Mart-deBlog

New Year is called Sylvester in Germany. I think there is only one true Sylvester feeling, and it is very simple, in mental echo: I am 23, I live in Berlin and - although some stuff is missing in my life - I am more than good anyway. Thanks to those who still read the crap on my humble blog.
Have a good 2008!

"You are so rational"
I hear it often, and it always means something like "You are a coldhearted, calculating, unromantic asshole." It means you do not feel. And I am so sick of it. Sometimes it seems you are allowed to be either a sensitive emotional soul or a calculator. Of course everyone understands the simple idea that these things are not opposed at all and that there are many who are emotional-rational and not to forget ones who are rational-emotional. Still, I hear it too often that I am just rational whenever I decide something that is not appreciated by others. The simple thought of the mixture-people can be pushed a little:
1. If you are an emotional rational then you emotionalize your thoughts, you reason about a situation and then feel something about the outcome. The origin is a calculated thought, the outcome a supposedly intense and intuitive feeling. And I suspect these people are best at cursing me for being "such a rational fucker" because they constantly fool themselves into believing that they act on gut feeling and deep-rooted emotions. And they can forget the hidden deliberations because they trust their calculation's outcome such that it is forgotten in the sensitive colors it gets. Seriously, the people I know who call themselves sensitive and intuitive are to me the most carefully deliberated people, who desperately long for being spontaneous and unpredictable. Sad.
2. If you are a rational emotional then you rationalize your emotions, which is quite different from the previous person. Your reactions are based on how you feel, and only afterwards do you explain them to yourselves. Maybe the reasoning is part of becoming more secure in your actions or maybe it is part of covering up your motives, to hide yourself from yourself because you find your emotions ugly or you simply do not want to know your emotions.
* Of course this is all just simple-minded pseudo psychology, yet people are more eager to say they know all this than actually acting like they know it. So let us hammer on it for a while.
** Of course, while you read it, you identified with the second category, everyone does although few actually are. I believe the rational emotionals are by far in the minority. I myself have thought a lot about what I am and genuinely think I indeed rationalize my emotions. And therefore I am pissed with being called rational. This weblog is itself a way to rationalize my emotions, and this two way character table of this post might be nothing more than a flake image of how I feel about being emotional and rational: "don't fucking make me the one or the other!" Or we should simply stop thinking in these terms at all, they are really quite pathetic, aren't they?

Of the many spheres in life, my time in Berlin leads me deep into the experience of the night. The night has come to stand for the world I experience and the mood of my character. In the night, there is the endless studying. And as I read the deeper I descend into the quiet and as I write, others seem unreal. The night is not dark. And it is all but sad. It is simply quiet and empty. Every book is a preparation for a next day, but simultaneously it is an end in itself as if nothing comes afterward. As a night does not truly end, it is only negated by the sun: the night lasts in the corners where the sun does not reach. And the submersion into books is the same movement as the journey through Berlin's nightlife. I do not know Berlin by day, I know it by its shadowplay. With a bottle of beer in my hand, Berlin passes by the window of the trains in the night. And in the clubs I journey through an underworld where one is not allowed to look back, where the day does not exist. Amongst the freaks of the nightclub I am sane, blind as the dark beats maim my senses, silence the voice of thoughts and turn them light and fleeting. As I dance, I learn about the space in between ideas, as they become a lightly breeze. And coming outside I am alone while everyone sleeps, they appear to be standing still as I move onwards through the shining dark. All is in nocturnal peace.

And that is the mood of how I live; the world I experience an empty sky, wherein ethereal clouds are passing by, a breeze and the sound of silence.

-

The gods were bored so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, so Eve was created. From that time boredom entered the world and grew in exact proportion to the growth of the population.
(Kierkegaard, 'Crop Rotation')


The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard expresses a view that has been with me since I could think. People are boring. Some are amusing but they bore themselves (think of all those depressed comedians) and people who bore others don't even know about their boredom. We do not want to be boring, it is the most repulsive - yes even evil - state to be in. A child rightfully does everything to avoid boredom, but when we mature boredom sadly becomes stronger and is at times even defended. Depression is it's called, when boredom wins over you. Our society is depressed. Imagine that you deeply desire to divorce simply because you are bored, society would scorn you; yet isn't this the most valid reason to break sacred marriage? What about stealing out of amusement or hurting your friends out of arbitrariness...

In the Divina Comedia Dante pictures Satan amidst a plane of ice, covered in frost and with his wings freezing the sinners around it. In my view, boredom is the frost of Satan. It brings static and makes lethargic, one who is bored does not move. This is maybe the most important task in life: to fight habits and predictability. It is a fight against our biology itself, our body works by forming habits and fixing us into patterns. And either we resist or there is no point to living.

One of the most painful experiences is discovering the boring in someone. At some point, everyone dissapoints the interest: the joker makes the same jokes, the drama-queen magnifies the same events, the philosopher applies the same idea in different guises, the intellectuals copy each other just like the masses, even the madman is arbitrary with its single disease. And you can only take distance. It is just too evil.

One can only change. And Kierkegaard explains us here: one can change the soil or one can change the method of cultivation. The one is hard and the other almost impossible. Changing the soil stands for those extensive changes, when changing environment, going on a trip or starting a new job. We are driven by our boredom like slaves, like a puppet on strings. Changing the method of cultivation stands for differing the experience of the world, to remember things without pain and forget in the equality of memories. Do not marry and do not make friends and do not identify yourself with a job. Then we're driven by our boredom into indifference and arbitrariness. We would become fear-struck rabbits if you ask me.

Kierkegaard makes sense but is too symmetric. I say (and be ready for my boring preachings), embody your boredom. Get to know the boring ways and then play with it. Just laugh about your own boredom. Be boring in unpredictable ways. Bore others and do it on purpose. If you are bored by someone do not waste energy on resurrecting them but bore back and enjoy it (thus being amused by someone's boredom). Indeed you have to change yourself constantly. But you do not change your interests, rather move your boredom. Amuse yourself by being boring and bore yourself with amusement. And, especially, get stuck in things willingly, push it forward until you exhaust the boredom of it and then move somewhere else. The thing will be left purified and insatiably interesting.

If your resist boredom, only then you get caught in it and it will eat you empty. People just do not go far enough. Only when I dive into it does it feel that I overcome boredom. It is about striving for the impossible: to embody opposites and be mad and sane, joker and gothic, boring and interesting. Only by embracing boredom can you become truly interesting.

The devil lurks everywhere and its ways are devious. So keep an eye on it at all times and it cannot surprise you. Live with the devil. It is the only way.

If only I could truly live my thoughts...

Sincerely boring,

Martin

"Essay deadline, Saturday at noon." It is Friday night and my maturity boots are waiting impatiently to enter the Magnet club. Ingmar (my cousin) leans against me and I trip past the bouncers. I am inside. A girl with wolfs' ears chases a guy with a red hood and a girl with red rubber bands in her hair stairs at my pants. They are my bad-taste pants. A German rockets at me but then jumps into Ingmar, it is his roommate. I walk to the wardrobe with my arm scraping the red brick wall. The floor is also red and liquidish. A tiger's tail whips my knees and a pair of red stockings pass by me. The bass takes me on trip and time is forgotten. The German roommate pulls me up, and screams some German at me. I nod and get a spliff in my hands. While I am guided to the courtyard I take a puff and the world starts spinning. That fucking dizziness again. My legs trip over other legs and my right shoulder does not leave the walls. The rough bricks are my only guide. I straighten my neck and see only colors. Everyone is gone, away in the blur. I lost it. A faint focusing of "toilette" draws my attention and in slow-motion my old leather boots carry me. With a sigh I sink onto my knees and stick my fingers in my throat. I do not feel anything, only the lumps that pass my swollen tongue. With my head against the spray-painted wall, I close my eyes... But the darkness makes the world spin away so I force my eyelids open. And I focus. I focus on a little mushroom drawn beneath the handle of the toilet-door. I raise myself slowly and smirk, remembering the 8 hrs of nonstop writing on heroism in the Iliad. It seemed so far away now. Straightening my shoulders and fixing my eyesight on the narrow point that was clear enough to recognize things, I open the door. A bunny stood right in front of me. She pointed the way. Screaming pinks flicker at me. A continuous stream of make-up masques. Waves of heads in front of me. With my arms I part the mass of neck-ties and upright collars, exploding yellows and starry skirts. Like a cowboy I calculate every step. My boots never forsake me.

Then I am on my black bike again, zigzagging I passed the half-empty bottle of wodka that I had left there in Knaackstrasse. I kicked it over and captured Troje.

The weekend of 12 - 14 Oct we went with the ECLA (both professors and students) to the Harzgebirgten where the witches live and Goethe's Faust joins in a Bacchanale, and the medieval village Quedlinenburg with 1000 yrs old timbre-houses. The trip was meant to 'stimulate the social bonding', which is really quite a sad and artificial context. You're sitting together in the train, looking around and thinking 'Do we reeally have to talk to each other, we're going to be stuck together for too long anyhow' 38 students studying, eating and living together is already a crazy social experiment without the mountains. But by the time we were walking up the mountains and happily kicking the leaves on the granite stone, there was a softening attitude towards each other. We were close to singing and there was happiness in abundance. Friends and foes approached and everything cleared against the background of mountain forest and time-frozen villages; and of course our share of beer and bratwurst. "It rocked."

So here I am. My first week in Berlin is over and the settling feeling slowly fades away. Whoever moved somewhere for a longer period might recognize the feeling of many processes going on under the surface of your mind, times goes slow and it is hard to fall asleep. I have the feeling that I have been here for a long time already. That does not mean that I have completely settled, it only means that so much happens in my mind that time stretches out like a rubber band. People who know me, probably already expect that I am trying hard to be aware of what is going on in my head, to raise stuff above the surface. But well, I have not really been able to grasp it. Of course it is easy to make guesses, there should be tons of mental processes as social adaptation, new habit formation, setting goals and changing self-perception. But the real processes of settling are simply beyond me, it is too much and too intricate.

In Hong Kong my experiences were radically different. I think that I never truly settled there, I was lost in translation, lost in bewilderment and psychedelia. I was a constant stranger. Berlin is the exact opposite of Hong Kong, it is open. There is just so much within reach, so much things I could do or worlds I could enter. This gives rise to a certain pressure, "will it ever be enough, whatever I do?" Thus a paradox arises in which Berlin remains out of reach, there seems to be an infinite amount of necessary experiences lying between me and Berlin. And then there is the ECLA obstructing me from having these experiences, frustrating, since I just know that both ECLA and Berlin are the right environments for me in so many ways. But then maybe this is also a misperception of myself (maybe I'm thinking to be more alternative or more scholarly than I actually am, who knows).

But this is all nothing more than guesswork, I have no clear idea what is going on with me right now. But what I am driving at is that I might here confront that restlessness hidden somewhere deep in me. It takes an extremely ambivalent situation to bring up the true face of it, I think. And I start to believe that I am exactly in such an environment: I live as close to 'the right place' as possible, yet I am for removed from it, in my books and studies. What do I want from my surroundings? Am I a hermit or a social animal? Should I find peace or be forever on the search for new experiences? Is my time going to be spend in ECLA or Berlin?

There is the saying of 'uitvliegen', in the sense of flying away from home. When I was sitting in the train to Berlin with my fat suitcase and stuffed backpack, I really felt as close to flying as one can get. It is an experience in which the senses get clear, sounds become piercing and sight becomes full. There is a new sensitivity, well-known from the childhood when everything still hurts. Although it is sad to have a melting mind, it is rejuvenating at the same time. In a way my summer prepared me for it, like a circle coming around I softened my mind back to when I entered college. I went back to computer games and careless indifference, uprooting my ways of the past three years. It is an essential experience to feel the existential control over your life, the sense of power over who one is. During my teenage years, I consciously did this every year, I recreated myself during summer sitting in the sun and looking back without contemplation, but somehow I could not do it anymore when I got into my twenties. But I think I now know how it happens: by the bounding of a period, an absolute ending of a self and its time, after which an absolute a new beginning will always follow. In this case it was the moment between the leaving behind of a home and the entering of a new environment, a moment of being disconnected. My period in Holland was clearly bounded, it ended with the last high-five with my brother; just as my life in Berlin had a clear boundary: the moment I had set foot in Ostbahnhof surrounded by the mass of Berliners in which I just fit. Two clear boundaries and nothing in between. Discontinuity is the secret.