October Dreams, from Brussels to Tübingen and Back
In between it all, long odd dreams, hiking in the woods, running into people, one after another in the dark. I’m lost, nothing new, but the unknown shapes itself into a new home, between here and there, not sure how to find the path, the usual dreams. It becomes the only thing that's real, disappearing before the alarm clock rings.
It had been like that the last few days, between the Brussels trains and the Library Bar with friends in the Lower East Side. I picked up a copy of the Murakami’s 2004, After Dark, a story of one night between a brothel and Denny’s in Tokyo, and Iris Murdock's Under the Net, her debut novel of London that had all one could ever want in a novel, each character more lost in love that the next.
“In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It's important to combine the two in just the right amount,” says Murakami. I agree.
I snuck out of town the week before, from JFK, NY to Copenhagen, bright skies greeted us, arriving at 828 am, 230 am NY. Welcome to Denmark. Four hour layover. I found a seat. Cloudy skies on the way to Brussels, where I meet James. Drizzle, grey, people stop for a beer at the train station, a break along the way, people sitting about, catching up, getting away from the rain.
Rains are good for stories.
I jot down a few notes in the journal, looking at the people arriving at the Dream Cafe, working down the street, saying hello, goodbye, together, apart, connected, separated, spinning through time, in and out of each other’s dreams.
Word on the streets about Brussels, a huge demo Saturday:
Ponce also called for a general strike on 17 November in which “all sectors and groups unite.”
All weekend long, we talked about the demos across Europe.
“It's no longer the Flamingo Revolution, it's turned violent,” said one Albanian in Brussels. “The cops are beating kids up, arresting them.”
Morning train to Tübingen, Germany.
I walked from Ave Louise to Midi Station, where I missed my first train, catching the next to Koln, the connecting train to Stuttgart was late, while the train to Tubingen I needed was just on time. Made it just in the nick of time, a goth kid behind me, a college kid reading Homer in Greek in front of me. The college kid is studying abroad there. We met looking about the town, admiring the bookstore where Herman Hesse worked and found himself. We talked about Thomas Mann and Goethe and life in a Southwest German university town.
I think Willow, the bass player in Flower, is my fave artist, they tell me, commenting on a flyer I brought from a show I went to in Brooklyn in September. Her art is like Nick Blinko's, they tell me, looking at the black-and-white etchings. They put up their new poster. We spent the evening exploring Tübingen, the 14th-century town where they are studying archaeology for the year. Largely spared the bombings of other German towns during WWII, the town has an old-world feeling. The kid walks through this town square to the bookstore where Herman Hesse, the ultimate dharma bum, worked, to a rooming house where Goethe drafted Faust. Goethe lived here, says one official plaque; Goethe puked here, says the unofficial plaque outside the student house next door where he hung out, which the city is always trying to take down. We walked to the castle, the Schloss Hohenubingen, the castle where they are taking classes. Ate cheese and bread and tomatoes, and drank beer listening to the Buzzcocks 1979 song, "I Believe:"
“I'm skipping the pages of a book that takes ages for the foreword to end
Triangular cover concealing another aspect from view
My relative motion is just an illusion from stopping too fast
The essence of being, these feelings I'm feeling, I just want them to last
And I believe what I believe in
Yes, I believe in, I believe in
And I believe I'm going to be late
So I'll be leavin' what I believe in
There is no love in this world anymore
“You only live in a medieval town a few times in your life,” I say, looking about, enjoying another bite of bread and tomato.
Bear generally loves the vibe, listens to Psychic TV, reads Genesis P-Orridge poems, deciphers society of the spectacle quotes on Willow posters, goes to demos, and abhors the jargon of Achille Mbembe's necropolitics "(often conflated with "necropolis" as a blend of "necros" meaning corpse and politics) to describe how social and political power dictates who is allowed to live and who is forced to die." It’s a bit of an Oedipus challenge to Foucault, they tell me. We all have to take on the bulldozers, privatizing the public, all of us. They do imitations of conversations with international students here: the Italians who drink Aperol spritz, the German friend who speaks better English, feels the anguish, the smell of rain on the sidewalk, goes home, has a good cry, and imagines the self. We read the graffiti, no one is illegal, housing for all, and walk to the cemetery and back home. The church bells ring all night long.
The conversation extends into the morning. And we make our way to the train, on the way back to Brussels for the demos.
Late night gossiping about it all with the lovely Irene and James, catching up, revisiting old topics, into new ones, the conversation takes the shape of a sonata with variations on a theme, Vassar friends, crosswords, Spain, Berlin, love, romance, love's labor lost, and found, and lost again. It had already been a long day, chatting away with the college kid about the Paris student demos, the Flamingo Revolution that has gone violent, the cops beating up students. One lost an eye, another group rounded up. Gushing with happiness seeing them. Then jumping on the 1133 train from Tubingen to Stuttgart, onto the 1249 to Mannheim, before I jump on the 1337 to Frankfurt, before the connection to Brussels Midi at 1436, reservation canceled by DB, due to track work, no replacements available available, white knocking it when Germans with reservations come kick out the stragglers who didn't bother to get them. A french couple behind me refuses to leave, "désolé." No Germans appear to intervene. No international incident. I scroll through fb to images of the tear gas and riots in Paris and Brussels. The students are on the move, demanding a future, good news from Serbia and Brazil, fascists on their heels. Meet James and Irene, chatting away all night with my friends, back on the road in the am, to catch the 1020 flight to Denmark, just in time for the connection to JFK, security asking when we left Greece this summer, what day. I dont member. Took the ferry from Corfu to Serande, and then flew back to Athens. Can't remember. He stamps my passport. I jump on the plane, listening the Danes chatting away, write some, read some, write some, finish under the net, Iris murdoch's epic novel of london. My used copy has been marks from melody e. lowe. Whose Melody? Her comments in blue and green incisive. Undermining and explaining, commenting aptly. Why not a year and a city Melody? Dad always said note the year and city when you read a book so then when you go back to them you have a record. Respect Dad.
"I wanted to hold on..." writes Iris in Under the Net, "A premonition of pain made me delay; the pain that comes after the drama, when the bodies have been carried from the stage and the trumpets that are silent and an empty day dawns, which will dawn again and again to mock our contrived finalities..."
"Global student rebellion from Albania to Indonesia to India, France, Italy, Mexico - is an inspiration to us all," writes Sarah Schulman.
Lula wins.
Says Ben Mansky: "Brazil, Serbia, Spain: Mass protest wins elections. U.S. history teaches the same."
And back to the crazy USA. Facial recognition at security, that can track us on our way.
Union organizing
As my friend Paul Bartlett puts it,
“No on Prop #3
Would open up Community Gardens for disposal!
Harvey Epstein confirmed most Community Gardens are "Unused City Owned Property" according to Real Estate giveaway and likely less public oversight on Environmental Impact review. vote No on 1-4, yes on 5.”
I had a strange dream about Michel Foucault, the day he died, the feeling, writing about the feeling, wondering if anyone would comment on my post. As if he had died, a long ago feeling like the Elvis Presley Blues song by Gillian Welch, with its lyrics, "I was thinking that night about Elvis day that he died..." Though Michel Foucault died on June 25, 1984, in Paris, France, at the age of 57, my age now. But I was writing a tribute in a dream, the gateway to hidden mental life, as Freud said in his dreambook. "But it is too late. So, thank you," he ended his final lecture that March, visibly diminished. Everyone seemed to know. Those in attendance seemed to understand. Looking out and about, grading student papers, teaching, going to vote, thinking about a family friend deported by the sadist in chief, going to Barbes with my buddies, chatting about it all, walking home, by the big buildings going up about me, about us in the Gowanus, buildings with anything but affordable rent, thinking about the ballot measures, no need to take away checks and balances, to fast track developer give aways, not under any mayor, not when Finance Insurance Real Estate are the permanent mayors of new york, hoping we can find our way out of this mess. Hoping it hasn't all gotten away. It can all be taken away, Troy said about his broadcasting job, in a puff of smoke. And then who are we?
So how do we live? Thinking about Mary Oliver's When Death Comes poem:
"When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world."
—Mary Oliver
"The only way out is through..." said Irwin, quoting Robert Frost' poem 1915 poem "A Servant to Servants" or was it actually "The best way out is always through" at my trauma class. Still a master in the classroom, telling his story about a partner with cancer. We didn’t have enough time. Still it was enough. Jeannette not Raquel served us burgers at Bijans afterward, Baby C and I kvetched about it all at Schen on Smith, and Andrew and I talked late into the night at the Library, recalling a sister long gone, a dissertation chair, and stories not quite complete.
And the week wound from Wednesday to Thursday, union meetings and classes and yoga.
I still can’t stop thinking about Iris’ novel:
“Events stream past us like these crowds and the face of each is seen only for a minute. What is urgent is not urgent for ever but only ephemerally. All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, like itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing. Yet through this shaft of nothings we drive onward with that miraculous vitality that creates our precarious habitations in the past and the future.
So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.”
