A Thousand Plateaus

21:52. wednesday night. the heating is on, it’s freezing outside. no gym today. i’m too tired. went to the hairdresser in the evening. tried to work on the dissertation but i was too tired as well. it’s weird, i feel like i’m running on spare battery for weeks now. the hours of sleep i get each night let me recharge just enough to get through the next day and each night i’m totally worn out and exhausted. the strange thing is that i can’t really even get any rest: i can’t relax. as soon as i’m doing nothing or trying to just clear my mind and concentrate on gaining some physical and psychic strength again i have the worst pangs of remorse and i start thinking: “what are you doing here you fool! you’re supposed to work!” i’m too tired to work but too tensed to relax and therefore i’m too tired to work. catch 22.

i know, it sounds childish. the other thing that’s bugging me is that people start asking: “and, what are you doing on new year’s eve?” and of course i don’t know yet, i don’t really have anybody. last year i was at a party with s.. s.. s.. s..

You’re the girl in the paperweight
I barely know you
you’re so quiet - is there nothing
in this weird perspective
that’ll let me breathe in the smell of Eden
in your eternally open eyes
I barely see you
I barely see you

busy day today. filled with useless and pointless things: bought a new mobile phone because the batteries of the old one didn’t work properly anymore. so now i have a samsung sgh-x200. it wasn’t very expensive and it doesn’t have any of the fancy stuff that mobile phones have these days such as gps, mp3-player, radio and camera. it’s simply a telephone.

when i came back i had to clean the cellar, did the laundry and then went to the gym. came home, fixed myself something to eat and wrote a short mail to jana.

i’m listening a lot to leonard cohen’s ten new songs recently. especially “boogie street” and “my secret life”. very melancholic without being melodramatic. even though the lyrics may seem at times, but the relaxed, cold, understatement.music keeps it from being too corny.

“i saw you this morning | you were moving so fast | can’t seem to loosen my grip | on the past | and i miss you so much | there’s no one in sight | and we’re still making love | in my secret life”

it’s friday night and instead of hanging around in some bar picking up gorgeous women i’m home, watching tv. the problem is: i’ve got too few heterosexual friends who are single and with whom i could go out. sitting in a bar alone is pathetic. so i’m home on a friday night and the most exciting thing tonight is that i cut some radish into my salad :-(. have been to the gym in the evening and now i’m aching all over.

“and oh my love i still recall the pleasures that we knew | the rivers and the waterfall | wherein i bathed with you | bewildered by your beauty there | i kneeled to dry your feet | by such instructions you prepare a man for boogie street”

A sip of wine, a cigarette,
And then it’s time to go.
I tidied up the kitchenette;
I tuned the old banjo.
I’m wanted at the traffic-jam.
They’re saving me a seat.
I’m what I am, and what I am,
Is back on Boogie Street.

O Crown of Light, O Darkened One,
I never thought we’d meet.
You kiss my lips, and then it’s done:
I’m back on Boogie Street.

- Leonard Cohen: “Boogie Street”

sunday. i’m depressed. big time. went to bernd’s birthday party yesterday. which was nice, but also frustrating. thomas (my boss) made a remark about how other people manage to finish their dissertations much faster than i do was tired all day long. slept into the morning and then slept for another two hours in the afternoon. actually i should prepare the seminar session for next tuesday (stein & eliot) and write on the diss, but i only watched television all day long and felt bad.

i hate being single. had nightmares tonight and when i woke up alone and cold a powerfull feeling of solitude overwhelmed me. mark eitzel is singing: “and your sad eyes reveal | just how badly you feel”.

i had hoped to meet j. at bernd’s party, but she wasn’t there. i’m longing for

okay, i think i said that i would tell you about that romatic moment with j., so here we go:

she is a riend of bernd and she’s living in another country, but this september bernd and i were there for a conference so we met her. i had gotten to know her the year before and already back then i felt that her appearance impressed me a lot.

so this one night we all went out together and it was about two in the morning when tom (a german/american friend of bernd who was there for the conference as well), bernd and i were walking j. home - she lived nearby. and we walked down a quiet street, it was a mild night and there were no clouds and on one side of the street rose old, baroque buildings and on the other side there was a wall, about a meter high, and suddenly j. jumped onto it and took my hand and pulled me up there. “come on!” she said, walked in front and led me on the narrow wall.

and i looked down the other side of the wall and suddenly realized that there was the river flowing down about seven or eight meters directly below us, but the water was pitch dark, i couldn’t really see it, only the reflections of the stars, the mirror version of the sky and it felt as if the wall was marking the brim of the world and as if anybody who left balance would tumble from the earth and fall into the sky below. but i wasn’t afraid because i felt j.’s warm, firm hand leading me until we reached the end of the wall and jumped down onto the safe side.

the next day, bernd, tom, j., three other people and me went to a city close by. to get there we had to take the bus that was driving on the highway for about thirty minutes. and we were laughing on the bus, playing games with the faces and when i was sitting by the window, looking outside onto the fields that were passing by i was filled with paul simon’s “america” and the lines

“kathy i’m lost’ i said though i knew she was sleeping.

‘i’m empty and aching and i don’t know why!’”

shot through my mind again and again. and i *did* feel empty and aching and *did* not know why.

i spent the last day of the conference - which we had off - alone. actually i wanted to come to a conclusion about what i’m feeling about anne, what i’m still feeling for s. and how i’m feeling about the fact that thomas is reading the online journal. but i was only thinking about j.. and i realized that i wanted to tell her that the moment when we were walking on the wall was very special to me. so i made the plan to talk to her that last night because there was a dinner marking the end of the colloquium.

that night we were all sitting outside in the garden of a restaurant and when j. was going inside i waited half a minute and followed her and met her when she was just about to return and i said:

“can i talk to you for a minute?” and she said

“yes” and i was really nervous but i knew that i had nothing to lose: we were leaving at seven the next morning so i took a deep breath and said:

“i just wanted to tell you that the night when we walked upon the wall was very special for me. when you pulled me up there and was balancing in front of me i thought that, even if we lost balance, we would not fall down but simply float there in the air. and i wanted to thank you for that.”

she was startled and said “thank you” and said “this is the most beautiful thing that some has said to me” and then she gave me a quick and unexpected kiss on the lips. now it was my term to be startled. she said:

“are you coming out again?” and i said

“in a minute…” and she went into the garden.

i stood there and was really surprised: it was the first time that something i said had these immediate effects. but i wasn’t sure what all this meant: was it a friendly kiss on the lips or did she feel something similar? when i got back into the garden we looked at each other from time to time. someone had brought a guitar and we were all singing songs - it was very 60s - and suddenly he started a new song and it was “america” and nobody really knew the lyrics except for me so everybody was quiet and i sang along to it almost on my own.

it was three in the morning when the restaurant closed and since tom, bernd and me had to get up at six to get our train to prague we decided not to go to bed at all. j. joined us and we went to the park and sat there, continuing talking. we had been there for some time when j. was suddenly standing in front of me, pointing with her head into the dark and said:

“you wanna come with me?” and i wasn’t sure what she meant and i hesitated but then got up and followed her down a small path that lead to the river. there was a wooden landing stage on which we sat. she asked me why i had said these things in the restaurant and that they had been very romantic and she leaned her head on my shoulder and she looked at me and then we kissed. she had very firm lips, and it felt good, it felt right, it felt the way i had missed it.

so i was sitting there at four thirty in the morning with this gorgeous girl by the river, a cloudless sky above us full of stars, the light was reflected in the water and painted little moving shadows on her face and our feet were dangling in the water and i realized that even though i didn’t really knew her she was affecting me tremendously: she was an it-ness for me.

when i looked at my watch it was already almost six so we hurried back to the dorms where we met tom and bernd. i packed my things in a hurry, just threw everything into my bag, and then we headed for the station. and we kissed when i boarded the train and then i looked at her getting smaller and smaller as we left the station and that was the last time i saw her.

about a week ago i wrote a long email to the girl i met at a conference this summer. the night before i was leaving we had a very intense and romantic moment – but that’s a different story that i might tell you another time. the point is that she wrote me and asked me what i was looking for in a relationship. or more specifically: what i was missing in my relationship with anne.

and what i was/am missing is an affection. a strange, ‘unpersonal’ affection that is not connected to someone’s individuality or subjectivity. for lack of any better term i call it ‘beauty’. but you can also call it ‘magic’. or ‘intensity’. or ‘grace’. or even ‘pain’ sometimes. it is an ‘it-ness’. it is a beauty that is not necessarily connected to a human being. as a matter of fact i more often find this beauty in words or in music - it is very rare that i encounter it in a human body.

this beauty is hard to describe without sounding utterly corny or confused - or both. it does not have any objective or essential qualities. i find it in unpredictable places, events, songs and people. like in the film “american beauty” when one of the characters, a film-maker, is showing his friend “the most beautiful thing i’ve ever filmed” - and it’s a plastic bag that is dancing in the wind. and even though it is the most mundane thing imaginable it has this intense beauty, this sudden grace.

this beauty affects me before i can reflect about it. it is a pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy. it’s the storm that a beautiful song can unleash in my lungs before i start figuring out the chords or the delicateness of the composition. it’s the shivers that a beautiful line of poetry can send down my spine before i start interpreting it. it’s the sparkling skin an everyday event like a dancing plastic bag can trigger. it is not connected to an essential quality that something has. sometimes i listen to a song and it has this beauty, and i listen to that same song the next day and it is gone. it is always singular and ‘event-specific’.

depending on the ‘medium’, this affection can cause various reactions in me: when i listen to a song that is beautiful, i want to sing, i want to make music myself. when i read a text that is beautiful, i want to write myself. and very, very rarely i find this beauty in a body. and then it fills me with an intense feeling of tenderness, and i want to touch this body then. sometimes - and this hardly ever happens - this feeling is returned and it is a mutual affection.

i guess ultimately this beauty - regardless of where i encounter it and in what form it comes - has the same effect: to reach out. either by writing or by singing or by touching. it is a kind of ‘opening up,’ a desire to become part of this ‘it-ness.’ i think i would even go so far as to say that this – for me – is the meaning of life: to experience these moments, these instances of beauty and likewise to create them for other people. to affect and to be affected. to be open to these intensities, to give in to the desire to sing, to write or to touch and to set it off in other people.

the relationship with anne was perfect, except that it lacked this beauty. for some reason she cannot affect me this way. and even though this affection alone is not enough to base a relationship on, it still is an indispensable prerequisite. 

and the sad thing is that there has been someone, s., who had this beauty in abundance. we had been together for over a year, but our relationship ended this spring. since then i have this memories, these after-images of beauty in the back of my head. s. had been such an it-ness for me. s. affected me. not even ‘her’, since it had nothing to do with who she ‘was’ as a subject. it was not s.. i would say it was her body, but that’s way to reductive and simplistic - and sexist it was something irreducible to her body or her mind.

watched “murder, my sweet” tonight. a 40s film noir. great dialogues. Blond Bombshell: “I find men very attractive…”. Philip Marlowe: “I imagine they meet you halfway.”

jesus, what a day!  bad new first: harvard university turned down our proposal for the conference on ‘materialities’ 

i’m not seeing anne anymore. and she is not seeing me. it was a painful process of breaking up. we agreed on having no contact anymore but then called again. agreed again on not talking to each other but then mailed again. i never imagined it to be such a difficult situation. i think for the first time in my life somebody is feeling more for me than i am for her. or rather: feeling something different, because it’s not as if i wouldn’t feel anything for anne. and i’m missing her. i’m missing her commentaries and our little witty dialogues which sometimes sounded as if they came right out of mad about you or seinfeld.

this morning the phone rang. it was thomas (my boss) and he was on the train to town and he said that he had to meet me in front of a big fashion store (h&m). they presented the new stella mccartney collection today - which i couldn’t care less about. but his wife sent him to buy about twenty items that she had chosen the night before via the online catalogue. and since they thought that there would be a great run of frenzied women in their twenties and thirties he needed me to help him against the mob.

now, the thought of a mob of frenzied women in their twenties was actually rather alluring, but the overall concept of storming into the store and grabbing pieces of boring and uninspired fashion was less so. anyway, h&m open at ten and we were standing in front of the closed doors at nine. we were the first. and for about 50 minutes we were the only ones. then, suddenly, from out of nowhere, women gathered, as if called by a secret and inaudible signal. there were only about forty, but when the doors opened they turned into a wild horde. i was frightened!

luckily we could get everything that thomas’ wife wanted to have. well, just leave it to thomas to get you into the most bizarre situations imaginable! while we were still waiting in front of the entrance - he reading butler, i reading whitman - he said to me cheerfully: “THESE are the important moments in your life. when you die, THIS is what you will remember!” and i knew he was right. and i was scared.

more bad news: didn’t manage to work too much on the dissertation. and i think we have alienated blaine today in the colloquium when we were discussing butler and criticized her for reversing some freudian key-concepts. he was really pissed, because he took it personally. which it wasn’t!

good news:

i’m sorry for not updating the journal. but a lot of things have happened, most of them not very pleasant or uplifting. i’m tired. i’m dead tired. not tired like at the end of the day. or tired like at the end of the semester. but genuinely and truly exhausted and worn out down to the smallest molecule. i could sleep for a weeks.

bought the new kate bush cd - and it’s brilliant. i’m listening to it right now and it makes me ache for writing songs again. my eyes hurt. my heart is somewhere, don’t know where. i don’t know. i need some rest from all of this. i keep hurting people. i keep missing people. i keep reaching out and pulling back my hands at the same time.

a while ago i thought that life would be getting easier the older you get. realized that this is a misconception. life is getting more complex day by day. i need to find some islands of rest and order in this sea of chaos. not to reterritorialize myself completely, but to have a space that gives me enough structural security to stop the worrying, the thinking, the panic, the missing, the missing, the missing.