August 19. Getting organized #3.

Berlin and getting organized. I must be riding the metro today, going from meeting to meeting, frantically fighting the depression that is luring in every corner of this city. It is dangerous to be here! How exciting! Dangerous, despite all the friendly people that seem to care about you because you can program their computers. Dangerous, despite all the good friends that seem to care a lot about you because you can stay with them, despite all the smiles you get from far friends that are quite busy. Je regrette, et j'écris:

"schlanke finger näher den klängen als der luft."

Those tender fingers, that seem to be more close to the sounds than to the air, what does that mean? It means a lot of things and I leave that to the imagination of the reader. The fingers are playing a cello perhaps, and as they touch the strings they move through the air but they are already with the sounds that the instrument will produce. Or the fingers are playing a trumpet, and they are closer to the resulting sound than to the air that flows below them. Or the fingers belong to lovers who touch each other's lips while they whisper something. Or the fingers are dead and the person whose body lies there has gone to another dimension where sounds replace matter. The line is, by the way, written by the 18th-century German poet, L.E. KIMA (1779-1869).

August 18. Getting organized #2.

Berlin and getting organized. Welcome back to my depressing transmission. It will become juicy again I promise. Just have to get on the move again. What's wrong with running anyway? And your unabilities, you better understand that they have a function too. Aren't you a bundle of functional fiber? You have to understand the function of every cell of you, in order to master the "grand function".

The eighteenth of August, two thousand and nine. A day on death-row. Executed only a few days after, when the firesquads of angst will shoot it into oblivion. Is there beauty in this day? Most probably, yes. Black is not her face, nor does she smile morbidly. There are messengers of beauty in this day, they may be fruit flies with their microscopically small hairs, sitting on a green leaf, they may be some portrait images flipped over by the wind that visits the room, they may be old breadcrumbs left on the tablecloth. There are fond memories of this day but they are not in my head. I want to know why. The past, after all, is not an army attacking us from behind. Does anyone have memories of this day?

August 17. Getting organized #1.

Berlin and getting organized. Sometimes I think I can't have real interest in anything. As soon as I try to pursue who knows what, the history of the Roman Empire, a specific problem in quantum mechanics, Goethe's Farbenlehre, Hindi, elementary astrophysics, up-to-date fysiology of the brain, Baudelaire's poetry, an exotic class of differential equations, the problem of truth, ancient Hebrew, it all becomes a farce to me. I guess that's because I'm operating on a low power level. By the way that's interesting. Have you ever noticed that we all operate on our specific power level and we might or might not find people who share this? At first you start to collect symptoms of this power level thing. How often do you cut off each other? How well do you remember things? Do you walk next to each other? Who is waiting for whom? What kind of questions do you ask in everyday life? That kind of things. And the theory that fits those phenomena is the theory of power levels. If you're very lucky, you get to talk about it with your friend and you can try to analyze on which power level you are both operating and if that is compatible, just like electrical appliances have to be compatible. You can use a 230V plug with a 220V machine, but don't plug a 50V device. You know what I mean.

So, I spend this day in Berlin and it is only after two weeks that I come to write about it. I totally forgot by then what I have done. Did that happen to me "on the road"? No. And I know why, o yes, I know why.