On a tree where the doves go to die

Now in Vienna there's ten pretty women

There's a shoulder where Death comes to cry

There's a lobby with nine hundred windows

There's a tree where the doves go to die

There's a piece that was torn from the morning

And it hangs in the Gallery of Frost

This early summer the endless shades of green haven't enchanted me; I have not felt the allure of life that fills the balcony and windowsills with basils, oreganos, lavenders, dill, parsley, physalis, blossoming little trees and perky vines. I did not wander away in order to revel in the faint shadows of pristine apple blossoms, even if the overwhelming scent of lilacs and bird cherries passingly intoxicated me as I drifted past them in the lingering stream of summer air. There's a lurking translucency to all that is green, a dry sensation of death. Where does the lurking premonition emanate from? – a gray, cold and damp stone too close to the surface, now dominated by warm sands and urine dust. The birches outside my windows are like wispy grey drapes, bashfully trying to cover the cavernous stone walls of the tomb that marks the world outside.

Oh I want you, I want you, I want you

On a chair with a dead magazine

In the cave at the tip of the lily

In some hallways where love's never been

On a bed where the moon has been sweating

In a cry filled with footsteps and sand

My pet god or goddess, that is my love of human beings, is not reliably present. I sense the ascending tremor. I mean this highly figuratively, of course – I entertain little Theism –, but the frigid eye lens through which I occasionally observe the stumbling life around me is as close to sacrilegeous disinterestedness as I get. The lovelike animal inside me is vague, troubled. Its dim gem struggles, developing a smoky hue that normally comes with seasonal darkness only. It's not that I haven't previously professed cynicism come to flesh, or all the available dark varieties of ill humour. It's the nonchalant danse macabre that's gone. Does a vampire realise its existential condition? Something reminiscent of a plastic doll underneath my gem kicks and tumbles over. It does not know whether birth is a variable here, where such processes are so closely bound to organic cycles. So foreign to us.

There's an attic where children are playing

Where I've got to lie down with you soon

In a dream of Hungarian lanterns

In the mist of some sweet afternoon

And I'll see what you've chained to your sorrow

All your sheep and your lilies of snow

A book in the mail falls on the floor with a hollow, rattling clunk – or I imagine one will. An artefact of sunburnt, pale, Derridan trace. It comes packed with a lot of inevitably delayed memory, another human being, badly preserved, ghastly, reminiscent enough to evoke a treacherous hope of mutual presence.

And I'll dance with you in Vienna

I'll be wearing a river's disguise

The hyacinth wild on my shoulder,

My mouth on the dew of your thighs

And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook,

With the photographs there, and the moss

And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty

My cheap violin and my cross

And you'll carry me down on your dancing

To the pools that you lift on your wrist

Take this waltz, take this waltz

Take its broken waist in your hand

I feel so incredibly hungry.



(image: an unknown doll by an unknown photographer; the poem: excerpts from Take This Waltz by Leonard Cohen, based on Little Viennese Waltz by Federico García Lorca)

Fanciful words after a night of little sleep

Luminary language, lozenges with coffee.

Sleight loof hurdy-gurdy legerdemain. Carouse (gar aus) or slatter. Rate or berate. Nigh genuflect, smitten. A pert young quean. Vial, veal, vile, vale.

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Bios Politikos from a Dead Angle

…prostituere (to set forth in public, to expose to dishonor, to prostitute, to put to unworthy use). The Latin verb is a composition of pro (forward) and statuere (to cause to stand, to station, place erect). (Wikipedia, Prostitution)

The name of this yet undefined little building – a French euphemism – is intended as a reference to the mutual reluctance with which people’s attempts to create and furnish some personal space for themselves are treated in pretty much all human social organisation.

Olivier Razac states it in his history of barbed wire (Histoire politique du barbelé, Le Fabrique Éditions, 2000): barbed wire marks something akin to the game of citizenship that bestows symbolic tokens to all those, who are ready to embrace the figurative, not that actual at all, equality within. In a landscape of direct and indirect borders, biofilters, those without the game tend to be unpronounced, undeveloped property that yet waits to be conceptually and physically earmarked.

I have a nagging feeling that it’s not all this simple, though, and I’m perhaps not primarily interested in workings, rights and wrongs of any particular political agenda. I don’t mean to sound like an anti-globalist either. I’m still figuring out the globular part. Bitter-smelling territory markings, gradually washed away by recurring showers of rain or covered in particles, are unavoidable in the grand scheme of things. Not to mention that in a way or another, when correctly positioned in the right conversations, the scent compels us all.

All the small ways in which human life-spheres and bodies necessarily keep being prostituted as a sign of submission to the game – aesthetic, economic, political, ethical, you name it to make it seem true – mark the site of maison de tolérance, the barely tolerant tension that marks the most palatably queer of our storytelling traditions; or the embarrassed feelings that fill those, who suddenly become aware of their own curiosity toward their newly incarcerated playthings in the game of barbed wire relations. Without the right stories to go with, leaving to die is not all that different from keeping alive.

No promises, other than where there stands a treelike tree in all its hierarchical, arborescent form, it stands on a plateau that gazes at it from many a more unknown places.

And how can we talk of order overall

when the very placement of the stars

leaves us doubting just which one shines for whom?

(from Szymborska, Psalm)

(image: Harboured Hopes, Scribe of Salmacis 2010)