Category: Imagined
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From Berlin
[Something I wrote in 1989… and now it is the twentieth anniversary of these events.] Amazed, sitting in a restaurant and reading of the collapse of the Wall, that vast shift in the meaning of our world’s past. The bizarre responses of people, Easterners who stay up all night and see real, free capitalist stores…
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Smart guys
(First of all: I'm sorry there have been no blog entries for what, a month – no, five weeks. I am improving, especially rapidly lately, though I did no traveling this summer; I am still intermittently tired and fretful, but more often just fine.) Tomorrow is the first day that we face all those new…
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Alternative histories
Last night's dream: a music conservatory, walking between buildings in rainy autumn weather – I am a student working on my technique, talking with others – serious, committed and reasonable, as I never actually was in school… a surprisingly detailed, and strange, setting. Like another life, one that might have happened. Today I was working,…
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Luck
It occurred to me today: what if I've actually been lucky over the past decade or so? What if I've actually been moved out of harm's way? An odd thing to imagine, of course. Especially as I've had such a long-running story about myself in terms of loss and disaster, over the past twenty-five, but…
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Thessaloniki
I don't know where I got the idea that Thessaloniki was known for being the home of witches in ancient Greece. I read it somewhere, but can't find any reference to it. My mother's family was from Thessaloniki, from a small town called Pentalofos ('Five Peaks') north of the city of Thessaloniki itself. My mother…
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Limitations; and, The Great German Novel
Even among these pleasant spring days, various small pleasant encounters, and the sense of positive direction I've developed in the past six months (related to Jung and analysis), I keep being made uneasily aware of limits, barriers, walls. A sense of shortened time, news of health concerns: will I really have to inject myself with…
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…
I am disoriented by the awareness of great chunks of time: time that is going by too quickly, time that is long gone, time that is frozen. Why, for instance, in these sleepless early mornings, should I remember the amazingly loud tropical birds outside my Hong Kong apartment? And my unease when I woke because…
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Projective
A burst of anxieties and slight despondencies: after several days of talking to students about their futures, and in a few painful cases having to tell them that their marks were not high enough to allow them to go abroad as exchange students – which feels like telling them: no adventures for you, my boy…
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Nights of power
The solstice is soon: Sunday, at a few minutes past noon this year. And Imbolc, Beltane, Samhain, and the rest… nights when the winter wind is sharp and powerful, or the spring starts to appear, or the supercharged midsummer night takes over – David kindly helped me to put up my small, but brightly lit,…
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Questionnaire
In trying to recover from the dismay and depression that resulted from yesterday's meeting; and the sense that my work is going to be taken even more out of my control; and that as a result I'll never, ever get out of here… perhaps it's worth copying in yet another writing exercise, this one from…
Paul Attinello 