#w g sebald

I’ve been in Philadelphia for a couple of months.

I have a few weeks left here.

I didn’t know anything about this city before, except for Mumia Abu-Jamal, AIDS, Thomas Jefferson, and maybe one or two things about the underground railroad.

Nobody ever knows what city I live in anymore and neither do I.

This is a gracious place in a lot of ways, gracious in the normal sense and also gracious to show its scars, the way New York hates to show its scars.   Currents of liberty and affliction are clear everywhere, which is so restful for me. 

There’s this old synagogue with antique and vintage vendors inside it, and one of the vendors, a corpulent man in high belted slacks, even listens to Jewish radio, I remember the day Netenyahu said that absurd thing about the UN being able to declare the world flat, and I had better not get into Israel-Palestine right now, I am trying to kill this blog, and no customers are ever in there, so when you go in you feel as you fondle the beautiful old things that you are touching a dying world whose sparkle is both too dear and too rarefied to circulate the way it might among for example those of us who hide our cracked hearts and minds in things that are beautiful because they are old and in things that are old enough to lend us a beauty that is old enough not to hurt or kill too much, like where are all the dreamy kids, they are never in that synagogue called antiques paradise or something like that, it has always been empty when I’ve been in there, and everything is too expensive, it’s like these strange old birds just want to stay in there surrounded by glittering flotsam and not sell it to anyone, just stew in a vault of every kind of past.

I wanted that passage to end happily but it put its head down toward desertion, like the mark of some forgotten architectural masterpiece solidifying the transit of an elegaic thought, as Sebald would do it, but not as good as he.

It’s cool how this old black church and the synagogues and the queer places, the places where the freethinkers and visionaries and rebels used to congregate, are all sort of close by here.

Philadelphia was the perfect place to get into alchemical, revolutionary, and abolitionist ideas, and it’s also been a place for me to do a weird kind of secret acupressure on my mom’s psyche.

She went to medical school here, and I like to think about her before the fall.

Here she is winning the chemistry prize at Jefferson Medical College.

Here she is more recently.  I am scared to really look at this picture just like I’m scared to really look at her and talk to her right now.  I am going to post it here and not look too hard.

I am only looking out the corner of my eye, as though looking at the sun, and I think she is gorgeous, and I feel scared.

I think about the beautiful ways that people can touch each other with their minds.  I think about the promise that we will get used to, get good at talking to each other in different ways from the old ways, I want to be braver, I think about the strange collapse of the difference between inside and outside, narcissism and generosity, that is part of what bewilders and stuns us into paralysis and action, mass delusion and stunning conviction.

Anyway, I can’t look my mom in the face and when I see her I usually yell at her and then burst into tears.

I went to New York to escape into art, and I got to, but it never made me happy.  I think I get too confused about the difference between what I love and what I hate when I’m there.  Like TELEPHONE was great, in infinite ways, but what it still boils down to is my mom standing outside the Cherry Lane in the cold during tech week waiting for me to withdraw $300 for her, never being able to sleep at night, never being able to decide if I felt better flat broke so I had nothing to give her or prestigious and earning so I’d be able to feel just sad enough about anything nice it felt like just another shitty gig to provide me the cash so my mom could give it all to Nigerian scammers and I could appease some bougey morailty in myself, bougey and half murderous.

It’s magical to finish Mercury in a city where my mom was a promising and ambitious young woman and not yet an operatic tragedy.  It’s funny, but when I get whiffs of the past here I feel like I’m doing a gentle accupressure on her soul, letting it know I love her even though at this point in my life I can’t look her in the face.

BTWThe Philadelphian Goldis an allegorical, alchemical text from 1697, from a magazine published by the son-in-law of one “Jane Lead” and that boldface is a link for the curious.

Long live this blog.  It is dead.

Love

Ariana

fairest:

““I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead.””

— W.G. Sebald, from Austerlitz