I need to keep my mind active, give it something to work on, just like you use prayer beads or knitting needles to prevent your hands from becoming pendulums that heavily and resignedly pull the body down or on the contrary swing into the air or rub and pick and chewing gum for the mouth, otherwise it (the mind) fiddles with catastrophes the outcome of which always results in coffins or in any case deathbeds or farewell letters, immensely trivial, but for that reason no less troublesome. I can get so consumed by an idea that I do not pay attention to where I am going, but accidentally run a red light and have to get off my bike and walk, but still one of these imaginary catastrophes has not led to a real one. It is normally only some ways into the catastrophe that I realize that I am in the midst of it, then I say ‘stop,’ but a moment later I am caught up in a new catastrophe. Perhaps catastrophe is too big a word when only one person dies at a time. But the person who dies – it is catastrophic for me. (I once talked to a psychologist about it, and she said that a person should not think that way. But I do. And there we foundered. Death cannot be plucked out with a pair of tweezers.)
It is the people I care for that my thoughts subject to disasters. Those whom I would hate to lose most of all, Charles, my mum, Alma. Or myself, writing goodbye to one of the three, as I find myself on the day of judgement, summing up what we’ve had together, a long thank you. (How daft. How pathetic.)
I think there was one time where instead I imagined that I saved people from drowning and from terrorists in planes while I sprang from seat to seat; civilization’s two possibilities: hero or victim. But the heroic era is presumably past, replaced by departure and the final farewell. What can this mire be traced back to? Have I once, for a rather long time, felt under threat; so that one wall of my cranium is built of fear of loss, and the consciousness, in a kind of pleading gesture, has to play ball (catastrophes) against it with an endless bonk bonk; who knows, but it is exhausting, and at times I would happily exchange my head with someone else’s, but of course I could end up with something worse, like for example the voice that periodically tells Charles that he is no good at anything, then I’d rather have deathbeds, thank you, oh generous allocator of unpleasantness.
Late in the summer when I returned to Copenhagen after several months in the country everything seemed rich and beautiful and immense. I saw the world as a platter, the elements arranged / numerous and varied, so many types shapes colours, so many moods, so many possibilities. I felt good, better than I had in a long time. Everything became clear, radiant, practically gleaming. At first it was lovely, then it was as though any object that my eyes happened to fall upon, or which entered my field of vision, made unreasonable demands on my attention. I had to stare. I simply could not stop. And even if it was a familiar object (a lamp at home, a pylon somewhere, with this continuous sound of water across its straddling leg), it was as though I had never seen it before. If I looked down for a moment and then observed it again, it was (again) completely new. It was tiring. I felt like going into hibernation. But it was demanded of me, all manner of things required my attention.
During a bout of staring I realized that in order for something to be completely new all the time, it (also) had to constantly be destroyed. Death birth death birth, so to speak. The way the death of something then takes form. Visibly, in the blink of an eye. Logical madness.
And thus I ended up where I always end, on the dreary topic of death. Why can I not stop myself. I no longer want to twist everything around the subject of death as though it were the world’s go-go pole.