The End

Although I would say that I am a person who very much believes in the power of words, I've experienced moments where language just escaped me. It's a banal and very general thing to say; it's a despairing and heart-breaking thing to live through when somebody close to you dies. No words can console enough; no words can mourn enough; no words can express sadness enough. In those moments, I very strongly feel the shallowness, the stereotypicality, the congealment of phrases; the fact that they have been used over and over again and thereby become like empty, bulky capsules in your mouth. I guess the conventionality and generality of language is particularly striking when you experience such a singular and ungraspable thing as the death of a person you love. I don't know why - biologically speaking - we cry when we are sad, but I find it to be one of the most wonderful and relieving properties of human beings; something to replace all words and all gestures; something to end all talk.
I find comfort in the particular tenderness and attention people at a funeral show each other, brought together (sometimes for the first time) because someone has left. Despite the superficiality and shallowness (maybe proper to all rituals), the "best friends" suddenly reappearing out of nowhere, the strenuousness of having to go through acts and speaking out words because "that is what you do", there are moments in funerals that can comfort in a very strange and beautiful way: A hand resting on a shoulder; the feeling of another person's crying, shaking body against your own crying, shaking body; the dumb silence and muffled voices; someone making the effort of smiling at you through their tears because, after all, and albeit the unhappy circumstances, they're glad to be here, right this momet, with you; the almost animal sound of women's voices moaning together.
What also comforts me in such moments is music. Suddenly, there is a particular beauty and depth in those music pieces (mostly classical ones) called "requiems". At my cousins funeral, it was her own voice that could be heard; strangely and beautifully singing a song she seemed to have recorded for herself and this particular day; a legacy of her life and her death. I have been hearing the Doors in my head these past days; maybe because of the simplicity, almost frugality of the song. In the end, what else can you say but: this is the end.
So here's to you, Isa, à toi, petite femme qui n'a pas voulue mourrir, qui n'a pas voulue succomber.

The Lévi-Strauss of football culture

Okay; so it's Euro 2008 in Austria-Switzerland (which always reminds me of the joke: Austria-Hungary is playing tonight. Oh yeah? against whom?). Since this marvellous event is also taking place in my home town, I was able to get some deep insights into the culture of football tournaments. Being a native, I find myself in the privileged position that I would like to call the "embedded ethnologist". Observations have been subsumed to the following axioms:
* As a fan, there is no outfit weird, tasteless and colourful enough. The only rule you have to observe is: The colours of the nation's flag must be part of your outfit.
* There is no limit of accessoires to be used, althought preferrably they should be recognizable as having something to do with the customs etc. of the nation you support (e.g. cheese for Dutch fans, preferrably in the shape of a giant hat that looks like a gouda).
* Make-up comes down to painting your face in the national colours.
* A fan - per definition - makes noise. Preferred instruments: drums and trumpets.
* Two fans are are louder than one.
* A group of fans is louder than two fans.
* Two groups of fans of opposing teams are louder than a group of fans.
* All the groups coming together is even louder than two groups of fans, the particular loudness reaching peaks when a team scores a goal. Observe that loudness grows exponentially.
* Consuming alcohol during the game is not obligatory. You can already start beforehand.
* The prices of beverages and foods even outside the fanzones are like earth quakes on a Richter skala: their limit is open towards the maximum (3 Euro 60 for a coffee, no problem!). The official fanzones being, in any case, the peek of prices (4 Euro 50 for a beer, no problem!).
* If your team wins, get drunk and celebrate. If your team looses, get drunk and celebrate. Either way: get drunk and celebrate.
* The ball is round. A game lasts 90 minutes, and in the end, the German win.

L'archéologue

It's strange to be back home. You walk through this city, and it's like an archeological field; memories of the first 19 years of your existence superimposed over each other, like a camera film that has been exposed over and over again, and you can see all those different photos blended into one, some of them blurred and so intermingled into each other that you can hardly recognize anything, others vivid and sharp, sticking out against the background. Places connected not only to one, but to at least a dozen moments and different stages in your life, like the centre of a spider's web reaching through time; your lifetime. Maybe this is why we feel at home; the sheer mass of memories attachted to a certain place; time attached in a particular way to space.

1978 - 2008

The most famous sentence in Austrian sports history...



Conclusion: Wien wird Cordoba !!!

Michel

La difficulté, c'est qu'il ne suffit pas exactement de vivre selon la règle. En effet vous parvenez (parfois de justesse, d'extrême justesse, mais dans l'ensemble vous y parvenez) à vivre selon la règle. Vos feuilles d'imposition sont à jour. Vos factures, payées à la bonne date. Vous ne vous déplacez jamais sans carte d'identité (et la petite pochette spéciale pour la carte bleue!...). [...] Vous avez eu une vie. Il y a eu des moments où vous aviez une vie. Certes, vous ne vous en souvenez plus très bien; mais des photographies l'attestent. Ceci se passait probablement à l'époque de votre adolescence, ou un peu après. Comme votre appétit de vivre était grand, alors! L'existence vous apparaissait riche de possibilités inédites. Vous pouviez devenir chanteur de variétés; partir au Venezuela. [...] Vous aussi, vous vous êtes intéressé au monde. C'était il y a longtemps; je vous demande de vous en souvenir.

Michel Houellebecq, Extension du domaine de la lutte

The Soundtrack of Our Lives

Today, a friend of mine showed me how to add videos to my postings, so now, finally, I can make ample use of this newly learned technology.
Joe Dassin's music is one of the major soundtracks of my childhood. More precisely, it is the soundtrack of our day long drives from Austria to the South of France. Every summer, my mom would fill up our car with suitcases, Austrian food and my brother and me to go visit her family in Marseille, where we would spend the summer. I have a vivid but somewhat condensed memory of those drives: the preparations beforehand (most important: we were allowed to choose our picknick food ourselves; always cookies, as you can imagine), the continuously growing heat during the drive, the stops at my parent's friends in Vevey and Grenoble along the way, the white rocks and dry bushes slowly emerging along the highway as we approached Marseille. I remember my mother's hands on the steering wheel and the look of her face in a quarter profile (I always used to sit behind the passenger seat). I remember the fights with my brother and my mother's hand reaching behind her into the air as she was trying to separate us without loosing sight of the road. And I remember Joe Dassin tapes played for hours and hours (and us singing along, of course, with our children's voices).
I guess picturing Southern French families outside around dinner tables for hours on end is sort of a cliché, yet, it is that what I most vividly remember about my summers in France: in my memory, they have all blurred into one, long, dinner with all my aunts, uncles and cousins and their various friends. Days passed on the beach; the obligatory burglary of the radio in our car. Excursions to the big shopping mall (Les Nouvelles Galeries) where my mom would buy clothes for us to last for the whole year (especially pyjamas! Now that I think of it: maybe that is why I like to wear them so much...).
It was the time when I used to tell people my second name because I was annoyed by the strangeness of my real name and people's weird reactions when they heard it. (Although I very distinctly recall an afternoon at the beach when I told a little French girl who I played with my real name; and also revealed the well kept secret that in my head, my name was associated with clouds [although I didn't even know the word for cloud in French].) It was a time when I used to think my brother had completely different and altogether unconnected faces, depending on his mood; it took me a while to put together in my head that he was actually the same person but with different facial expressions. It was a time when I didn't understand that the TV would play programms even when it was turned off and I didn't watch; and that the TV programmes in France weren't different to the ones in Austria because they were different TV sets.
One day struck out of the rest: my birthday, and every year I would get some - strongly wished for - equipment for my Barbie collection from my godmother (once being very disappointed because I got the Barbie camping car, which seemed like the most boring thing to me, but I knew that I shouldn't let my aunt know so I diligently played with it for as long as I was in France). It was a time when being separated from my mother for just one night was a catastrophe for me; I was struck with fear - nay: utmost certainty! - that I would never see her again (once I was so courageous to stay with my cousin for the night; I kept her awake until I don't know what time in the morning, until she finally pretended she was asleep to escape from my constant whining). It was a time when I learned to tell left from right with the help of the birthmark in the middle of my right arm. I had no sense of time; no sense of the future or plans - our departure always arrived as some sort of a shock for me.
I can't remember who said that childhood is the only paradise we can't be expelled from because it is always already lost, existing only in the past, in retrospect.

Moments musicaux

Les bouffées de bonheur traversant mon corps...

Digitalism - Pogo

yeah, there's something in the air
.
.
.
just take a look at my place
it's such a mess
but i'll be out of this space
as soon as you tell me
when the night is
you have to set up
bring it on
.
.
.
for a while
yeah, woa-ho
there's something in the air
woa-ho
.
.
.
it's been quite a while
since i could experience your brightness
now you've got a brighter smile
and i think i'm going to like it
talking 'bout the better things
you know how to maximize
everything around you
will become supersized
you have to set up
.
.
.
away from
.
.
what matters
.
.
and get it prepared
.
.
for a while
.
.
.
yeah, woa-ho
there's something in the air
woa-ho
yeah, woa-ho
there's something in the air
.
.
.
we could get so wasted
if you really want
we could get so wasted
bring it on
.
.
.

Moi-même, revisited

Voilà un message que j'ai écrit à un ami il y a quelque mois. Quel sentiment bizarre de se retrouver soi-même, devenu une étrangère à travers le temps...

V, merci pour ton beau message, et surtout pour les lignes de Pascal Quignard. Tu m'as apporté les mots pour la poésie de cette rencontre amoureuse, qui - je le sais bien - n'a pas d'avenir dans la vie "normale", et qui est pour cela autant plus précieuse. Les jours passent, et déjà tout cela me semble comme un rêve d'une autre vie, sans me perturber autant qu'avant. Je crois bien que je suis trop prosaique et pas assez lyrique dans les histoires d'amour: je veux un roman, une histoire, et non pas un petit poème bref et vif et intense. Peut-être il y a l'amour pragmatique: un roman qui peut durer quelques années avec des hauts et des bas, des complications et des dénouements. Et puis il y a l'amour anti-pragmatique: fou, insensé, mais beau, beau, beau. Un instant qui peut te faire rêver pendant des jours, mais qui ne peut pas durer.

Perdue entre chien et loup

Voilà environ deux semaines que j'ai commencé à lire un livre francais, suite de quoi depuis quelques jours, je rêve de nouveau en francais. C'est un sentiment étrange et irritant; un sentiment déconcertant qui, pour moi, renvoie à un état d'esprit plus vaste de déboussolement que je resens voilà un bon moment.
D'une certaine manière, je me suis toujours beaucoup plus sentie attachée à la langue - Allemande ou Francaise - qu'au pays eux-mêmes. Mon analyste pense que mon choix d'études vient du désir de "traduire" (littéralement et métaphoriquement) entre mon père et ma mère; comme si j'étais un lien de transmission entre les deux cultures auquelles mes parents appartiennent. En éffet, je me sens souvent comme héritière de deux patrimoines; comme si je dévrais incorporer en moi seule tout un tas de demandes largement contradictoires et opposés (rien d'exceptionnel à cela peut-être; n'est pas le cas de chaque culture?). Non seulement y-a-t'il la différence de culture entre mes parents, mais il y a aussi deux histoires de familles cafouilleuses, énigmatiques; pleins de resentiments inexprimés et chargins non-avouées (mais là encore, rien d'extraordinaire, non? y-a-t'il une histoire de famille qui soit différente par qualité, et non seulement par degrée?).
L'histoire de ma famille maternelle est étroitement lié non seulement à la France, mais à l'histoire de la France en temps qu'état colonial: ma mère et ses frères et soeurs sont tous nés sur des continents différents suite à un père militaire; une histoire de déracinement et vagabondage que je n'ai moi-même jamais connue, sauf à travers d'anecdotes. Du côté de mon père, une famille apparement attachée et enracinée dans l'Autriche rurale; mon père lui-même un nomade qui a couru le monde pour la plupart de sa vie adulte. Ma mère, ayant quittée son pays pour voyager elle aussi, s'est finalement installé en Autriche et s'est fait un devoir de nous garantir à nous, ses enfants, la stabilité et simplicité d'une enfance champêtre.
Attirée par le nomadisme puis en même temps désirant la sécurite qu'offre une racine - une vie vécu dans un pays, un même endroit, voir là même maison -, il me reste par fois qu'un vaste sentiment de déchirement et insuffisance. Ni l'un ni l'autre, il m'est difficile de me retrouver moi, de me débarrasser de ce double héritage dont je n'ai jamais demandé et que par moment je refuse avec la véhémence déséspérée d'un animal enfermée qui se cogne contre les barreaux de sa cage encore, et encore, puis encore; se prétant à l'illusion qu'un jour, peut-être, par miracle, la chair et les os d'un être vivant pourront briser du fer.

Autobiographical

The Stoicists had a tradition of autobiographical writing very different from what we today consider autobiographical writing. A diary, for them, was a book where one would write down philosophical maximes, aphorisms, etc. Not only were you meant to read those time and time again, but think them and, well, sort of incorporate them, in order to make you immune - stoic is the word! - to life's ups and downs: the thought behind it being that once you really got into a bad situation, you would be able to live through it with dignitiy, because of all these wisdoms you had already made the effort to introject before (if I remember correctly, Seneca has a lot to say about this in his letters to Marc Aurel).
In the year of 1999/2000 (gosh, my life cycle has been running in semesters for way too long now), I started a sort of notebook where I wrote down all kinds of quotes and, well, I guess what you might call "words of wisdom". It was the year I was an Aupair in the US; I had just finished school and took a long break from all sort of things (family, friends, my home country - in brief: life as I knew it) to figure out what I wanted to do "in the future". During that year, I devoted myself to a couple of things (going out like a lunatic, gaining a lot of weight, etc.), and one of them was reading the "classics". I went about it in my usual, more or less systematic (you might call it neurotic) way: Like you would start a special diet, I set out to make lists of the books I wanted to read, slowly and more or less continuously making my way through the list, ingesting the various books piece by piece. I then had another list where I would write down all the books I had actually read (which, as you might guess, was quite different from the initial "to-read-list" [btw: I love lists, in case you haven't noticed]). And then one day I started writing down passages of books in a notebook (bought especially for the purpose).
For reasons one might call coincidental or fateful, the notebook re-emerged this weekend as I was searching for something else. 'Course I started reading in it, and was touched, again - but maybe in a different way than 8 years ago - , by the words, always, and always again words written down by somebody else, unknown to me and under unknown circumstances but which, strangely enough, made a whole lot of sense to me and my life. In any case, here goes a brief selection of my personal words of widsom...

Why waste your final hours racing about your cage denying you're a squirrel?
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Prime numbers. It was all so neat and elegant. Numbers that refuse to cooperate, that don't change or divide, numbers that remain themselves for all eternity.
Paul Auster, The Music of Chance

His name was Disastrous because his godmother thought it such a pretty word.
Jean Rhys, Wide Saragasso Sea

Any description of the main street of Fort Curtis can begin and end inside this very sentence. Beyond that I find only redundancy.
Don DeLillo, Americana

Another odd feature of the parallel universe is that although it is invisible from this side, once you are in it you can easily see the world you came from. Sometimes the world you came from looks huge and menacing, quivering like a vast pile of jelly; at other times it is miniaturized and alluring, a-spin and shining in its orbit. Either way, it can't be discounted. Every window on Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.
Suzanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

I regard kids as hostages to the malvolent.
Philip Roth, I married a Communist