and again

My friend Meriel came to visit me this weekend. It was great.
I'm finding it hard to deal with being apart from my family and best friends. Before I came here, I thought that finding new friends would make it easier to accept the absence of my old friends. It's not. It just makes me realise why my old friends are my friends. It makes me realise how familiar and easy human interaction can be, how I took things for granted. You see, one of my fixed ideas is that to understand other people we need to know their background, their history. Without this knowledge, other people are almost always strange. The problem is that this knowledge can only be aquired over time, so even if you're surrounded by a number of interesting, lovely people, it'll take ages until you actually know them. Sometimes this freaks me out and I feel alone in a sea of strangers. Sometimes I ignore my sentimental streak and simply enjoy myself.
I wonder if living in the 21st century means that I'll be forever separated from people I love. I still hate Skype, it only increases the distance. I don't like e-mails that much either, the only exception to this being my brother whose emails are so incredibly idiosyncratic that they're completely in character. Facebook messages are the worst, tiny anonymous blocks of text. Really I think my favourite mode of communication is thinking of other people intently, looking at their pictures, making the occasional expensive phonecall (why this feels different from Skype I have no idea...) and receiving things in the mail. Postcards. Letters. Parcels. Even if it's something completely random. My best friend used to send me concert tickets. I can deal with that, random things are the best because they make me feel as if I was a part of the other person's life instead of a friend who you have to make time for. It's pretending that the other person is still around instead of hundreds of kilometres away.

missing you

What is is that makes us think of the family as a category of its own? Is it really blood and genes? Or is it time? Is it the years that we've spent together? Why do we love them as we do? (No, wait, not everyone does. But I do.) There are people who don't have much in common with me in terms of hobbies or interests, and yet they are closer to me than everyone else. It's strange. It might well be time.

nowhere near

Train stations I have seen: Cologne, Brussels, Rotterdam, Alfreton.
This is the song I've been listening to since I've come home.
Fair warning to anyone who reads this: The following is a product of lack of sleep, euphoria and a terrible habit of mixing my metaphors.

Yesterday I was on a train to London, contemplating the past week or so, when I realised that there's an obvious problem with using a device like a Pensieve. (Let's just pretend for a moment that it's real. Non Harry Potter readers, I'm talking about this.) It's quite simple, really - memories aren't either pure, or have been meddled with.
In fact, they are always tainted or tinted, by other experiences or nostalgia. They are shaped by the narrative we force upon them, the stories we tell our friends and the confessional notes we scribble into journals. A wonderful, unique moment is gone in an instant, as per definition. If it is retrieved however, looked at again, it can never take the shape of those neat and orderly scenes encountered by Harry Potter when he dives into the Pensieve. We know that. Historians have tried to either ignore that fact or work around it for ages.

But still, it is a dilemma. I'd love to keep the memory of certain moments safe, like an old photograph hidden in a dark place so as to keep it from aging. This means keeping it locked up, not sharing it: The more you look at the picture, the more fragile it gets. And the more you talk about moments, share them with others, the more they turn into a story - until you can only remember them with the words you use to describe them with. And of course words aren't all that accurate.

It's similar to something I discovered when I (finally) met my friend Q again and we talked about the last time we had seen each other: Our memory was shaped by the photographs we had taken. It is confined to the limits we imposed on it.

Basically, I am facing quite a simple question: Is it better not to take any pictures? And, even more importantly: Should you avoid talking or writing about precious moments? Your memory will remain in the solitary confinement of your brain, undisturbed, it won't turn into a story that loses its depth of feeling after having been told for the third, fourth, fifth time. It will, however, be all the more prone to merge with illusions, what if's, daydreams, wishful thinking, until the original is changed, until it's hard to tell what actually happened. And one day, you'll forget about it, forget what it meant to you that day, the immediacy will be gone.

In the end, what happens is this: You sit on a train, and then later you're at Heathrow and it's six in the morning. Instead of writing down what has happened, events, people, places that have had an impact on your life, instead of facing the dilemma of turning your feelings into nothing more but words and a story because you want to keep at least a part of them alive forever... instead of doing that, you just write about what a strange thing memory is. Contemplating what has actually happened seems like a task you can't face right now.
You talk to your friend Martin who wisely says, "You're overthinking this, aren't you?"
Already, nostalgia has set in.

Later, you'll board a plane. You come home and, half-convinced that you must have been dreaming, you tell your friend all about it, just to confirm to yourself that things have happened. The moment is gone, tainted, mixed with longing and regret, just a memory, bound to fade. Only wizards and robots know how to keep them pure.

imagined communities

currently pondering...

museale Repräsentation

Dear life, you're a bit like the British Museum which is the fourth thing I liked when I was in London. You're strange and beautiful and scary and filled with odd, amazing things like a rolling ball clock and people walk in and out and are clueless. If only it was possible to put all of life's experiences into chronological order with neat labels attached to them.

inbetween days

Right now I feel as if I was constantly pressing the "refresh" button on my life, waiting for an update on a live blog on a slow news day, and yet nothing happens. Which means that my life is like politics in Austria where nobody even bothers with live blogs because nothing ever changes.