THEOREM

Today I got up with this line in my head: don't worry about the soul. That has been fixed. As I was dreaming about walking around Riemann's zeta landscape, climbing the mountain and looking down to the zeros of the zeta function, I felt fixed in my soul. When plugged into Riemann's prime formula, each zero of the zeta function, or the points that correspond to the complex numbers, produces a wave corresponding to a pure musical tone. Simplified here, and in line with my own trivial thinking about Riemann's hypothesis—which, for the life of me, I don't know why I tend to think of on Sundays—the idea that one can chart exactly the occurrence of prime numbers on an infinite line, is fascinating. As we tend to think of the primes as occurring at random, the notion that one can orchestrate them, when one 'knows' them by plugging them into a harmonic scale, creates the illusion that the primes possess some sort of cosmic otherness.

Now, why the soul, via Riemann? Yes, because since March 18, when Grigori Perelman was announced to receive the first Clay Millenium Prize Problems Award for his resolution of the Poincaré conjecture (consisting of 1 million dollars, the prize was instituted in 2000 with view to be awarded to anyone who will come up with a proof for any of the 7 most intriguing mathematical conjectures), I've been thinking about the reason why I didn't become a mathematician myself. The story is too long and lousy, so I won't get into that, but I do want to mention the fact that there is out there a beautiful solution to such regretting anguish. Perleman, who is only two years older than me, and whom I would marry on the spot if he didn't live with his mother and was so sensitive—he declined the Fields medal in 2006, and gave up mathematics because he thinks that the discipline is now devoid of mathematicians with intact integrity—formulated a proof for what is called the soul theorem... The soul is in general not uniquely determined by the manifold...

I may not have become a mathematician, but by treading the landscape of analysis (the opposite, as it were, of algebra), I get a sense of the fact the even the greatest ironies in my life, if seen as symbolic inconveniences, can be orchestrated to yield the output zero, Riemann's laughter at incongruities. Schopenhauer once said: “every good joke is a disrupted syllogism.” The question of the soul is then, still, a question of what we choose to believe in. Today, I believe in numbers, even if, cosmically speaking, well, another long and lousy story...

EXACTITUDE

What attracts me to teenagers who enjoy my company is that they are prone to listening to you without posing too many questions that in effect merely echo their insecurity about what they do, and whether what they do corresponds exactly to what others who are their age do. Such imitation of others without an ounce of reflection behind it bores me to death. So what if you're a teenager and you're insecure? If you want to know things, go ask people who have experience and their wits about them, and that includes your parents, than merely imitating the nearest 'cool' idiot simply because others do it. So, I always make sure that, say, when kids and I travel together – which is not very often, as I don't know that many – I completely disregard their thinking – especially if they are boys - that spraying ourselves with half of the perfume stock at airports is unusual. I often go quite irrevocably when sensing their anxiety: “get over this nonsense,” and then suggest that it is not all right to entertain the idea that such an activity as playing with smell is only reserved for girls. “In this household,” I say, “we do not, and I repeat, we do not sanction the voice of patriarchy.” After the perfume, we play musketeers or jedi knights, yet I also make sure that the roles assigned are clear: “I will not,” I say, “I repeat, I will not be the damsel in distress.” When such pronouncements are articulated, and which go beyond settled negotiation, they often elicit this response from the kids in question: “Fair enough,” as a result of their accepting that, indeed, there may be other states in between what boys do and what girls do exclusively. And if “fair enough,” is followed by this rhetorical comment: “you won't play the damsel in distress because you have other things to be grateful for?” you just know that your day is made. My nephew, Paul, a 15 year-old, delivers such statements, and I am always astonished at his perceptiveness. My sister says he takes after me in his obsessive reflections. As far as this goes, I'm still out there deliberating on whether such heritage is good or bad. Yesterday I announced that it was high time that the two of us will soon have a Bikram yoga session. “Paul”, I said to him, “next month we'll go for Bikram yoga,” and the only question that he posed without objection was this one: “we are?” “Yes, we are”, I said, and then I showered him with links to this type of yoga that everybody thinks is quite challenging, as you have to go through 26 positions in a heated to 40 degrees celsius room. “Nonsense,” I told Paul, as a way of anticipating his concern with such toughness, and then I explained something about the value of having the feeling that you can touch your own entrails as you sweat through your consciousness, and as you can imagine that you hold your own brain in your hands, raw and beautiful as it really is, thus invariably implying once more that if you think that you can't do it, then it's only because you can't imagine yourself doing it – which is too bloody bad and boring. Now, while others may think, “how gross,” Paul, who sees me almost becoming one with the machine I'm typing on this information while we skype, goes: “Oh, I see, it's like going into a Mac store and relishing touching and turning on all their facets all the pieces they have there on display.” Exactly. Bikram yoga, here we come!

OMENS

For Mark Shackleton

Although in Helsinki this week, I talked to people from afar. The feel of the highland of Tromsø, the light and its air is strongly with me. “Beckett depresses me” – people say, upon hearing that I do Beckett. “What an amazing performance of Gertrude Stein!” – people also say after my reading. The Finns who are close to me know better. “Would you say I have dimensions?” - one who wants to use my radar wants to know. “If you didn't, I wouldn't be here talking to you.” “I often wonder about yours,” the one who's English is the Queen's also wants to know. “You have such a continuous flow of up-frontedness.” "I don't waste my time," I say, while having mathematical thoughts. But instead of calculations, I offer info on my methods: “I read the pain of others.” Then I offer my hands close to his face. He offers the face close to hearing and touch, and a moment out of time takes place. “Gertrude Stein was here, Gertrude Stein was here”, another Finn who gets it says. “Oh, she was really here,” he insists. And I believe him. I don't argue with the picture in his head. That of music. “God, as you were reading,” he tells me, “I got Kafka in my head.” “No kidding,” I said. “Yes, and more. György Kurtág's composition.” And then he goes in German, sounding Kafka in Hungarian rendition: “Ich kann...nicht eigentlich erzählen, ja fast nicht einmal reden.” [I can’t actually...tell a story, in fact I am almost unable even to speak]. "Thank you, thank you," he says, leaving me speechless. Another one approaches me and says: “You're the answer to my prayers.” “I am,” I go? “Yes, you have to come and guest our upcoming major event on writing at the school where all the serious Finnish writers go.” “Seriously?” I go, while pledging to do it. This being Finland, I say yes to everything. I'll be back in Finland in two weeks already, up north in Oulu, to do some serious Beckett. This talk will be decisive, for I'll be willing to call myself a Beckett scholar after it's done. The title is “My Breath in Brackets.” Beckett was interested in tenacious faces and traces. “Grace to breathe that void. Know happiness,” he says, as the last word in “Ill seen Ill said.” I take a deep breath, as Kafka's fragment, written on my birthday, the 22nd of October 1913 interferes with my bracketed thoughts about omens. “Zu spät. Die Süssigkeit der Trauer und der Liebe. Von ihr angelächelt werden im Boot. Das war das Allerschönste. Immer nur das Verlangen, zu sterben und das Sich-noch- Halten, das allein ist Liebe." [Too late. The sweetness of sorrow and of love. To be smiled at by her in a row-boat. That was the most wonderful of all. Always just the yearning to die and the surviving, that alone is love.]

And so we know why we love fragments. The ones that can take everything in the corners of their eyes. The ones that are brazen, and glowing, like faces and traces. Says Beckett: “Absence supreme good and yet. Illumination then go again and on return no more trace. On earth's face. Of what was never. And if by mishap some left then go again. For good again. So on. Till no more trace. On earth's face. Instead of always the same place. Slaving away forever in the same place. At this and that trace. And what if the eye could not? No more tear itself away from the remains of trace. Of what was never. Quick say it suddenly can and farewell say say farewell. If only to the face. Of her tenacious trace.” Camelia Elias and Eino Leino. On the grass alas, exploring the omen in the nomen.

For another beautiful staging see Vivian Cruz's mise-en-scene here

(P.S. Kurtag, who was born in Lugoj, Romania, is as belated in his preferences for writers for whom he writes as I am. For those interested, he also did Beckett, Hölderlin, and Lichtenberg, all good writers of fragments and aphorisms.)

THE SOCIALITE

For E.L.H

Roskilde University

—So, you're a PhD student?
—I was one 10 years ago.
—Me too.
—Any children?
—No.
—Then you'd better hurry.
—I can't have any.
—You can adopt.
—They'd have to be special.
—I was 8 when my father died, some 55 years ago.
—I was also 8 when mine died, some 35 years ago.
—And your mother? A feminist?
—No, a Marxist.
—Marxism is artificial.
—But useful.
—I've seen my mother doing things that were not artificial.
—You mean, like hammering?
—Yes. What do you hammer on?
—Poetry.
—Why?
—I'm interested in death.
—But you're not old.
—Didn't you just tell me to hurry?
—... Wait until you're old.
—Old age has nothing good in it.
—Sure it has.
—Like what?
—Well, er, wisdom, I guess.
—Isn't wisdom a myth?
—No.
—Then, you have it?
—I suppose.
—How do you pass it on?
—Well, through my writing and teaching.
—About physics?
—Exactly.
—What else?
—Well, I don't know. You'd better ask my son.
—But I'm not asking your son. I'm asking you. What else?
—I need some air. Will you excuse me?
—Sure. Are you all right?
—No. Er, yes. I think so.
—You think so?
—I think so.

Tromsø University

—So, you're a writer.
—Not really.
—But you write.
—I analyze.
—Like that?
—Like what?
—Like Beckett.
—I like Beckett.
—You look great.
—Thanks.
—I mean, for a Beckett scholar.
—I'm not a Beckett scholar.
—You're not?
—No.
—You're really smart.
—Thanks.
—I can recite a poem for you.
—You can?
—Yes.
—About what?
—Death.
—What's it called?
—Death, Death.
—Go ahead.
—Døden, døden...
—Nice.
—Arhhhh, you know, I could... you're... I would...
—I know.
—You'd also?
—Yes.
—You can have anything. I'll give you everything. My whole life is on this phone. You can have it. Take it. Take me. Steal all my texts from it. My publishers...
—If I didn't already, have everything.
—Then you would?
—I would, for all the 15 years between us.
—Live and die.
—Your poems are so young...—
—Love and die.
—...and beautiful.
—Love and love me.
—You'll have a good death.
—You think so?
—Yes.

Dublin University

—So, you're going for professor now?
—Yes.
—Your hair turned white.
—Yes.
—But, your body.
—Yes. I look better now than at 16.
—You bet. What's the philosophy?
—In your old age, the only good thing going for you is your light weight. Be ethereal.
—Like Beckett?
—Yes.
—His stomach curved inwards.
—So it did.
—What about Gertrude?
—She didn't believe in weight.
—She must have believed in something.
—Gertrude said: “I rarely believe anything, because at the time of believing I am not really there to believe.”
—Do you believe?
—In what?
—In love.
—What kind?
—The total kind. The all the way kind. The interminable kind.
—I like infinity. My own.
—My girlfriend... you're a psychoanalyst, right?
—Sometimes.
—My girlfriend, she wants commitment.
—Sure she does. Don't they all?
—Yes, so you understand?
—Sure I do.
—Then, why doesn't she?
—Because she's not so smart.
—She is.
—Then what are you afraid of?
—Children.
—Do you want them?
—Well, yes.
—Then go for it.
—You think so?
—Sure I do.
—Why?
—Do you believe in life or guarantee?
—Life.
—Then, as I said, go for it.

Helsinki University

—So, you're still doing mathematics?
—No. Never have.
—Sure you have, at all our gatherings.
—I'm more of a priest now.
—You are? What doctrine?
—The loving kind. Love thy neighbor kind.
—Whoa, Norway messed you up again?
—No.
—You're cool.
—No, really, if anything, it's arithmetics.
—Whoa, such passion.
—You think?
—Yeah, a priest with a cool head and passion for counting. Churches need that. And that body of yours!
—Yes, they allow whores in the temple now.
—I've heard.
—Isn't that neat?
—Absolutely.
—“Shall we go all wild boys,
Waiting for the end?”
—Just a smack at Auden.
—With a smack of leaf and eagle, girl.
—Professor, to you. I qualified in the Arctic.
—“Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end.
What is there to be or do?
What’s become of me or you?
Are we kind or are we true?
Sitting two and two, boys, waiting for the end.”
—What end?

BELLS

On a holiday, if you don't go to church, the synagogue, or some other such worshipping place, you go to the books, if you are a type of person who is interested in 'the word'. My own homely worship place is in the bathroom. There I have all the favorite Jesuits, the Kabbalists, the contemporary interesting theologians, several bibles in several languages and editions, and other such ancient texts. You get the picture. My morning ritual begins with a good look in the mirror. These days it is my hair that fascinates me. Next, I let my eyes glide down on the spines of the books, and then I make an instant selection. Today it was Balthasar Gracián's Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia (1637) that caught my gaze. The word, oracle, made me think of my mother. In spite of her Marxism as her primary religion, she liked going to the prophets in town. This was usually not an affair that one was loud about, and you had to know the right people if you wanted to get in touch with these saints. She used to make my sister and I swear that we would never disclose our exciting activity of visiting, which, however, often involved a bathetic conclusion: “By Jove,” mother would say, “such nonsense, but how I love the passion in it.”

Indeed what the prophets had to say was nonsense, but the fascinating part was sensing that at least where mother was concerned she really would have liked to come across the real astonishing part which would have placed her in a state of grace. So she was always hopeful. And it wouldn't have mattered which one, as long as it was there (the Catholic theologians distinguish, for instance, between actual grace and sanctifying grace, accidental grace (gratia creata accidentalis) and uncreated substantial grace (gratia increata substantialis), efficacious, sufficient, irresistible, infinite grace, and so on. You get the picture). But states of grace are hard to come by, and for the most part, what we are left with is making distinctions rather than experiencing them in their fulness of beauty and being. I read these lines from Gracián in the bathroom:

"Do not die of the fools' disease. The wise generally die after they have lost their reason, fools before they have found it. To die of the fools' disease is to die of too much thought. Some die because they think and feel too much, others live because they do not think and feel at all. The first are fools because they die of sorrow, the others because they do not. A fool is he that dies of too much knowledge. Thus some die because they are too knowing, others because they are not knowing enough. And yet though many die like fools few die fools." (180)

It occurred to me that if there is something that never ends, it is devising strategies for testing our courage when it comes to making distinctions between house oracles and heart oracles, especially when we know that revelations about their inner qualities rely on bells ringing. One such bell reverberates in my head, as we speak, through the words of Gertrude Stein, ringing through Alice B. Toklas, which I have just quoted in my post on the 11th: “I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken.” I'm going to church today and worship along Augustine's genius: Ipsi sancti in ecclesia sunt alii aliis sanctiores, alii aliis meliores.

PRONOUNS

It feels like Sunday today. I'm in need of total Bach annihilation. And the organ blasted through the speakers will take care of it. It must be the Ascension Day yesterday that still weighs on me. Gertrude Stein also weighs on me. After her successful tour of America after 30 years of absence, she came back to Paris and decided that she didn't know who she was anymore. This was very unlike Gertrude, who was famous for her precision, and thus never posed questions as to the shifting signifiers of pronoun positionality. Who? Who is this person? And what does she move towards? I read these lines in William Carlos Williams on Gertrude Stein:

Movement (for which in a petty way logic is taken), the so-called search for truth and beauty, is for us the effect of a breakdown of the attention. But movement must not be confused with what we attach to it but, for the rescuing of the intelligence, must always be considered aimless, without progress.

This is the essence of all knowledge.

Bach might be an illustration of movement not suborned by a freight of purposed design, loaded upon it as in almost all later musical works; statement unmusical and unnecessary, Stein’s "They lived very gay then" has much of the same quality of movement to be found in Bach—the composition of the words determining not the logic, not the "story," not the theme even, but the movement itself. As it happens, "They were both gay there" is as good as some of Bach’s shorter figures.

Music could easily have a statement attached to each note in the manner of words, so that C natural might mean the sun, etc., and completely dull treatises be played—and even sciences finally expounded in tunes.

Either, we have been taught to think, the mind moves in a logical sequence to a definite end which is its goal, or it will embrace movement without goal other than movement itself for an end and hail "transition" only as supreme. (Imaginations, 350)

I'm still looking at the picture of Jesus ascending the sky, while using his finger to hold the sky, or point to it, or admonish the crowd. Who knows what master Garofolo was thinking?

Between ascent and descent, this morning in the bathroom I got greeted by Rilke: “And if I cried, who'd listen to me in those angelic orders?” And I'm thinking: who is this “I?” Who? And how does she handle it?

HEAD-ECONOMY

I'm writing a paper on economies of love in Gertrude Stein for a conference in Helsinki next week, and although I have no intention of linking love in Stein with love as a neurosis, a Lacanian concept keeps nagging me: Can one stage a passage à l'acte? Can one plan it or arrange it or organize it? Lacan's dissecting of the Freudian notion of agieren, acting out, to also include, beside a call for attention as a defense against anxiety, what Lacan calls a passage to the act, is interesting to consider, especially since Lacan never talked about this notion as being anything other than spontaneous. There are times, Lacan contends in Seminar X on anxiety, when because of strong desire for an object which the subject sees as unattainable, the subject may experience a moment of total identification with the object, which brings about a sense of falling, an inverse kind of afhebung often manifested in some violent act that is unmotivated and devoid of message to anyone. It can take the form of slapping someone on her face, saying something really stupid, or more drastically throwing oneself in front of a train. As the subject becomes object, the subject exits the scene. While in Tromsø last month, I've been asked expressly to talk about this concept, but I didn't think of the possibility of the passage to the act as being consciously premeditated, even though an occasion prompted me to consider that, until today when I read these lines from Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – which, as everyone knows, is not written by Alice but by Gertrude, and it's not about Alice but about Gertrude:

“I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken, and I may say in each case it was before there was any general recognition of the quality of genius in them. The three geniuses of whom I wish to speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Alfred Whitehead” (9).

What happens here is a cross between what can be perceived as a liminal statement on self-love as an economy of enunciation and its unfolding against the background of another economy, namely an economy of geography. Gertrude Stein as “Gertrude Stein” takes herself out of “here” and places herself over “there”. Gertrude knows the genius of herself but she cannot localize it within the space of enunciation that reflects a first person's perspective, and which is already part of a dominant discourse with fixed hierarchies: man is a genius and woman is merely aspiring. For a woman, where is this 'there', then? In the slapping of all men so that the subject can cross over to consciously enact the object, arguably that of embracing one's womanhood, in Stein's case. 'I am', Gertrude suggests, 'the premium genius' when I become “Gertrude Stein,” the desired object—here, genius or not—and the one talked about in the 3rd person, and one that is also aligned perfectly with men. The subject in general as a recognized genius resists localization which brings about a desire to escape fantasmatic narratives about geniuses into the real space of 'there is' or 'it's there' precisely as this space is devoid, or rather it is desired to be devoid, of any symbolization, whether contingent on gender difference or not. If you are a genius then you are a genius, and that's all there is to it. Gertrude, the writer of the autobiography becomes an object of her own desire. Gertrude desires to desire herself desiring. Thus, geographically speaking, an economy of love can be expressed at the limit of the point of convergence between first and third person narrating voices, when the border of figurality dissolves both the 'there is' or 'it's there' and 'there is not.' What is suggested is that there is a whole different country between the enunciating 'I' and the receiving 'other,' which allows for a premeditated criss-crossing of 'there is' with 'there is not'. It is as if Gertrude says that when something 'is there' beyond the opposite of what may be expressed in words through 'but there is also'– a new situation, a new stage, or a new act - the only position that makes sense in acknowledging the significance of topos and one which accounts for the function of a premeditated passage à l'acte is the one which relies on repetition. One of Gertrude's favorite phrases in her writing is namely the reminder to her reader: “As I was saying...”

—Before I started writing this morning, I've cleaned the lid of my Miele washing machine. I like to see it spotless. I like to see the metal inside it glistening through the spotless glass. I was thinking of how the aluminum color matches my hair which is turning more and more irrevocably white. The remnant of auburn is diminishing vertiginously. I imagined my “whitehead” separated from my body and tumble-drying in the machine. I wondered what Salomé did with the head of John the Baptist after it was presented to Herod on a silver plate. What did she do with its continuous reflection? I'm known to make drastic decisions on the 11ths of the month. Today I'll shift my angle and make this claim in my writing: In its relation to the passage to the act, the economy of love can be described as an act of losing one's head to own the words (or the love of another).

HYPER-SOUL

My mother could never understand why I liked to read Cioran. “Sure, he's good,” she used to say, “but isn't he over the top?” I remember that I disliked her comment. “So what if he's over the top, if indeed that is the case?” I would blurt at her and then remind her that particularly a woman like her should know better. And what kind of woman was she, some may like to know? As far as I am concerned, and apart from being family, she was the most fascinating person I have ever known. And what fascinated me about her was her ability to combine total mercilessness with soft reason. She was brutal in her approach to facts, which she always formalized down to the “meremost minimum.” “This is this,” she used to say, “not something else.” “Sure,” I would say, feeling crushed by 'reality' “but listen to this,” and then I would venture into some counter-argument that would make the matter-of-fact situation appear more nuanced - or so I liked to believe.

What I liked about mother was the fact that although she was always ready to bulldozer my exposition, she would often also go: “I see your point – beyond 'the fact'” - which would stop her demolition project. As I grew older, I understood what enabled her to be both uncompromising and yet flexibly reasonable about listening to how "this is this" might also be something else. She always hoped that people, even when living most inauthentic lives for the most part, had the potential to reveal their 'religious' dimension within themselves and to her. Expecting this of everyone was a tall order, however, and it didn't make her popular. On that, one could then say that she was as over the top as Cioran, whom I still read for the exact same reason: that he really believed that reading for the soul, rather than the plot, is infinitely more interesting. We narrativize our existences all the time, all according to the variables available to us to permute and which enable us to feel good about ourselves. But the soul, as mother and Cioran seem to suggest, has its own set of channels through which to manifest itself.

My partial translation of and introduction to Cioran's Cartea Amagirilor (The Book of Delusions) has come out in the latest issue of Hyperion, the New York based journal of philosophy and aesthetics. Fragments of insights into the soul are in it, and the editors did a beautiful job at matching what is at stake in our desires to relate to people in the moment when they reveal themselves to us 'beyond the fact'. The fact also that Mark Daniel Cohen managed to be so exquisite in his layout and visual effects after his accident—which has delayed the publication—is quite miraculous in itself, which supports the idea that if the soul is believed in, it is rendered as an experience of beauty in the unfinished, which thus itself takes on infinite proportions. Mark is the master supremo of good sense and style. Congrats, my friend, and welcome back to life.

Here are also a few listings so far of the Cioran piece, which interestingly enough, and although independent of each other, quote passages that basically say the same. In Cioran's words:

"––Just like when during daytime, when we close our eyes to immerse ourselves in the sudden darkness we discover points of light and bands of color which remind us of the other part of the world, when likewise we descend into the vast and dark depths of our soul, when what is revealed onto us, in the margins of darkness, we find the reflections of an unsuspected golden world. Can these reflections be a calling to our soul or a regret?

Thought cannot solve the contradictions of the soul.

I only love the one who goes beyond there is."

(E.M. CIORAN: The Book of Delusions)

wood's lot

A Piece of Monologue

Ordinary Finds

ovenbird

wanderlust

Hyperion (full pdf)

The Nietzsche Circle

TURNS

The neighbors told me: “it must be good to be home again.” “But I rather liked it up there,” I told them back.” And they went, “In the cold?” “That's right,” I said. And then they kept silent. I walked up the stairs to the apartment, and a grand view compensated for the lack of the Tromsonian mountains.

I owe Denmark a lot, and I don't think that I got the country wrong, when it comes down to it. When it comes to geography, I rather think that it was Sweden I got wrong, when 10 years ago while crossing the border into Norway from Sweden, almost rather by accident, a reindeer popped on the road out of the blue and started smelling my hands. I had an epiphany: it was not Sweden I was supposed to be in, but Norway. So I hurried up the plateau, with the whole family backing me up, to see what this 'Norway' place was like, and why, although looking just like the other thing of Sweden, it also seemed different. What was different was the smell. My sister claimed that it couldn't be, as we were in the middle of the exact same type of nature. But I insisted that someone was soon going to corroborate my suspicion, that Norway was 'it'. I didn't have to wait too long. My nephew, 5 at the time, went to a water nearby a godforsaken place that popped out of nowhere, just like the animal did, and started exercising his newly acquired perfect and fluent Queen's English on some Germans who were fishing. Ja, ja, this was definitely Norway, ja, ja, za smell. Ja, ja, Norway, it vas better zen Sveden. I ended up developing a fixation with the place.

This made me think that if things don't move as such, they always take a turn. We turn left, we turn right, we take backwards turns, but ahead we go. And hold on to some things we do. As I was turning the key to my apartment in the keyhole, sounds started flying in my head, going all the way back to my time, the 60s. I heard The Byrds and their cosmic titles and hits: Turn Turn Turn, Fifth Dimension, and Eight Miles High. I put on some records, and I almost wasn't so sad anymore for having left the ice behind.