Authentica Habita

Photo by Carmen Young.

As I was saying, The Decline of the German Mandarins is a terrific companion for The University in Ruins.

§

Visited PK + RS in PDX over the holidays. PK asked how things are going in NYC. I repeated something that I've been saying to MK for awhile: that I've begun to feel...not uprooted, but un-rooted. I no longer feel at home anywhere. I move from city to city, always just a year or a few years too early or too late. Always -jected in some way, floating. Desychronized from my own prior experiences of a place, a scene. Not there.

falling up again

A couple weeks ago, my bag stuffed to overflowing with groceries from the (can I just say insane) Trader Joe's on 72nd, I was calmly riding my bicycle north, homeward, on Central Park West. Somewhere in the 80s I semiunconsciously noticed the numbers were going up and started: "Oops," I thought, and turned west at the next street and then turned again; and as I began calmly, smugly even, pedaling south down Columbus, I realized with a bigger start that I was now going in the wrong direction...and had to turn around again. So strong is my residual homing sense from the few years that I lived in The City before – years ago, on Broome St – that this is the third or fourth time since returning here that, in a kind of trance, I have begun going south in order to go home.

last Monday

Pretty girls on bikes, pretty girls clogging up Bergmannstr., as I pass, we grin at one another, until you see the child's seat on the back of my bike. Today the seat is empty, but you still turn your face away.

I have also lost interest in you. You are lost. I have begun to understand where I am, despite this city's size. I did not check the map once today, on my long ride to make an appointment in person -- because I am evidently too stupid to understand how to dial the office's telephone number correctly.

Also, on the way back, I derive a pleasurable sense of moral rectitude from pedantically waiting at traffic signals when no one is coming. That there are no witnesses to my strictness only increases the feeling of rectitude.

Pretty girls on bikes, why are you wearing tights in this heat?

archipelago

If the cognitive map of The City that grew in me, in my 20s, consisted of a dynamic network of places/spaces in which to drink and smoke, then my image of this city, Berlin, now, is an expanding archipelago of Kinderspielplatzen Kinderspielplätze: Rüdesheimer Platz, Hohenstaufenplatz, Bolzplatz Böckhstraße, Hasenheide, Tempelhof, Grimmstraße ("Grimmi"), Hobrechtstraße at Pflügerstraße (what do people call that one?), Victoriapark, etc. The beer garden next to the Spielplatz in Victoriapark represents a possible, personal sort of point de capiton...