Tangents and Conditions

So Wednesday on the couch where I still spend a consquential amount of time, my shrink, as her ilk are wont, picked up on something I had said about my hesitations about plunging into writing and said, "follow those traces." I think what I'd just said was something about how I didn't know where the traces of Berlin were going to end up settling this time around, where they were going to be déposées. That's one of those charged words in my analysis, déposé. It has to do with traces and remains. Caroline has been described several times in analysis as déposée in me. Now she, or at least her remains, are a little more firmly installed in the name I’m signing with. It also happens to be a name I have now actually published under. In French!

Part of the charge of that particular word déposé comes from Genet, because it’s close to the word disposition. In one of his late interviews, after he got throat cancer and somehow survived for years hanging out with Palestinians, he talks about the "disposition" that brought him to writing. I can almost cite him word for word. "I understood that certain things in my life were blocked for me." And so he was disposed to writing. And to hanging out with Black Panthers and Palestinians. Lucky fucker. With that hard cross he bore after writing his way out of prison and into the theater, he basically haunted hotels waiting to die. And along came Angela Davis and the others. Towards the end of his life, all he had to do was to show the world how he bore the traces of those others in him. It's bonkers, that late book, "Prisoner of Love." And often very very beautiful.

Maybe I run into trouble when I ask for too much. Genet didn't seek out the Panthers or the Palestinians. They just came to him. There’s a sort of famous quote from him where he talks about how wrong it would be to say that he had done anything to advance the causes of those groups. Quelle sottise, he says, refering to the fact that people often ask him why he is helping the Palestinians. "Bullshit. They helped me live." I love the extravagance of that gesture.

They're not Palestinians, and not (yet?) in anything like the impossible position Palestinians are in, but I have been hanging out with some boys that are helping me live, some but not all of whom I met in Berlin. They all, though, end up having some relation to that beautiful Babylon. And I think one way of saying lots of the many things my mind has been up to is to say that I’m translating Berlin. First of all, all that writing about Berlin from April 2008 that's archived here on this site ended up being something like the contact sheets for a publication that meant rethinking what those pieces were doing and figuring out how the pictures in prose were supposed to be arranged on the page. To do that, I had to translate them into French and hear several people tell me how maybe the things seemed weird, no doubt because they were written in English. Quelle sottise. I'm pretty fucking weird in English, too. The whole thing was not entirely unsuccessful. I learned I knew a little bit about how to fight, and I don't even think anyone was killed in the battle. There's actually another party for the journal, Monstre, this coming weekend. I went to the first one for the release of the thing in November and was entirely too cranky and exhausted to have much fun. This Friday, though, I'm supposed to be meeting an on-line friend who likes to expand assholes and is some kind of a tangential element to this Monstre-world. That should be fun. Tangents are essential, as I've always known, but now I'm in a position where I can follow through on a few of them. Translating Berlin is a lot about that, about being careful about where certain tangents are leading me. Walter Benjamin: "Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point, with this touch rather than with the point setting the law according to which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity, a translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux."

Last weekend there were several tangents touching and shooting off into their linguistic flux. And they are more good evidence that translating Berlin goes beyond just translating whatever words I can put together in whichever languages about the time I spend there. At the moment, as you can tell, I’m as interested in the surplus to Berlin as in Berlin while I was there. This is because I, like you and like, I think, a lot of us, need a little bit of structure in my life and in my writing. And I think that a blog is a place where we work on the conditions for that structure. Maybe it’s a place where we can plot out the trajectories of some of those tangents Benjamin would have us thinking about and get some kind of a working map of the crazy force field working its way through us as we work our way through it.

So last weekend started last Thursday, a week ago today. I’ve been trying to write my way into it and into Berlin and trying to figure out how those two fields of writing are working on one another and how exactly I can say how they work, and if they can afford, too, other kinds of writing. (Jesus—look at that sentence. No wonder it takes a little while for us to work our way back here when we’ve been off on a hiatus for a while.)

So last Thursday my weekend started, after attempts at translating a great little book—my first real contract for a book translation, difficult, critical, philosophical, fun—by making my way to the theater. Since I’ve been on hiatus, I haven’t been blogging up my theatrical ventures, but one of the more remarkable ones this past fall was a big-ass mother-fucking piece by an old Greek fag named Dimitris Dimitriadis. He rocks. By which I mean that I discovered in his writing some kind of a kindred spirit, a brother. I have such a profound inutition for what his writing was up to over the course of his life. The first play by him that we saw was called Dying as a Country and it involved something like a hundred and fifty extras. (In French, “extras” are called “figurants.” I like the play between those two terms.) It takes place during a civil war. People are dying by the wayside. There are soldiers and sterile women and mass open graves. I quote, translating from the French, “And there were more than a few of them,” (ie, the soldiers caught up in this devastating war), “who waited in horror for night to fall, because a mute flow would rise up under the bones of their skulls and they would feel the while sky compress within them, and in their heads galaxies and infinite expanses would pulse with a piercing silence that would unleash their inarticulate cries, and would make them coil up in their beds as if they had been struck by the worst pain...” I remember crying to that line. The play is actually a kind of monologue, but it had been staged to be carried by a core of about ten or fifteen Greek actors who would come to a microphone, most of the time, to say their spell. That particular moment was enuniciated by a woman wearing the cutest little red leather jacket. Somehow, I can remember with a certain amount of precision the way she articulated those particular lines, even though they were in Greek and I was reading the supertitles in French. Her voice went slightly into her head as she talked about those imploding galaxies in the soldiers’ heads. Standing up, her arms were stretched out behind her head as if she were laying down, like the soldiers whose torturous existence she was narrating. As she said that line about the galaxies imploding, her hands clenched up into fists that then opened up behind her head. The extras, the figurants, were all lined up in a circle that went in one of the doors to the theater and out the other. Some of what was going on outside—at some point, for example, they all start to sing, and, at another, snow begins to fall—was transmitted by video onto the screen at the back of the theater. As I hope that little excerpt shows, the prose being spoken was so amazingly beautiful, but what was most amazing was that most of it was spoken in Greek, with French supertitles, and you could hear maybe not every little aspect of its beautiful density, but really? A whole damn lot.

So, with our faithful theater-going friend Andreas, Thierry and I had made a date to go see another play by him in the same theater: The Vertigo of Animals Before the Slaughter. This one was performed in French. Beforehand, we were all more than a little nervous. We hadn’t realized that we had signed up for three hours and twenty minutes of modern Greek tragedy, and we were all a little afraid. I even moreso than the others, because I had watched about a minute of video of the production on-line, and it had looked scarily stultifying and very French. We were also joined by Andreas’s Pierre and Pierre’s colleague Katja, and we all agreed that we could leave at the intermission, if we wanted to.

The end of the play allows you to understand exactly what has been going on throughout the play up until then. It reenacts the beginning of the play, where the audience saw two older men awkwardly acting the roles of two younger men. One of them tells the other that he has exciting news, and that he is getting ready to get married. This sends the other literally into a prophetic spew that is really very funny. He says that the other will have a lovely family of some incredible amount of children and that they will be happy up until the point when the children reach a certain age. Then the prophetic spew really begins, which has to do with his friend’s success and all of the havoc it will wreack on his family, involving, of course, lots of incest and horror. At the end of the spew, the dude sort of steps back, like, what the fuck was that all about and where did it come from? I think I was already giggling, because it was either at that moment or at one slightly further on that the lady in front of us, who apparently really didn’t get what was going on, turned around to stare at me, wondering what in the hell I was chortling at. Soon, though, there were enough people tuned in to what was going on on stage and, in particular, to the words the actors were saying that I wasn’t the only chortler.

The prophesy was, of course, entirely accurate, and the vast majority of the play brings the characters to full, stunned articulation of the horror. The daughter goes crazy because her father falls in love with her, the two sons fall in love with each other, one of them assassinates the prime minister and shacks up with the father’s friend who had prophesied all of these events, while the other starts sleeping with the mother who bears and smothers his child at the end of the play within the play. All, it is implied, because the father denied his love for his friend and got married. All because of what that brought to be born of the pen of the poet. All the beautiful, luscious indulgent speech of these crazy people that you can so easily identify with until you freak out and realize what horror you are watching. The actress playing the mother is named Claude Perron, and I recognized her from this film made by Godard’s partner Anne-Marie Miéville called After the reconciliation. I didn’t love that movie, but I did love the way she at one point growls in this gutteral snarl, “Rrrrroooberrrrt,” which is the name of the character played by Godard. I recognized her right away. Her first big monologue—which is actually probably the moment I chortled and got looked askance at by the lady in front of me—is addressed to God the night before she fucks her husband for the first time and evokes all of the elaborate pleasures she expects from it. Luscious stuff. At the turning point of the play, the house expands into a palace, and all of a sudden the family is sitting on more excess than they know what to do with. And then they have to figure out how to deal with it, which they don’t. It drives them mad, in beautiful ways that really did make me think that this play was doing what a tragedy is supposed to: giving you that chill of identification with monsters trapped in situations far beyond their control. It also made me think that I never really thought that particular shudder could involve often hardy laughter.

At the end of the play, we see something like its obverse potential, the way the play and its tragedy might not have been. The father’s friend has invited the family to come and see the spot where he and his father used to meet. This happens just to the other side of this kind of screen that has been used throughout the play, and it’s an obvious kind of nod to realist or naturalist theater. You watch all of the characters we’ve been seeing doing crazy things file on stage, disappear behind the screen that obscurse their forms, and you hear the father’s friend say what the importance of the place was to him and to their father. The friend sends them on their way, wishing them the best before emerging from behind the screen to face the audience wielding a pair of scissors. He sticks out his tongue and cuts it off while we gasp.

Goodness me, what good a smart and funny tragedy can do for you. I knew I was pushing things a little bit, but I’d heard that a new club night called Bordello was happening for the first time that night in central Paris. The idea behind it was to make a sex-club fun again, to put some sexy alternative pop on so the cuties could dance around and to try and do something that Berlin does ever so much better than Paris seems to be able to swing. It’s still definitely the case that Berlin swings things that way much better than Paris does, even if Bordello happens again, but I was all for the initiative. Plus, Vincent had invited me to come on Facebook. Remember him? He’s the one who’s with Julien. They’re that lovely couple we met this past summer. I remember naming the time spent with them in their lovely little house in northeast Paris “a promising parenthesis.” It turns out it was indeed just a parentheses. We went to their country house in August, and that’s a whole other story, but after that we hadn’t heard much from them. It turns out that we didn’t see so much of them, because when they got back from vacation, Vincent found out that he had been let go at his job. We had run into them the weekend before, it had been nice, and Vincent had invited me to come to Bordello, this fun sex party, on Facebook. Even after three and a half hours of luscious contemporary Greek tragedy, I felt like I couldn’t quite just go home without giving it a go. So Thierry and I decided he would go just for a quick drink before the last metro, and I would either go back home with him or else stay and shake my tooshie if I found it in motion.

Julien and Vincent were there, and so were some other boys that I recognized from around. Thierry ended up running into this guy that he met at the Lab in Berlin. I wonder how many European boys’ lives turn out that place? More than a few. Mine does. It’s part of the Berghain, which is where the big Easter party happens. It’s the space that has the happy dance floor where so much goes on. I’ll tell you what went on there in January at some point, but for now its importance is that it was where Thierry met Christophe without ever knowing his name. The night we went there in January, we had noticed him because he’s beautiful and also because he was smoking pot. This was the weekend I had rented out a playroom for Thierry and me to celebrate his birthday in. We did celebrate, and that was a lot of fun. But on Friday, all of the drugs I’d been working so hard to assemble for our fucking pleasures were not yet assembled. They were for Saturday, which was a good if somewhat schizophrenic thing. But that Friday night, we went to the Lab sans drugs and Thierry ended up fucking around with Christophe without ever really finding out his name. Apparently, Christophe told Vincent that he picked Thierry up off of the floor at the Lab, which is, I think, a bit of an exaggeration, but which also seemed entirely imaginable to me. Vincent told me this while I was making my way to the coat-check (which, hello, cost 5 euros!), saying that it was a little strange because he was almost sure that Thierry was making out just to the side of the dancefloor with one of the two guys they’d come to Bordello with. “There’s something a little incestuous about this whole thing,” he laughed. I countered with, “I just spent three and a half hours watching a contemporary Greek tragedy where the mother and the son have a baby, so I really don’t think this is going to be a problem.”

Christophe was there with his German boyfriend Frank who lives in Berlin. I think I’ve met, seriously, like, (I’m counting), five Frank’s since I went to Berlin in January. So that when this particularly sexy Frank said “I’m Frank,” I think my answer was something like, “Right, of course you are.” Frank had my name on his t-shirt, which through its safety pins said “Anarchy Will” in a punk slant down the front of it. He felt dumb when, after we’d been making out and dancing around for a good hour or two, he asked me my name again. Ever patient and understanding, I said something like, “Oh, don’t feel bad,” and he said, “Yeah, but look,” and fingered over the letters of my name on his t-shirt. I smiled and got back to dancing with him.

I talked and danced and kissed a lot, with Frank and with Christophe, with Julien and with Vincent. It was fun. I was expending myself almost as if I were in Berlin, with the idea of Berlin the background and even in the fore, since Christophe was something like an import even though he’s French. The most beautiful moment of the evening was undoubtedly when, in between kisses and massages, Christophe asked me how long I’d been living in Paris. “Ten years,” I answered. At which point this incredibly sexy man—whose pectorals are so beautiful that some obscure part of me is still absolutely certain that if I sucked them long and hard enough, I would end up drinking milk—plunged down to the floor and kneeled before me, staggered by the force it must have demanded of me. I’ve said to a few people since then, including my shrink, that this was so exactly what I’ve needed for so long: just an ounce of recognition for the feat of my survival in and around Paris represents. I haven’t yet totally given up on the idea that that survival of mine might, if I follow through on some of the tangents that work their way through my conditions, morph into some kind of life.

A preface to what is to come

OK. So I've just been in Berlin for the longest time ever, up until now. That means I have a lot to write about and figure out.

I have a hat now, a little skater's cap, that hardly leaves my head. Today I went to buy a cigar for some sex tomorrow night and to get loops put into my ears that are a couple of milimeters wider than the one I have been wearing for the last, jesus, decade or so at least. That involved reopening a hole. In about a month, I can go get the next step up with the loops. I'm aiming for some thick posts. I'm thinking colors, like maybe green on one side and blue on the other. You know, like the ground and the sky. Things like this happen because I was on vacation in Berlin for a month, working a little bit for me. They're like wonderful unavoidable surplus from my time there. I'm ready to go back in a heartbeat, even into the heart of the worst winter Berlin has had in seventeen years. Even in those conditions, I find myself differently there, and with others, confident in the difference I'm discovering and the difference I'm making with those few with whom something like a relation begins. There are a few people like that I want to tell you about, and they're just as incomparable as you and me. I'd be happy if my paths crossed with any of theirs again. I look forward to it.

I went to Berlin thinking that even in winter I might find a prairie or two: somewhere wide and welcoming, where the wind can tickle your hair and might stir your pen to write. I think I found one or two, but it took some effort and of the hardest kind: the effort to let go. It's amazing what you get when you quit looking for what you thought you wanted. Just so long as there's more, whatever you get is good.

You know how it goes: I've somehow come back with a life that was already here to be lived, it's just that I hadn't figured out how to do it yet. I'm careful all of a sudden with what I'm doing with my time. I'm aware of efforts I spend, and can feel pleased when they sometimes bear some fruit. Let's keep it up.