Apparition
<<2004-06-13 - 9:50 p.m.>>

Big names at "Das MoMA in Berlin" and there it is, the click and whirr, the sense of dialectic. Dialectic is such a visceral thing. I'm terribly mixed-up about the relationship of my internal monologue to my antidepressants. I skipped them for a week, and maybe thence the feeling of stolid void, but I was terrified as I started to go back on that they would make me like that forever, just this big wordless thoughtless autopiloting mass. But I'm back on them, and I'm feeling the opposite of that, and isn't that odd? Because I used to not take my antidepressants in high school because I was so afraid of what they would make me into. I wonder now what they would have made me into.

A little way from Potsdammerplatz is a slanting and angular Bauhaus park with sleek and cylindrical Bauhaus seesaws maybe thirty feet long. Oh, come to Berlin and play with me. See, I can find things. I tell funny stories. You will not be bored.

There's this kid in my German class who thinks I am a crazy girl. You know the kind of crazy girl I mean. He thinks I am the kind of crazy girl I aspired to be in high school, with the eccentric college and the eccentric family and the eccentric capitalization habits. He keeps making comments about Reed. I half hate it and half scrape it up with little spoons and savor it. I never knew I was so authentic.

Zeke is not coming to Berlin. That's not good news. The promised format has broken down.

Out the window I can hear the soccer game.

Last night, I cooked and we ate and drank wine and told stories around our kitchen table. Brian, who is thirty-one and trilingual and studying for the FBI exam when he is not studying German, told us about African history and why he left his doctorate program, and then I slipped my academic face on and couldn't stop. Secretly I love being ridiculously academic (though I worry that I have no right to call myself that, because secretly I've never read any Adorno or Derrida or even Foucault. None at all. Other than the first five pages of Discipline and Punish). Just like I love my buzzing manic internal monologue. There is a sense of ongoing effort.

A gallery off the MoMA exhibit showed paintings by Gerhard Richter. I decided they were about the entextualization of the self, but I've sort of been deciding that about everything lately. Degas in particular. Especially "The Singer in Green."

I want to have poems tattooed all over my body. Today I thought "In a Station of the Metro" over and over again, watching my face in the S-Bahn window:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals, on a wet, black bough.

<< - >>