Quick Missive From Berlin

Ok. You can count on Jesus to rise. But you can never know what the weather's going to be like in Berlin for us to celebrate it. In the minute or two I've been contemplating this brief "hey," I've seen sun, snow, and hail. I have already seen several crocuses, and tulips, too, in some of the midways around the city. Poor things. They must be cold.

So Power is vulnerable. Way back when I actually kept up a blog, I had the vague idea that maybe what we needed were new slogans, May '68 style, mysterious and provocative. "What we need is ritual spontaneity." I probably did have sex in mind. Or at least sex as one of our overdetermined ways of getting to ritual spontaneity. But I think writing, and perhaps even especially writing a correspondence, is about ritual spontaneity, too. For me it is. You give yourself time to get to where you might generate something. I'm a fiend for generation. To the point that I sometimes repeat myself wildly just to get there. That's no doubt one of the reasons I'm stretched out on the couch three times a week now. That, and the fact that I had never really described my childhood in French, at least in any kind of sustained way.

It's hailing in Berlin again.

It's weird that feeling that something's over. Especially if it's some version of yourself. It's a good time for correspondence, I'd imagine. So long as the person playing "you" to you has at least a vague sense of responsibility.

The sun's out in Berlin.

I do have more than a vague sense of responsibility. Though it's sometimes hard to answer you because I get my head around a missive, only to return to our page and find that it's actually either not there, or is, but radically modified. No worries, though: I think it will become part of my skill set, the way I need to return to read you and the ways those returns inform the rhythms of my response. Everyone does indeed need that. I find myself often, these days, dreaming of structures for that rhythm. Our friend Barthes, with his appreciation for the "gracious and incorruptible," should be able to help out a bit. One of his last seminars, just recently published a year or two ago, was all about what he calls idiorhythmics. He, too, was dreaming of structures: structures that would allow each member of a group to go at his or her own rhythm. Structures that would encourage those idiorhythmics. He looks at lots of early-Christian experiments with ways of regulating them: eating, thinking, talking, walking, seeing... This virtual world, I think, has interesting potential for that kind of thing. But the structures need work. Themselves need to be created. I think for the last long while I'd assumed that the structures were just there and that I just had to work myself into them. They're not, though, just there. They are there to be created. Which has a tendency to create vast amounts of anxiety, I think. We just need to breathe in and get some work done.

I really like the citation from Lewis Hyde. Maybe what I'm calling rhythm is"the thing in motion" he's talking about. And maybe he's saying we should just keep in good faith that its movement will give us, and the other ones, what we need. I guess the structures I'm dreaming of would seek to regulate the capacity for fulfilling certain needs. Because these days it's just hard to imagine that in letting things go in their motion, those needs are getting fulfilled.

I've finally slept a good night's sleep after two nights of parties. I can't yet guarantee that I'm all there for the rhythms of the response you need. But I'll run the risk and publish this now. Knowing there'll be more soon.