Time flies like an arrow

Fruit flies like the yeast and fungi that cause the fermentation of organic matter.

Go bananas all you want, but don’t break the rhythm too often.

You are trying to resurrect what Marx and Feuerbach before him called species consciousness, where the individual is folded into the collective, and the instant of being becomes the totality of being.

To do this, you must strive for coherence.

Danish Situationist Asger Jorn’s hexagonal three-sided football (3SF) retooling of the Hegelian dialectic. Since its creation in 1962, 3SF has been played in places of psychogeographical significance around the world—Taksim Square after the Gezi Park protests in 2013, on the grounds of the private St Kilda Primary School in Melbourne, Australia (on the Aboriginal Land of the Yalukit-Willam Clan) in 2014, in a forest at the exact midpoint of Europe, inside a Soviet-era fuel silo and a druidic stone circle, and, three years ago, in Mudchute Park in London, on the precise point where John Dee, official court magician of Elisabeth the First, created the British Empire by either summoning a demon or sacrificing the playwright Christopher Marlowe, in May 1593.

“Don't bend,” said Kafka. “Don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” The goal is to create something that bears a resemblance to reality but is, in fact, above it. Alternatively, below it; that will work, too. But if you break in too much or move around too much—asking for money or a job or recognition, complaining about the elections in Europe or the ubiquity of bad burgers in Paris, trying to show how clever you are, how well-read and cultivated you are, how much you know about this or that, how you’re not duped by the in-crowd, how you don’t give a toss about fashion or autofiction or espresso martinis, how you don’t watch sports, how you think Kafka was a hack—you allow your readers to lose focus and drift.

Or gain focus, which is worse because they’ll see right through you.

You need to lull them. It's like those foie gras ducks and geese in the Périgord. You have to coax the corn down their throats. It is not torture; it will not kill them; they will love it.

And then you get to gorge on their livers.

But above all, coherence. “When you see a force-fed goose, you see a portion of genius.” I think Rilke said this. Context is boundless, but for fuck’s sake, people, it’s not everything. You want readers to forget their own time and space and disappear into what you have constructed. Rilke also once wrote, “I have a doctor's appointment at 5 p.m. Grab a beer after?” Why he needed medical attention and to whom he proposed a quick pint¹ doesn’t matter. What matters is that the 20th century’s most idiosyncratic and expressive poet was profoundly interested in metaphors, metonymy, and contradictions. Where and when he drank beer and with whom—(23 November 1923 at the Café Papon in Geneva with the Australian Alma Moodie, widely regarded as the foremost female violinist during the inter-war years)—is of no more consequence than what temperature the beer was or whether it came with peanuts.

This is why Jesus used stories to teach people who see but don’t see. “And hearing, they hear not, neither do they understand.”

This is also why, I think, I hate restaurant reviews. Let me just go there, sit down, and find out for myself.

Rose, oh pure contradiction, desire,
To be no one's sleep under so many
eyelids.
—Rainer Maria Rilke's epitaph 

Rilke’s romantic quest and spiritual transformation: He was preoccupied with emotions, love, and the pursuit of truth. He grappled with disbelief. He experienced crises of faith. He also reflected deeply on the need of a young poet—and, presumably by metonymical, or, more accurately, synecdochical extension, all young poets, all young minds, all minds of all ages—to understand and engage with the real world and the world of art.

How, however, is a rose pure contradiction, and what is its relation to desire (LUST in German, see photo above)? Moreover, what does it mean to be no one's sleep under so many eyelids? How many eyelids? Are these metaphors? Is LIDERN (eyelids) a pun on LIEDERN (songs)? And if so, so what? This has kept me up for three consecutive nights, nights during which my exhaustion level (Kafka: “sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man the most guilty”) was at close-to-an-all-time high already because of the fitful nights that had preceded them, and by what followed them, as surely as every night follows every day—the mornings, the goddamn mornings, starting at around 6:30 a.m., during a week-long demolition of a building across the street from my bedroom window.

Yes, the man walking the bicycle is the 21st century’s most idiosyncratic and expressive chef Hanzhou Piao, who Hexagoons have seen here, here and here but never from my bedroom window, which I like to keep open at night despite the frequent presence of late-night revellers because the jasmine planted in the window box, jasminum volubile that I stole from Rilke’s grave in Raron, has blossomed, and its fragrance, at once familiar and foreign, is, more than anything, bewitching.

The view from this window revitalizes me, especially at 5 a.m. and especially when it includes the cat on the window sill across the way, which never moves or rarely moves, usually just a turn of its head to catch my eye and make my gaze flail.

What’s more, three mornings ago, Friday morning, like every other weekday morning since the Thursday’s of a week before, I was awakened not by thoughts of the cat or Ranier Maria Rilke’s epitaph or the strange career of Alma Moodie—she was considered for almost half a century one of the most important interpreters of Brahms's works for violin, and now she is completely forgotten, not even mentioned in recent editions of Grove's and Baker's Dictionaries—but by a black truck that each morning, pre-dawn, chuffs down our still-dark street, drops with a loud CLANK a giant green bin on the opposite sidewalk, and drives away.

An hour later, at what the French call 7:30 pile, the blue excavator in the above video fires up its engine and shovels debris into the giant green bin. It is not supposed to. It is not allowed to. It is too early. But I don’t mind because the debris is from the demolished building, a temporary prefab structure—(aren’t all human structures temporary?)—erected a quarter century ago to provide public primary schools—écoles maternelles (kindergartens)—in our catchment area with a dedicated space for art classes.

(Isn’t everything temporary?)

I do—did—not mind the noise and dust because a park is to replace the building. Or, rather, an extension of an existing park that, until this week—the week of the European elections and the 100th anniversary of the death of Franz Kafka—was hidden behind the so-called temporary building.

This is all part of the psychogeographical fabric.

Among the new park’s potential elements still apparently under discussion are a ping-pong table, flowers, benches, toilets, a treed picnic area, a small waterfall, a birdhouse, a mural of the little mermaid or a hero, a swing, a banana tree (?), a merry-go-round, a refreshment bar, a running track, a climbing wall, a slide, a basketball hoop, a nuclear bunker, a cat-shaped fountain, and graffiti games “hidden” on the walls.

There is also a plan to make the park the hub of a Quartier Moineau (“Sparrow District”). According to the League for the Protection of Birds, more than 70% of Paris’s swallow population has been killed by cats, glass buildings, shitty human food, lack of wasteland and insect life, and too much enveloping and un-nestable thermal insulation. The City of Paris has thus established seven "Sparrow Districts" in collaboration with the League to address this issue. The goal is to provide “suitable nesting places for sparrows that foster their development.”

Unfortunately, the

Maternelles? Qui appartient à la mère? Why? While we’re at it, kindergarten? Why? And preschool? How is it “pre”? It’s school.

Unfortunately, the

Les pieds dans le plat…

Unfortunately, the excavator took down a giant bush that has long been home to thousands of sparrows.

Then, just the way a cat will see
your wandering eye and in a sudden coup
reach out and suck it down into its own
great swirling, circling maelstrom of an eye
(your gaze will flail awhile, then sink and drown;
caught, it will know itself no more, then die
when what had seemed to be an eye that sleeps
unlids itself only to slam with thunder
and yank your gaze into its blood-red deeps):
so, once, from a cathedral's dark façade,
the great rose window seized and tore asunder
the heart, and dragged it down, deep into God.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, "The Rose Window", 1918

I recently read about men who made their living killing men who killed for free. The men in the first group were not contract killers, though they had contracts. They probably had health and social benefits, too, and, for all I know, restaurant vouchers. The men in the second group were volunteers.

Were any of them executioners? Assassins? No, these men were freedom fighters. Men who fought for freedom. And against it.

Neither group was necessarily right or wrong, nor even some third, triolectical value—a third force—at the limit between them. They believed, thought and wanted different things. If what unfolded through their antagonistics resolved in a synthesis, so be it. If it didn’t, that would be fine, too. “Most men are not wicked,” said Kafka. “They are sleepwalkers, not evil evildoers.”

Is any of this true? No, I don’t imagine it is.

Yesterday, I met a brigand, a highwayman who cuts throats and steals purses. He had kind eyes, but he was stooped with sadness.

“VICTORY BELONGS TO THE MOST TENACIOUS”.—Roland Garros, after whom the French Open’s stadium is named. I just saw it on France 2, written across the grandstand.

Time flies. The men’s single final is well underway. Alcaraz is up a set. Zverev is leading the second. This is right now the psychogeographical centre of the universe. As Kafka put it, “The meaning of life is that it stops. The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but the truth, being indivisible, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. Thus, the writer is the truth, yet when he speaks, he lies.”

Gotta go.

(Time flies? Good luck. They’re way too fast.)

1. In Switzerland, beer is traditionally served in two volumes: 0.33L for a small beer and 0.5L for a large. There is also the birrino, which is 0.2L. In some bars, the standard size is 0.4L. In a glass, it is usually 0.3L. In Austria, Rilke was known to prefer the pfiff (“whistle”), which is half of a small beer. In Munich, where he changed his name from “René” to “Rainer” on the advice of Lou Andreas-Salomé, a typical Hofbrauhaus beer was 1L. Those served in Bürgerbräukeller, where Adolf Hitler launched the Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923, announced the re-establishment of the Nazi Party in February 1925, and was almost assassinated in November 1939, weighed 2.5K.