Four

People work. People are useful. Soon I will….

Then we went to meet Stefanie for dinner. I spoke to Marc and S, but the Susi about my day, and felt that my words were the end of a reel of film which when spoken fell tangled upon the sidewalk. Each word was a frame, and they could only make sense by spooling in the film. Back at the hospital the gang did not meet.

Instead we arrived each alone, until one other came and there would be a charge in the air, a waiting and wanting to speak which would be aborted when another could not face the need and would walk out of the kitchen. This dance continued until at last Jossi and I spoke. We spoke of the experience of thought, of the clouds of ideas, the chaos and sadness of these storms. We spoke that the need to hurt oneself might be an attempt to locate something real, to confine the suffering to one spot that it might be examined. We gave room for each other between pauses. This too was a dance.

After an hour I left to smoke and returned to the kitchen to find Nani. Here too was an intimacy as with Jossi, but the shared subject was different. Here we spoke of the essential nature of trust as a fundamental human need, of our damage in its destruction inside us both public and private. The skin of trust covers our bodies and if it is broken in one place it may become broken everywhere.

I went this morning for a brain scan. The nurse put a red rubber cap on me with several holes in it. In these holes she inserted small metal pins into my scalp. I could not help but wonder who had invented such a machine and why. From what research and historical context did it appear? The nurse instructed me to open and close my eyes at irregular intervals. I did not know what she was looking for on her big monitor on her desk, but thought I would try to perform for her.

With my eyes closed I tied to memorize all the sounds in and out of the room, and their placement in terms of distance and right, left or center. When I opened my eyes I would prepare for what came next. When then instructed to close my eyes I “played” the previous sounds and mixed them with the new sounds. These too I memorized, and when played again, I replaced sounds from outside the room with those inside. The mental space I imagined had to become much larger as the procedure continued. I hoped this was doing something nice on her screen and imagined using it for a future score of music.

When it was over I asked her what she was watching and she told me it was alpha waves. I asked her if she knew the history of this instrument, and she told me that twenty years earlier she could have told me, but she could only say that the science had come out of research in the early 20^th century. I could imagine that its origins could only be described as nefarious in the least.

Again I avoid talking about myself. Can you tell?

Franz, Marcel and I waited three long hours for the promised doctor visit. The wait was horrible. Marcel and I joked by playing fanatical Nazis waiting for our doctor with the Über Plan. Eventually he came and asked the others to leave before inquiring about my weekend. I told him about the weekend of breakdowns. When I was done he told me that I was very ill at the moment and that a day of bike rides across the city to meet for meals, galleries and rehearsals was the type of thing that people did when they were well and that I should use my free time to relax and see fewer folks. Marcel was told he would be leaving the hospital soon and Franz got his coveted exit pass for three hours a day.