Status Updates From The Village on the Edge of ...

There’s something I still don’t know to this day, though: is there a form of laughter that is more profoundly sad than weeping? A laughter that has fallen on its head, tumbled upside-down into an abyss? At any rate, a laughing fit is harsh and cutting, it hurts inside, it is an attack, an extravagance, an outbreak of all sorts of things – but it is no outbreak of joy.

I couldn’t avoid the laughing fits, and then, once they’d started, I couldn’t stop them. I wasn’t feeling joyful at all, nor was I making fun of anything... I was probably dividing up what I could not bear as a whole. And as such, in laughing, my sympathy was greater than if I had been crying. I was distraught, but nobody seemed to understand this.

But what remains incomprehensible to me to this day are my fits of laughter. I often felt compelled to laugh at the most inappropriate moments: when something valuable dropped to the floor and shattered, when someone fell and hurt themselves.

I think one can be just as alarmed by unexpected tenderness as by unexpected violence.

Superstition,... is poignant. There is something magical about it, it is basically poetry – the poetry of people who do not write. These are connections that transcend themselves and are dauntingly beautiful, linguistically and figuratively, when I look back on them today. But when you practise superstition, there is nothing poetic about it any more – then it is a reality just like any other.

Darkness is eerie, because it encloses you and you drown in it – your surroundings disappear, you can’t see yourself. ..In sleep, you are taken away from yourself. But we’re lucky that in sleep we don’t feel the uncertainty of the night. When you wake up, it’s over: you are yourself again, you’re like new. And if you don’t wake up, you’re dead. ...Darkness shows you what death will look like when it comes.

In response to such slip-ups, my grandmother would also sometimes say: don’t think where you shouldn’t. Where, she said, as if when thinking one went to an actual place – down an overly long street or into an unfamiliar room.

Perhaps I turned away from potential allies because I knew that what was inside my head was forbidden, because I didn’t believe myself to be capable of being normal. Because I did in fact know that it wasn’t normal to think that plants walked around at night, that life threads our breaths on to a chain and measures them, that the Earth gobbles us up. It was surreal.

When you write down your childhood, it becomes worse than it was. There is a sleight of hand at play in the child’s perspective in literature. There is admittedly a lot that is real in there, but it’s all conveyed through words arranged in sequence ...– whereas when you were living through it, everything was mixed up: one experience on top of the other, simultaneous and piled up.

As for people like us, we set our minds to work in order to escape how we are feeling. But we are no different to my mother; we simply put up different defences. For my mother, working was her natural disposition. It was mechanical, she didn’t get tired; she was both entirely absent and completely present while doing it.

If I had been born elsewhere or had different parents, I would muse every now and again, would I now be a different child? Or would I be the same child, regardless of who my parents were and where I was born? Would I always remain the same child, fused to my skin, regardless of what I wanted to be and how many plants I ate? Does everyone remain fused to themselves?

The question was always how long someone would live. I wanted to pin a measure on Time, so that it would become an object that you could see, that you could handle. But I never knew what the right unit of measurement was, so not only was I wrestling with this enigma of Time and its alternating languor and agitation, but I was also thinking up all of these absurd, fruitless calculations, which left me even more scared

People plant something, it grows, then they harvest it and eat it. I thought: in your life you eat the flour from, say, thirty bags of grain, or fifty or a hundred, the wheat feeds you until the earth gobbles you up. For me, death has always meant that the earth devours you. And I thought the Earth was so large because so many people and animals had already died.

I didn’t need to name an experience to learn how to cope with it, or at least not using abstract terms. And even if I had needed those words, it was good that I didn’t know them. There are some feelings, especially in childhood, that are as concrete as the body itself – no more and no less. They are simply there, and that is enough. It’s more than enough.