Sense of Duty
<<2004-07-19 - 4:32 p.m.>>

Excerpts from paper journal, last three weeks:

7/5

I'm uncomfortable because so much of me is verbal. So much of the good of me is nonexistent without words. To be wordless--or maybe worse, to be artless with words--is profoundly unsettling. So it was the best yet of Berlin to explode into conversation with Abigail and Ellen and Claudia on Saturday--aesthetics and poems and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and meaning and here I am, engaged and articulate, here, talking enthusiastically about loci of meaning, and maybe I am aesthetically insecure (the need for reciprocal engagement, the suspicion of analysis) but I am here, thinking, more than a freakishly large body to drag around, silent and, simultaneously, constantly expressive, this foreign place where I want to explain and cannot.

On Saturday, most of the Judisches Museum was strangely unmoving, but the oddly angled tall void of Libeskind's Shoach memorial was affecting--like, perhaps, the Kathe Kollwitz memorial I just saw to the victims of fascism, the figures curled together like a Pieta, like a Madonna and Child, like emerging out of the presculptural void ainto articulated consciousness, alone in their unfeeling space, unprotected from the world--the rain drew a circle around the figures, slicked them to a shine.

7/9

I'm sitting in the Aprodite nook of the Pergamon--three busts and a dismantled body--no arms, no head, no legs below the knee. Long straight noses, gently blooming lips.

What makes someone great?

Why a museum filled with the pale tender fragments of a departed world? Did the people who raised faces out of stone know something about the sublime? What was I looking for in the photographs at the Martin Gropius Bau? (The photographer was famous, but I'd never heard of him, and now I've forgotten his name.) Why was I looking?

7/14

I had a feeling of easy ownership the other night...walking toward Wittenbergplatz on what I'd mistakenly been calling the Ku'damm (I am compulsively documenting my mistakes so as not to be able to accuse myself of image-doctoring or self-deception, but then find myself criticizing myself for self-congratulatory honesty). Maybe it just takes a month and a half to lose my self-consciousness. A little.

...

So much deja vu lately. I had a jolt of it this morning, writing the essay portion of the Abschlussprüfung. I can't remember what triggered it. But it's the third time it's happened in Berlin--I always feel, I've dreamed this.

7/17

I'm reading Vanity Fair--Republicans and ingenues. It makes me want to start a passionately progressive magazine that both emulates and contradicts the Vanity Fair model. I'd call it Bonfire. But I don't know what it would be like. I can never choose a myth--rollicking unpretentious parties in picturesquely squalorous downtown (/Brooklyn) lofts, earnest intimate dinner parties, social-networking cocktail parties? Do I want to be a genteel politician (of a new brand, of course, blunt and scrupulously honest), a starving poet, a game-player, a wandering expat? Most of the time I have such a naked desire to be Someone, to be a bold-face name, to be--literally and figuratively--entextualized.

7/18

Sometimes I think all I want to do is talk to people. Have long comfortable precise interesting funny talks with people. In bright Oregon-spring-penitence sunshine. In storms. Under trees on Berlin canals.

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