The cold, the dark, yuk. Dug out the neon yellow waistcoat with the reflecting stripes, got myself a brand new pair of wind- and waterproof thermal gloves, still not looking forward to cycling home in the dark for the next 12 weeks or so. Got the oil tank refilled this morning which will cost about two months wages (mine, and a good month at that). The oil man thinks we have between 10 and 20 years before the stuff runs out. For all. But he is optimistic and believes that the patents are waiting in the drawers once the profits have been squeezed out of suckers like us. What do we know, he's only the delivery guy. Me, I think we are doomed, pretending ignorance. Patents. What gibberish.

a very cold day

 

 

we should listen

                   
                   
                   
               
                   
                    
               

Sadness woke me up this morning. A small ache deep in my throat, remnant from a dream too vague to remember. I tried to hide inside my duvet for a while longer, grey fog seeping in through the half open window.

It has been so very mild and sunny, the very last bits of summer squeezed out of a crunched up tube. I took a double turn when someone mentioned the eight weeks to Xmas.

Today this is all over. 

The air is cold, the sky is heavy and grey. All we need is one windy night and the trees will once again be bundles of bare sticks. The weekend will bring frost. I will rub rosehip oil into my skin and add a spoon of honey to my cup of tea, I will walk through the garden and admire the morning glories, nasturtium, cosmea, fuchsia, all busy flowering for the last time.

Five months.

Ok, ok. I overdid it with this cycling trip. I get the message. It has been staring at me from the baffled, incredulous faces, shaking heads and mutterings of disbelief from the various experts and well wishers in recent days. 

I feel like a naughty child. But it was nice, anyway.
So can I just nurse my cold and get on with it.

in no particular order

Horb

Tübingen

Tübingen

Burg Hornberg

Schloss Hohentübingen

Tübingen Stiftskirche

Tübingen

Horb

Tübingen

Rottweil

Schloss Hohentübingen

Tübingen

Rottenburg

Horb

Rottenburg

along the Neckar

Washed out. I get the message: Do not attempt to cycle 50+km/day while on immune suppression, i.e. never again. Obvious, really. So we agreed tonight to go for a maybe three day, 30 km/day thingy next time.

Like a fool I have already started to look at various maps...

Meanwhile: herpes, shivers, sinusitis, vertigo, the works, but getting there, even did some serious cleaning and watching R replanting a couple of climbers and putting down bulbs. Harvested the big fat dark green pumpkin. And lots of purple figs.

I think at least  four ten neighbours (instead of just the one) must have fed our cat while we were away, she's all roly poly and bossy.

Tübingen university graffiti

 Basically, however, no life has a name. 

The self-conscious Nobody in us - who acquires names and identities only through its social birth - remains the living source of freedom. The living Nobody, in spite of the horror of socialization, remembers the energetic paradises beneath the personalities. Its life soil is the mentally alert body, which we should call not nobody but yesbody and which is able to develop in the course of individuation from an areflexive "narcissism" to a reflected "self-discovery in the world- cosmos." In this Nobody, the last enlightenment, as critique of the illusion of privacy and egoism, comes to an end. 

Peter Sloterdijk (Critique of Cynical Reason)  

It was tough, tougher than I wanted it to be. What if this is too much, said the tiny voice in my head more than once. And utterly tired most days by 3 pm, too tired to even sleep some nights (well, yes, strange beds etc.). In the end, we cut it short by 100 km - and so what. Rolled along the last beautiful stretch on the slow train to Heidelberg. Glad I am back home, but so happy we did this. 

Exhausted, dizzy with vertigo, a couple of bruises here and there from shoving the bike on the train. I have until Monday to recover. Sort through the pictures next.

weather permitting

Neckar valley, next week, 320 km, bicycles are ready, we are keeping our fingers crossed for sunny dry weather

In the prosperous country of my childhood the weather map on TV showed a Germany with a straight line on the right edge and the clouds and sun beams of the daily forecast always faded abruptly into the east, the nowhere land. My Latin teacher would correct any messing around in class with his standard phrase, "you are in Central Europe, please behave accordingly" and we would reply with a suppressed giggle (preposterous snob). In the city, on the old market place right in front of one of the three medieval churches that had been reconstructed from rubble stood a short piece of wall, maybe 2 m by 2m with a plaque reading "A wall separates the people of Germany".

Of course all this meant nothing to me. The good world, our world ended just there at this fading line on TV every night and we were on the right side of it.

Many years later and  long after I had left this place behind me with no intention to return - my reasons were vague and angry - I met Anna, a woman my age (30), my first encounter with life from the other side of that line. We were living in paradise, in  this beautiful, corrupt and poor African country that used to send its promising young people to whatever university anywhere would offer a scholarship. East Germany did. And so Anna had fallen in love with this handsome African engineering student and after they had married she was allowed to be 'repatriated' to her husband's country. For whatever reason they were given tickets to fly from Frankfurt and not via the circuitous route with aeroflot. They had been instructed to travel straight to the airport and Get. On. That. Plane. Period. But they arrived way too early or maybe the plane was delayed, whatever, they had hours to kill. 

I was so ignorant, really, I listened in disbelief as she described how they sneaked out of the airport and into the city, just to look around, terrified of getting caught. And so, they just managed to run into the first department store and with their secret stash of dollars bought a Barbie doll of all things and then raced back to the airport as quickly as they could. All the time thinking that secret agents were watching behind every corner, while in fact they could have walked into the next police station where they would have been welcomed like heroes - those were the days.

We soon found out that, surprsingly, we had much in common, and anyway, Germany was way beyond the horizon.

Several months later I am sitting on the beach at sunset, in a lovely crowd of people, a beer in my hand, my feet touching the surf when this Australian guy walks up. He is working at the BBC relay station across the mountains where the reception is ok most of the time. We have no radio or TV and only the occasional newspaper, four weeks old if we are lucky. I first think he is trying to be funny when he tells me that people are standing on the wall in Berlin, singing and hacking big chunks off it. So I laugh him off and get another beer. But he is serious and out of the corner of my eye I can see Anna shouting and jumping and soon enough the crowd is cheering and dancing. Most people haven't a clue why but, hey, this is life on the beach. 

On the way home much later I try to imagine my mother at this moment, either drunk or in tears, probably both.

hello autumn

watching Werner Herzog again

Werner Herzog's accent makes me feel safe. There are too many wonders to comprehend.

Through our eyes the universe is perceiving itself, and through our ears the universe is listening to its cosmic harmonies. And we are the witness trough which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.

Alan Watts

Sunday

This afternoon I translated the testimony of a 15-year-old boy from a Central American country. Earlier this year he had been kidnapped and tortured by a private security firm hired by a wealthy land owner who has been intimidating the local peasant farmers. He wants them to disappear because he started a couple of palm oil plantations. On their land.  

The woman from the NGO also sent me a video of his testimony so that I could decide on the details and the effects. He speaks slowly and carefully, somewhere outside where it is warm; I could hear roosters in the background. Then there is about 10 mins of shaky footage, armed men shooting into crowds of people, fancy pick-ups with masked drivers, women being dragged by their hair.

In between I stood outside on the patio and turned my face to the sun, while the cat was chasing imaginary mice through the vegetable beds. 

This morning I slept in and had a bowl of porridge with fresh blueberries for breakfast. We listened to the radio for a while and then S called and we talked for a long time about gardening and the time we went to Amsterdam together  when she was what, ten years old? And then she had to go to bed because in her part of the planet it was already midnight.

For almost thirty years have I been translating these stories, reports about human rights violations in literally every corner of our world. Statements, appeals, campaigns, urgent actions, progress reports, international hearings, position papers, proposals, drafts for legislation. Promises. Hopes. Hopelessness. 

When I translate I have to turn a switch and concentrate on the text, the words, the order of words. It's a bit like solving a cryptic crossword.

But it gets harder, I am getting older. The world is full of horrors.

The dial has been altered by another tiny fraction, the air feels and smells of autumn. The light is hazy, even the background noises have a new quality, settling down, dimming. The nights are cold now.

Our discomfort arises from all of our efforts to put ground under our feet, to realize our dream of constant okayness. When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment, or awakening to our true nature, to our fundamental goodness. Another word for that is freedom—freedom from struggling against the fundamental ambiguity of being human. 

Pema Chödrön

Your youth evaporates in your early 40s when you look in the mirror. And then it becomes a full-time job pretending you’re not going to die, and then you accept that you’ll die. Then in your 50s everything is very thin. And then suddenly you’ve got this huge new territory inside you, which is the past, which wasn’t there before. A new source of strength. Then that may not be so gratifying to you as the 60s begin, but then I find that in your 60s, everything begins to look sort of slightly magical again. And it’s imbued with a kind of leave-taking resonance, that it’s not going to be around very long, this world, so it begins to look poignant and fascinating. 

Martin Amis

Something to look forward to after all?

A cold front swooshed in from nowhere, literally. Sitting in the garden for breakfast and next thing you are looking for your mittens. That kind of cold front.

My Heidi Klum colleague will have the heating turned up high in the office because apparently Heidi never wears cardigans or jumpers. Ah, she is lovely, really, we have a good relationship for the two hours overlap most days. We talk, about our kids and about neck strain and of course about the boss. She does all the things I always failed at, yesterday her fingernails were Nile green (so she told me) and last week there were tiny pink and blue striped bows painted on them. I am not kidding. And she is Blond, whereas I have always only been blond and now I am sort of pale-grey-blond-straw whatever. 

My Heidi Klum has multiple matching wrist-watch-earrings-necklace-arrangements that could make me drool were I so inclined. 

I vaguely remember a time when I used to wear jewellery, pick earrings out of a box every morning and so on. What happened? I gave away the last of my Bollywood bangle stash to S this summer. And I gave her the pink mother of pearl thing from Mona. She is old enough now to take care of it and not lose it and maybe get that crack fixed. I have the feeling that there is more stash somewhere, my mother's things, the stuff my sister eventually passed on. Vague memories of hiding it somewhere really safe a couple of years ago after  some houses in the neighbourhood were burgled. And this vivid memory of me taking off the big gorgeous silver ring before washing my hands, the one R bought for me from the Iranian silversmith, and then rushing to the car. I can still see it sitting there beside the soap dispenser. Somewhere. In Europe.

When we renovated Mona's bedroom before she came home from the hospital, we found most of her jewellery sewn into the curtain hems. She was already too ill to explain but I am sure she thought it was a safe hiding place.

Oh that whole sorry affair of distributing her jewellery according to her will. And against the combined wills of her daughters. That was a long time ago. 

And also a long time ago S carried it all in her small backpack to France and back, secretely. Well, almost back. Because on the way home, after she had brought it up and down the mountains, when we had driven north for a while she started wailing that she left the backpack behind. In the motorway restaurant on a Sunday in July, in the south of France, where a million people were queuing and eating and watching the Tour de France final stretch in Paris on TV.

Plus the day some years earlier when we were messing and splashing in the high waves just before sunset and in the corner of my eye I caught this glimmering arc as the first two rings R ever got me slipped off my finger and sank into the soft water of the Indian Ocean.

Many years later I would sit at a table in a small cafe in Turkey while Birsel explained all about cyanide based gold mining.

This is the moment that we come alive 
I'm handing out the breath and the kiss 
I'm electric with the snap and the crackle of creation  
I'm mixing up the mud with the spit

...

And I'm thinking big things 
I'm thinking about mortality 
I'm thinking it's a cheap price
That we pay for existence  
This is the moment that we come alive  
This is the breath and this is the kiss

end of summer

lunch at no. 5

storm coming

damson harvest

Here we are, all innocent and full of regret? This is us.

You know, sometimes we're not prepared for adversity.  When it happens sometime we're caught short. We don't know exactly how to handle it. When it comes up. Sometimes we don't know just what to do when adversity takes over.  And I have advice for all of us. I got it from my pianist Joe Zawinul who wrote this, too.  And it sounds like what you're supposed to say when you have that kind of problem, it's called mercy. Mercy. Mercy.

So, I've got plans. Of course I have. I mean, there are things I want to do and thinking of it makes me all excited. And I make a list of what I need and at night when I cannot sleep I try and sort out where I'll do this and how I'll do that and before I know it I can see myself all busy and involved and it looks so good that I eventually fall asleep over it. Some nights. 

But in real life, in real real life, I am just waiting until I had maybe a bit more rest, a couple of good nights, or until the latest itsy infection (gums, stomach, sinuses, nailbeds, all those busy eruptions) has cleared and and and. I am just waiting for the energy to kick in, just enough to get started, to get going and surely once I am there it'll be easy peasy.

Fatigue, my doctor tells me with a smile, you must make allowances for fatigue. It's easier if you do. Believe me.

When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down 'happy'. They told me that I didn't understand the assignment, and I told them that they didn't understand life.

John Lennon

These are my thoughts at the moment. Memories, all that stuff pushing its way up from the dark somewhere. In my mind's eye it comes from deep in my guts while neuroscience tries to tell me about synapses and grey matter.

There are these little insignificant flowers in the forest, almost gone now with the cold nights that have started to creep in. My first Latin lesson at age five. My grandfather in his three-piece suit complete with watch on a chain and a freshly ironed handkerchief - you get the picture - pointing his walking stick at this tiny pod and snap!! it would open and scatter its minute seeds. Noli me tangere, he said and I would whisper this like a magic mantra for the rest of the walk and have done since whenever I see it and stop to watch a pod snap open at my slightest touch. Quite the party trick.

My grandparents, my mother's parents, used to visit at least once a year when I was small. There was a style of long ago to their train journeys with seat reservations by the window and small sandwiches in a hamper with a silver flask, the collapsible fruit knife and the small napkins with ship motifs. 

In the mornings we would fight outside the guest bedroom over who could climb into bed with him. Once there, cuddling up to his small bony frame, he would show me tricks, bending fingers just so, elaborate games turning intertwined thumbs and teaching me phrases in Arabic and French and Russian and Latin. While he got ready to shave and dress we fought over his travel slippers, made from very soft black leather which fitted just so into a matching soft leather bag.

This is what I know now. My grandfather was a scientist. There was a time when he was a famous scientist. I have a box of photographs from the 1920s of men in old fashioned safari suits and stiff explorer hats in front of mounds of rocks or staring down cliffs and ravines, holding up plants and a variety of dead lizards. There is one very shaky picture of a deck of a ship covered in millions of grasshoppers and one of a group of about twenty deeply tanned men in dinner jackets standing around a poor looking Xmas tree decorated with a banner "Borneo 1929".

I also know this. My mother adored him. My mother who was raised by nannies and house maids, who was driven to school by her father's chauffeur. I have been told that my grandfather published seminal works in his area of research, although I cannot find a single one. I have been told he was dined by kings and queens and dictators and mass murderers. 

After the war, my grandparents lived in a tiny attic flat, stuffed with monstrous dark furniture from much grander times. They were quite helpless without maids or driver. The only room with decent ceiling space was used as my grandfather's study where I would hide below his desk, while he worked, puffing away on his small cigars, carefully writing elaborate notes with a sharp pencil in a silver holder. 

So let's get this: Here he was, the famous scientist, the professor who - so I have been told - could electrify a crowded lecture hall with his quiet voice. Here, in a tiny flat. Very few visitors. A meagre pension.  While others rebuilt their fortunes, brushed up their standing, rose back to fame, honorary doctorates, senior experts, laureates.

He was a gentle smiling grandfather, patient and exciting to us with his stories of exotic locations and his deep knowledge of nature. He was never denazified. I have no idea whether this is so because he opted not to apply for it or whether he failed it. Of course, not a word. Not ever.

The famous professor.

happy birthday Van Morrison

Van Morrison - Brown Eyed Girl

spot the cat

work

It helps to start the day with translating energetic position papers on human rights of asylum seekers before moving on to disheartening reports on causes of famine. While it is inspiring to read that there has never been a famine in a functioning multiparty democracy (Amartya Sen), this is all theory when I get to the long list of displaced nomadic pastoralists in Ethiopia, in Kenya. My heart sinks even further when I work my way through the various definitions of famine according to the WHO, the FAO, the UN and even the World Bank: Four children dying of malnutrition per day vs. three or maybe just the one? And what about chronic malnutrition due to lack of micronutrients (doesn't count) and then there are endless calculations and recalculations of minimum calories per day (no agreement at all).

Meanwhile, my paying customers want me to translate their research procedures on colon cancer which involves breeding mice with certain disease characteristics which are then operated on (under anesthetics, thankfully) and bits of this and that are removed and examined in 1 million ways. The mice are then allowed to recover and are observed (and fed and watered) until they die or they are sacrificed, I have yet to see a medical paper where the mice are simply killed.

And in the middle of this a nice but very sad looking woman from Nigeria (so she claimed) came to my door and showed me a photo of a poor misfortunate woman (in Nigeria she claimed) with an eye tumor and asked if I could help her. We had a little talk whereby I expressed my concerns regarding her actual intentions (she would not provide me with a name or an address etc.) but she was sooo sad (and maybe drugged to her eyeballs) that I just gave her some money. 

Try and find the thread connecting all that.

The thermometer just hit the 40° C mark, at 4.30 pm. I step out occasionally to feel the hot patio stones and the heat from the sun and the hot easterly wind. 

I close my eyes and I am almost transported back to Victoria, walking around Market Street during my lunch break, eating juicy pink mangos and spicy samosas wrapped in old newspaper, people nodding my way (Ki i dir madam? Byen mersi. Oumenm?), shops stacked to the ceilings with rolls of fabric, colourful cottons from India, polyester lace from Hong Kong, animal prints and neon coloured stretch for the daring, the Mesdames Patou (cattle egrets) stalking the streets, groups of men playing dominos underneath the trees by the court house. And Creole music, from doors, windows, tinkling away on little transistor radios here and there. The wind is salty and through the gap past the bus stop I can see the ocean, turquoise and blue and dark in the deeper places. The feeling of the hot hot sun on my skin is like a powerful embrace. I walk down to the little snack bar and get a fizzy orange soda before I make my way back to work. As I open the door, the air conditioned cool slaps me in the face, Jude and Pascal grin at me and quickly switch off the kung-fu video they have been watching while I was out. Marie-Ange yawns and slowly starts to make sweet milky tea before we all get on with the afternoon.

                                  
Wep - Kassav

I will punch the next person quoting Khalil Gibran and how our children are not our children and so on in the face, hard, very hard. I guess he didn't have any kids himself and he never had to say goodbye to precious wonderful daughter at the security gates of a crowded airport, knowing that it will be at least two years before you can hold her again.

this is from a book I just read

Feelings are not as old as time. Just as there was a first instant when someone rubbed two sticks together to make a spark, there was a first time joy was felt, and a first time for sadness. For a while, new feelings were being invented all the time. Desire was born early, as was regret. When stubbornness was felt for the first time, it started a chain reaction, creating the feeling of resentment on the one hand, and alienation and loneliness on the other. It might have been a certain counterclockwise movement of the hips that marked the birth of ecstasy; a bolt of lightning that caused the first feeling of awe. […] Contrary to logic, the feeling of surprise wasn’t born immediately. It only came after people had enough time to get used to things as they were. And when enough time had passed, and someone felt the first feeling of surprise, someone, somewhere else, felt the first pang of nostalgia.

It’s also true that sometimes people felt things and, because there was no word for them, they went unmentioned. The oldest emotion in the world may be that of being moved; but to describe it – just to name it – must have been like trying to catch something invisible.

(Then again, the oldest feeling in the world might simply have been confusion.)

Having begun to feel, people’s desire to feel grew. They wanted to feel more, feel deeper despite how much it sometimes hurt. People became addicted to feeling. They struggled to uncover new emotions. It’s possible that this is how art was born. New kinds of joy were forged, along with new kinds of sadness: The eternal disappointment of life as it is; the relief of unexpected reprieve; the fear of dying.

Even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist. There are still those that lie beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written, or painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom, or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And then, for the millionth time, the heart surges, and absorbs the impact.

Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

Late afternoon I sit on the veranda with the sunlight just so from the right and I pull the needle through the last bit of seam and secure the thread and snip off the end. There. It has only taken me three years to finish the very last bit. It was here on this chair in this sunlight an eternity ago. I thought I would just pretend and go on as usual and finish this sweater, the last bits and pieces. In the days when I was told by my GP that maybe it was all down to a bit of rest. Sweet innocence. 

Three years later. Roughly. That's really nothing. I have only just started. How dreadful wonderful will it be? The future.

Any day now my child is returning from her visits and the sailing and the lakes and the Alps and I will smell her hair and watch her sift through the fridge in search of olives and cheese. She has the most amazing rings and bangles, like a pirate's stash. And little tattoos in secret corners. And this day next week she will be on her long flight back to the other end of the planet.

You own nothing and yet you have this cluster of stars, this wind, this direction, these shadows flitting across the earth.

(Breyten Breytenbach)

 

A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it's made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there. The roads you went down yesterday are full of different people now, none of them knows who you are. In the room you slept in last night, a stranger lies in the bed. Dust covers over your footprints, the marks of your fingers are wiped off the door, from the floor and table the bits and pieces of evidence that you might have dropped are swept up and thrown away and they never come back again. The very air closes behind you like water and soon your presence, which felt so weighty and permanent, has completely gone. Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

Damon Galgut (In a Strange Room)

What a morning, the sunlight so brilliant, the sky wide open and ancient, never ending deep blue. Butterflies, sleeping cat, a mild breeze, the midday heat only a guess away.

Slowly, carefully, my balance has been returning. All that has come off the moorings and has been sliding around inside my head is slowly settling. As I put one step in front of the other I can feel once again (wooden floor, smooth patio stones, dewy grass) how solid it all is. I am not quite there yet, but my center is back, carefully, tenderly, allowing me to stand and bend and reach without falling or bumping into walls.

S just called from the road, they are heading down to the big lake, we will be sailing on Sunday, she says and I can hear the delight in her voice. My water baby.

Once in a while when we were living in paradise we would sneak into the posh tourist hotels with their big pools lit up after sunset and music tinkling from hidden speakers, sipping rum cocktails at a bar made out of tropical wood and some shiny materials from far away, watching our little six year old swim, S and another girl her age. Watching the expensive tourists watching our kids swim, one with blond curls, one with dark curls, diving in at one end, almost crossing the entire length of blue water, brightly lit from below, before simultaneously lifting their shiny wet heads, laughing and jumping up at the other end, diving in again and back and forth in a beautiful dance under water. Two mermaids, two sleek dolphins perfectly matched, deliriously happy and healthy.

Is it only me noticing it now or has blogger always included ads? I am tempted to switch off adblock to have a look what ads are running with my blog but nah, never mind.

Yes, you can have too many visitors, especially when  the guest list includes your bossy sister and all those cousins who came to gawk at my child. 

It has been a week of too much food, too much talk, too much heat and so in the end my body switched off and send me a heavy dose of vertigo. Thankfully, those who cannot handle ill health rapidly disappeared, while my lovely ones got the place sorted in no time and now all is calm and Sunday evening and I am working on getting my balance organs back into gear to stop the world spinning. All those silly thumb movements and standing on one leg with closed eyes (and bumping into the wall), while keeping my fingers crossed that it's only another bout of vestibular neuronitis and nothing else, thank you very much.

it's very something different

two things:

It is really really hot. The Irish cousins suffered greatly and with eminent relief boarded their planes back to rainy Dublin this morning.

Can you have too many visitors? I am finding out. It helps to have lots of towels.

We did. Cry like babies. For quite some time. Felt so good.

In less than an hour's time my child and her sweetheart will be on the last leg of their long long journey over here. I guess that at this very moment they are queuing up somewhere at Singapore airport. They only have to cover the last 10 000 km which is nothing. My heart is jumping in my throat as I am getting the beds ready and R is unpacking wine and antipasti and cheese and rinsing fat black cherries and apricots and little pink peaches.

I will bake a blueberry cake and feed the cat and then we will drive for a couple of hours to the big airport and check in to one of these big fat hotels right there in the terminal and try to sleep a bit before they land at the crack of dawn very early tomorrow morning. Excitement is too small a word for what I feel. We'll cry like babies, obviously.

da wee man from Strabane