The sky this morning was a bit grayish from having rained. I saw, through the window only a bit subdued white. I was the first person to rise up and leave, with neither the festivity of a finished party, nor the relief of a landed plane. It took a certain kind of courage and emotional transition to be able to just walk away. Every day I willingly commit myself into various prisons, and after 150 minutes, out of them again.
I would usually bring a pencil to write down a few notes; however eventually I realized that these notes were not written down for the value that they supposedly convey, but were for my reassurance of feeling the tip of the pencil sliding across the paper, amongst various predetermined lines. I would shroud myself with an almost Islamic relief when I sensed the pencil's quiet brush - the black trail of ink that it left behind just so animated, persisted, and meant. Though like having sex, the process of opening a notebook and beginning to write was distinctly dissimilar from the closing and ceasing of it. Weary of the back-and-forth inflation and deflation of my elatedness, I opted instead to bring the book of Infinite Jest. A hefty piece with a page count that I seemed unlikely ever to match. Possibly due to its verbosity and weight, it represented to me something almost much more earthly and intransient. When I held the book, I had the same simplistic joy of holding up a wad of brick, and was somehow emboldened to declare war on whatever that had dared to fuck with me. I read the book in-between sessions of the Diversity Management course like having a thought in-between non-thoughts during a trip from Bremen-Vegesack to Bremen-Burg, not for the actual advancement of human affairs, but for the masturbation of it.
Grabbing the umbrella from to my left, and the book from to my right, I acceded towards the door as if I had maximum-volume punk rock blasting in my ears. It was moist, windy, and slightly cold as Bremen had always been. The lane immediately in the front had almost a layer of mud upon it. But I stepped over it with the gist of a mini-stampede. Like an anonymous pedestrian leaving the warmth of a street-side cafe and unto the rain, I opened the umbrella with a certain resignation and grace. I walked diagonally towards a residential college where I didn't reside. And under my umbrella, I was joined at first by a gentleman from Pakistan, and then by a lady from Belarus. Though soon after turning left, they both went away.
In The Prophet, Gibran wrote "we wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us". And henceforth, amongst the howling wind, amongst the scattered mutters of the passing students, and amongst the silent pirouette of leaves from afar, I wandered alone.
The handle of my umbrella pushed me in its firm grip the tenderness of a wildflower. I stood briefly at the door, retracting the umbrella to its original shape, and resumed into the staircases of College Nordmetall. The drops of rain were falling still, collapsing themselves on the windows at the corridor. They formed sheets of water that blurred the landscape outside. And the contour of my own reflection was barely discernible; but I could tell immediately that it was me, blended in with sky.
Like a car that was parked in the garage when both the speaker and woofer were turned off, the moment I entered my room and the black wooden door was shut behind me, all of the metaphysics that had previously been tacked onto me were sieved out like the lyrics of my favorite song. I sat down on a dull and strange silence, while the dim lights lightly quivered at the curtain that was just closed.
Friday, February 24
Thursday, February 16
2/16
I woke up nonchalantly, with an abrupt and disregarding start. I hadn't a dream last night. As the commanding whiteness of a morning sky began to seep through a slight separation between the curtains, my body braced itself artificially yet ruthlessly upward. I twisted my head as if to examine myself and only halted because all I saw was an empty slump in the middle of the pillow. I walked in perpendicular to the bed, turning after three or four steps to the left, and opened the bathroom door in a compact series of interlocking metallic sounds.
The light in the bathroom shone with almost surgical brightness. The frail man in the mirror flinched automatically like a beer bottle. Amused by his outright stupidity, I put up a tender smile and looked closer - the face was roughly symmetrical with a touch of animalism that I'd learned to ignore. The two nostrils, delineated with some sort of in-between wall, contracted in a rhythmic, ever-lasting dance. The eyes are sitting comfortably in bones' enclave, pointing towards different directions like a pair of chained-up squirrels. The lips were a bit dry, but still reddish - I mused, it was such that this young, vulnerable, wishful, certified penis-bearing gene gun was presented on the market. And not without an oversized slice of self-importance, the man brushed his face like an African wildcat licking its fur.
"What kind of morning is this?" Impatient, I retreated into the shower with leg's artful glide. My fingers curled unto the handle and rotated left, and the water came down with a mushy steam that clouded the glass container, where a body could be seen to move with all of its visceral, vague sense of beauty. I held my breath intently as the foam of shampoo was first applied, and then washed away, and silently stood there to feel the water's irrevocable flow. After perhaps an eternity of warmth, I turned off the shower, and walked out.
Everything was all of sudden different, as if I became more judgmental in an instant. One ought to describe such difference not with adjectives, but with a quick collection of nouns: morning, class, breakfast. The shower somehow lifted me from a smothering tedium of emptiness into an smothering array of things upon which I construct my inscrutable edifice. These things were quite like hunger, thirst and yearning, but in reverse order, epistemologically distinct but functionally similar. Compelled by these things like I would by hunger, thirst and yearning, I grabbed the black overcoat and headed out - the traffic condition was quite good today; the road was clear, and there wasn't any need for me to adjust the course. Yet it was at this moment, the engineering marvel of being me was shattered. There were not many engineering marvels at the servery on 7:30 AM - but in the systemized movements and unbending determination of the way the few were eating breakfast, I felt a Renaissant push like an egg cracking on the head of a poet.
I consumed a few pink eggs produced by several far-away female chickens, and piled the two coffee cups made from several far-away trees, and went for the class amongst several far-away buildings. I was surprisingly fine. I galloped forth quite steadily even when I was not paying too much attention to the ground. Like enjoying a sip of whiskey on an airplane seat, I downloaded the "Diagonal Walking Challenge" game from my mental App Store, and began to play it - 20 meters ahead a vertical vegetation was spotted, and at the 50-meter mark a slope appeared too steep to traverse. I was even playing in multiplayer mode, where the other players were not as skillful as I was. I secretly gloated at such a distinguished honor. But like any game downloaded from the App Store, that game became old so fast that I had to search for a new game to download.
When I reached the class, I had not downloaded another game. The Moonlight Sonata was not playing in the background; I was not writing a book; Berlin was not suffering from terrorist attack; the Wall Street was not melting; many people were starting to have an unimaginably good love affair; many people were not; the bookcase in my old apartment was sitting right next to the wall; a woman was giving birth; another woman was being born; Petr was still afraid of his wife; and I was somewhere on a planet circling a star, doing presentation.
15 hours later, when the planet has finished another 0.625 cycle of rotation, I'm going back to sleep.
The light in the bathroom shone with almost surgical brightness. The frail man in the mirror flinched automatically like a beer bottle. Amused by his outright stupidity, I put up a tender smile and looked closer - the face was roughly symmetrical with a touch of animalism that I'd learned to ignore. The two nostrils, delineated with some sort of in-between wall, contracted in a rhythmic, ever-lasting dance. The eyes are sitting comfortably in bones' enclave, pointing towards different directions like a pair of chained-up squirrels. The lips were a bit dry, but still reddish - I mused, it was such that this young, vulnerable, wishful, certified penis-bearing gene gun was presented on the market. And not without an oversized slice of self-importance, the man brushed his face like an African wildcat licking its fur.
"What kind of morning is this?" Impatient, I retreated into the shower with leg's artful glide. My fingers curled unto the handle and rotated left, and the water came down with a mushy steam that clouded the glass container, where a body could be seen to move with all of its visceral, vague sense of beauty. I held my breath intently as the foam of shampoo was first applied, and then washed away, and silently stood there to feel the water's irrevocable flow. After perhaps an eternity of warmth, I turned off the shower, and walked out.
Everything was all of sudden different, as if I became more judgmental in an instant. One ought to describe such difference not with adjectives, but with a quick collection of nouns: morning, class, breakfast. The shower somehow lifted me from a smothering tedium of emptiness into an smothering array of things upon which I construct my inscrutable edifice. These things were quite like hunger, thirst and yearning, but in reverse order, epistemologically distinct but functionally similar. Compelled by these things like I would by hunger, thirst and yearning, I grabbed the black overcoat and headed out - the traffic condition was quite good today; the road was clear, and there wasn't any need for me to adjust the course. Yet it was at this moment, the engineering marvel of being me was shattered. There were not many engineering marvels at the servery on 7:30 AM - but in the systemized movements and unbending determination of the way the few were eating breakfast, I felt a Renaissant push like an egg cracking on the head of a poet.
I consumed a few pink eggs produced by several far-away female chickens, and piled the two coffee cups made from several far-away trees, and went for the class amongst several far-away buildings. I was surprisingly fine. I galloped forth quite steadily even when I was not paying too much attention to the ground. Like enjoying a sip of whiskey on an airplane seat, I downloaded the "Diagonal Walking Challenge" game from my mental App Store, and began to play it - 20 meters ahead a vertical vegetation was spotted, and at the 50-meter mark a slope appeared too steep to traverse. I was even playing in multiplayer mode, where the other players were not as skillful as I was. I secretly gloated at such a distinguished honor. But like any game downloaded from the App Store, that game became old so fast that I had to search for a new game to download.
When I reached the class, I had not downloaded another game. The Moonlight Sonata was not playing in the background; I was not writing a book; Berlin was not suffering from terrorist attack; the Wall Street was not melting; many people were starting to have an unimaginably good love affair; many people were not; the bookcase in my old apartment was sitting right next to the wall; a woman was giving birth; another woman was being born; Petr was still afraid of his wife; and I was somewhere on a planet circling a star, doing presentation.
15 hours later, when the planet has finished another 0.625 cycle of rotation, I'm going back to sleep.
Tuesday, February 14
2/14
Today in the early afternoon I was caught in a stupor - one of those moments when I cease to be motivated by the common range of things yet couldn't really figure out what I would do otherwise. It wasn't, though, that I have finished all of my presentations and accorded my duty as a student - I was simply too absent-minded to play along with them as I often do.
The sun outside was blazingly white (when I'm writing this it occurs to me that I'd like to mention the sun quite routinely and each time in a different shadow), so were the grass, the trees, and the buildings. Most of the people I still knew were probably all having classes, and I stood alone in my room, amongst a pair of sunglasses, a noodle bowl, and a spoon. Sartre said, "I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these characters spend their time explaining themselves, and happily recognizing that they hold the same opinions. Good God, how important they consider it to think the same things all together." Though I was surrounded with neither voices nor characters, in a sense I felt the same as he did - all of these familiar beautiful things around me, and the way the sunlight was casted upon them created a sense of togetherness that I was not in. After all, I thought to myself, it was a wintry Monday afternoon, and I was a young lad at the university. Perhaps I should dumb down slightly and try to blend in with nature. Hence, with a pair of sunglasses hastily placed on my face and a book in my hand, I dashed out of the room like a naked man dashing out of the sauna - I decided to go to Bremerhaven - there's a wonderful beach where I used to chug around, and if there's anything that Bremen could offer yet Berlin couldn't, it should be a beach with seagulls.
Like any story about a journey that I would tell, I had myself transported in various trains, buses and escalators and reached the town in under two hours. Even though I was then almost 30 miles away from the university, my actual walking distance was about thrice of that from Nordmetall to C3. I wasn't therefore tired - I was merely a bit eager and unsure. Like trying to date with a woman who's chubbier and stupider than I thought, I arrived in Bremerhaven a bit underwhelmed but was anyways eager to enjoy it to a fuller extent. I passed by various shops like Karstadt and Mai Mai, the latter of which somehow triggered my appetite, almost running down the whole trip to a lunch break, emerged from the revolving door and sat on the bench away from the teenagers blasting German hip-hop music and in front of the ocean, while my buttocks spread like they did on the black cushion chair back in college. I took off the sunglasses, and exhaled fully like an upcoming gangbang member waiting on the sofa, but of course, without cigarettes, beer, and any other participant. I fidgeted, swirled, smiled, and then abruptly stopped smiling when a seagull was caught flying mid-air by the violent wind - its face was at first bewildered, but quickly turned aghast when it began to fly backwards. I had the brief intent to laugh, but ended up only twisting my mouth with a certain gentlemanly restraint. I realized that I shared some similarities with the seagull - we saw the same scenery, breathed in the same oxygen, and waddled in the same organismic packages in pursuit of the right feelings, the only difference being that the seagull waved its wings with a vehemency and sincerity that was impossible in my own sore, unmovable ass.
I shuffled through a few pages in my book on philosophy, barely registering a thing, and looked up to the horizon, perhaps, I thought, some of these days, I would remember this. For longer than I would prefer, my catchphrase had been "fuck it", so long, as a matter of fact, that I had forged a label "fuckitism" for the convenience of referring to such an attitude. I left the bench with an adverb that I could only write as "fuckitistically" - correct, I then left the bench fuckitistically as the teenagers listened to the same song, or a different one with the same uncomprehending swagger. The landscape of Bremerhaven had dimmed a little bit but contained largely the same things.
I boarded the train back to the university without the capriciousness when I started out. It was with what that I came back I couldn't exactly pinpoint - it was the feeling of having the primary and secondary senses met, yet the tertiary rebuked. I came back confounded with thoughts but none of them valid enough to nudge my consciousness. I walked automatically, found automatically my semester ticket in the pocket, and gazed automatically at the tree. I was perhaps happier? Perhaps the trip had from some angle validated a portion of my existence where it had not been? It was like drinking orange juice after refusing to order drink at a salty Chinese restaurant? It was like playing basketball after work while thinking about astrophysics? I didn't know the answer to any of these questions. I didn't even know what is a question and why would I have it.
Meanwhile, the teenagers have perhaps returned to their home; the sun has begun to shine several timezones behind mine; the students have stopped having classes and started to sleep; I have stopped writing and started to sleep.
Tomorrow, though, tomorrow, as I remembered dearly, the grasses are green.
The sun outside was blazingly white (when I'm writing this it occurs to me that I'd like to mention the sun quite routinely and each time in a different shadow), so were the grass, the trees, and the buildings. Most of the people I still knew were probably all having classes, and I stood alone in my room, amongst a pair of sunglasses, a noodle bowl, and a spoon. Sartre said, "I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these characters spend their time explaining themselves, and happily recognizing that they hold the same opinions. Good God, how important they consider it to think the same things all together." Though I was surrounded with neither voices nor characters, in a sense I felt the same as he did - all of these familiar beautiful things around me, and the way the sunlight was casted upon them created a sense of togetherness that I was not in. After all, I thought to myself, it was a wintry Monday afternoon, and I was a young lad at the university. Perhaps I should dumb down slightly and try to blend in with nature. Hence, with a pair of sunglasses hastily placed on my face and a book in my hand, I dashed out of the room like a naked man dashing out of the sauna - I decided to go to Bremerhaven - there's a wonderful beach where I used to chug around, and if there's anything that Bremen could offer yet Berlin couldn't, it should be a beach with seagulls.
Like any story about a journey that I would tell, I had myself transported in various trains, buses and escalators and reached the town in under two hours. Even though I was then almost 30 miles away from the university, my actual walking distance was about thrice of that from Nordmetall to C3. I wasn't therefore tired - I was merely a bit eager and unsure. Like trying to date with a woman who's chubbier and stupider than I thought, I arrived in Bremerhaven a bit underwhelmed but was anyways eager to enjoy it to a fuller extent. I passed by various shops like Karstadt and Mai Mai, the latter of which somehow triggered my appetite, almost running down the whole trip to a lunch break, emerged from the revolving door and sat on the bench away from the teenagers blasting German hip-hop music and in front of the ocean, while my buttocks spread like they did on the black cushion chair back in college. I took off the sunglasses, and exhaled fully like an upcoming gangbang member waiting on the sofa, but of course, without cigarettes, beer, and any other participant. I fidgeted, swirled, smiled, and then abruptly stopped smiling when a seagull was caught flying mid-air by the violent wind - its face was at first bewildered, but quickly turned aghast when it began to fly backwards. I had the brief intent to laugh, but ended up only twisting my mouth with a certain gentlemanly restraint. I realized that I shared some similarities with the seagull - we saw the same scenery, breathed in the same oxygen, and waddled in the same organismic packages in pursuit of the right feelings, the only difference being that the seagull waved its wings with a vehemency and sincerity that was impossible in my own sore, unmovable ass.
I shuffled through a few pages in my book on philosophy, barely registering a thing, and looked up to the horizon, perhaps, I thought, some of these days, I would remember this. For longer than I would prefer, my catchphrase had been "fuck it", so long, as a matter of fact, that I had forged a label "fuckitism" for the convenience of referring to such an attitude. I left the bench with an adverb that I could only write as "fuckitistically" - correct, I then left the bench fuckitistically as the teenagers listened to the same song, or a different one with the same uncomprehending swagger. The landscape of Bremerhaven had dimmed a little bit but contained largely the same things.
I boarded the train back to the university without the capriciousness when I started out. It was with what that I came back I couldn't exactly pinpoint - it was the feeling of having the primary and secondary senses met, yet the tertiary rebuked. I came back confounded with thoughts but none of them valid enough to nudge my consciousness. I walked automatically, found automatically my semester ticket in the pocket, and gazed automatically at the tree. I was perhaps happier? Perhaps the trip had from some angle validated a portion of my existence where it had not been? It was like drinking orange juice after refusing to order drink at a salty Chinese restaurant? It was like playing basketball after work while thinking about astrophysics? I didn't know the answer to any of these questions. I didn't even know what is a question and why would I have it.
Meanwhile, the teenagers have perhaps returned to their home; the sun has begun to shine several timezones behind mine; the students have stopped having classes and started to sleep; I have stopped writing and started to sleep.
Tomorrow, though, tomorrow, as I remembered dearly, the grasses are green.
Wednesday, February 8
2/8
It's been a week back from Berlin, and rarely have I the tenacity of writing down something. Usually around February and March my literary urge would be resuscitated, my words would sprout into a semblance of a tree. But I must admit with a forthright countenance that this year it could be different. Maybe it's Sartre, or Andrew O'Hagan, or some other gentlemen who unsettled me with their words, whatever I intend to write seem to induce a level of sardonic smirk, a signal for the ostensible inanities of, and especially of, my work.
Never mind, I should be used to this by now - especially in this university, one has to have quite some finesse in adaptability in order to cope with the cuisine offered at the cafeteria. Rather than food people would normally envision, the food here is tilted towards an abstraction. Say, an impressionist artist from the renaissance period conjectures up a painting of a plate of sausage spaghettis - the food here is quite like that, a mashed hodgepodge of likely edible things, mixed together with bold color and salt. One could only enjoy it on an intellectual level. And almost with an Orwellian touch, the students come by periodically to obtain their food like museum-goers attend to art. And I am really the exemplary pragmatist in this respect. I would picture a post-apocalyptic world, where humanities are reduced to a single spaceship heading towards another star system, where food is scarce and portioned, and only the aristocrats, or "Jacobanites", are endowed with the privilege of daily natural food. Thematically it fits well, and I just deem myself a particularly picky aristocrat.
In Berlin though, one need invoke neither an intellectual traverse, nor an a priori apocalypse; one simply chooses between Foodora and Deliveroo.
But the subsistence of food aside, the room I have now been allocated, after multiple back-and-forth emails, is spacious and outfitted with a range of amenities akin to those of a proper hotel room. I have even avoided having to bear with a roommate. If in Berlin I had a vague hope of what my life back in the university should look like, it's quite close to what I indeed manage to have, even though there isn't a U2 line at the front door. I have even retrieved my old circle, itself greatly dwindled, and picked up a new habit of having a pot of tea with Owen and a pot of stir-fried tomato egg with Franklin.
I tend to have a complicated relationship with my friends. On one side, it is human nature that my earthly companionship serves as a weight to keep me grounded, so that, for example, when I was having my 22nd birthday, I would convince myself to forage for some kind of a cake. On the other hand, as they have always been, friends are like the various landscapes seen through the cabin window - always appear the same and change only slightly, until the train reaches a city, or I have to get up to pee. The whole intricate and grandiose construct of sociability is so invincible, of course, unless, I find a job elsewhere, or a romantic relationship, or there has been a looming mid-term exam.
Before departing every station, the computerized voice at the BVG subway would announce "zurückbleiben bitte" - one would not mistake it for friendliness; but if a lady tells me to do the same, I would appreciate that with a humanly smile; if she tells me the same thing but in a different way every stop along the line, I might try to strike up a conversation; if she happens to have an attractive physique, and that she tells me the similar things even after I got off the train, like "be careful, it is slippery outside", I might propose to have a cup of coffee with her. This, of course, is only fantasy. But the same useless repetition, when carried out more artfully, becomes the corner stone of a friendship. In a sense, I believe, we secretly yearn to be taken as idiots.
Mind is an incredibly tenuous thing; heart is no less tenuous; however, it is more visceral, therefore more in accordance with our nature - childlike hairless little bipeds, who'd like to scratch their heads, build little things, cultivate a few offsprings and die.
Sartre's view is incomplete from this point of view. The world is existential, but our lives are not. Our lives are animalistic, veiled by varying degrees of eloquence, righteousness, and delusion.
Never mind, I should be used to this by now - especially in this university, one has to have quite some finesse in adaptability in order to cope with the cuisine offered at the cafeteria. Rather than food people would normally envision, the food here is tilted towards an abstraction. Say, an impressionist artist from the renaissance period conjectures up a painting of a plate of sausage spaghettis - the food here is quite like that, a mashed hodgepodge of likely edible things, mixed together with bold color and salt. One could only enjoy it on an intellectual level. And almost with an Orwellian touch, the students come by periodically to obtain their food like museum-goers attend to art. And I am really the exemplary pragmatist in this respect. I would picture a post-apocalyptic world, where humanities are reduced to a single spaceship heading towards another star system, where food is scarce and portioned, and only the aristocrats, or "Jacobanites", are endowed with the privilege of daily natural food. Thematically it fits well, and I just deem myself a particularly picky aristocrat.
In Berlin though, one need invoke neither an intellectual traverse, nor an a priori apocalypse; one simply chooses between Foodora and Deliveroo.
But the subsistence of food aside, the room I have now been allocated, after multiple back-and-forth emails, is spacious and outfitted with a range of amenities akin to those of a proper hotel room. I have even avoided having to bear with a roommate. If in Berlin I had a vague hope of what my life back in the university should look like, it's quite close to what I indeed manage to have, even though there isn't a U2 line at the front door. I have even retrieved my old circle, itself greatly dwindled, and picked up a new habit of having a pot of tea with Owen and a pot of stir-fried tomato egg with Franklin.
I tend to have a complicated relationship with my friends. On one side, it is human nature that my earthly companionship serves as a weight to keep me grounded, so that, for example, when I was having my 22nd birthday, I would convince myself to forage for some kind of a cake. On the other hand, as they have always been, friends are like the various landscapes seen through the cabin window - always appear the same and change only slightly, until the train reaches a city, or I have to get up to pee. The whole intricate and grandiose construct of sociability is so invincible, of course, unless, I find a job elsewhere, or a romantic relationship, or there has been a looming mid-term exam.
Before departing every station, the computerized voice at the BVG subway would announce "zurückbleiben bitte" - one would not mistake it for friendliness; but if a lady tells me to do the same, I would appreciate that with a humanly smile; if she tells me the same thing but in a different way every stop along the line, I might try to strike up a conversation; if she happens to have an attractive physique, and that she tells me the similar things even after I got off the train, like "be careful, it is slippery outside", I might propose to have a cup of coffee with her. This, of course, is only fantasy. But the same useless repetition, when carried out more artfully, becomes the corner stone of a friendship. In a sense, I believe, we secretly yearn to be taken as idiots.
Mind is an incredibly tenuous thing; heart is no less tenuous; however, it is more visceral, therefore more in accordance with our nature - childlike hairless little bipeds, who'd like to scratch their heads, build little things, cultivate a few offsprings and die.
Sartre's view is incomplete from this point of view. The world is existential, but our lives are not. Our lives are animalistic, veiled by varying degrees of eloquence, righteousness, and delusion.