Well-spoken German has a hushy, pleasantly raspy sound and I liked not understanding it at first. But that soon began to shift. Laughter took on a disembodied, abstract quality, sounded manufactured. Movements looked like pantomime. I created mental super-titles: “The man lifts his drink to his lips, squints,” “The women clasp waists, one wobbling on her high-heels.” The actors were no longer people but symbols, forms imbued with indecipherable meanings. Architectural ruins, Egyptian pictorial alphabets, computer code. It must mean something, I thought. I’m sure it all means something. I shifted in my seat, my eyes dilated with effort. I forgot where I lived. I forgot what I was doing there. I forgot that I could speak. I tried to come back, repeating in my head over and over: You’re in Germany. You’re in a theater in Germany. You’re a dancer in a theater in Germany and you speak English. But it didn’t help. Intermission came, and I left quickly in relief.

***

Kassel is home to about 150,00 people, if you count the villages. Its claim to fame is the international art exhibition Documenta, which takes place every five years, but most of the time when people come to Kassel it’s to shop. They also come for the theater. Performances play on three stages forty weeks a year. I’ve seen many of them – been packed in with the laughing kids at Christmas shows, tucked into the upper loge for the second act of the opera, sat in the last row for the ancient Greek drama – enough to wonder about the other people in the audience. Where they come from, why they’re there.

Of his characters, the novelist Milan Kundera said, “They are my own unrealized possibilities. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented." We are sitting in our seats you and I, watching the characters lie, kill, writhe, leap, get drunk, get their hands dirty, neglect to say the most important thing. We let them fail, transgress, supersede and are content to watch. There is, in all of us, an urge to get lost in the story. And there is, in many of us – and not just those of us who stand on stages for a living – the urge to take part. We want to cross borders ourselves, to find unrealized possibilities, to lose ourselves over and over.

***

Amanda Knox is a 21 year old American currently on trial accused of murdering her former roommate during a semester abroad. She has been in an Italian jail for 20 months. Last week she was called to testify for the first time. It is a murder trial, a well-publicized and heavily analyzed spectacle that you can read all about on the internet.

Knox comes from Seattle, and when she got to Perugia, she started studying, found an Italian boyfriend and got a job at a bar. On the night of the murder, she was working at the bar. When she was finished working, on her way to hook up with her boyfriend, she sent her boss an SMS message which ended, “Buene notte. Ci vediamo.” Good night, see you later. The bar owner was a suspect in the murder, and when the police found this text message they called Knox in for questioning. With “See you later,” the police’s line of reasoning was, Knox meant she would see her boss later that evening - to follow through with their plan to kill her roommate.

Knox was brought in by the police, questioned for hours, berated and even hit by police officers, she said. “I wasn’t sure what was my imagination and what was reality,” she said of the questioning session. Eventually, she broke down and asked to write down her statement. In what later turned out to be false testimony, she wrote her account of the evening, accusing her boss of killing her roommate. The written declarations, “were taken against my will, and so everything I said was taken under confusion and pressure…In my confusion I started to imagine that maybe I was traumatized, and under pressure I imagined lots of different things because during the days prior the police had suggested many things."

Last week when she testified, Knox spoke in both English and fluent Italian, but at the time of her arrest, her Italian was only passable. She wrote an SMS message in her non-native language, using a common farewell, and this was enough to begin an investigation for murder. Amanda Knox is either guilty or she is not. She testified that she is innocent but there’s a good chance she is not. But I can’t even get far enough in my thinking to form an opinion. I’m still picturing her standing under a street lamp in the warm Perugia night, thumb-typing.

***

Parallel worlds exist simultaneously. Chinese rice paddies are cultivated while Hollywood wives get eyebrow waxes; traffic is jammed during Denver’s evening rush hour while on an island off of Sweden they’re celebrating the solstice; I am swinging high on a ferris wheel above the valley but across an ocean from me in Brooklyn a thousand books and records sit in a dark room to which only I have the key. It is easy to step out in and out of countries, languages, theater lobbies.

What we find is often different from what we seek. We end up far away from where we set out. Some things are recoverable, or like language can be learned; others are lost forever. Stepping out of the brightly lit lobby into the humid, ticking night, it may all look unrecognizably foreign, or uncomfortably and suffocatingly familiar. Or maybe there is no intermission, no chance to leave early. That’s the risk. That the casually tossed “see you later” at the end of the night might not actually mean that. Maybe I will see you later. Maybe I won’t.