There are, obviously, a countless number of ways to start a story. E.M. Forster more poetically put this "selective dilemma" (for lack of a better word) as follows: "One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister." A line which, by the way, Zadie Smith picked up in On beauty. So let me open my entry with an intertextual tribute to both of these writers (this statement being not true in some sense, since the post really started with "There are, obviously, a countless number of ways to start a story."):
One might as well begin with a very plain and general observation: a lot of people around me (inculding myself) are presently having a bad time. Not only a bad time, but sort of a life crisis. (I don't remember where I read or heard that, but apparently there is the term quarter-life-crisis, a phenomenon proper to people in their late twenties/early thirties, obviously referring to midlife-crisis. Be that as it may, I do not intend to subsume the quite different problems my friends are having to such a general and very vague "thing", since, as we all know, a label does not necessarly help you with anything, it might just be easier for people to deal with it. Like: "Yeah, right, I have this thing, it's a name, it's out there, other people see it, so it must be REAL and not just me going crazy.")
Anyway, I had a really really amazing conversation with a friend yesterday. She's the sort of person that you talk to about "her" problems, and through the way she talks about them, through the questions she asks herself and the way she tries to make sense of things, you wind up understanding more about yourself. One of the things she said yesterday has kept on working and working in my head - what I call the oyster-technique: when a sentence stays with you like a grain of sand in an oyster, and, by thinking about it again and again and again, it might just wind up a pearl. Or it might just stay a grain of sand, irritating and bugging you like a piece of hair in your mouth. So anyway, she said one of the things that she wonders and fights with most is that such periods of trouble tend to refer her back to "the norm". The way I understood it, she seemed to suggest that in periods of doubt and uncertainty, you wind up longing for a "secure" place, a place that you might have struggled not to inhabit or distance yourself from before. I think it was Judith Butler who said that identities are also recomforting places, they're kind of secure ground, they're - to some extend - the least threatening place to be. The joke in this being of course (I think), that a norm never really exists, insofar as it is an ideal (and, let's face it, virtuality or ideality is a wonderful, yet slightly uninhabitable piece of earth).
In my particular case, I read my dreaming of my childhood home, my longing for some sort of family I lost and would like to recover, as precisely such a wish for the "norm" - as in: the heterosexual, mommy-daddy-kids happy family nucleus -, coming in the back door. Irritatingly - but also: luckily - enough, this longing was cut short by the actual family meeting I had nearly two weeks ago. My brother came to Frankfurt, and we met together with my dad and his girlfriend. We did what families usually do, that is, sit down to dinner and shovel unlikely ammounts of food into ourselves. At one point during the evening I had this very strong, very painful and irritating feeling that I was the main actress in a show called "The happy family". I had such a strong sense of us acting, pretending we were something (a happy family with no problems) that clearly we are not, trying very very hard to persuade ourselves and the others that we were clearly, obviously, happy and normal. I looked at my brother and thought that his laughter was just a pitch too loud, looked at my dad and thought that we was praising the food just a little too enthusiastically, looked at myself and felt that my voice was coming out way to shrill and sharp. [NB: I don't mean to suggest that we ever were a happy and normal family, even during my childhood. Problem is of course that, looking back, one tends to idealize one's own childhood - sort of a different oyster-technique, where you re-model and re-work a memory so often that it turns into a pearl, beautifully polished and not at all like the grain of sand it once was. Which reminds me of something Homi Bhabha said at a lecture I attended recently: "Never again", says history. "Again and again and again" says memory.]
I didn't know whether I could sit there for any longer without either bursting into tears or slapping them in their face screaming. What I wound up doing is something similiar to what I learned way back in biology class fighting roosters do: In the confronting scene of a fight, the brain sends off two different messages - attack and retreat. Usually, one of the two wins, but sometimes the hormones (or whatever else chemical messengers) are at such an equal level that the animal doesn't go either way but ends up doing something completely different altogether, like picking the floor. Well, I didn't go as far as picking the floor, but wound up filling myself up with beer and getting drunk enough to live through the evening. Which reminds me of a line in a song by Psapp: "Nobody knows where they might end up."
