Last time we were here talking about 10 days ago you reminded us not to forget about walking, and to look at our feet from time to time to check that we were still on the move. Or I could just walk away, you said. Or I could just walk away. It was shortly before the Easter break, a break as a result of which I appear to have forgotten what it was I was thinking about before. I guess I have moved on. I guess I have.
This forgetting, it is the nature of this flitting about the world, the wildness of thought, or the wilderness as we refer to it in the language of this particular sort of thinking we call walkingtalkingwriting. A wilderness, whether we mean a boggy patch of Dartmoor, or the break between sleeping and waking, or somewhere similar. It happens that way.
It is any location where I am aware of having forgotten how it was that I got to be there, between doubt and certainty beyond that death which awaits (Not “beyond that death awaits me” as I wrote in my last error-strewn piece, written at the beginning of that crisis of biblical proportions, the Easter break that included the circuits of my desktop PC going ‘POP!’ on Palm Sunday, my electronic notebooks spilling all over the editorial floor, and my running around in such a flat panic attempting to restore them that I tore a muscle quite badly in my right calf on Easter Day, ‘POP! POP!’, in the hopping-mad limitations-of-age-forgetting rush).
A location like the Easter break, in which that awareness arises which prompts a resistance, the same intention that demands we stop long enough to meet the deadline of this serial-feuilleton writing. Resistance. The demand of that awareness arising – a search for coherence? A thought experiment? The process of discernment? – in the midst of a crisis, a tear, a meaning gap marked by at least apprehension, if not (more likely) outright fear and terror.
Or a location like the first time in Berlin, City Centre. Resistance. It was several years ago now, and – November 2008, Alexanderplatz – it is a location to which I periodically return, indeed am almost required to, as it were, by force. Resistance. As in this beginning:
c l i p p i n g s
09 April 2010
When I opened the window
Fishes swam into the room.
Herrings…
…
…
I don’t think I can stay here.
(from ‘Where I Live’ by Gunter Eich, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n06/gunter-eich/five-poems)
Memory like glass architecture has surfaces that are part reflective and part permeable, and so it was as I recalled my early morning waking in the new city, new because I had never visited it before, and first looked out of the hotel window…
This beginning which I wrote: it is a story, here of unknown length and kind, whether something which might be called a novel or a piece of (so-called) non-fiction, which is both subjective and universal. For instance, the ‘glass architecture’ appears to be based on a twentieth century methodology defined by (among others):
Robert Walser. Berlin Stories (NYRB tr. 2012)
Alfred Döblin. Berlin Alexanderplatz (Continuum tr. 2004)
Joseph Roth. What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-33 (Granta Books tr. 2005)
Anselm Kieffer. Berlin Tempelhof Airport (Canvases exhibited at White Cube
Gallery, London 2011)
The resistance of the location of Berlin, City Centre; I have told it before and will no doubt tell it again, next time perhaps (‘triangulated’ c20,000 words) in pamphlet form.