Forgot Sunglasses Again
1
July 2022. I just came back from Greece. I. invited me to Athens and together with friends we took a big ferry to a tiny Island. It was very windy, and eventually we left the deck to head to the restaurant inside the belly of the ferry where you didn‘t feel the waves and the wind as much, and to maybe eat something. The portions were big. The biggest portions they served were spaghetti. Big in a way I had never seen before. They were enormous amounts/mountains of spaghetti bolognese. They seemed not just good-enough, but enough. Really enough. I was so stunned that I didn't think of taking pictures. Days after this turbulent ferry ride, I still had to think of these spaghettis and how much they had amazed me, or rather how much I was amazed by enough.
2
Every other time when I want to look at the weather on my phone, I open the clock or the other way around. I touch weather when looking for the time or clock when wanting to know about the weather. They appear side by side on my display. I mix them up constantly. And I have for some time. It's annoying. I‘m much less but still too impatient. I'm a mother, I need to know about the weather. What does time have to do with the weather, or me and my patience? The sun comes when it's time. Or Trevor Shimizu's Forgot Sunglasses (2010). Or has this something to do with my linking desire to the weather, namely rain? There's a visual resemblance between emoji raindrops and the way I visualised the objet petit a (according to Lacan the object cause of desire) years ago. Or I move the objet petit a into the rain. Everything/Love is overcast. Or what does rain have to do with desire and what does rain have to do with seeing? And with not seeing or not seeing well (I can see clearly now the rain is gone). And what has this to do with not, or only sometimes, being able to read signs. Weather is here all the time, though Rain is a cage you can walk through. A line in a poem by Jeredith Merrin that I only know of because Sabeth Buchmann used it as a title for her text about Judith Hopf. Often it would make more sense, and would be less confusing, to just look out of the window.
What does it mean when I liken the object cause of desire to rain, when it rains object causes of desire? What does their proximity mean? Futility? You cannot pick up raindrops. Possibly this picture was a mistake, only describing my hysteria. How does an umbrella help? Why do I want to evade object causes of desire? Is the falling away of desire as disorganising as desire? She doesn't remember anything! Or I repeat myself forever. How passive is a/the objet petit a? And time? Is there a relationship between time and desire? Time's awkward and elusive or disappears constantly/or with time, as so often does what we desire. You seem to always be somehow with-without. How do you answer time (in time/in good time)? And at the same time, time is just gluey/greasily there all the time (lingers like love sometimes). Often the affects of what has happened take much longer than whatever happened took, that affected you. Or as Kristian Vistrup Madsen put it: Nothing is ever over when it's over, only much later. Though later, now you still might not be prepared for what has been. And/Or how difficult it is and how much time it takes to forgive oneself for whatever one had allowed or not known and to mourn, and how much confidence it takes to trust again. I was unmovable in the glow. With you and not, and not with me. Or, the subject's darkness/eclipse (Subjektfinsternis) consists in the disappearance of the subject.
Two movements (moved to tears). On my way home, pushing the bike, I slip, hit my head hard against a wall at U-Bahnhof Hallesches Tor (did I move it/something?) and don't but almost faint. I hail a young taxi driver in Kreuzberg, to take my prints to the framer, and he gives me a free ride because he too needs to go to Tempelhof. Also in other respects, I currently have the feeling that I/everything works like a charm every other day and the other day – nothing. As if I needed to go through something. A lot seems unclear/uncertain, the world seems not totally with me or dull, but at the same time also as if all things unclear/uncertain would be important (even magical at times), or (I) closer to a wish or to me. I can remember my dreams more. Does something dissolve? As if a certain kind of not-knowing and an open acceptance of all things unclear would be a/the premise for, or harbingers of change, or a turn.
Clouds move, desire moves, makes one move. Just not always. Time and desire are also both linked to waiting. And then, time is a place. I post a mobile phone screen video of wiping left over four pictures of two grey puddles, that were taken in live mode, in photos on Instagram and write nothing. It's raining, you see raindrops causing wacky circles before inevitably drowning in their puddles. The movement feels wrong, choppy, doesn't flow. The live mode is too short. It's winter. I stand in winter forever and wait forever. Or I am improbably tired. The heating purrs calmingly like a cat. I want to be more mobile/lithe. Or its purr used to be calming before heating evoked a war. One of the most beautiful and saddest sentences I came across recently or one and a half years ago, I found on the first page of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son (1992), I knew every raindrop by its name. I bought an umbrella. I don't know any names.
What is enough, and when is it enough?
Time, desire, and the weather are too often not funny, and you wouldn't suspect them to, and you cannot suspend them. The first words in Straub/Huillet‘s film 'Class Relations' are: “My umbrella!” A little later, the stoker says to the young man who forgot his umbrella: “I don‘t even talk about the umbrella.”
Timing is important. You cannot or only barely make up for something, only be ashamed in retrospect. Some things pass unrecognised. I'm afraid there's a lot I didn't realise in time, and other things I didn't realise at all.
There's a silent/surprising o in you. An objet petit a. Something that I don't understand, and you don't know you have, and can't give away. I lost track of time. What will there be time for? Then what? I cannot postpone the weather, or the reality of tears or desire and sunglasses, and what does not happen.
Anyway, my desire might be more me, more hysterical, than I know (or want/ed to). I tend to run in my own direction, but I hardly come around. I take out the trash. And then what?
What is desire's or time's relation to change? What does (really) change? And where? How many questions can a text take, can I/a text (still) hold? Alenka Zupančič says in an interview with Agon Hamza and Frank Ruda about psychoanalysis and feminism, among other things: “... to begin with, women are subjects who question the symbolic, women are the ones who, by their very positioning, do not fully “acknowledge” its order, who keep signalling its negative, not-fully-there dimension.” And we don't even know where to start. And it is/would be your problem. When are we all there already? The word cowboy comes to mind, but I won't use it (I once liked the sound of cowboy boots far too much). He takes it all, the coffee too. I am somewhere else/everywhere. I don't drink coffee. Who drinks coffee? Weeks run into months, years. She didn't always know. Or I'm slower/younger than time. Love shifts. Or something very slow is happening.
Maybe I'm also so drawn to psychoanalysis because it represents something very slow or long, it might take years and years. And because it depicts a relationship/commitment, only works through relation (like real life, you always only learn/understand via others). And it is a process, a movement that brings together thinking and the body and one's own desire via dreams. At least that's my fantasy. Pictures have time, texts do too. Humans are slow, and it may be important not to forget that (just consider how long things take, from getting to know oneself to getting to know another, to producing something that might be worthwhile). You always also pay in/with time.
When I 'performed' Everything at bobshop last summer, I was very slowly walking backwards, which also helps with getting in touch with a text that has always already been written beforehand. I would have loved to wear one of the monochrome pastel coloured plastic hairpieces from the Comme des Garçons 2022, Ready-to-wear show, then. And now. They look like fiction. Like soft Lego hair for human heads. There's something playfully safe or protectively consoling about them. They'd be perfect in/for rain, too. It was raining a lot (you know?).
The objet petit a is an object which is already lost, even if it's very unlikely made of rain.
Victoria Miro doesn't take responsibility for umbrellas
At Vienna's main station, a female loudspeaker voice says:
Bitte beachten Sie, dass sich Verspätungen jederzeit verändern können. Please note that delays can change any time.
Forgot sunglasses ≈ I can see clearly now the rain is gone
2b
April 2023. You text me out of the blue – or so it seems. I haven't thought of you for some time. You text me on the first evening that I'm spending with someone new, and to which I was truly looking forward to since I last saw you. How did you know? Or you just do. I text back quite late. When I wake up, I see that you texted me again. We meet for coffee. You come to my neighbourhood. I didn't sleep enough. It's been almost a year since I last saw you. You were coming over in the morning. I was making the coffee then. It was sunny, too. Like the very first time we met, I again first see you at the opposite side of the street. While you wait for the green light, you look at me and then away. You look smaller, although you're tall. You look different. A little pale? We have coffee. Mine's black. In yours float irritatingly many milk froth hearts. We have muffins. They're out of New York cheesecake. Out of brownies, too. We catch up. You tell me that you were really sick. We talk about our work. We love what we do. And a bit about the kids. Nothing special really. It's good to see you. It's easy this time. I'm calm. Are you? You're hard to read. Always were, or for me. We don't have much time. Not today, and even then. I'm not who you had pictured for yourself. Plus, some mutual attraction prevented us from initially being friends. What would we have come closer to? Us? Anyway, I wasn't ready then. Timing etc. I was a little intimidated and confused, wasn't sure about anything or what I wanted from you, except maybe that I wished for time, to simply pass time with you. You have to leave to fetch your kid when you try to explain to me something about your current relationship. I don't tell you about my evening, which was different and a bit crazier than I had anticipated. I'm curious. He's sweet. I'm happy I texted you back, happy we met. And again and not immediately but for the next 24 hours or so I feel something I never felt before with anyone or not like this. The same feeling I had the very first time we met. Though when thinking of trying to touch or handle this feeling/thing, I instantly get the sense that I have hot dog fingers, or maybe I'm intimidated anew. Do I intimidate you? Still, it's quite magical. Is it this fragile? A very subtle, deep, and surprisingly calm connection. Something very true, but maybe not inevitable. Hardly discernible. But very much there. Which makes me look beautiful (happy?) in a way I hadn't looked in a while. Even though I might not meet you there. Some kind of shy landscape. Then it simply fades like froth. And maybe it also doesn't really matter. Is nothing that needs holding on to. Not now anyway. Is it too early, still? Thus, for what, I wouldn't even know. Despite everything, I barely know you. Don't know you enough to predict anything. But this transient feeling/thing fits quite well into a text about margins of wishes. And what could be, is, or isn't enough.
3
All these stairs.
Things/We begin on the floor. Downstairs, where the rain disappears.
There's a problem with the margins or the floor. Or something towards the floor. To have the feet on the ground/floor, one has to feel one's feet and find/see a floor. To under-stand something in the best sense or really always has something to do with feet. With coming and going, with withdrawing and not, etc. Maybe that's why I do love tabi shoes. You always feel where you begin. They help sometimes. Can feet be lonely? Can they respond? Something/What got lost? I want to sprawl, stretch out over the room and in my whole (new) patience. Everything in its Right Place.
I'm not connected, or I don't see any connection. All is quieter. I feel dizzy (schwindlig), or I feel like a swindler as an artist. To take pictures is like listening very closely, and I almost hear nothing. I know nothing. I have difficulties finding pictures, difficulties with this text. To find what makes up a picture/text that might hold something, hold/describe something that isn't there or a wish. Or at least its margins.
What is it with the inherent absence in pictures/texts? The use of Photoshop always underlines one's own weakness. Is it able to hold/show something/desire? Some of the new pictures I'm working on appear to collapse in on themselves, not rising like cakes, or maybe they only try to touch themselves, perhaps finding their boundaries and one leaks. Some pictures fail to play tennis. I thought that tennis would/might be a good illustration for relationships (per se), though the aim/idea in tennis is to hit the ball in a way that the other cannot hit it back easily. And the/this text should break off in between and/or I would have wanted to work out a 'bracket structure', but I don't have enough time. And it is too long, or what kind of length is this? Time and again I have to think of Abel Ferrara's film New Rose Hotel (1998) which I saw years ago in Vienna and whose structure had impressed me so much. As far as I can remember, after half of the film previous scenes recur with tiny aberrations, or show a bit of what has happened before the repeated scene, and also a bit of what comes after. What comes through? What can I bend? What about glue?
Where is the body, my desire, in relation to what is actually there/real? And with what I do? Or how do I get there, come around? How to be generous and love? How to play with what's impossible? How to relax in questions, or answer despite being in question? How to move, and respond? Sometimes I'm almost there. Close enough? In the park close to my house there's a graffiti: Alle werfen / Keiner fängt Everyone throws / No-one catches. Does wearing a Lacan text t-shirt help the memory of one's own body? Even the feet? Do I want to/Can I get involved? What do I catch? There were times when I would rather have been in a bubble tea joint at a certain moment and have disappeared with it. Or suddenly and just long enough like Josef Strau during a Zoom talk in Düsseldorf some months or years ago.
My uncle, Michael Turnheim, wrote that writing would be the only dignified outcome of mourning. But it has to happen in the body too, go through the body. And before that has to be perceived and received there, in a lot of alternating and different feelings to really be able to get to a dignified and in the best case open outcome. And it/this takes patience and quite a bit of time.
I want to retrieve something like a relationship with the world, the world, or reality which I brushed off out of plain disappointment too often with a genuine if naïve “Really?” or defiance. Is one able to find (again) a/one's form, one's poetic abilities, in what lacks or unintentionally or by surprise? In tiredness? There might be access in absence. A feeling of participation? And I don't see it/this, or it's just some feeling. Bubble tea bubbles are perfectly round. My pictures describe desire only in the absence of a world, a form of address, an address, or maybe something like a family/relationships. Though family is/might be a wonderful and/or, and sometimes at the same time, a traumatic floor. At times, I walk away a little. Like pictures seem to, that were taken using a zoom. I stand a bit apart. You're in no sentence.
In chapter 1 of Und sie fällt uns dauernd runter / This one's about love, an unfinished text that I started to write two years ago, it says: 'No love is left in the eyes or on the floor' and later 'Is there anything left on the floor? If I had to illustrate this text, I'd put this cropped screenshot here, that I found somewhere in a note folder of Oldenburg's dirty brown and beige Floor Cake, with a text saying: Claes Oldenburg, Floor Cake, 1962 (MoMA) May 22nd, 2006 / A podcast about this fun sculpture of a giant piece of cake.' Again I'm reminded of the song Cake in the rain, that is McArthur Park, of which D. says that the cake is a substitute for a/the relationship. Or getting soaked and eating this/it too. I always liked the sound of a tennis ball hitting the floor. There's an attempt to play tennis. To gain ground, any(thing) real ((other than) rain). More than any other ball, the neon yellow of the tennis ball indicates the wish to not be missed, to be seen (before and after hitting the floor). I increasingly drop things. Probably to remind me of a/the floor. Berlin is built on sand and doesn't remind you of the beach. Everything takes longer or is postponed. Things like to get lost, and it seems more difficult to hold onto anything. Or to be in touch, not least with yourself. It is too easy to disappear here, and not just for the sun.
Still and for almost two years now a good illustration or something like an illustration for me or maybe rather my work is this screenshot I did years ago of this somewhat worn out/tired looking Floor Cake from 1962. Somehow it calms me. There is something hopeful about big cakes that have the time to defiantly squat on floors. Or perhaps because this one wouldn't get soaked in the rain that easily. Or maybe just because this cake is (big) enough. A long/slow beginning.
In a run-down gym somewhere in Moabit where I spend some hours of a Sunday morning in January I'm thinking about all of this and read Constance Debré talking to Angelique Chrisafis and Constance Debré talking to Olivier Zahm. With whom (Debré in these interviews) I agree on almost everything except her dismissal of psychoanalysis. Although I feel that in some ways she might be closer to Lacan than she thinks, cf.: “The fissures can appear anywhere, at whatever level, individual or collective. My sense is that today we no longer know. And there you have it! It’s a start.”).
I can't stop reading and listening to Jamieson Webster by the way. What, despite my interest in psychoanalysis and in her thinking (her Life and Death of Psychoanalysis lies like a treasure in my lap in this gym as well), has to do with her writing/speaking with her whole body, with all her desire, naturally and seemingly playful and touchingly vulnerable. In such a way that I don't understand why not all of us do it. Or are not able to do it. How astoundingly difficult it is to come around and stay, to not sidestep oneself/anything, also not one's own surprise or the surprise of others about oneself and to not displace feelings into thoughts. But to be with these feelings and possibly communicate them, also one's own desire, and what doesn't make sense. To dissociate binds (if only to the past or some anxiety). Then one stops or is not felt/seen, disappears. Tried to say.
My son's football team provides the buffet for a football tournament for which I, in the early morning still a little sleepy, make a cake with one egg too few, which turns out just fine. We didn't leave it in the rain/or it didn't rain. I love baking, when I have time. It's sensual, or I feel sensual then. I can concentrate well while in the midst of excitingly screaming kids and coaches and the sound of screeching trainers on gym floors. While being a mum to a son busy playing with his friends. While it's a sunny Sunday and I might not have to. While having a reason to be somewhere in the world, or in a run-down gym somewhere in Moabit. And after having baked a cake with too few eggs. Or is it also their, the kids, relation to the world that moves me? That allows me to withdraw more calmly, to think/work, to be. To be happy. I know again that there is a floor sometimes. It is important (wichtig) and it is windy (windig). Something happens or seems different. I like illustrations. Actually, I just somehow wanted to evoke feet.
4
And the ceiling? I think about how to make absence/desire readable/visible. What happens if you add together carefully ideas about absence and desire? Is there a surplus? Or what resonates? I forgot my sunglasses. How much love remains?
Saw rain, cf. Tao Lin, Leave Society, p. 249.
If I'd read this text as a performance indoors, I would very slowly have walked backwards. There would be cake now and it would stop raining. There's cake. And it doesn't rain. Not only because I love to have cake, but also because I am interested in what literally comes or may come out of pictures and/or texts like this. Everything. And because I like redundancy and non-performances, performances that are mundane, mere gestures or very boring. It must be read as something that came/fell out of this text.
All my pictures from the last few years are portraits, landscapes that point downwards like this text.
Thank you! Please have some cake. I baked it this morning. It fell out of this text.