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The Priest – 1861

 

FotoHe had lived in the rectory for over 35 years. When he had arrived to take care of the parish, people had soon introduced him to their daughters for he was young, unmarried, of a well known family. But he had kept to himself, had dedicated his time to his parish and his academic studies. He was especially interested in the work of a catholic lawyer, philosopher and counter-revolutionary, Joseph de Maistre, mainly his Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques et des autres institutions humaines (“Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions and other Human Institutions,”). He was intrigued by de Maistre’s doctrine that war and the shedding of blood were necessary for the expiation of sin. Also that sin was inevitable, that physical evil is the necessary corollary of moral evil, expiated and lightened through prayer and sacrifice only. These ideas resonated with him in a very deep and personal way, he was severe and unforgiving and so were his sermons. He had to redress these ideas to make them acceptable to the views of his own church, and it hurt him personally to offer forgiveness for mere remorse in the name of Christ. Over time, as he became older and his severity started to show in the deep lines in his face and the emaciated appearance of his body, people started to fear him and went out of his way where possible. There were no more attempts to introduce him to an unmarried daughter or niece and less invitations to other social events, which was a welcome development in his eyes, as it provided him with more time for his studies. He suspected himself to be prone to a weakness that both churches would have condemned and was relieved that in consequence of his social isolation there was only limited temptation to give in to his desires. If one of his young male students would catch his attention in this unwelcome manner, he treated the boy with special unkindness to keep at a safe distance. While his philosophical comprehension and reasoning deepened over the years, recorded in countless journals, he did not manage to overcome his burden, and realized that he actually suffered more severely from it the older he got. This in turn supported his views on the inevitability of evil, for as evil he regarded his infliction, but also as unavoidable, as nothing he had done to purge himself from it had been successful. His life was complicated and joyless for the most part.
He did take an avid interest in the building of the new church that was to replace the old wooden steeple. It’s neo-gothical style resonated with his ideas about a purer world and society. He contributed generously to its building cost out of his inheritance as had other wealthy landowners in the parish. The new church was a symbol at the same time of their moral purity and economical wealth. His contribution was so significant that he was chosen to model for the statues that were to be put on the roof and overlook the parish. The idea of watching over the life of the parish from a far distance appealed to him. The last winter before the completion of the new church he had an encounter with a stranger who had called upon him repeatedly and who was staying at the town’s only inn. He was dressed in simple, yet elegant clothes, cut out of fine, dark cloth. In a small town a stranger like this would normally have generated a great deal of curiosity. But he was so quiet and unassuming in his manner as to almost appear invisible. He went for daily visits to the rectory where he was served tea and would have long conversations with the pastor. The elegance of his appearance was so convincing that it took a while for the pastor to notice that the stranger wore but a kind of biblical footwear, close to being shoeless.
It was late fall. The trees were brilliantly red as if with religious fervor. The pastor felt alert, alive almost as if a lifetime of doubt and study suddenly held some promise, as if the dark aspects of his life were less weighing on him. Then the stranger came down with a severe flu which delayed his departure. High fevers made him delirious, and the doctor and priest both were called to soothe the rage which seemed to devour the man who had been a quiet guest until he came down with this fever. After three days he lost his consciousness and did not regain it. He died in the fourth night without the pastor at his side. The pastor himself was delirious in fever at this time and died only two days after the stranger.

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Mud people (excerpt from Gargoyle)

fullsizeoutput_b93 The shallow hole the boy had dug became deeper with time as he scooped out the red colored clay the ground was made of. He filtered it through his hands, taking out stones, sticks, decomposed leaves and roots. Punching and smoothing it he compacted the clay to one block, thus slowly building up a monolith from clay. He devoted great care to this process, making sure that he would have a structurally sound mass with which to work. Over the course of building hundreds of small people from mud he had gotten quite skilled at this craft. Only when he was content with the sound that a slap against the block produced, a deep, saturated thud, would he proceed to sculpt. With deliberate slowness he worked from the general form to the details. Many times a form had collapsed when he had tried to overemphasize a movement or had placed the limbs too far outside the center of gravity. In the beginning he had tried to use sticks to support an arm reaching out or a leg stepping forward and though technically that solution had worked he didn’t like that the figure now seemed to defy the laws of gravity that nature put on the material and form. It was thus almost impossible by the mere use of sticks and clay alone to sculpt an outreached limb that looked natural. So he had returned to work from the inner core of the material and to rather hint at a movement that – though invisible – the eye would project into the empty space. He was always intrigued by what he could see without seeing it. He liked the way his sculptures randomly related to one another, all he had to do was to quietly look at both sculptures and discover this relationship of forms. Something deep inside him stirred when he looked at his creations and their silent endurance. He could see the form of the space in between two physical forms, it was nothing and yet visible if one cared to look, it changed constantly, stretched and diminished, even disappeared. It was actually easier for him to comprehend the properties of this in between space than the form itself. You could get out of the trajectory of any moving object if you controlled that space. If you made that space in between adhere to your inner voice you did not need sticks to build a figure. Why, you barely needed your hands, all you had to do was to look long and hard, look at the clay monolith and make some slight adjustments. Soon his people were crouching, stretching, running, turning. He took great pleasure from this.

His father began to take notice too. One night when he had returned home from the workshop the little garden patch had first caught his attention. In the twilight the clay sculptures his son had build in the afternoon had a strange quality of perfection. There were seven fresh sculptures, six of them crouching on the ground, the seventh a small figure in flight, emerging out of a block of brick-colored earth, running.
From a distance it had seemed that all sculptures possessed distinct personalities and bore individual facial features. Something about these features seemed oddly familiar to the stonemason. Upon closer inspection he realized though that the impression of an actually sculpted face dissipated from a nearer perspective – but reinstated itself the moment he stepped back like a magical trick. The inability to confirm his initial finding, to come closer to the truth, was intriguing to him. He asked himself how a not yet six year old child could have created such a sophisticated illusion. He didn’t ever doubt that the impression was created deliberately. He studied the people his son had made for a long time. Inside the house the light from the boy’s bedroom shone dimly through the drawn curtains.

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Literary avatars,Jawara´s story, excerpt

IMG_5726Where do you live when you live in a mattress under a dining table as a roommate to a legal intern? What is your legal address? Do you even have one? You are not freezing at night. You do not go hungry by day. You are alive to the world, breathing, thinking, feeling, and you have a history that walks by your side as you walk past the store fronts on Madison on your way to the subway on 96th Street after your boss has taken off with the food truck towards Queens. His day is not over yet. He still has to drive the truck out, clean and unload it in order to comply with food regulation rules, to keep the truck running that provides both of you with a livelihood but in your case just so.

From the window displays on Fifth and Madison distant galaxies of human existence are reflecting. The entry to these worlds is being jealously guarded by slim young men in well cut suits with cold stares. You don´t even desire the kinds of goods that are hiding behind those faraway windows though you are also not ignorant of them, there is simply no meaning in the acquisition of things that furbish and decorate for events that are not even on your far horizon.

You do desire books though and a place to sit and work quietly. At this moment all you need is a few minutes for yourself, to be a free man and a free agent of your fortune, maybe pretending there was indeed a place for you to go to, not here in the Upper East side, maybe somewhere in Queens like your boss, a place with friends and family waiting for you like back at home. You correct yourself: like it used to be at home.

You stop in front of the book store on Madison Avenue, Crawford & Doyle. You have never once been here during opening hours but you love the window display and the old-world storefront. Your time is ticking, and you are incredibly tired, but you take a few minutes to let your eyes rest on the new arrangement of books. You love book design. Your mother was born in in Saint-Louis, Senegal, where she grew up before moving to Dakar to finish her secondary schooling and becoming a book designer. You know book design because she loves it. You miss her, but you know she approves of you being here and giving it your best shot. And so you feel ashamed that your best shot does not go so very far as you are exhausting yourself working at the food truck so you don´t have to live in the street. Any other city you might be having your own place but here it is all but impossible, all you can afford here is the mattress under a dining room table of a legal intern who is too poor to afford that place on her own.

The studio apartment you share is really small like a doll´s house, which explains why the only place for your mattress is under the table. The intern herself owns next to nothing – but she does own this table that is like a small hut. A table like a boat, like the Arche Noah she once said. New York could drown and all she´d have to do is turn the table over and float out of there. The both of you share the upper part of that table and the kitchen and the bathroom. She has made her own bedroom in a walk-in-closet which accommodates her own mattress underneath the clothes hangers. The arrangement works remarkably well. You are rarely at home when she is, time´s maybe overlapping a few hours at night. She comes in late, often after midnight, you have to get up at 3.30 am to meet your boss set up the food truck in time for the morning crowd of office workers. Both of you try to be mindful of the other´s sleep. Neither one of you brings a lover home though you have once seen her with this tall guy on Bank Street, artist looking type. He would not have fit in that closet. Such a strange thing though to know there is a girl in the closet while you are brushing your teeth. Sometimes she´s talking in her sleep from deep within that closet. New York is a strange place.

All of this you think as you let your eyes travel unseeing over the books displayed in the windows at Crawford & Doyle. You should be writing a book and have it displayed in this book store´s window for people to see and buy, you are a good narrator and a good writer, and you have a story to tell. But even in real life no one here seems to care about your story, you are all but invisible. People ask you for a bottle of Peach Snapple or Newman´s Lemon Ice Tea, they ask for coffee to go, they ask you for a donut with cream cheese or a pretzel with salt which you carefully wrap in a napkin and hand out to your customer, but not before you have carefully counted the change. People don´t care for you touching the pretzel with your hands, they are afraid of touch and life and smell, though the city is full of touch and life and smell, but it is like a playground to them with their own set of rules, it is their playground but your jungle, and they know close to nothing about you and they don´t want to either. You are not their problem, you hand out snacks and food and sugared drinks and coffee in a sanitary, non-threatening, polite way so they can forget about you the moment they bite into their pretzel, you are like an extra to their own, legitimate story while you keep invisible, keep in your place. Your head is so full of life and stories that all you want to do is sit down and start writing, tell a story, only you can´t because you are so tired and lonely and tired again,  so tired you almost hear your thoughts and they are so loud that they are almost painful and the blood rushes to your face, and what you really have to do is to go home and wash the dust off and crawl on to your mattress under the table in order to be able to get up in a few hours to start working again, so you will still have that mattress under the table and water and enough food to survive, and so this will be another night when you don´t start your book. Maybe tomorrow night. Try again. You have not given up quite yet. And you slowly start walking toward the subway station on 96th and your life´s avatars drag behind a bit, still clinging to that beautiful window display.

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Ms. Liquid (Das Kartenspiel / Ausschnitt)

Hannah warf das Magazin auf das Bett und ärgerte sich. J. für Julian, dachte sie, D. für Daniel. F. für Hannah, einfach nur: Frau. Passend für jemanden, den Julian für seinen Protagonisten J. als eine Person ohne jeglichen körperlichen und geistigen Grundwiderstand beschrieb. Gegen ihren Willen empfand sie eine gewisse Achtung für den Umstand, dass Julian, wenn es auch die Abmachung verletzte, Kapital aus jenem Abend geschlagen, indem er das Geschehen kurzerhand in eine seiner Kurzgeschichten eingearbeitet hatte. Daniel hätte aus dem identischen Material eine seiner üblichen hedonistischen Phantastereien gesponnen (but then again Daniel would have never broken their, or for that matter any agreement), aber Julian war seinem politischen Alltagsrealismus treu geblieben. Dem Kritiker blieb natürlich verborgen, dass die Szenen in Julians Geschichten, die im allgemeinen als „schonungslos aufrichtig“ gefeiert wurden, sich durch erhebliche Auslassungen auszeichneten. Der Gebrauch des Wortes „onanieren“ war ausreichend, jeden einigermassen von seiner eigenen Souveränität überzeugten männlichen Rezensenten zu ein, zwei Worten gemessenen Lobes zu veranlassen. Hannah grinste. Julian hatte es schon immer verstanden, den Rezensenten Zucker zu geben. Dass D. in der Erzählung von J.s einsamer Beschaeftigung gewusst haben sollte, war bei näherer Überlegung doch eher unwahrscheinlich. Es war auch nicht Daniel sondern Hannah gewesen, die sich zu einer spöttischen Bemerkung hatte hinreißen lassen. Hannah erinnerte sich sehr genau an den Anlass. Auch an den Umstand, dass Julian die Tür zum Badezimmer nicht ganz geschlossen hatte. Wer Julian kannte, wusste, dass Zufälle in seinem Leben nicht vorkamen. Julian verstand sich auf die Kunst der sorgfältigen Inszenierung.
Seltsam, dachte Hannah, dass Julian, der eine solche Zärtlichkeit bei Frauen inspirierte, seinerseits derart aggressiv vorging, wenn er sich auf Eroberung machte. Seltsam auch, dass er sie, Hannah, jeglicher menschlicher Eigenschaft entkleidet hatte, als er daran gegangen war, den Abend in seiner Erzählung wiederzugeben. Als habe er sich vor ihr gefürchtet. Als habe er sich gefürchtet, sie als Person zu erinnern und in seine Geschichte aufzunehmen. „This is the story of how I fell in love with a woman who read me a specific story by Herodotus.“ Es ist nicht die Rede von Julian und Hannah. Nicht einmal ihren Namen hatte er ihr gelassen. Statt dessen erscheint F. in der Geschichte, oder Ms. Liquid, eine Frau zwischen zwei Männern, oder dreien, genau genommen, wenn man Jan mitzählt, dem die zweifelhafte Ehre widerfährt, namentlich erwähnt zu werden. Einmal. Erwähnt.
Fünf Flaschen Wein hatte Julian mitgebracht, als er wider Erwarten in aufgeräumter Stimmung zurück gekommen war, säuberlich in einem Karton sortiert. Genug, um die Stimmung anzuheben, Hemmungen zu senken, zuwenig, um sich ernsthaft zu betrinken. Sie waren zweifellos angetrunken gewesen, ebenso zweifellos nicht betrunken. Besonders Julian konnte wesentlich mehr vertragen. Hannah fragte sich, ob Julian sich beim Kauf des Weines bereits Gedanken über den weiteren Verlauf des Abends gemacht hatte. Er war in gereizter Stimmung gewesen, als er sich recht widerwillig bereit erklärt hatte, ins Dorf zu fahren, und sie hatte es für möglich gehalten, dass er das Angebot, die Besorgungen zu erledigen, zum Vorwand nehmen werde, um sich für den Rest des Abends absetzen. Es war ihm regelmäßig ein Leichtes, eine Einladung für einen Abend zu ergattern. Hannah erinnerte sich der jungen Frau, die offenbar als Saisonkraft in dem kleinen Laden arbeitete und sich zu langweilen schien, und die Julian bereits beim ersten Einkauf überaus zuvorkommend bedient hatte. Es hätte ihm ähnlich gesehen, jetzt auf die unausgesprochene Einladung zurückzukommen und sie, Hannah, mit dem missmutigen Daniel allein zu lassen. Der Gedanke, den Abend allein in Daniels Gesellschaft zu verbringen, so wie seine Stimmung gerade war, war ihr unbehaglich gewesen und sie hatte sich entschieden, zumindest den Nachmittag allein in ihrem Zimmer zu verbringen.
Nach dem Aufwachen hatte sie auf den ersten Blick aus dem Fenster gesehen, dass der Volvo immer noch fehlte. Julian in Daniels Volvo. Julian, der ausweislich seiner Geschichte nicht über die entfernteste Ahnung verfügte, was der hochrespektable Daniel in seinem vernünftigen Wagen, den Julian in seiner Geschichte so abfällig als Familienschüssel bezeichnete, so anstellte. Hannah lächelte. Julian zeichnete sich durch eine gewisse Faulheit und Phantasielosigkeit beim Schreiben aus, die er durch die Virtuosität seines schnellen Erzählstils auszugleichen verstand. Aber dies war fraglich eine weitere Lücke in Julians Erzählung. Julian wusste natürlich nicht sehr viel von Daniel, so wie er überhaupt nicht viel über das sogenannte bürgerliche Leben wusste, über das er sich von Zeit zu Zeit so abfällig äusserte, als sei es eine Art widerlicher, ansteckender Krankheit. Daniels und Hannahs Freundschaft war ihm, wie den anderen Kollegen im Institut, immer Anlass zur Verwunderung gewesen. Daniel in seiner spröden Disziplin und unfehlbaren Korrektheit, und sie, Hannah eben, deren generelle Unerreichbarkeit und verbale Aggression sie im Kollegenkreis nicht gerade beliebt machte. Selbst Julian hatte sich also gescheut, ihr Verhältnis zu Daniel, und sei es nur literarisch, auszuloten.  Schließlich lag ihm an seinem Job. Noch. Es sprach indes für sein sprachliches Intuitionsvermögen, dass der Volvo auf seltsame Weise dennoch in die Erzählung geraten war.
Hannah dachte träge über sich selbst, Hannah, und ihre ungewöhnliche Freundschaft zu Daniel nach, und sie erlaubte sich auch, einige Augenblicke über sich und Julian nachzudenken. Die Kunst am rechten Ort zur rechten Stelle zu sein, ist das Talent, das den Lebenskünstler vom geborenen Verlierer unterscheidet, hatte Daniel einmal gesagt. Daniel hielt sich für einen talentierten Verlierer und er kultivierte diese Überzeugung bis hin zu seinen teuren formlosen Klamotten. Zur richtigen Zeit am richtigen Ort. Das war die beste Beschreibung für Julian und seinen unfehlbaren Instinkt für das Rampenlicht. Vielleicht hatte Daniel recht. Aber jenseits dieser Begabung  gab es wohl auch die Gabe zur Geduld oder Gelassenheit, die Hannah besass.

Alles andere, sei es Malerei, Sprache oder Wissenschaft, entwickelte sich doch nur sich im Rahmen dieser grundsätzlichen Begabungen, am richtigen Ort zur richtigen Zeit zu sein wie Julian, der Superstar, oder aus endloser Geduld. Vielleicht hatte es auch einige Künstler und Wissenschaftler gegeben, deren Talent die Zeit geformt hatte, dachte Hannah, Leonardo vielleicht, aber wenn man zum Beispiel Joyce oder van Gogh bedenkt, schafft sich ein grosses Talent nicht unweigerlich auch den Ort, an dem es gedeihen kann. Hannahs erster Impuls von Ärger beim Lesen von Julians Erzählung hatte sich jetzt gelöst und war einem Gefühl von träger Kontemplation gewichen. Hannah und Daniel, Hannah und Julian. Und Daniel und Julian.

Wenn Hannah über sich und die beiden Männer nachdachte,  musste sie unumgänglich auch darüber nachdenken, ob ihre gemeinsame Arbeit anders verlaufen wäre, wäre sie selbst ein Mann gewesen in dieser Situation. Sicher, sie hatte Julian begehrt, und zwischen Daniel und Julian herrschte eine fast altmodische Rivalität, die nur zurücktrat, wenn alle drei gemeinsam an den Texten und Entwürfen arbeiteten– aber von beiden Männern hatte sie selbst zuerst Freundschaft begehrt, und so war es immer noch. Intellektuelle Verbundenheit war selten und kostbar, und sie hatte sich schon bald, nachdem Julian in das Institut gekommen war, überlegt, wie sich das Verhältnis zwischen ihnen, Daniel, Hannah und Julian, entwickelt hätte, wenn sie selbst ein Mann gewesen wäre, alle anderen Umstände identisch, alle drei mit ihrer intellektuellen Leidenschaft und Begabung, mit ihrer Hingabe an die Arbeit. Statt dessen wurde ein guter Teil der kreativen Energie, die in dem Team zusammenkam, auf das ungeklärte Begehren umgeleitet. Wenn sie schon als einzige Frau, F. wie Julian so passend geschrieben hatte, in diesem Team arbeitete, war sie froh, attraktiv zu sein (und sie war sich bewusst, dass dieser Umstand die Glaubwürdigkeit ihres Bedauerns kompromierte, nicht als Mann geboren zu sein, oder aber in J. und D. weibliche Kollegen zu finden) , aber sie war zugleich davon überzeugt, dass vergleichbare Unruhen aufgetreten wären, wenn sie nicht attraktiv gewesen waere. „So you say, a man can be friends with a woman he does not find attraktiv? – No, he pretty much wants to nail her too.”
Hannah hatte Daniels Freundschaft begehrt, und sie hatte sie um den Preis von Daniels Begehren erhalten, aber das war lange her, und inzwischen war ihr Verhältnis von der Freundschaft und dem Wissen umeinander geprägt, und Daniel hatte längst neue Eroberungen gemacht. Zum Beispiel Julian. Das schmerzte nicht. Besseres timing vorausgesetzt wären sie und Daniel perfekte Ehepartner gewesen in ihrer gegenseitigen respektierten Unabhängigkeit, ihrer Zuneigung zueinander und der gegenseitigen Wertschätzung für die Arbeit und das Leben des anderen. Aber Hannah und Daniel hatten sich zu einer Zeit getroffen, als sämtliche persönlichen Entscheidungen in Daniels Leben bereits gefallen waren und es lag nicht in ihrer Natur, weder Hannahs noch Daniels, diese Umstände in Frage zu stellen. Hinzu kam der beträchtliche Altersunterschied zu Daniel und der Umstand, dass Daniel von Anfang an als akademischer Mentor aufgetreten war. Er hatte beide, erst sie und dann Julian, ausgewählt und gefördert. Julian und Hannah waren Konkurrenten um Daniels professionelle Gunst. Das ergab sich auch aus Julians Geschichte, mit der er Hannahs, F.s;  Zuneigung zu Julian  diskreditierte und als strategischen Schachzug darstellte. jedenfalls hatte es den Protagonisten J.nicht kalt gelassen, wenn er auch seine Betroffenheit in erster Linie in Selbstmitleid zum Ausdruck gebracht hatte. Hannah wurde wieder ärgerlich. Wenn sie Julian darauf ansprechen würde, würde er sich hinter seiner Geschichte verstecken. Es ist nur eine Geschichte, Hannah, das weißt Du selbst am besten. Feigling. Sie verbot sich weitere Gedanken und nahm statt dessen das Magazin mit Julians Erzählung wieder zur Hand. “Today is the day I quit art”, dachte sie.

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Si a jure discedas vagus eris, et erunt omnia omnibus incerta

or: If you depart from the law, you will go astray …

Legal avatars were walking with me every night right up until dawn. Most of them were missing something, something that was living and breathing in the legal clients who had come to the law office and had told their story of need and desire to the attorney but that somehow had got lost when the client´s life subsequently had been translated to fit in a file. Every day for about 15 minutes after lunch time Mr. O´Leary gave me a short introduction to the new cases he had Ms. Cavendish put on my desk in the morning. He was a very good narrator, mentioning details about clients that a less practiced observer would have overlooked or found insignificant. He was incredibly generous with me, 15 minutes is a long time for a lawyer whether he gets paid by the hour or contingency fees, that I knew even back then. And yet, the gap between his narrative and the legal brief I was supposed to write was so wide. Not unbridgeable but wide enough to truly humble me.

I still remember seeing the avatars slipping out of the files and silently pacing the room waiting for me to finish up. It started one night at about the time when I had been practicing my hand at writing briefs for about three months, practicing day after day with the many different cases that appeared in sets of three or four on my desk in the morning.
In the beginning it me had taken me a really, really long time to come up even with a just-so acceptable brief. By the time I brought the file back to Ms. Cavendish, Mr. O´Leary´s formidable secretary, I had read and reread the case close to a hundred times until I felt that I had either identified all the relevant information that I needed to actually write the brief, including the issue, the facts, the holding, and the relevant parts of the analysis, or, more often, that I had arrived at that kind of sinking, sick feeling that you have when it´s still not good enough but you just cannot do any better. Perversely, I had liked studying law for just that reason: it had made me small and humble and human insofar as it made me fail over and over again and that was perfectly in sync with my Puritan upbringing. I had been raised an atheist Puritan who had the severe character fault of having a creative streak. So if there ever was a law student who should have studied something instead it was me. And yet I continued in a distracted, untechnical, unstructured but seemingly still just-so good enough manner, because „not quitting“ had been ingrained into my personal code since my terrible-twos, and it continued to be my great weakness well into grown-up life. I was too stubborn to quit law school even as I was painting and dreaming and visiting museum after museum, I just couldn´t quit, it was as simple as that.
Generally speaking, before I had decided to go to law school I had been seriously suffering from delusions about what I could do in life, like: really anything. I had been convinced that I could do just about anything that I would set my mind to, you name it, math, sciences, language arts, and I´d be brilliant at it, and yet here I was, a few years later and not even being a quite good enough lawyer.

I simply had no clue what people were like and why they acted the way they did. I had no clue what other people actually wanted from life. No clue whatsoever. And you just can´t be a good lawyer if you don´t get people – on both sides of the law. You need to understand what drives a person and you need to understand what makes the law want to rule that very person in or entitle it to do as desired, you need , with other words, to have a good grasp of societal goals and values. Or, in the absence of such an abstract understanding, you at least need to believe that there is an order to things, a somewhat natural state of being that you will recognize when you see it.
If, on the other side, you are a multifaceted, spacey kid who lets the winds that blow through the city grid take a hold of you and push and pull you into any which direction it pleases, if you are but a drifter, if you live in books and if you cry while reading Sylvia Plath and if you are stricken by a certain Yellow in a Miró painting as if your life´s meaning depends on it, Miró, of all painters, if you are completely content with the universe for the view of the tar beach on the roof of your rental building on a freezing but fiercely clear morning, still barefoot and in your PJs and with a mug of coffee hot enough to burn the skin between your thumb and index finger (your stereotypical European intern kid), if you are happy with cheap Asian food from the corner store for weeks on end, if you are content with sharing your cramped studio apartment with a guy who works crazy hours at a food truck  and crashes on a mattress underneath your dining table, if you get a kick just out of running around Central Park in worn-out-no-brand sneakers trying to keep up with the Mexican runners for a few minutes before collapsing on to the Great Lawn, if you feel insanely alive for a split-second just because the light over Manhattan illuminates the Avenues looking south with toxic quick silver, and if on top of being this incarnation of a European nerd you think that your kicks are what makes all people around you stop dead in their tracks for excitement, then you might be on to something great for life, but as a lawyer you know next to nothing. If you don´t get what actually makes people fight for their very own piece of Lexington Avenue, small or majestic as it may be, you will be but a pathetic excuse for a lawyer.
So night after night, after I had closed the last book, feeling exhausted and ready to loose myself in the city, the avatars were quietly slipping out of the files and following me down the long hallway, past the pale light of Mr. Letterman´s office, into the creaky elevator and down, through the marble tiled lobby and out into the night. As we left the building, the avatars and I, and I was walking out into the night, they were following me and I was to them like the one eyed king amongst the blind. Si a jure discedas vagus eris, et erunt omnia omnibus incerta.

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Mr. Letterman keeps a secret

 

Mr. Letterman was the kind of man who found find intrinsic value in reflection and contemplation and had allowed this inclination to become the building structure of his life. This was why as an undergraduate student even with law school in mind he had chosen to study philosophy rather than economics and had concentrated on 17th-century philosophy which he found particularly intriguing because it answered to his own temperament. He had studied Descartes, Locke, and Newton, and had read Kant as well as Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Adam Smith. He cherished reason and individualism as the core values of enlightenment.
He knew quite well how difficult it was to actually live an individual life as he understood it, starting with an education that gave a student time to acquire the ability to distinguish individual choices from prefabricated ideas. He had been a keen observer all of his life, and since the late Eighties had noticed the changes imparted by a growing globalized market on American cultural habits which had been in fluid transformation of very different heterogene cultural movements since the late Sixties but now were anastomosing into more or less one all-emcompassing stream of consumer culture. Since then, or so he was convinced, increasingly suggestive marketing strategies had been skillfully reducing individual freedom more or less to the act of choosing between different consumer goods. According to the logic of the market commercial success was the gate to freedom as it allowed access to consumer products, and striving for the possession of consumer goods had been accepted as the ultimate meaningful pursuit in life. People now spend most of their time working and earning money to spend on such consumer goods and if their work in itself happened not be meaningful, there was little time left to construct meaning from whatever was left over to their private discretion. Consumer goods as carriers of a lifestyle that few could integrate into their everyday routines were tailored to fill the void of the un-lived life while at the same time creating the desire to acquire even more goods, more things to throw into the abyss of time.
Mr. Letterman knew that poverty enslaves families, condemning generation after generation to a living on low wages and social security, that people as intelligent as he considered himself to be had to forego higher education and work hard, repetitive jobs, wasting their potential, that he himself, due to fortuitous social circumstances, had been allowed to develop. He knew that in low incomehouseholds – among other things – there was indeed also a lack of needed consumer goods from food to clothing to furniture to kitchen appliances to books. But he also knew that it was not the lack of consumer products that was most painful consequence of low incomes but the lack of education and access to the many sources of meaning that were reserved for those who knew how to decipher the code. Higher education was an expensive privilege. He was not fighting for social justice per se even though he was representing a fair share of pro bono cases. But he kept aware that he did not earn the privilege of an education that was denied to others and he kept a special kind of contempt for people with access to this kind of privilege who nonetheless proved incapable of making individual and intelligent choices.
For him, prerequisite to a mindful life was reading. And the prerequisite to reading well was education. He visited the New York Public Library during late lunch, sometimes just to sit down in the reading room for a while. Since childhood he had loved the gigantic stone lions who guarded the entrance to the Library, Patience and Fortitude. He loved the many different book stores of New York´s neighborhoods.He chose his books with care following his established interests and toyed with the idea to write a book himself if he should ever find the time, a book about the many stories that clients brought to him daily and which were a kaleidoscope of the many brilliant pieces of NYC of but like any passionate reader he was also curious about books and authors yet unknown to him. He loved to rediscover new as well as almost forgotten authors and frequently visited used book stores. He was a regular at Strand´s.
Saturday mornings he liked to stop by at Crawford & Doyle booksellers, a small old-fashioned independent bookstore on Madison Avenue between 81st and 82nd street close to the MetMuseum. After his visit to the book store he walked straight over to the Met where he spend whatever was left of Saturday afternoon, sitting in one of the courts and reading a new book while tourists and New Yorkers walked past him.
Crawford & Doyle booksellers catered to a eclectic  reading tastes, offering a selection of the New York Times bestseller list and the annually published most notable book list yet always keeping the discriminating reader in mind, and offering a plethora of topics including fiction, history, philosophy, biography, religion, politics, lyrics, social studies, art, children´s books and a fine selection of crime novels on the first floor of a space hardly larger than a spacious living room. The store was beautifully stacked with old dark wooden shelves and lower showcases and booktables stacked with books, leaving only small alleyways to pass through and two very narrow benches to sit down.
There was a gallery on the second floor which was, in fact, a book store within a book store, with collectible and rare books, concentrating on first editions of primarily American and British fiction. Mr. Letterman had found first editions of Frost and Yeats upstairs and a small volume of the Dubliners which he treasured and always carried with him as it fit perfectly in the pocket of his overcoat.
Crawford & Doyle was dependable and friendly like an old acquaintance. Customers were entering and leaving the store on Saturday mornings in a lively flow without interrupting the reader in the corner; they politely accommodated one another in the narrow passageways between the displays and conducted short, quiet conversations among themselves or livelier ones with the knowledgeable staff at the register. It was a store dedicated to the art of reading and thus to an enlightened public, readers like himself, in search of the path that was as individual as the reader, leading from one book to the next, choosing one, leaving out another equally deserving one, following an instinct that had formed over a lifetime of reading.
As many customers were regulars Mr. Letterman would see familiar faces on Saturday mornings and got to know the taste and habits of people who remained strangers to him yet at the same time were like family to him, serious readers like himself.  A Saturday morning regular for example was the small lady whose features were so delicate and who moved so lightly that she reminded him of a small bird. She had a special taste for all kinds of political fiction and quite obviously a voracious reading appetite. She would assemble sizable stacks of books to take home, carrying The Reader by Bernard Schlink on top of The History of the Siege of Lisbon by Jose Saramago, followed by Anthony Burgess last novel Byrne, postwar German author Heinrich Böll with a  short story collection titled The Mad dog, and on top of this formidable stack The Three-Arched Bridge by Ismail Kadare who had just recently become a lifetime member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of France.

Mr. Letterman loved to cast a sideway glance at the birdlady´s finds and sometimes he let himself be inspired by her choices. It was through her that he discovered his love for Kadare. He read Ura me tri harqe, The Three-arched Bridge, first published in 1978 because he had spied it on top of her stack, and had continued with Përbindëshi, The Monster, an even earlier work from 1965, which took him some time to find and that he finally discovered in the used-book section of Crawford-Doyle´s just like before the reasure of an author-signed version of Nata me hënë, Moonlight, first published in 1985.
And then there was the girl mainly lingering in the art book section but sometimes straying to children´s books. She was mostly dressed in faded Jeans and an NYU-sweatshirt, wearing her straight dark blonde hair open and pushed back on just one side behind her ears. He had never paid too much attention to her because he did read little on the visual arts, and had no interest in children´s books but he had indeed noticed the girls just as he did notice the other regulars and had inscribed her on his inner map of a particular Saturday morning.

Then one Saturday, something strange had happened. Instead of in her usual spot in the arts he had encountered her in the non-fiction area between philosophy and history. She had taken a somewhat awkward turn to let him pass, misjudging the space between their passing bodies and with an abrupt countermovement had just so prevented herself from running the art volume into his rips . The abrupt movement almost made her drop both of her books, the art book on top of which she had opened another book, using the larger book like a small reading desk. This other book he recognized at once because he owned an earlier edition of it and was familiar with the new one she had been studying before he had interrupted her. After he had passed her unharmed, answering her apologies with a polite apology of his own, she went right back to reading. The book was „The Hedgehog and the Fox“ by Isaiah Berlin. Mr. Letterman considered this an unexpected choice for a girl who would spend most of her time in the arts and children´s book section. Isaiah Berlin had commented on this collection of essays, bearing the title of a fragment from the archaic Greek poet Archilochus. Berlin has said: „I never meant it very seriously. I meant it as a kind of enjoyable intellectual game, but it was taken seriously.“ which struck Mr. Letterman as an appropriate motto for his own well intentioned life that was meant to be light and unattached to convention but that had also turned out a bit different than he had foreseen. A little lonelier than anticipated for example.
The girl looked like the serious kind of girl who preferred reading to going out, maybe a bit too serious for young men´s taste, he thought. She was pale and almost pretty and she squinted her eyed as if she was in need of glasses while reading.
He liked the The Hedgehog and the Fox . It too was an intellectual game in which Berlin divided writers into two categories: hedgehogs, who – like Plato – view the world through the lens of a single defining idea, and foxes – like Shakespeare – who draw on a wide variety of experiences and who pursue multiple ideas simultaneously that were all but incompatible with each other but coherent in themselves, representing Berlin´s irreducibly pluralist ethical ontology. Mr. Letterman suspected that he himself – unfortunately and despite his curiosity – was more of a hedgehog really, not least due to a certain shyness and his need to keep a steady view of life while the value pluralism that Berlin was able to embrace gave his own ethical system a spinning sensation.
He had been curious if the girl would actually purchase the book or had just been attracted by the whimsical title. It was a hardcover edition though and bound to be expensive, probably around sixty Dollars, and so, even if she decided against it, it might not necessarily tell him much about her intellectual preferences. Still, his curiosity was aroused, also she seemed vaguely familiar, and so he gave her a sidewards glance every once in a while.
After a while she closed the Hedgehog and the Fox carefully, but did not put it back. Instead she pulled out yet another book from the shelf, this one slender with a marbled green-greyish paper cover over a frayed soft cardboard binding and a light green title tag glued to the front like an old fashioned school notebook. There was no dust cover.

The first thing he thought as he looked at the small book was that he must have overlooked it (because he knew all the books in that shelf and noticed new books right away when he got to it), the second thought was that it must have been displaced because quite obviously it belonged in the used book section. The girl put the art book and the Hedgehog and the Fox down on top of the fairly low shelf and gently opened the marbled book in order to spare the book spine from damage. By the way she handed the book he could tell that she was used to handling books.

He stepped a bit closer, randomly pulling out a book of his own and looking over to her again, smiling in case she should meet his gaze but she didn´t. She was fully concentrated on her book and did not look up or showed any other sign of awareness of his presence. He therefore dared to move a little closer still in order to identify the book and saw that the volume did indeed not belong in this shelf. The gilt letters on the title, partly obscured by her hands he deciphered as Ri- – o-nn- – Orph – -s and concluded that she had found a treasure, Rilke´s Sonnets to Orpheus. He knew the publishing house´s signature marble cover, a German Publisher called INSEL, the Island.
The girl became even more interesting to him now as she seemed transfixed by this new book, caressing the paper while turning the pages. Quite suddenly she looked up as if she had grown aware of his observing look. She looked directly at him and smiled. For a moment he was startled by her sudden awareness, but then he returned her smile. I am German, she said, it´s strange to read Rilke in English translation. She said this as if  they had been meeting before and this was just one out of many remarks that had already passed between them. Well, he answered, I envy you, my German is very limited and I would not be able to read Rilke if his work hadn´t been translated. That is a nice edition you found. Someone must have placed it in the wrong shelf.
She smiled again, lowered her voice and then continued the conversation  with an even more personal tone. -Will you keep a secret if I recited some lines from my favorite Rilke poem in German to you? Her English was excellent with only a slightly rough edge that gave away the German native speaker. He considered the question. He was curious and so he nodded. She briefly closed her eyes and, reopening them, looked straight at him again and started with a clear if still quiet voice, not at all like a schoolchild reciting a poem by heart, as he had half expected. Though clearly in verse it did not sound like a recitation of a poem at all, more like an intimate confession. He could make out single words, colors like Grün and Blau and simple words like Sommer and Sonne und Frau, and names of places places like Venice and Kasan, Rome and Florence, Kiev and Moscow, but the rest to him was like a strange music, beautiful and raw.

Und du erbst das Grün vergangner Gärten und das stille Blau
zerfallner Himmel
tau aus tausend Tagen
die vielen Sommer, die die Sonnen sagen
und lauter Frühlinge mit Glanz und Klagen
wie viele Briefe einer jungen Frau
Du erbst die Herbste, die wie Prunkgewänder
in der Erinnerung von Dichtern liegen,
und alle Winter, wie verwaiste Länder,
scheinen sich leise an dich anzuschmiegen.
Du erbst Venedig und Kasan und Rom,
Florenz wird dein sein, der Pisaner Dom,
die Troïtzka Lawra und das Monastir,
das unter Kiews Gärten ein Gewirr
von Gängen bildet, dunkel und verschlungen, –
Moskau mit Glocken wie Erinnerungen, –
und Klang wird dein sein Geigen, Hörner, Zungen,
und jedes Lied, das tief genug erklungen,
wird an dir glänzen wie ein Edelstein.

Es geht noch weiter, she said, after a pause, then realized that she had spoken German, repeated: – This is not where it ends, but I think this is good for now. He smiled warmly and bowed to her. She gave a small laugh and answered: – Now for my secret. He replied: – But that would be two gifts then, implying that the poem had been a gift and he had appreciated it, but she did not pay attention to him as if she was in need of depositing her secret whatever it might be with someone, just anyone, maybe the first person she met who liked Rilke.

He felt a bit uneasy, because the encounter had become personal and he did not know whether he wanted to be burdened with a private detail. – You see, she commented as if she had been following his thoughts, – the second one is not a gift, it is a fair and square deal. But don´t be afraid, it´s just an insignificant small thing I am going to tell you, quite childish really, and he felt ashamed that he had been nervous.

She continued with a hushed voice and in a slightly pedantic tone, her German accent now more apparent that she had recited the Rilke poem, – I cannot afford to buy this book, it´s really quite expensive. It´s a first edition, published in 1923, and it is absolutely beautiful. I do spend money on books as you can see, but this one´s out of my reach. So I took it from the rare book section down here and placed it in social studies because I figured chances are that most people interested in social theories and politics and history would not much care for poetry and so it would be awhile until it either found a buyer or the clerks put it back where it belongs and until then I can look at it. These editions normally go very fast. Now, there it is, my secret, and I am going to put the book back on the shelf right next to Isaiah Berlin because he was fluent in German and would be good company to Rilke. I hope you will keep my secret because then I will be able to enjoy this a little longer and all the more now because it is a shared secret now.
Mr. Letterman watched her shelving the book neatly, holding on to his own books tightly to steady himself. He was feeling troubled. He did not know whether he felt disapproval or interest in the girl or both he was at the same time curious and uncertain as to how the situation would continue, asking himself whether she would expect him to answer to her confession and what to say, and whether he was to be her accomplice in the crime or give her some fatherly advice. Surely this was not a grave violation of ethics, not as bad even as hiding a book at the law library to prevent other students from finding specific titles that were relevant for a semester assignment as was a bad habit of some of his fellow students at law school. Surely, there was something intriguing about a girl her age who knew Rilke by heart and seemed to know a bit about Isaiah Berlin as well, already knew this before she opened The Hedgehog and the Fox. Surely, he did not normally seek out young girls for literary conversations and confessions, and he felt at insufficient and uneasy and overall insufficiently prepared for such a situation, which in turn made him feel irritated and at a loss for words. But she just turned around, smiled at him once more, but now in a polite and distant way that betrayed nothing of the intimacy they had shared just a moment ago and with a small nod of the head, walked over to the register to pay for her two books. He looked at the shelf where the small grey-green volume nestled up to its neighbor, like an ordinary, out of the ordinary secret, a secret quite different than the ones he was entrusted with every day save Saturday and Sunday as a lawyer. When he looked up again the girl had left the store leaving him behind with their shared secret. Should he take the book out of the shelf like a good schoolboy and carry it back to the rare book section? But nobody had made him the guardian of the books after all and the clerks, as she had said, were bound to find it sooner or later, so there was no harm done, really. After giving this some consideration he still didn´t feel right about it, and he still felt angry with her for leaving  him with  choices that would put him in the wrong no matter whether he decided it one way or the other. Finally he turned his back on Rilke and Berlin and started browsing in the opposite shelf, in History. He pulled out Herodotus who was shelved properly and leafed through the pages until he found his favorite part, the story of Candaules and Gyges. When he had finished reading it and Candaules had been killed and succeeded by Gyges, he had successfully willed himself to forget about Rilke, and about the secret and about the girl. Or so he thought. Thus he kept the secret. Thus the trouble began.

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autocorrect

IMGP1041When she was ready to write, the first word that presented itself was: nocolor. Autocorrect corrected it three times over. Autocorrect wrote: “No color”. The word as it needed to be was: nocolor. She knew what it meant. It was a good word to start with. She could see that autocorrect was struggling with the concept. She took a piece of transparent drawing paper o and instead of typing she drew the word with a radiograph pen, 0,35 mm: nocolor. The paper endured the non mistake.

Autocorrect was a mediocre little man in a grey woolen suit. She knew him. Raymond Chandler had known him, too. Common sense, autocorrect, is the little grey man who never makes a mistake in addition. But it is always someone else’s money he is adding up. Oh, I have met the little man in the grey suit many times over. Here he lingers. I am sure autocorrect wears a grey suit, but I know better than to pay attention to him. nocolor is a good word to start writing about the exits that are not accounted for. the little grey man wouldn’t know them if he stood facing one. He would insist there was no door. And he’d be right there is no door. Only there is.

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Artist’s logic: to a friend who just celebrated an important birthday, (isn’t any birthday?)

While I travel between two very different worlds, one might just as well say, universes, between the paper world of the lawyer backed up by the many stories and needs of my clients, as different from one another as one can imagine, and the turpentine world of art, the stark smells, the mess, the need to tangle that which has just before been neatly ordered, backed up only by my own perception of the beauty of randomness, my need to stretch beyond the confines of an individual biography and yet of course always landing face first back in, well  if not in the mud then at least in a bucket of paint like any other clown in business,

while I travel between these worlds I feel entirely grateful that for some random reason I have been given the gift of intense pleasure in all these fragments that might never amount to much, not make a front page but at any time give me a sense of wonder and awe of the wild twists and turns. How I wish you would, too, I mean, take intense pleasure in what is, not fear how much or how little there is to come. Take the deep breath and dare to live this imperfect, strange, angst-ridden, beautiful, funny, short, long, light, dark thing called a life. How I wish you’d get to be just you, not judge yourself nor let yourself be judged by others while you lay down, if only for a moment, the burden of your insight.

Here’s to the wild twists and turns, my friend, to moments of desperation followed by sudden outburst of unfounded optimism, to the great calm between the days of discontent and the fractured mirror of contentedness reflecting the light of other possible worlds.

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The elusive act of teaching children how to be creative …

Legal Chimaere

To be creative is a basic desire of humans, all humans. It is a genuine expression of who we are even before we are defined by our social and economic circumstances. To teach a child to be creative therefore seems to me an elusive act. I look at children with a sense of awe, they are still there, right at the origin, and all I do as the teacher I am honored to be at times is to take them on the same kind of  long walk that I had been privileged to undertake with my own grandparents and I simply allow them to discover their world and to collect at will what responds to their own desire of creating this world new. If we’d allow our children more freedom and time to explore their own world and provide them with materials that are not dedicated to specific purposes, we could cut back on many extracurricular activities. Let them venture out there and the artist that lives in every one of us but is acutely alive in our children is ready to meet all the great challenges of art right in our neighborhood.

 

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Time itself took notice of the unlikely creature

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“I  will be back.” Was it even meant to be a promise or rather the a mere, impulsive expression of an intent? The gargoyle pondered this question over many days, even weeks after the mason had left. He remembered the exact  sound of the words, their intonation, the expression of the mason’s face, the thoughtful gathering up of the tools, the turn of the head to once again rest his eyes upon the face of the stone creature, the final words – the gargoyle relived all of these moments and weighed them, day after day.

Every day up to midday he collected small reasons why chances were good that the man should appear this day, after midday he thought of excuses why he could not possibly have made it possible to come this day but would surely be able to fit it in tomorrow or at least before the week, the month , the season was over.

Perhaps the last gargoyle had been lonelier than he had cared to admit previously or maybe this obsession with the return of the mason was just yet another way to pass time.

Waiting for something to happen, somebody to appear, seemed to be far superior to just being, even if it infused his previously peaceful existence with a permanent sense of pain, a feeling that was so close to boredom that at times he would have been unable to distinguish it.

Boredom or pain both compromise our sense of regular time passing and whereas a day had just been a day, an hour just an hour before the advent of meaning and desire (now time had a direction, time existed so the mason could bridge it, so the gargoyle could subtract minutes from the greatest distance that separated him from the return, the moment when the mason had finally turned his back on him and left the roof), now a day could be excruciatingly long, especially if the gargoyle thought to have detected sounds coming from behind the closed roof door.

Expectation, gladness, desire, wishfulness, frustration, even despair were all variations on the same theme, waiting. Waiting in turn meant the refusal to accept time for what it was; it was like a progressing illness. It never occurred to the gargoyle to abandon his unreasonable expectation and to return to stone nature in order to gain the peace he longed for. Peace seemed attainable only if his curiosity about the reason for the return of the mason could be satisfied. Time passed and the mason did not return. Eventually the initially glad expectation turned into a numb pain, over time seemingly removed from any cause. A general disappointment  overcame the gargoyle, the most human of feelings, as if something that had been promised to him was now purposefully being withheld. It was as if his existence was gradually being tainted by something he could neither name nor really be completely sure of.

Time itself took notice of the unlikely creature and inexorably started gnawing at him with tiny teeth. The  gargoyle still formulated his thoughts in human phrases. But instead of patiently following a thought until it moved just out of grasp and then starting all over again like a child, he had taken to a summarizing his thoughts in a more generalist way, often colored by self-pity. A second rate stone poet he was now, defeated and ridiculous, utterly grown-up and utterly human. He felt contempt for himself, for his dependence, his passive waiting, his pathetic obsessiveness but he couldn’t help himself. There was no way to stop. No way to stop waiting. Tiny cracks were forming in the rough granite surface. Defeat was looming.