Status Updates From Atemschaukel

The camp stretches on and on, bigger and bigger, from my left temple to my right. So when I talk about what’s inside my skull I have to talk about an entire camp. I can’t protect myself by keeping silent and I can’t protect myself by talking. I exaggerate in one case just as I do in the other, but I WAS THERE doesn’t fit in either. And there’s no way of getting it right.

By now I’ve realized that what’s written on my treasures is THERE I STAY. That the camp let me go home only to create the space it needed to grow inside my head. Since I came back, my treasures no longer have a sign that says HERE I AM or one that says I WAS THERE. What’s actually written on my treasures is: THERE I’M STUCK.

Little treasures have a sign that says, Here I am.
Bigger treasures have a sign that says, Do you remember.
But the most precious treasures of all will have a sign saying, I was there.

Now I was someone else. We knew each other in a way we no longer were and never would be again. Being a stranger is hard, but being a stranger when you’re so impossibly close is unbearable

I knew they’d been more frightened than surprised when I came back—there had been relief but no joy. By staying alive I had betrayed their mourning.
Ever since I came back, everything had eyes. And all the things saw that my ownerless homesickness was not going away.

For my five years in the camp I have five things to say:
1 shovel load = 1 gram bread.
Absolute zero is that which cannot be expressed.
The emergency exchange is a visitor from the other side.
Inside the camp, the we-form is singular.
Perimeters run deep.
But all five things have one truth in common: they are fundamental, like the silence that exists between them, and not the silence in front of witnesses.

..People mistook memory for yearning. How can you tell the difference, if the same thing keeps churning in your head over and over and your world is so lost to you that you don’t even miss it.

When you haven’t heard from that other world you know as home for so long, you wonder if you should even want to go back, or what you should wish for once you’re there. In the camp, all wishing was taken away from us. We didn’t have to decide anything, nor did we want to. It’s true, we wanted to go home, but we contented ourselves with looking back, and didn’t dare yearn ahead...

Every day since I came back home, each feeling has a hunger of its own and expects me to reciprocate, but I don’t. I won’t ever let anyone cling to me again. I’ve been taught by hunger and am unreachable out of humility, not pride

The very last happiness is the onedroptoomuchhappiness. That comes when you die.

Head happiness is easier to talk about than mouth happiness.
Mouth happiness wants to be alone. It’s mute and introverted. But head happiness is gregarious and craves other people. It’s a happiness that wanders around, even if it’s limping along behind. It lasts longer than you can bear. Head happiness is fragmented and difficult to sort out, it mixes itself whatever way it wants and changes quickly...

If I’m ever to be deported again in this life, I’ll know: there are things that intend a different thing, even if you may not want that second thing at all.
What’s driving me to stay so attached. Why do I insist on being miserable at night. Why can’t I be free. Why am I forcing the camp to belong to me. Homesickness. That’s the last thing I need.

There are words that do whatever they want with me. They’re completely different from me and they think differently than what they really are. They deliberately pop into my mind so I’ll think there’s one thing that intends a different thing, even though I may not want that second thing at all. Hemingway. Heimweh. Homesickness. That’s the last thing I need.

From all around the mess hall came the clatter of tin. Every spoonful of soup is a tin kiss, I thought. And every one of us is ruled by our hunger, as though by an alien power. But no matter how well I knew that in the moment, I forgot it right away.

And at the same moment I know that the hunger angel sees me dead, but the death that he sees has not happened to me, not yet.

each and every thing—every person and every event—has its own place and its own time. This is a law of nature. It follows that each and every thing has its reason for being in the world, and also a wire that connects it to everything else that exists, the MINKOWSKI-WIRE. As I sit here, I have a Minkowski-wire running straight up from my head. When I bend, it bends, and when I move, it moves with me. So I’m not alone.

Boredom is fear’s patience. Fear doesn’t want to exaggerate. Only on occasion—and fear considers this very important—does it want to know how things stand with me.

The truth is I speak with everyone more than I want to, simply to be less alone. As if anyone could be alone in the camp. No one can be alone here, even if the camp is an empty village in the sun.

Heaven and earth make up the world. The reason the sky’s so big is because there’s a coat hanging there for every human. And the reason the earth is so big is because the world’s toes are so far away. So far away you have to stop thinking, because distances like that make you feel hollow and sick to your stomach.

The things that last never squander themselves, they need only one unchanging connection to the world. The steppe connects to the world through lurking, the moon through giving light, the steppe-dogs through fleeing, and the grass through swaying. And my connection to the world is through eating.

Then my mind would no longer be home to people, only objects. Then I could simply shove them back and forth across the place where it hurts, Objects may be small or large, and some may be too heavy, but they are finite.
If I can manage all this, my homesickness will no longer be susceptible to yearning. It will merely be hunger for home as the place where I once was full.

Of course you can become a monster if you give up crying. The only thing that keeps me from becoming a monster, assuming I haven’t turned into one already, is the sentence: I know you’ll come back.
I taught my homesickness to be dry-eyed a long time ago. Now I’d like it to become ownerless. Then it would no longer see my condition here and wouldn’t ask about my family back home.

Being pleasantly addicted didn’t mean I had made my peace with the chemicals. It only meant that, just as there were hunger words and eating words, there were also words of escape from these poisonous substances. And for me these words were both a necessity and a torture, because I believed them, and at the same time I knew why I needed them.

I don’t know why pink aging into gray is so heart-stoppingly beautiful, no longer like a mineral, but weary-sad, like people. Does homesickness have a color.

The more I wanted to go home, the more I tried not to want it so much that I’d be destroyed if they never let me. I never lost my yearning to go home, but in order to have something besides that, I told myself that even if they kept us here forever, this would still be my life.

Because in the trinity of skin, bones, and brown water, men and women lose all difference, and lose all sexual drive. Of course you go on saying HE or SHE but that’s merely a grammatical holdover. Half-starved humans are really neither masculine nor feminine but genderless, like objects.

In any case, the violence meted out by bread justice is different from hungerless violence. You cannot approach the bread court with conventional morality.

Never was I so resolutely opposed to death as in the five years in the camp. To combat death you don’t need much of a life, just one that isn’t yet finished.

The hunger angel looks for traces that can’t be erased, and erases traces that can’t be saved.