Obituary

“She had existed and now she did not. Not at all, as if not ever.” 

–Alice Munro

Das unumgängliche– that cannot be tackled. Not by talking about it, not by writing about it in a foreign language, albeit the emotion might be somehow mitigated during mediation.

On the 20th of May 2015, my mother had been officially discharged from the role of a daughter. We had a lengthy conversation, though 80 percent of which were mere repetition and paraphrasing.

“She had reached her time. It was just a natural process. It was a good death.”

“Do not dwell too much upon this. Cry if you want to. Write about it if it helps.”

I still cannot write about this. Caught up by job interviews a continent away, I could not even have left a rose for her– and I have left roses for people I was way less connected to.

I still refer to her in present tense when I talk about her in front of people.

Amsterdam is only 22 hours ahead and packing could be a fitting metaphor for exhumation. And thus I thought about closure. I thought about death. I thought about how saying goodbye is dying a little. I’ve exhumed the memory that could not be tackled. And then I thought, it’s about time for the feeble attempt.

She was a remarkable woman who had given up her chance of being happy for her family. She was Japanese, and then Taiwanese, but never Chinese– she did not speak a word of Mandarin. And thus on the day of her cremation I stood by the window and bade goodbye to her in Taiwanese. My waning first language, and I was surprised that I was still able to say what I meant to say.

I wish I had conveyed.

270615, Berlin

The Berlin Stories

I want to go back to summer 2012. Melancholia had not yet seized us. The world was not yet out of joint. We were free spirits-- aspiring, and inspired.

Lengthy walks in various Berlin districts in summer dresses and flip flops. Carrying a lomography 4 lens camera around, trying to capture the fluctuating feelings and momentum. Developed the pictures, pinned them onto the wall. I used to stay in a hundred year old Altbau with a magnificent entrance and a dramatic staircase. Every step up was a stride. I stayed on the top floor. Day and night, striding upwards like a triumphant warrior.

It was a house much like the one Christopher Isherwood stayed in the movie Cabaret. Fiction 101, I learned about Isherwood and Sally Bowles--my first literary impression on Berlin, and it was in its golden times.

I did not know if my Altbau was occupied by wanton writers or cabaret singers. But for sure it used to be a brothel, was mildly burned during the war, briefly the studio of a certain rock star, and decorated by my artist landlord.

As if to go with the artsy atmosphere of my apartment, I once carried a bulky typewriter all the way from Mauerpark to Schöneberg, secretly planing to type a letter addressing to an obscure French poet. I never found the matching ribbons, and the young Turk who sold me the typewriter lied about its condition. So there it stands now, out of place, adjacent to two nutcracker soldiers, alienated on the windowsill of a newer apartment.

The alienation of the typewriter is almost a fitting metaphor. As the initial addressee, now a high school teacher, does not write poetry anymore; and the owner of the typewriter, having abandoned her pen and paper, writes only on Apple devices now.

I still revisit the neighborhood sometimes. Not for lengthy strolling intending to appease ennui, but for dining in nearby restaurants or visiting vintage shops. I have lost my status as a Kiez resident, resident of this neighborhood once inhabited by Isherwood and Rilke. This neighborhood where the angel of history was asked for direction in Der Himmel über Berlin, where some of the street signs are still in pre-war script.

I no longer loiter in Kleistpark, trying to recite the lines of Ophelia. I no longer sit on the bench in the very same park on a chilly Sunday morning, reading The Tempest. I have moved from parks to cafes,  from cafes to the State Library, and finally from the library to an office located in a deserted suburbs of Berlin.

I do not take lengthy walks anymore, and only have enough time to conjure up haikus during my commuting time.

I want to go back to summer 2012. When Melancholia had not yet seized us. When aspiration and inspiration were still within our grasps.

Tropical Sun

Nothing, not even
Homesickness solidified
Beats tropical sun

Dead Letters

In such silence I

Revisited dead letters;

Re-lived, not relieved

A Thousand Plateaus

In this forgotten region of the colossal country, the landscape was nothing but flatness. No mountains, no valleys, not even trees. It was a neverending vastness and barrenness: rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds. The only being of significant height stood in the far east, known to the inhabitants as A Thousand Plateaus.

A Thousand Plateaus was an artificial landmark, composed of a thousand graves, under each buried a baby. A Thousand Plateaus was constructed overnight, in the wake of a thousand casualities. A thousand casualties of the firstborns. 

In the juvescence of the year, a traveling merchant arrived, unloading a thousand metal jars from fifty camels.

Never encountered a visitor their entire life, the inhabitants gathered around, curious.

"I would meet you upon this honestly," said the merchant disarmingly, starting distributing a thousand metal jars.  "I've come here for the future kings and queens, leaders of our generation. With this magic formula, your firstborns shall be blessed with wisdom and health. Mix the formula with boiling water, for our future kings and queens." 

And so the inhabitants brought the metal jars home, with the formula ivory silky liquid was fed to the blessed firstborns.

The merchant was patient. He sat himself under a Judas tree and waited, until the first burst of howling broke out in the night. "I have not made this show purposelessly." The merchant left with a complacent smile, the camels lined up after him mechanically.

All the trees were cut down overnight, for the sake of building a thousand baby coffins. Dogwoods or chestnut, all eradicated. No exception.

And so were A Thousand Plateaus erected. Each plateau claimed by a baby, a baby who could have gone against the time, who could have achieved something great yet failed to meet his time. Leaving the bereaved inhabitants to a sleepy corner among windy spaces.

Indebted to: 

Gerontion, T. S. Eliot (1920)