A Middle Voice

We drove with the ashes along the sea shore Storks were sitting on the rocks. There was the whole ready at the graveyard, So deep my knees got dirty, When I put the box down there. Three handfuls of earth on top of it. Bye. Then we shoveled the rest of it.  I love you. We drove without the ashes along the sea shore Storks were sitting on the rocks.

For no one and interesting for no one. Still, the voice inside of me starting a dialogue over and over again. What happened the last summer. It was only a couple of weeks, but still those weeks come back haunting me, and I cannot get rid of the shadows of the sun of the little town in Italy. I feel ashamed, and I feel sorry. But sorry for whom and for what? Did I do something? Everytime I engage in a deeper dialogue with the voice inside of me, we cannot find anything I actually should be sorry for. For hoping to find a friend in a person who was so nice to me (but then the voice in me says that he might have been nice, because, as he said about another dude who was nice to me, I was "a pretty girl")? The only thing I can be sorry for - and this feels bad, because I hate myself for this - is that I agreed to kiss him when we were drunk of the marvelous local sparkling wine the last week. It's like my mom who married the wrong person just because she felt so lonely. An...

A good question. I've been thinking a lot about it. After some time of pondering, the reason seems obvious. I had to find a way to handle all what happened within a small time frame in a small town in Italy last summer. When you look at it, on the surface, there was nothing much. Some lectures from the keynotes, some seminar sessions, breakfasts, dinners, lunch brakes and napping in our rooms in between. However, between the lectures and seminar discussions there were many moments where you could get to know the other participants and find out that you are an outsider. For getting rid of the feeling of being excluded there were even more moments for doing things that would help. And that is what happened. It was nothing much. Loneliness, anxiety, trying to forget, happiness for small things and irritation for all the meaninglessness regarding many factors in the event (I am still irritated about the whole concept: having a U.S. collegium in Italy just because Italy and Europe...

Cw: strong heteronormative presuppositions, implicit and hardly recognisable oppressive attitudes towards women in human relationships, anxiety and acquiescence. There is this person X. X was very nice to me. He asked me how my day had been when no one else seemed to recognise me. He actually learned how to pronounce my name when I felt that everyone else ignored my existence. I felt very alone at that time. I was happy to find a friend in a foreign environment like that. While I felt like a foreigner among foreigners, and I was tired of learning so much new in a foreign language and in a foreign place, there was someone who, for some reason, seemed to like to talk to me. I didn't waste too much time thinking about the reasons he was interested in what I had to say. He invited me to some really nice places and activities with a small group of people, and we shared some nice and even beautiful moments with those people in those places. At one point I saw a certain look in ...

Some phenomenologists use Edith Stein’s theory for analyzing the phenomenon called ‘eating disorder’. Others use Edmund Husserl’s or contemporary scholars’, such as Matthew Ratcliffe’s, analyses. Often these authors argue that it is the body image that changes and causes the disorder. Often, these scholars do not seem to grasp the whole picture. Of course, the perversion of one’s body image is one aspect of the disorder. But, the perversion is far from sufficient for creating a disorder. And sometimes, no perversion takes place at all, like in the case of my friend, who did not even think about his body but just unlearned how to eat. I do think sometimes that my body is bigger than it actually is, and I am always surprised when someone tells me that I am skinny or “thin,” as one of my friends said. “You are like a crain,” he said. “Thin and white and beautiful” (I was wearing a white dress. Also, later the same friend told me that my other friend likes to talk to me because I...

I can’t write poetry in English, so I’ll just write words.   I do not know whether my words are right and rightly put, but the reason(!) why this is not poetry is that the aesthetic is not primary but what is important is the content, the affirmation, the implicit secret we (always?) already share.   Poor in words, everything becomes simpler, thought shuts down, opens up new possibilities.   For feeling, perhaps?   Feeling the friendship, l’aimance, not asking, what is love? but listening, responding, being, and finding what was destined in the way.   And what is destined is that we cannot choose, where to go. Not going back to where we came from, because time has already passed, and we are lost, again.   But, please, I ask you, tolerate the messiness. Only untruth and naïvité are clear and clean, what there is, is already decided, not by you but for you.   Be the honest yourself, ...

I thought I was the one making decisions. Still I find myself in situations that I would like to describe to someone, not because I would like to tell something about myself but because I want to share the news. I am surprised of how situations develop and unfold. I find myself on a train to Vienna. I left from Venice. In between those two sentences I had to pause for a moment for remembering my point of departure. It seems that even when it is me who makes the decisions for taking a direction of action, I still can not decide the situation that follows. I feel that I am flowing in the surface and diving from a space to another. I do not know where I am going, and I do not know what to expect. - - I survived from Rome. I did not decide to leave two days earlier, but I could not help the strong feeling of having to leave. I did not decide to be treated in a certain way (good, I guess, but not for me), and I did not decide to miss my beloved one so much it ...