taking a break until the 30th of september, 2006

i wish this life:





here is a big thanks to hugh macleod for publishing this cartoon just when i needed it.


it is that i am just so damn tired of addressing the question of how i am doing that even the idea of getting laid makes me start to laugh out loud, really loud. hysterics or histrionics, you pick the label, i just do not care. it will be your label, and this is my life. i need a break from the madness of this blog, and yes there is some madness to this blog. it is the only kind of madness that i am deeply and madly in love with, my own madness.

within the past few weeks i have not been seen blogging much, or writing much otherwise. you guessed it right, i am feeling very blocked at this point. i have been blocked for the past year or even past year and a half. the novel that i am working on like an idiot is just not flowing, it is not coming, and it is so damn frustrating to have the story, write about the story, characterize the characters, and then have the bloody story just not flow! it is  stuck in the pipeline. yes, i have been reading a lot, and no i have not been drawing enough, nor have i been taking enough walks along the beach, or walks for that matter, or hiking... it is time for me to go take a hike.

i wish this life shit was more meaningful, it ain't! i wish hugh good luck or whatever is on his list, after all that is what it takes for both selling wine and getting laid, or at least that is what i have been told. i am no  good with lists anyhow, but have always been showered with luck.

did i ever tell you that one of my grand-fathers was a wine producer? yeah, it totally ruined the possibility of becoming an alcoholic for me. i grew up around wine, and to me it is something that one adds to soup to make it edible.

if i am to put away all the babble and nonsense speech aside with the incongruent and fuzzy logic that this scribe is fond of displaying, then i can tell you, the few brave souls that click away to these pages, that i am truly exhausted from spinning my wheels in place. clinically speaking this is called depression. it really is not a roller coast ride, nonetheless an intimate relationship with this condition is not for the faint hearted. the way that i see it now, is that this is a necessary condition in coping with past traumata. there was an event last year that triggered the unveiling of a repressed memory that had served up to now to keep all the trauma out of conscient examination. the day that i remembered that trauma is still well etched into me and i faced emotions and feelings that threw a whole world out of balance. it was my world crumbing, and behind the ruins i saw a beautiful landscape that i had always wished was not just in my imagination, that that beauty had somehow a bit of reality. behind that shattered world, a reality is emerging, a reality much too tender, delicate and precious and very foreign to me.

i am tired of looking for excuses, and i am tired of making myself wrong. i need time offline when it comes to answering that question of how i am, i need silence.

inshallah!

Technorati Tags: abuse, aggression, amour-propre, art, depression, gapingvoid, recovery, trauma, zen

the thing with the storyteller (part three)

(continued from part 2)

all that i ever wanted to give you is freedom...

on monday one corporate legal counsel held the storyteller in his arms. the story teller was crying, he is one of her very best friends. together they share a passion for life lived to its fullest, something about a city in north africa and a deep commitment for peace.

what remains of a love affair when the ashes in the fireplace are cold? sinnan. once more the storyteller returns to it, this place, and what it is that remains to do. action is all that there is, and action is not about doing things, and certainly it never was a circumstance or an excuse.

it was on a bridge over this river of chance, near a place that should hold history and fright, that the the storyteller one fine summer evening came to realize that it is action that will make a difference. the storyteller continues and crosses that bridge, the storyteller can not turn around.

how does a storyteller, a woman, an hermit and a damned mortal human being deal with the path so chosen? where does it begin and how does it start?

choices they say, is what life is about. choice to this storyteller is a very poor cousin of what the woman discovers. listening to music reveals wonder. music is, like literature, something that passes on from one human to another through some representational abstraction of letters or notes either on paper or as sound produced by a musical instrument created be it by the simplest of craftsman with the most rudimentary of materials, or with the most farfetched gadgetry out of the quantum kitchen of technology. use a stone, or use a quantum-well, music you can make. music is not about technology, it is about rhythm, and it touches the soul directly. choice is an illusion; in reality there is only one path to now.

For myself, I cannot live without my art. But I have never placed it above everything. If, on the other hand, I need it, it is because it cannot be separated from my fellow men, and it allows me to live, such as I am, on one level with them. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of people by offering them a privileged picture of common joys and sufferings. It obliges the artist not to keep himself apart; it subjects him to the most humble and the most universal truth. And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge. And if they have to take sides in this world, they can perhaps side only with that society in which, according to Nietzsche's great words, not the judge but the creator will rule, whether he be a worker or an intellectual
.

Albert Camus  (speech, Nobel Banquet, Stockholm, 1957)

while the hyperlink has restricted associations and recall from the fuzzy to the explicit, and it has made knowledge a resource yet to be fully reckoned with, if it has not totally redefined it, the storyteller remains in the privilege of painting the common joys and sufferings, like the musician remains in the privilege of resonating with our deepest senses.

while in americana one wonders about the epidermic truth of the fiction-absolute of tom wolfe, in europeana the storyteller wonders why the  rift between the shores of marseille and martha's vineyard have grown apart, or why supposedly smart-grown-up-people who claim to know what is good and right, do all the wrong things and nobody dares to tell them one simple piece of information, that they are wrong. wrong. but who would dare to say so and risk life in its process?

when the man in montana tells the storyteller that he is tired and dealing with existential angst and that the world out there is wrong and not ready for life, then this storyteller listens and knows that most of all he needs to be listened to. although the world out there surely looks to be out of order, it is not, this is the world that we have created, this is the world that we live in, it is ours. for the storyteller, the woman is not important, neither is the man, but something grander is important, the moment, the instant, and every and each breath of this life. war happens, men kill each other for reasons beyond comprehension, and then find excuses in the texts of history books. causality becomes an excuse and tragedy and drama become a certainty, and we go on and call it war, or we call it life. when the man in montana is grieving the pain of the past, the woman wonders about what is real and what is absolute. perfection may be the ultimate utopia, but then utopia is never perfect, and the storyteller would warn that never is not absolute. then they say that the storyteller is sultry while the woman keeps herself veiled,  the unattainable recluse whose skin you may touch, and whose being you may experience. she returns, and then it all starts again, once more, like the seasons on the shores of europe. she returns and the seduction continues.

when the tears shed in paris are recalled, the woman knows that the storyteller will go on, day after day, one step at a time, one word after the last, and again the fears are recounted, retold, rehashed, and eventually conquered and embraced. fear, once more fear. fear is just another emotion, she says. then the woman appears and she is divorced from fairness. the universe is complete; it lacks a sense of fairness. the world is as it is.

when intimacy is felt... what happens then? it was felt. the first time, it was not recognized, an abyss summoned the woman, and the world lost its innocence. the storyteller froze, the woman tasted paradise.

(to be continued)

Technorati Tags: alone, fluage, story, storytelling

4 AM

i went to bed relatively early after a delightful and distracting afternoon spent with a dear dearest. we met at the "rosengarten" and we drifted off to a short walk along the river...

"yesterday was for falling in love with you all over again. thank you for being yourself. thank you for laughing and crying with me"

still around 4 am i was wide awake and felt a cramp coming on my right calf muscles. it did. ouch. my body is manifesting itself, and the greek aikidoka who told me that i do not take good care of it was right. at the time, i would have rather punched him out, i had just tensed up on taking ukemi and it had hurt like hell. it was more an irritation to my ego than a physical injury, it also gave me a chance to just shut up, the tears came, the pain subsided within hours, and there was no injury. the art of shutting up is a long lost and neglected art. shutting up and crying can do wonders on occasions.

it maybe that this is all about me being tense: my diet for the past couple of weeks would give a rash to any nutritionist; even a teenager on fast food eats better than i have been eating. it is time to hit the magnesium and the vitamin supplements. soya milk and coffee is a rather lopsided diet even if i do eat the occasional french fries and drink a beer now and then. remember that beer is considered food in bavaria and i did live there for a few years many moons ago.

there is at least one good reason why i have not quoted james joyce here before, although of all the dead men, he is one of my favourites, still today i make an exception.

„Herr Dufy wohnte unweit seines Körpers.“
"Mr. Dufy lived not far from his body"
James Joyce

this little bit of wisdom is one often quoted by another of our many aikido sensei, and the one that my aikidoka colleague had chosen to start off his shodan essay. somehow there is a lot more there than meets the eye. so it is that this very little sentence penned by joyce best describes my sentiments of what it was like to spend an afternoon with that dear dearest of mine, a man alive. this man is the same one whose domestic drama i refuse to be a part of. still, i find myself, if not a part, certainly a curious observer of the dynamics in his domestic strife. see, i run away from anything to do with jealousy and possessiveness like i would run away from the pest if i knew what "the pest" smelled, felt or was like. screwed up relationships based on possessiveness and desperation i have never quite understood, they remain, so to say, a curiosity that i am much too ready to investigate. no doubt there is some form of self-interest in this research of my life.

now simon and garfunkel sings "bridge over troubled waters" one of my all-time-loved songs associated with memories of growing up in california. los angeles that is, where people are superficial, flicks get made and somehow we all are on the forefront of the groove of whatever is next. deep down i remain an angelino (not an angelina), but you would have to pay me damn good money to live there again. i will be accepting offers from now on.

Technorati Tags: james joyce, mr dufy, music, sense, sensei, talkingheads