by Thomas Heise
Berlin, Winter 2009
You cannot judge a man for what comes automatic to him, but you can rest assured that later, years after you leave, he will judge himself, and once the judging starts, it will never end: it too will be automatic. So it has been of that period in my thirties when I took to the habit of frequenting the brothels clustered in the old Art Nouveau commercial district of Berlin where the women and girls, mostly Persian and Eastern European, would serve me tea in a tulip-shaped cup. For reasons inexplicable, my thoughts had become increasingly distracted and disturbed by the slightest sensation as I grew older, and I would find myself repeatedly in these quarters when the weather turned cold and the cobblestones were slick with a mixture of rain and oil that created rivulets of colour that recalled spotted koi I had once seen in a Japanese reflecting pond surfacing as if to kiss the air. As I remember it now, I would arrive at their draped windows, often forgetting why it was I had come and sometimes just as I laid my finger to the doorbell I would recall, as if the sound had bounced the memory back to me, I had left with the intention to purchase some eggs and a newspaper around the corner. Or sometimes I would stand discombobulated, suspecting some stranger — perhaps a hungry child or a mail carrier with a package under his arms — had rung my door. And then water tapping my shoes, the curtain pulled aside by an elegant hand with red nails, my gyroscopic brain would regain its momentary orientation and balance and I would proceed into a perfumed world of muted voices. The books and paintings I had studied through the years led me to imagine these interior rooms were filled with Pre-Raphaelite consumptives lounging beneath blue lampshades of long flowing tassels that reminded me of jellyfish floating up through the dark sea borne aloft on their own interior luminescence that divers everywhere associate with poison. And no matter how many times the image was dispelled, it would return as I walked down the narrow hallway as its six doors fell closed in succession like a row of dominoes. I turn to this subject now, because I recall how for my thirty-third birthday I sat in an alfresco café in Charlottenburg that had once been a planetarium bombed during the war. The seats still encircled the rusted insectlike projector perched on spindly legs in the centre as if sending invisible beams of Orion and the Great Bear that I contemplated on the cracked, eggshell dome above the tuxedoed waiters when a woman’s calling card mysteriously dropped from the sky like a piece of wartime propaganda and landed on the fish skeleton stretched across my plate. I plucked it just as the server, as if protecting me, I later thought, snatched the dish with a gloved hand. I recall the card’s tawdry insignia of a fanged serpent coiled around a heart-shaped apple was one as a nine-year-old boy in the orphanage I had spotted in a street parade decorating one side of a fighter plane’s nosecone, the other, a buxom girl in white shorts on a swing whom I stared at as I scampered along the perimeter of the silent crowd. Back then, the twin images had seized my attention because the night before I had woken from a reverie in which I was trailing a shirtless old man walking along a road abutted with abandoned four-story apartment buildings, formerly proud emblems of the bourgeoisie, now eaten away by years of sniper fire. Riddled with holes, the buildings loomed like huge termite mounds, unpainted, the walls dun and dust, whorls of wind reverberating in their empty casements and colonnaded verandas where women — mothers and daughters — once stood in colourful dresses to survey the world as they gradually dissolved into nothingness. As the wind began to blow a little harder from the east, the air was so dense with particulate matter that to see in my dream I was obliged to close my lids and run my young fingertips in the ruts on the colonial wall that seemed to go on forever. The body of the dreamer is paralyzed by a chemical the brain releases, though in the somnambulist it is missing, so his imagination is free to wander. I have often felt this condition has seized me even in my waking state, my eyes filled with the fogged-over look one sees in others filing out of a theatre in a single stream under a marquee of yellow bulbs befitting another era, and into the sudden overexposed light of midday. The mere recrudescence of a sign is no reason to ascribe it meaning and the recurrence of patterns of behaviour is, I feel, thoroughly arbitrary in most instances. Even my memories are not repetitions so much as reenactments forming new clusters at each moment of recall. The chamber music, I remember, was barely audible above the chirping yellow parakeet neurotically scratching the bars of its elaborate Victorian birdcage, which seemed a replica of the Palm House in the Royal Botanic Garden. While this rather attractive courtesan in furs — I will call her Ms. M. — with her hair behind her ear like a ribbon of light began to politely enquire what my name was, why I was there, what my tastes were, if I were single, I peered around the room, noting its small details knowing someday they would come back to me: a Chinese vase with a blue floral and dragon glaze, a map of East Germany in a state of advanced deterioration, and a black-and-white security monitor on a bookshelf filled with VHS tapes whose labels I was straining to decipher when I began to bleed rather heavily and for a sustained period from both nostrils.
Berlin, Winter 2009
Though it was immediately clear to anyone who met me, it took me years to realize that at seemingly random moments of my life, I fell into periods of near delirium, during which I would lose consciousness of time. If I happened to be reading, as was often the case, I would place the book facedown in the grass and with a dim and glazed look take to walking in a waking dream through the winding streets of the city through the night and into the earliest hours as newspapers and pastries are delivered to the cafés and merchants cleaning sidewalks with their hoses would glance quizzically, curious about the motives of a solitary wanderer at sunrise. Sometimes in the grip of a somnambulistic episode, I had been known to begin speaking in a language other than my mother tongue, one I had never trained in or had only the most passing familiarity with, such as the few words one learns in another country where one’s time is deemed in advance a layover, no matter the duration. I had been known to ask the day of the week in broken Mandarin to a puzzled teenager at a kiosk in New York selling theatre tickets or to return in the middle of the night to the front desk at a hotel where I happened to be staying in Germany and enquire in Arabic why the flowered carpet in my room was dark green. Subsequently, doctors diagnosed me with multiple sleep disorders — confusional arousals, bruxism, periodic limb movement, and forms of automatism, including writing while slumped at my desk like the artist in Goya’s etching, though the sleep of reason has produced no monsters, only letters and disquisitions on miscellanea: the marriage customs of countries I never visited and some wholly invented, on the conical symmetry of seashells (a subject I know nothing about, though I have a faint memory of my mother as a meticulous collector), and on at least one occasion, an attempt to capture the night when Verlaine in London slapped Rimbaud, his “exquisite creature,” with a fish round the face and fled to Belgium threatening suicide as he left, but the writing broke off. The humiliation in the younger poet’s bewildered eyes must have woken me. And upon waking my writing bore little in the way of logic and its looping and attenuated sentences swirled across the page like a butterfly with a damaged wing, a child’s scribblings from the wilder shores of love. Suffering from a recurrence of acute parasomnia, I once rose out of the confines of my bed in a trance, and rather than depart alone, fastened the leash to the harness of my dog, who undoubtedly perplexed at being roused hours after midnight nevertheless made his way down the wooden stairs, my hand skimming the wax banister to a curtain lit from behind by a streetlamp, guiding me as he would a blind man across the cobblestones, the cord a nerve channelling unspoken, inchoate thoughts and impulses from my mind to his. On this occasion, I was led out to the desolation past the railroad tracks and the industrial canals where in my normal state I would travel in the future to have a key duplicated or a chair reupholstered by a woman from Greece named Ms. V. whose specialty was sewing patterns as elaborate as the underside of a starfish, and I woke briefly, startled by a car horn, I thought, or the siren of an a
mbulance two blocks over, or perhaps because a crane lifting into the air an empty BSL shipping container that was to be converted into modular housing for an artist commune momentarily cast a shadow over the street, but soon enough I slipped back under and was led an additional kilometre west to the Brutalist concrete high-rises that since the 1960s marked a sudden and definite threshold rarely crossed from either side. The water- and rust-stained edifices, fourteen in total, seemed to attract musty weather, for the southern walls of each were enveloped in a carpet of moss and nearly every third window by my count held a flag from Algeria or Morocco to repel the glare at noon and conceal the sense at night that life within possessed the eerie claustrophobia of an aquarium. These images slid on the aqueous humour of my eyes like drops of oil, leaving a thin film through which to see the imaginary world in all of its drowsy wind by which I remembered it, in particular a man in this eighties leaning over a railing with an outstretched hand that appeared to gesture at some ominous force approaching behind, but when I turned and looked back at him, there was just a rustle of curtains. No one on either side of me. The chance for recognition, for empathy, or even simple contact was lost. Your placid surface betrays nothing of the debilitating guilt you harbour unaware; like a ventriloquist’s doll you speak without understanding the words, or even their source; sometimes I wonder you weren’t born, but merely “uttered,” Dr. T. R. said to me, a psychiatrist with whom I carried on a brief affair until the transference was too much. This was her reply after I concluded relaying my story. I kept silent on the irony of her claim, for she herself seemed no more than a medium to me, our sessions in the lamp-lit dimness of her decrepit living room in Berlin were only séances by another name, and the glow in her eyes was my final confirmation that the theories she had read but which remained divorced from her world appeared to have taken possession of her. I had divulged that I had been raised in a small town dominated by a frightening armoury in the style of a Moorish fortress with reinforced clinker bricks, narrow lancet windows that were always dark, and four octagonal towers where the last guard stood fifty years ago though I was sure inside was a record of brutal acts perpetrated in the basement shooting range and Roman baths. Its impenetrable emptiness drew from me the worst of my coiled imagination. As a boy, I would routinely walk twenty minutes out of my way to avoid it, circumambulating the dark structure, which cast a pall over the district, absorbing all of the light around it, and even now when I am fully awake listening to a news program on the radio the condemned building is never far from my mind, which fatigues me. There is no pleasure in learning it has been razed to the ground. The thought wakes me at night. I have learnt to cope with my sleep disorder by tying a ribbon around a wrist to the headboard at night, but often I outwit myself, become loose from the entanglements meant to protect me. After a half-century of hard work and reflection, the wall is still there. Nature—or rather, my nature—remains mysterious, Matisse, the accused orientalist, wrote. Increasingly I have come to believe what others with greater insight and a stomach for the truth know at a younger age and learn to accept with bemused resignation: that life is no more than a series of linked encounters, like beads on a string, one thing following another in a sentence through time, in a sentence that is the flow of time. Every writer is a man or woman resuscitated, brought back for a little while before being dismissed. While I was hovering in bed barely asleep, my father would sneak in to check on me. Sometimes he came in the shape of a stranger, but his black eyes with a mark of sorrow never changed. When I was younger I could run so fast my shadow would fly off me. I would leave it behind in the city where I was born. There was no city, only my mother’s arms. Dear grief, hermetic as a goat’s skull. The future where you are, but how to get there except by waiting another year.
New York City (lyric)
There’s nothing latent in my wireless imagination where everything, even the heart’s muscle, is public. Give me one more love song and I’ll destroy it. Orpheus looked over his shoulder because he wanted Lili Brik to disappear, the only way to save himself for the poems he thought he’d write before thirty-six arrived, a shock in its chamber. Oh mother. Oh love. Beauty enters wrapped in furs and the whole train to Moscow suddenly unsure of itself, the revolution suspended between wheels: “Down with Symbolism. Long live the living rose!” The moment the chimp recognized he was human, he began to paint over the mirror. These days, mystery floating in the recesses of the plaza, a memory of green sky high above us like glamour and the history surrounding us forgotten for a minute, then we’re cold. Every woman begins as a description. A brochure. A leaflet. Love made into origami. This one’s now for July. This one’s now for August. This one’s now in the wave pool, buoyed by the chlorine and sense of possibility, as if the water were in me and churning and could this feeling last forever and that seagull, you don’t have to think. Sometimes you have to be shot in the heart in order to stop dreaming. These days of false humour and sequins, like Jean Nouvel’s windows, we look in from the outside because we’re fortunate to be poor and part of the city. Every city begins as an accident and soon becomes a need. The player-piano melancholy through the avenues now that the night is quiet ushered in by a line of crows as if pulling a photographer’s cloth. Finely granulated static after the daily life counting coins in our solitude after the dry cleaners after the loneliness of the mall at closing, the lights in the fountain turned off, after that you were, after the ornamental civic gardens after the letters tossed from a balcony after the street that ended at a power plant and a river you never drank from, you were, then the orphanage then the House of Assignation then the locked door then the brain scan, you were, the nonfunctional façade after the mattress store after the Museum of Mind Over Matter after that after all that, you were, and the great throbbing crowd once in super slow-mo formed a Rorschach blot, the visuals moving to the melody of a soundtrack, I don’t have a map, she said, I just enter the territory — I love you to this point. A leaf. A few thoughts on paper. Nature doesn’t grow on trees, the critic said, but we don’t believe her because we don’t believe in Nature, and even her dress is synthetic and her glasses have no lenses so how can she see the moon, or the flag planted there for Marilyn? These days, the intricate architecture of our past lives, the rhythm and beauty of it, the way you could walk into a stanza at midnight and surprised to find me at the desk, our home, it was an idea I grew inside of, and if asked to describe these days, what I would say would fail, as does every poem at the title. I’m remembering in Berlin remembering you and I’m remembering in New York remembering you and I’m on a bus by Tupper Lake remembering you for the first time I can’t, the morning in blades of light through the pine trees, a kind of triage. Every map begins as a legend and ends with a woman on the Bosphorus where the blue is so supple you wore it as a scarf and then you took a shuttle called a metaphor. In forty years, I’ll be dead if I’m lucky. These days, three o’clock in the afternoon of November, the Eiffel Tower a radio transmitter of secret signals to the befuddlement of the professor who thought life was fixed in amber and that one’s home could never turn into a pawn shop or that no one would blow up the Louvre and replace it with a W, rather than these love letters to the people of Juarez. We walk through the streets like a seam in Barthes’s stocking, we’re where the threads come together before they unravel. All that’s solid melts into money and the day ends with a comma, and even belatedness is marketed like the colour green will wash the dirt out of your mouth and with it another philosophy of progress. The city in which you left me I give it back like remorse. My breath in your deaf ears, we’re both bodies, only yours in autumn is gone.
