5 posts tagged “melancholie”

A love letter from Karoline von Günderrode.  Sort of.

Den vorigen Sonntag war ich den ganzen Tag allein zu Hause, abends hatte ich etwas Brustschmerzen, und nicht nur war ich sehr ruhig darüber, ich möchte fast sagen innig froh, ich dachte an alle mich umgebenden drückenden Verhältnisse und da war mir der Gedanke, ihrer vielleicht bald entfesselt zu sein, sehr erwünscht.  Zugleich dankte ich dem Schicksal, daß es mich so lange hatte leben leben lassen, um etwas von Schellings göttlicher Philosophie zu begreifen, und was ich noch nicht begriffen, zu ahnen; . . . Auch Deiner gedachte ich . . .

Last Sunday I was home alone the whole day, in the evening I had a pain in my chest, and not only was I quite calm about it, I might almost say inwardly joyful, I thought of all the pressing circumstances that surround me and then the much-desired thought that I might soon be released from them.  At the same time I was grateful for the good fortune that I'd been allowed to live long enough to understand something of Schelling's divine philosophy, and to have an idea of what I don't yet understand; . . . I also thought of you . . .

Written 22 March, 1805.  I always feel like crap around that time of year too.  Maybe I should try Schelling.

I'm starting to feel a little bit like the cat moving around the bedroom in pursuit of the sunlight: I keep moving from project to project in a similarly almost-regular way.  Alas, my advisor wrote to remind me that I do owe him a lot of work, so I had to revisit The Rings of Saturn, a book I've spent too much time disparaging.  Unfairly!  It really rewarded a second reading.  It's probably best suited to people who are entirely unfamiliar with his intertexts— I just read a book of Chinese history, so the bit about the Taiping rebellion served mainly to make me giggle helplessly at the line, "The bloody horror in China at that time went beyond all imagining"— since much of the book seems to be about bathos as a form of engagement.  Untold millions died... people perished in unreckonable numbers...  the heap of corpses must have reached the sky...  all the houses in the area were burnt to cinders...  bloody heaps of pheasants...  tons of dead fish... eternal night... death... destruction...  lousy hotel beds...

But no, no, I'm being unjust.  It has its moments.  I can't do justice to the best of them, but at one point Sebald gets lost in a heath:

Only in retrospect did I realize that the only discernible landmark on this treeless heath, a most peculiar villa with a glass-domed observation tower which reminded me somehow of Ostend, had presented itself time and again from a quite different angle, now close to, now further off, now to my left and now to my right, and indeed at one point the lookout tower, in a sort of castling move, had got itself, in no time at all, from one side of the building to the other, so that it seemed that instead of seeing the actual villa I was seeing its mirror image.  (171-72)

I like the "castling move" with the reflexive verb: imputing agency to the chess pieces— as though they'll just do that sometimes, through inertia or statistical factors.  (Something like the physics exam question about the probability of a saucer tunneling through the dinner table: it sits, and sits, and sits, and then foop— right through to the floor.  I found it endlessly amusing.  The world where normal physical behavior is only suspended to produce absurdity.)

But more to the point: it's amazing how much good a tiny bit of aesthetic pleasure does my work ethic.  It lasts until I pick up an essay meant to tell me about Sebald's acquaintance with poststructuralist theory, and it tells me his explication of a Rembrandt painting is totally taken from Foucault's Velázquez chapter in Les mots et les choses, and I read the Foucault and find only a similarity between two pieces of writing about paintings.  I guess if those are the only two you've read, they sound alike?  (I'm sure this too is unfair, but I was baffled.)

Also: I hear we signed a free trade pact with South Korea.  Any good sources on this?

Okay: tell me about an amazing book that will change my life if I read it, offering equal measures of delight and clarity.  Soon.  Ideally within the next fifteen minutes— or, if you must, after a delay.

I know, this is my job; alas, I seem to be losing perspective.

While I work on a review of Genres in Dialogue, you may read my notes from the last night in Berlin, which I have been encouraged by other members of the household to post.

I thought my life was beginning again (Zurückbleib' bitte)

It took the S25 20 minutes to arrive at Bahnhof Lankwitz.  Do you know how long 20 minutes is at Bahnhof Lankwitz?  You do not.  People believe me, oh yes, but they don't know, except Paul.  Two southbound trains passed.  Two inbound Deutsche Bahn trains came flying up the parallel track in the meantime, as I untangled a sentence-from-the-Hungarian in my last-purchased book.

The book I brought to Germany was Vergil's complete works in Latin -- Vergil and Dante, though I didn't read either.  But standing on the platform leaning over the tracks, listening for the approaching whirr of the train, I thought of Ovid instead and briefly, honestly wondered if my helpless and profound longing to stay in Europe would transform me into one of those fast trains: constantly in motion, bound to the earth.  My first thought about this was that it would make Paul terribly lonely.  My second thought was something trainlike: whirr.

Now I'm here on the train in the falling darkness: the halting creep of darkness up here in the north, further north than anywhere in the U.S. [except Alaska -ed.]  I don't remember if the summer days in Cork were this long, years ago.  All my nerves feel exposed: every passing meter of Berlin hits them, like pieces of baggage swung by insensate passersby.  Unter den Linden.  Friedrichstrasse.  Someone lifts a mug to his lips, somewhere in quiet half-light, half-heat, which I have only half-seen and half-intuited: buried, like everything, by the passage of time, like the 20 minutes at the Lankwitz station: I can't describe them.

Last night I lay awake thinking about God, thinking: the word "atheist" really has no meaning for me, I mean individually for me, because I haven't the faintest idea what God is, so I can't either affirm or deny his or her or its existence.  I used to put this more cryptically and say that I didn't believe in God, revelation pending.  This is as strong a profession of faith as I've got.  Fuck some sort of propositional definition: do I believe in an all-powerful being who created and controls the universe?  Why would I believe in that, out of some overwhelming epistemological need to believe in such a thing?  It has no sense for me.  Faith is an individual matter: well, this is mine.

Oh but who could make sense of that.  I sound like I'm looking for an argument, reluctantly.  Maybe it will strike someone, somewhere.  Easier by far to claim atheism; often I do.  But it really is critically inaccurate, critically inaccurate in an almost invisible place.  Cf. Simone Weil, gravity --

This seems like the most serious thing I've ever done, leaving Berlin, or maybe the second, after coming to Berlin.  That is, if seriousness is a feeling, which it may be.  In terms of consequences it's actually hard to see.  I said my good-byes, and left a few unsaid.  I wrote a paper, seven whole pages, all in German.  My classmate who hadn't finished her work said she was too busy translating the paper from English into German and I thought: insanity.  So you write two papers.  I have to blunder through in a single language (in Spanish equally so); I can't switch.

Translation is a thing I've actually lost faith in -- I think I'll find it again, but in the meantime

er, something bad has happened, actually.  I checked out of the dorm thinking I would find a hotel in der Nähe von Tegel in which I could spend the night, or half the night, or however much of the night remains, and from which I would have easy access to, say, the center of town.  Uh-huh.  So.  Es gibt ganz und gar nichts in der Nähe von Tegel.  Nothing.  I took the X9 bus, got off, walked, got on the 109, got off, walked, got back on the 109 and realized that the buses don't run on Saturday morning until after I land in England.  I know that "normal people" take "taxis" and so forth, and that normal people check to see if there's a hotel before they plan to stay in one (please, don't even try to square this with my firm theological logic), and that normal people don't think that spending the night in the airport is a perfectly good outcome.  On that last point, admittedly, we agree.  I'm really not sure what to do now.  Should I tell you my plans for sleeping over the next few days?

Tonight: dodgy
Sat. night: one million hours
Sun. night: no sleep, bus from Ox to Lon
Mon.: 20 hours in transit

Folks, I am already shot.

And what kind of airport is not ringed by hotels?  What kind of MAJOR INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT is not RINGED BY HOooooohhhhh.  weh mir.  I really, really didn't want this to happen.  Thank God I don't take the grad school high stakes bets very often.

You answered "the same kind of airport that shuts down practically every service other than the Schoko-Automat by 10 p.m."  Correct.  One thing they don't shut down, as it turns out, is the free access to airport websites, so I did end up finding a shockingly expensive room for the night on a bus line where I slept in a beautiful, uncannily luxurious bed for 5 hours, got up, took a shower with several different beauty products, and took the bus to the airport.  I don't know if I would have held up at all the next day if I hadn't found that bed.

The following important things have happened: my laptop has become 75% unusable, friends came into town, I began to have real homework, and the Prague trip traumatized me well beyond what I would have considered possible for a lovely Central European city.  I should never underestimate American hegemony.  For those of you who haven't heard the story, the American students who alienated me on the bus ride into Prague began screaming, when we were outside Dresden, for dinner at McDonald's, and continued howling at every McDonald's in Dresden until the bus stopped at McDonald's for dinner and I, who had foolishly given the howlers my only food to try to encourage silence, went hungry.  The piece of dialogue that summed it up best for me went as follows:

Irrepressibly happy student, on the city bus back to the dorm: But look, everyone, we got to see Prague!

Second, more typical student: No, sorry.  I am not ready to look on the bright side of this yet.

Much of this, I admit, I did to myself.  I had a lot of angst over being unable to speak Czech and pushed the limits of my ability to walk around and take in a thousand different objects of interest per hour; I didn't make it to Jan Palach's grave, where I really would have left a flower or two if I could have found it; I skipped the Mozart opera after being disabused of the notion that it would be real art and, when friends invited me to see a chamber orchestra play Bach and Vivaldi, inexcusably passed on that too.

But it crystallized, better than anything I could invent in writing, the negative side of my experience here: I'm happy to be a grad student because I like the work I am doing and will do, and the connections I make with people on the basis of it; I don't, however, want to be an undergraduate again, not ever -- I am told that I behaved like a grad student even before I got my B.A.  There is a certain, often American but also international, personality with which I share no important qualities: it seems to be common among "students," which is to say people who sign up for overseas academic programs, which is to say the 19-year-olds on the bus with me, and the disconnect didn't occur to me until I got here.  This sounds sort of wretchedly whiny and unkind, and I mean no disrespect to anyone by stressing my own difference.  If anything, all of this has made me more ambivalent about it.

Anyway.  I also realized I want to study in Germany, and my options seem to be a) a 4.5-year master's program or b) a year on exchange in Baden-Wurttemberg, i.e. Tübingen or Heidelberg, not Berlin, not even Leipzig or Munich.  There is this great stony cliff before me, rising higher and higher, and I am in the smallest of boats.  At the Gemäldegallerie: Rembrandt, his late beatific portraits, Dürer (but not "Melancholie"!  O Melancholie!), the mighty 15th century, a bite to eat with Vitaminensaft and still-staring artstruck eyes: every few hours here I see something I love and I don't know the name for it, but I don't know the words to alienate me from it either.  I dreamt I spoke German as a child, that there were recordings of me at 5 speaking fluently, I only forgot it later.  The house on the Ku'damm where Musil wrote his novel: there is a plaque.  But I have not written anything here yet.  What happens?  What happens then?