Ein Nachruf ewiger Bußfertigkeit

To encounter that feeling known as ghostly; to encounter a ghost, a ghost of a feeling; to feel that feeling; but this time not the memory of an acquaintance or friend or dear friend or family member or immediate dear family member, but to come suddenly face to face with the loss of a dear friend and lover. Love’s not lost. The love missing is gone, yet still missing. And here forever.

The only thing that’s changed has something to do with a sad ghost bereaving alone in silence.

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It’s the way we were most vastly different that resulted in our having something special in common, more than most: you being the dedicated working wife and mother; me – as not that as humanly possible. The intimacy in our relationship could only have happened the way it did: non-traditional, yet classic. We got to know each other quite well in that sense, and for some hundred weeks before the passion-fueled affection stole our manner of choice in how things would play out over the some hundred that would follow.

You routinely spoke fondly of your children and though, once our affair began, no words of their father left your lips, I never got an inkling that you were anything but happily devoted to your entire family and the life you had together with them.

To my mind, the details and nature of our relationship only reinforce the evidence of your capacity for this devotion, expressed more accurately as the pure innocence of love. Anyone thinking otherwise would be tragically mistaken. I hope this is not the case. I don’t like to think that there might be someone from your life who knew about us and thought you less considerate a matriarch for it, less humane a woman, or less dear a human.

The ghost I encounter is not a haunting memory of you, for your spirit doesn’t deserve such depiction. The ghost I encounter is the prudence of not knowing anyone who knew you, or the denial of imprudently seeking out someone who I could really share your memory with.

You’re the only one I can really talk to about you. Is this a fake conversation? Was our relationship real?

We talked about everything, but we never talked about us, which actually made things much easier for me at the time. I hope it did you, too.

The most obvious thing we never spoke about was the forbidden character of our communion. Care was taken to keep it a secret, but not explicitly so. For a long time after you hadn’t made contact with me – what had become the only way to assure not arousing suspicion, the sheer brilliantly implicit nature of which only you and I as initiates could comprehend – I thought you’d finally been overcome with too much guilt to write me.

Sternly promising myself every time we were to meet that I owed it to you not to give in to lust, the affection always proved too acute, so I came to experience that each meeting would become a tryst. I assumed I was the one in control of whether or not the clothes came off and am pretty sure, still, that I could have been the one to keep it chaste, even after the love boat had sailed.

I do suppose, now, you felt at least as conflicted as I did, though wouldn’t hold it against you if that discord had been all my own.

In fact, our last time together, I wondered – and wondered later, and still wonder – if I infected you unconsciously with my own sense of shame. My familiars might say this is burdening myself unnecessarily; yours more likely the opposite: that I should carry it all the more. Yet, I doubt there is anyone that knows about us – each and every one of them a ghost.

To say that I miss you would be a great disservice to those who miss you most: your every day, not your every week. I cannot allow myself to say I miss you. I do insist that I miss something, though. Not the sex, intensely forbidden, or the tenderness, exceptionally sweet. Not like the missing you between the last time we were together and more recently, when I was reminded in as appropriately inappropriate a fashion that I would have to miss you finally and forever and for sure.

I was bound to discover eventually, as we live in an age in which our curiosity can be satisfied theoretically with technology, even if it only feeds back to the same. I am reminded of our having been born within a few months many miles apart, and think about how if this were twenty years ago, I never would have come upon the dreadful news. I am torn in spite of my understanding that you could in no way share this one last part of your life with me.

This is the most cruel aspect of the ghostly dilemma.

Now, of course, I wonder how long your illness was, what it was, and what caused it. I imagine your having been strong throughout, for the family. I grieve sincerely for their suffering and for your having so suffered.

I regret that our final moments together were laden with guilt on my part, or that you might’ve thought less of me because you thought I thought less of you. Or that you might’ve thought less of yourself all on your own.

I lament your not being able to see your younger two through to where you saw your oldest, the story of which you chronicled in that letter to me. I told you what accomplished storytelling it was, but I never told you that it made me cry. At that time it was a simple, yet profound parallel of periods, the tale of two moments between a mother and son; now its bearing is too much to embrace when I think that your youngest will not experience the same full-circle poignancy.

I bemoan that I’d swear to my death this is fiction. I wish I could openly extol you in name.

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The Passing of Brunnen 183 – Berlin 2013

RIP VAN ROLIHLAHLA

I love Rolihlahla Mandela.

What I don’t care for is one particular sub-textual narrative surrounding his passing, which provides the state & its media and their half-witted water-schleppers the opportunity to praise from onhigh (an office tower on Eighth Avenue, for example*) the non-violent approach as transcendent-est beyond all things material and worthy of the greatest respect.

It is to remind the little people that the most admirable way to resist is to sit in prison for 27 years; to wait until we finally get around to saying it’s okay for you to leave. And now we’ll describe the nature of your struggle, and we’ll define your legacy.

That’s not even really promoting non-violence as much as it is advertising non-resistance in the face of those selling the story at any given time in history.

For, the same cultural organs that locked him up – and relentlessly hounded him as a terrorist before & after his release – send their prattling heads to heap exalted boilerplate upon his corpus at the same time they continue to employ violence & oppression in the name of fabricated premises and with a pre-emptive vengeance on a monstrous scale, which begins & ends with the bottom line.

Let alone its contempt for those currently sitting confined for their twenty-seventh year, let alone the cruel indifference toward those suffering right now under the fate of the state & her cronies’ mis-doings, to swallow without a stink such self-important crocodile eulogizing from any of the free-or-other-world leaders is more disrespectful to Nelson Mandela than otherwise humanly possible.

* the perch from which they successfully sold the war he openly resisted,
   the perch from which they struggle $truggle already today for Hillary ’16

Germane Nooze

Adding new meaning to “taking a number two”:

rel·e·vance noun
1 relation to the matter at hand
2 the ability to retrieve material that satisfies needs of the user

rel·e·vant adjective
1 having significant, demonstrable bearing on the matter at hand
2 proportional, relative

In both cases, the second definition imposes itself upon the user in spite of its being impertinent. When it comes to distributors of information, relevancy is achieved in the same way that a drug store or coffee shop chain establishes itself: by rendering a theretofore relevant sole-proprietor insolvent; even in cases in which customer loyalty is predominant, the chain has the ability to take a loss while waiting out the eventual demographic turnover. This is why gentrification rarely benefits local small business: Big money rakes in the relevancy until there’s no more left.

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If dearth of reader comments is any indication, AriannaOnLine is not doing so well in their German venture. Yes, I still can’t help the occasional click over to the Huffington Post, whose regional default, landing me on her Hinterland partner-page, indicates her standard modus operandi: sensationalism.

This is how they plan to wait out a German media implosion:

They’ll huff, and they’ll puff, and they’ll post das Haus in!
OH, THE GERMAINITY!!11 Given enough time, the crickets will become clickets. Will there be enough time? Stay tuned.

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Maybe the struggle for relevancy 2.0 is folly, or maybe it’s the actual be all, end all of it all. After all, Huffington Post owes its very existence to content from people so desperate to be relevant that they’ll continue to provide free labor to the burgeoning tumescence of its bottom-line. And now that it’s so hugely relevant, even billionaires use the format to stay ahead of the street-cred curve, I assume, aware of the shrinking relevance of actual street-cred – already questionable as a concept. Now the Beta meta-word from the Worldwide Street undertakes to rule the relevancy roost.

See how no one better boosts his bonafides than emerging media mogul Pierre Omidyar, masking a puff promo of his own venture in a discussion about First Amendment press freedom.

While he’s at that, one of his employees is making the rounds promising shock and awe. “Remember me?” The Berliner Zeitung picked up this interview with Glenn Greenwald for one reason only: Relevance.

Do you think I’m drawing a dubious distinction between Relevancy I & II?

As dichotomies go, it’s a relevant one (meaning number one), at least relatively (implying meaning number two). By comparison, take the alleged dichotomy of Left vs. Right and Public vs. Private:

The ostensible Left would have you believe that the ostensible Right is out to destroy government; and the ostensible Right would have you believe that the ostensible Left is out to establish State ownership of all private property. What neither will tell you is that they need both Big Government and Big Corporate to maintain the ostensible tendencies, and they’re all doing just fine, thank you very much.

Yet so many people think there is a relevant dichotomy when all there really is is a number two: “the ability to retrieve [shit] that satisfies the [biases] of the user”.

So I think it is important to be able to distinguish the difference between relevance and relevance. It’s important to be able to tell which is more relevant to the seekers of relevance.

Pierre Omidyar’s sitting atop the pyramid that contained PayPal when they cut off Wikileaks is relevant whether it was due to government pressure or not. His huff-post reeks of the “willingness to have a conversation” and how it is readily conflated with wanting to do something, especially as it relates to a latent desperation to elevate somebody of influence to the status of hero and declare scepticism thereof irrelevant.

Regarding his venture with Glenn Greenwald, what matters to me, still today, is the latter’s misleading criticism of the method Private Manning used to leak what he’d discovered, which, rather than lend credence to Greenwald’s motivation in slow-leaking information given to him by Edward Snowden, I believe calls into question his credibility when he touts an informed public via a free press.

I don’t think you have an informed public while buying into the National Security narrative, whether you’re covering your ass or not. Greenwald has said he wants to keep the leaks relevant, not himself. I say that in the meantime the leaks have become mired in irrelevance (meaning number one) while their purveyors continue to jockey to be relevant (meaning number two).

Most relevant reading:
– series conclusion of the BS in the Snowden Saga