A Thousand Plateaus

sitting in the café, preparing tomorrow’s class. didn’t manage as much as i had planned today. thoughts were all scattered. then in the evening : gym. which was good. tried to listen to sigur ros on the cross-trainer. the gym is located in a huge factory hall that they’ve renovated, and one wall – the one you’re looking at when you’re on the machines – is completely made of glass, overlooking a parking lot and the city’s skyline and a row of trees that are standing by the side of an avenue. and this evening the sun that had almost gone down broke through the clouds a last time and the light was the color that flames make and it shone on the trees with their brown and red leaves which were glistening from the rain and it was just unbelievably beautiful and i couldn’t tell whether it was drops of sweat or drops of tears i tasted in my mouth. and i wished you were there, hearing the same song and working out on the machine next to me. i admit : my romantic fantasies are somewhat extravagant, but in that moment they made perfect sense.

yesterday my colleague j. got a new computer, and some technician was there to install it and set up the network. his name is fuchs. fox. j. and i had talked about him the day before, because he’s a little strange. he was supposed to be there for a couple of minutes only, but stayed the entire day, swearing silently because things didn’t work out. j. was sitting next to him all the time, smiling at me awkwardly each time i passed the open office door, trying not to burst laughing. and i had this old german children’s song in my head which i almost whistled while walking down the corridor : fuchs du hast die gans gestohlen. fox you’ve stolen the goose. but i thought twice because i knew that it would crack up j. who had to stay serious while herr fuchs was cursing bill gates.

before i returned home, and i swear this is true, i stopped by the supermarket to buy some groceries. and while i was walking down the neon-lit aisle i noticed an abandoned shopping cart. nobody was around. when i got closer i saw that a little boy was sitting inside it, knees drawn to his body, about four or five years old. he looked at me, looked me straight in the eyes, then looked at an orange that he was turning in his hand and started to sing : fuchs du hast die gans gestohlen. here’s elaine’s favorite pynchon quotation: “watch your paranoia!” but it really did happen!

monday night. it has started to rain at ten this morning and it hasn’t stopped since then.

alice has sent me sigur ros, and it’s playing now while i’m at the café and as soon as the piano sets in and i recognize the melody i’m moaning loudly, and then there’s a hail storm all over my skin and i have to crty and i’nm glad i’m sitting in the drak corner of the café oh my god oh my god it totally fucks me up hftur dfbvi78 hfi5 gu(//vf$ztbrjhnIbruzh7 sdejbji ibv9ujrvbi )vurbvh weoqcbdhz )03 2i ( 238aevirew urikv rue iurv ervf vier irkvbarub rutz giu§§§§§Gi4I

:-(((((((((

i’m only going through with this because you promise me that it will all be different by tomorrow.

hm, bad dreams watching the film yesterday night was fun. of course, it’s not the new lynch (which other people might have seen on the week-end) but then my life’s lynchonesque enough already. i brought a movie, too, one of my all time favorite silly films: “noises off” with michael caine. while i was studying the dvd boxes of this movie and “what’s up, doc?” i realized that both were made by peter bogdanovich! and guess who has conducted the only interview with director edgar g. ulmer (remember the ulmer conference last year in olomouc?) which has become legendary? : peter bogdanovich. it’s a small world.

hm, feel the restlessness rising up again. guess i better hurry to the gym before i’ll do anything to get some distance between me and the beasts - “trauma-bears” jodie called them yesterday night when some of them appeared on television.

[later]

sitting at the café, few familiar faces, coke tastes stale and it’s been completely dark since six. winter time kicked in last night and now the bright hours of the day are even fewer. if i hadn’t so very wisely deleted your email address i would have sent you this song today, but i know that you wouldn’t even value a good old fleetwood mac attack:

Something in you brought out something in me
that I’ve never been since
That part of me that was only for you,
that kind of romance
Cause only once that kind of love,
that kind of fever dance
That you love because you become someone else in an instant

Say you will, say you will
Give me one more chance
At least give me time to change your mind
That always seems to heal the wounds
If I can get you to dance

Something in you put a hold on my heart
Hard to believe now
Here is a place that will never be dark
I remember that place
That kind of touch
Electricity of love
That certain kind of grace
That you love because you become someone else in an instant

Say you will, say you will
Give me one more chance
At least give me time to change your mind
That always seems to heal the wounds
If I can get you to dance

i’m writing all this to keep myself from thinking about the thesis. or rather : from not thinking about the thesis. or rather : from thinking about not thinking about the thesis. can’t things be easy for once? like falling in love?

and guess what they were showing today on the big screen tvs which overlook the gym’s cardio-section like huge eyes and normally spit out multicolored images of ideal bodies in music videos so we don’t forget what it is we’re sweating for : a documentary on polar bears.

did more stupid things : listened to the live version of suzanne’s “rock in this pocket – song of david” because i referred to it in the “american literature and religion” class. shouldn’t have done so because it immediately filled me up to the brim, the energy of the performance making me fantasies again how great full band live versions of 200 lurkers songs might be.

tonight i’m going to meet jodie and her roommate v. and we’ll watch “what’s up doc?” – which was v.’s idea. she (v.) acted weirdly towards me lately, trying to ask me out on dates which i successfully managed to avert. couldn’t really find an excuse for the video screening tonight, though. but jodie will be there, too, so it will hopefully not come to any awkward situations.

paula wrote a sparkingly happy mail the other day, describing almost manically how much she enjoys life right now. she ended with this line : i love you, p. in divine cologne and someday we will meet face to gorgeous face! until then we are unutterably alone!

see, i try so hard to express things and then i stumble over songs and they say it in a nutshell:

when a night city’s breeze blows across the room
and a 5am moon and sun start their swoon
you hear your lover’s breath
and not a moment too soon
you get to release all your emotions

and yes, that filtered backing voice is laurie anderson’s.

sitting at the café, agonizing over the hypertext thesis. thomas always says that you have to “pick up” your listeners, meaning that a talk must always take into consideration how much the audience knows/does not know about the topic, and i fear that most professors on the board will have to be picked up at a very basic level when it comes to digital literature. which results in the fact that what i have written so far sounds very trivial to me.

yesterday thomas talked to the dean and if all goes well, i can still do the orals even if the new regulations have not come into effect yet. trying to think as little about all these ‘technical’ problems as possible, just like i’m trying not to think about the sad fact that i’m sitting in front of the laptop on a friday night (and have so on the past friday nights during the past months) while the rest of the beautiful, graceful people is out partying or playing a gig somewhere.

i chatted with alice last night after the gym, elaine called tonight and checked on me, jodie is working behind the counter but the truth of the matter is that i’m simply very lonesome, even among a crowd of people. a round of pity for the poor guy!

and how strange : that stupid thing i did last week ‘returned’ today. who would have guessed! it was almost like a compliment. but i was wise enough not to repeat it.

“so what is it that you want?” he asked.
“i don’t know. no, i *do* know but i can’t articulate it. at least not in a simple way.”
“from what i understood you want a relationship…”
“yes. and no.”
“what do you mean?”
“i want this affection. and the relationship is only a way to frame it, give it the air of permanence. i’d settle for the affection only, even without the relationship if necessary.”
“what do you mean, ‘affection’?”
“this special presence.” a wind. a season. a time of the day. an atmospheric variation. a  change of hue. an imperceptible molecule. a discrete population. a fog or a clouds of droplets. everything has really changed.

a reader wondered:
to what extent love/the search and longing for this security brought on by a “presence that has special qualities” is a distraction/escapism from, or misinterpretation of, “one’s true purpose in the world”– that is art/creativity, or (at least) living creatively: interacting meaningfully with “the world at large” and having transformative experiences based on or intertwined with a more general love+intimacy.

i’m not really sure whether i think of myself as having “a true purpose in the world”. no, i don’t think that i have a purpose. i don’t think there’s a plan. i do think, however, that this search for a presence is connected to “living creatively.” i’m not quite sure yet, how. it’s strange, but sometimes i think of this presence as something like the embodiment of a song, not a specific song, rather of an abstract ’songness,’ the sum of all these emotions that songs can trigger in me: joy, wonder, sadness, pain, longing, acceleration, disappearing.

the thing is (and i think that’s why i could never become a successful buddhist) that i do not experience this “general love+intimacy” as something that quenches the thirst, only as something that makes me even more thirsty. it is only when it materializes in a body which i can encounter (and which is equally eager to encounter me) that a space is opened in which i am simultaneously calm and agitated, at peace and excited, hungry and filled with this presence.

okay, this needs some context. there are two kinds of latin certificates in germany. a ’small’ one and a ‘large’ one. the large one is by far more difficult and complex and you have to take a written and an oral test with some state examiner. the avid reader might remember that i did  latin this summer. however i did the ’small’ latin which only requires a written test that a university teacher takes.

so, right now regulations at the university require that you must have a large latin certificate to make your phd. but earlier this year the professors of the english department agreed that the small one would suffice for english. the regulations were changed, but to come into effect, the faculty-convention (a gathering of all professors of the philosophy-faculty) has to accept these changes, which normally is simply a formal matter.

in the summer there had been a faculty-convention which was supposed to accept the changes made to the regulations, but they didn’t because the regulations of the german department were not formulated yet. today was another meeting, and since i want to make the exams this year (also because my contract is about to run out and can only be prolonged if i pass the exam) it is simply very very very important for me that the new regulations are accepted and can come into effect.

thomas, as being part of the faculty-convention, went to the gathering this afternoon.

so this evening i called elaine, and i asked her whether she had already talked to him (sometimes these meetings go over three to four hours) and she said:
“yes. he didn’t mention the regulations, though…”
“hm…maybe i’ll call him”
“yeah, do so.”
so i called thomas.
“hey” he said “bad news. they didn’t accept the new regulations. i don’t know why because i had to leave early. guess we’ll have to talk to someone from the dean’s office tomorrow…”

so, the orals are off. my entire graduation might be off, even. und ich habe echt so keinen bock mehr auf den ganzen scheiss. as elaine uses to say so poignantly:
FICKEN GEHN!

argh. almost midnight. spent way too much time on preparing tomorrow’s course instead of doing important stuff like working on the thesis then guest lecture in the afternoon, headed home, dinner, gym, more work at the café.

he said:
“so what is it that you want?”
after a long time i tried to answer and he interrupted me, saying
“you know, it’s getting more and more complicated. the more you try to explain, the more diffuse and complex it gets.”
“that’s weird, because it doesn’t feel diffuse and complex. it feels real and simple…”
“what is it that you want?”
“i want the security of a presence that has special qualities.”
“as i said: diffuse.”
“i wish i could make a photo of it!”
“what would that image show? a certain person?”
“no…”
you know what i answered.
“a plastic bag. but i cannot put it in a single word. but honestly, i don’t really think that it’s something that we could work out. it either happens or it won’t.”
“right.”
“the only thing i can do is try to deal with the pain of the not-happening.”
“right.”

“and I only have escaped alone to tell you” this is what each of the four servants of job say after they have brought the bad news that he has lost all his fortune, his cattle and his children. i didn’t know this.

i don’t know. call me an idiot, but i just stumbled over this, and the first twoandahalf minutes are sooooooo beautiful!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CX6pn28gu-8

and of course then there’s this:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/j8hfmc

summary of today: got up, worked, read, took notes, read, worked, gym (again), tütensuppe, read, took notes. and now it’s almost midnight and the virus scanner is searching my hard drive and has already found three viruses, which might explain why my pc had developed the annoying habit of shutting itself down for no apparent reason every now and then.

sitting in the café, trying to work. i know i’m fucked if i don’t manage to get seriously started tonight. half of next week is planned already and time’s running out. i’m aching cause i’ve been to the gym. alice has sent me two songs by devendra banhart to which i’m listening right now. or not listening, because the first track i had to skip after 0:59 seconds when he was singing about how he remembered “your arms around my neck”

i want to go back home. where i can find melodies and a bedcover that i’ve washed three times since you’ve gone and still i find memories caught in the fabric. i want to write songs.

switching to steve reich’s drumming and trying to work.