“This is how I see him, although he’ll live another third of a century. This is the moment when the world first finds him out, the night I hear where his voice is headed. I’m up onstage, too, at the battered Steinway with its caramel action. I accompany him, trying to keep up, trying not to listen to that siren voice that says, Stop your fingers, crash your boat on the reef of keys, and die in peace.
Though I make no fatal fumbles, that night is not my proudest as a musician. After the concert, I’ll ask my brother again to let me go, to find an accompanist who can do him justice. And again he’ll refuse. “I already have one, Joey.”
I’m there, up onstage with him. But at the same time, I’m down in the hall, in the place I always sit at concerts: eight rows back, just inside the left aisle. I sit where I can see my own: fingers moving, where I can study my brother’s face–close enough to see everything, but far enough to survive seeing.
Stage fright ought to paralyze us. Backstage is a single bleeding ulcer. Performers who’ve spent their whole youth training for this moment now prepare to spend their old age explaining why it didn’t go as planned. The hall fills with venom and envy, families who’ve traveled hundreds of miles to see their lives’ pride reduced to runner-up. My brother alone is fearless. He has already paid. This public contest has nothing to do with music. Music means those years of harmonizing together, still in the shell of our family, before that shell broke open and burned. Jonah glides through the backstage fright, the dressing rooms full of well-bred nausea, on a cloud, as though through a dress rehearsal for a performance already canceled. Onstage, against this sea of panic, his calm electrifies. The drape of his hand on the piano’s black enamel ravishes his listeners, the essence of his sound before he even makes one.
I see him on this night of his first open triumph, from four decades on. He still has that softness around his eyes that later life will crack and line. His jaw quakes a little on Dowland’s quarter notes, but the notes do not. He drops his head toward his right shoulder as he lifts to the high C, shrinking from his entranced listeners. The face shudders, a look only I can see, from my perch behind the piano. The broken-ridged bridge of his nose, his bruised brown lips, the two bumps of bone riding his eyes: almost my own face, but keener, a year older, a shade lighter. That breakaway shade: the public record of our family’s private crime.”
“Next door, a family of four watches the denouement of Dancing with the Stars. One house to the south, an executive secretary for a semi-criminal real estate development firm arranges next fall’s cruise to Morocco. Across the double expanse of backyards, a market analyst and his pregnant lawyer wife lie in bed with their glowing tablets, playing offshore Texas hold ’em and tagging pictures from a virtual wedding. The house across the street is dark, its owners at an all-night faith-healing vigil in West Virginia. No one thinks twice about the quiet, older bohemian in the American Craftsman at 806 South Linden. The man is retired, and people take up all kinds of hobbies in retirement. They visit the birthplaces of Civil War generals. They practice the euphonium. They learn tai chi or collect Petoskey stones or photograph rock formations in the shape of human faces. But Peter Els wants only one thing before he dies: to break free of time and hear the future. He’s never wanted anything else. And late in the evening, in this perversely fine spring, wanting that seems at least as reasonable as wanting anything. I did what they say I tried to do. Guilty as charged. On the tape, the hum of deep space. Then a clear alto says: Pimpleia County Emergency Services, Dispatcher Twelve. What is the location of your emergency? There comes a sound like a ratchet wrapped in a towel. A hard clap breaks into clatter: the phone hitting the floor. After a pause, a tenor, in the upper registers of stress, says: Operator? Yes. What is the loc— We need some medical help here. The alto crescendos. What’s the nature of your problem?”
“Lights blaze from an American Craftsman home in a demure neighborhood, late on a spring evening, in the tenth year of the altered world. Shadows dance against the curtains: a man working late, as he has every night that winter, in front of shelves filled with glassware. He’s clad in mufti, protective goggles, and latex hospital gloves, and his Giacometti body hunches forward as if in prayer. A gray but still-thick Beatles mop hangs in his eyes.
He studies a book on the gear-cluttered workbench. In one hand-a single-channel pipette, raked like a dagger. From a tiny refrigerated vial, he sucks up no more colorless liquid than a hoverfly might take from a sprig of bee balm. This pellet goes into a tube no bigger than a mouse’s muzzle, a dollop so small he can’t be sure it’s really there. His gloved hands shake as he shoots the used pipette tip into the trash.
More liquids go from the beakers into the dollhouse cocktail: oligo primers to start the magic; heat-stabilized catalyzing polymerase; nucleotides that fall in line like enlisted men for a five a.m. reveille, a thousand bonds per minute. The man follows the printed recipe like an amateur cook.
The brew goes into the thermal cycler for twenty-five rounds of roller-coaster flux, swinging between near-boiling and tepid. For two hours, DNA melts and anneals, snatches up free-floating nucleotides, and doubles each time through the loop. Twenty-five doublings turn a few hundred strands into more copies than there are people on Earth.
Outside, budding trees submit to the whims of a light wind. A wave of holdout nightjars skim the air for bugs. The do-it-yourself genetic engineer removes a colony of bacteria from his incubator and sets it under the laminar flow hood. He stirs the flattened culture flask and dispenses the loosened cells into a twenty-four-well sample plate. This plate goes under a microscope, at 400x. The man puts his eye up to the lens and sees the real world.“
“They converge on the river at winter’s end as they have for eons, carpeting the wetlands. In this light, something saurian still clings to them: the oldest flying things on earth, one stutter-step away from pterodactyls. As darkness falls for real, it’s a beginner’s world again, the same evening as that day sixty million years ago when this migration began.
Half a million birds—four-fifths of all the sandhill cranes on earth—home in on this river. They trace the Central Flyway, an hourglass laid over the continent. They push up from New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico, hundreds of miles each day, with thousands more ahead before they reach their remembered nests. For a few weeks, this stretch of river shelters the miles-long flock. Then, by the start of spring, they’ll rise and head away, feeling their way up to Sas-katchewan, Alaska, or beyond.
This year’s flight has always been. Something in the birds retraces a route laid down centuries before their parents showed it to them. And each crane recalls the route still to come.
Tonight’s cranes mill again on the braided water. For another hour, their massed calls carry on the emptying air. The birds flap and fidget, edgy with migration. Some tear up frosty twigs and toss them in the air. Their jitters spill over into combat. At last the sandhills settle down into wary, stilt-legged sleep, most standing in the water, a few farther up in the stubbled fields.
A squeal of brakes, the crunch of metal on asphalt, one broken scream and then another rouse the flock. The truck arcs through the air, corkscrewing into the field. A plume shoots through the birds. They lurch off the ground, wings beating. The panicked carpet lifts, circles, and falls again. Calls that seem to come from creatures twice their size carry miles before fading.”
„In some empty hall, my brother is still singing. His voice hasn’t dampened yet. Not altogether. The rooms where he sang still hold an impression, their walls dimpled with his sound, awaiting some future phonograph capable of replaying them. My brother Jonah stands fixed, leaning against a piano. He’s just twenty. The sixties have only begun. The country still dozes in its last pretended innocence. No one has heard of Jonah Strom but our family, what’s left of it. We’ve come to Durham, North Carolina, the old music building at Duke. He has made it to the finals of a national vocal competition he’ll later deny ever having entered. Jonah stands alone, just right of center stage. My brother towers in place, listing a little, backing up into the crook of the grand piano, his only safety. He curls forward, the scroll on a reticent cello. Left hand steadies him against the piano edge, while right hand cups in front of him, holding some letter, now oddly lost. He grins at the odds against being here, breathes in, and sings. One moment, the Erl-King is hunched on my brother’s shoulder, whispering a blessed death. In the next, a trapdoor opens up in the air and my brother is elsewhere, teasing out Dowland of all things, a bit of ravishing sass for this stunned lieder crowd, who can’t grasp the web that slips over them:
Time stands still with gazing on her face, Stand still and gaze for minutes, hours, and years to her give place. All other things shall change, but she remains the same, Till heavens changed have their course and time hath lost his name.
Two stanzas, and his tune is done. Silence hangs over the hall. It drifts above the seats like a balloon across the horizon. For two downbeats, even breathing is a crime. Then there’s no surviving this surprise except by applauding it away. The noisy gratitude of hands starts time up again, sending the dart to its target and my brother on to the things that will finish him.“
„Toen hij, beneden in het dal, uit het station kwam, bleef hij enkele ogenblikken met zijn valies in de hand voor de uitgang staan, en hij keek rond. Het dal lag als een reusachtige schelp onder de blauwe hemel. Het besneeuwde stadje leek uit een sprookjesboek geknipt. De bergen die het omsloten, waren als belegd met hermelijn. De pijnbomen die tegen de hellingen optorenden, zagen eruit als grote kerstbomen, behangen met zilver en diamant, en de huisjes in de verte leken met hun laaghangend sneeuwdak en hun zwarte stijlen op kabouterhuisjes.
Het was wonderbaar. Pierre ademde diep, en de lucht was zo dun en zo ijl, dat zijn hoofd er duizelig van werd.
‘Als je de bus wilt nemen, moet je je haasten, broeder’, riep iemand.
Hij keek om en zag de autobus staan, die zijn richting uitging en waarin verscheidene reizigers met hun pakken en hun ski’s hadden plaatsgenomen. De chauffeur hing naar buiten en bleef op hem wachten.
‘Rij maar door!’ riep Pierre opgewekt. ‘Ik ga te voet.’
‘Je hebt meer moed dan ik’, zei de chauffeur, terwijl hij het raampje dichtschoof, de motor aanzette en vertrok.
Pierre keek de bus na, en glimlachte. Laat ze maar in die muffe ruimte zitten, dacht hij. Ik heb de lucht en de zon en de sneeuw. En hij keek omhoog naar het kasteel, helemaal boven op de berg, waar hij moest zijn, omvatte nog eens met één blik al de heerlijkheid daarrond en begon te gaan. Een kilometer of drie, dacht hij. Als ik het spoor van de autobus volg, kan ik niet verkeerd lopen.“
“It was during one of these playful sessions at the end of a working day, when the girls were alone with their eunuchs and their wine, that Baal heard the youngest talking about her client, the grocer, Musa. ‘That one!’ she said. ‘He’s got a bee in his bonnet about the Prophet’s wives. He’s so annoyed about them that he gets excited just by mentioning their names. He tells me that I personally am the spitting image of Ayesha herself, and she’s His Nibs’s favourite, as all are aware. So there.’
The fifty-year-old courtesan butted in. ‘Listen, those women in that harem, the men don’t talk about anything else these days. No wonder Mahound secluded them, but it’s only made things worse. People fantasize more about what they can’t see.’
Especially in this town, Baal thought; above all in our Jahilia of the licentious ways, where until Mahound arrived with his rule book, the women dressed brightly, and all the talk was of fucking and money, money and sex, and not just the talk either.
He said to the youngest whore: ‘Why don’t you pretend for him?’
‘Who?’
‘Musa. If Ayesha gives him such a thrill, why not become his private and personal Ayesha?’
‘God,’ the girls said. ‘If they heard you say that they’d boil your balls in butter.’
Zoveel als deze boom heb ik nooit beloofd: mijn schaduw is minder, mijn nutteloze insekten tieren weliger, geen konijnen nestelen aan mijn voet.
Wel is mijn schors schor en hees en ik overschreeuw mijzelf dagelijks met kinderen en bladeren.
Traag en moeizaam is mijn ringen en even moeizaam wen ik aan het snoeien van handen, de taal die mensen spreken. Uit mijn hout worden geen goden gesneden, ook zonder hen wordt mijn hout ouder.
Soms is het in mijn merg zo onophoudelijk donker als in het windstil centrum van een ziekte; je hoort er mensen als marmotten piepen diep uit de zwartste zwammen van hun menszijn.
Maar jij die uit dit hout een stem wilt snijden, snijdt een stem. Zoals mijn litteken is zing ik.
Mijn litteken is mijn sieraad.
Strandschap
Achter de duinen het overbodige landschap. Geronselde wolkenhorden. Strand dat langzaam zichzelf schept.
In ouderwetse rieten strandstoelen zitten mensen te sterven, tatoes op hun geloken oogleden.
Een enkel sigarettenrokend lijk lost op in rook.
Een beroepshond met een bijbaantje snuffelt langs de vloedlijn.
Vindt een kinkhoorn.
Uit de schelp klinkt het zachte geblaf van een dode zeehond.
Sybren Polet (Kampen, 19 juni 1924)
De Tsjechische schrijver Josef Nesvadba werd geboren op 19 juni 1926 in Praag. Hij was opgeleid tot psichiater en introduceerde de groepstherapie in Tsjechoslowakije. Hij begon met het vertalen van Engelse gedichten. Als student schreef hij ook al toneelstukken. Aan het eind van de jaren vijftig begon hij korte verhalen te schrijven die men het best omschrijven kan als satirische science fiction. In de jaren zeventig ontwikkelde hij zich van dit genre vandaan richting meer psychologische romans. Verschillende van zijn boeken werden verfilmd door Juraj Herz.
Uit: The Einstein Brain
„“The situation is extremely grave,” Professor Kozhevkin brought his report to a close. “During the lifetime of the last few generations our progress in various technical fields has liberated mankind, freed mankind from drudgery, hunger and war, and opened the way to the Universe. I can still remember the time when the Engineering Faculties of our Universities had the pick of the finest students, and when it was the heart’s desire of every young man to study some branch of technical science. Look at things today! Our young people have lost interest in what we are doing. Physics, chemistry and mathematics suddenly seem to have lost all interest for them. Every year there are fewer and fewer students applying for entrance to our Engineering Faculty in Alma-Ata. There is a danger that in a few years we shall find ourselves obliged to restrict our research work and set limits to the number of staff we can employ. This state of affairs cannot be allowed to go on. Our machines cannot work without people to control them; they cannot take care of the needs of mankind unless there is someone to run them. Energetic steps must be taken.”
We all clapped and Dr. Kozhevkin sat down.
“At our University in Toronto,” Professor Clark Smith-Jones took the floor, “things are almost worse. We have already had to shut down several of our specialised departments in certain aspects of space research, as well as the Department for Research into the Nature of Elementary Particles.“
Josef Nesvadba (19 juni 1926 – 26 april 2005)
De Japanse schrijver Osamu Dazai (eig.Shūji Tsushima) werd geboren op 19 juni 1909 in Tsugaru. Osamu Dazai behoort tot de generatie van Mishima, Kawabata en Tanizaki. Hij was echter een enfant terrible die geen aansluiting vond bij de gevestigde orde. Hij had en heeft de status van cultheld. In 1948 pleegde hij samen met zijn minnares zelfmoord. Deze en andere sensationele gegevens uit zijn leven krijgen vaak meer aandacht dan zijn werk. Zijn eerste korte verhaal dat hij ondertekende met zijn pseudoniem was Ressha dat verscheen in 1933. Na zijn zelfmoord trof men 14 verhalen aan onder de veelzeggende titel ‘Jaren van verval’.
Uit: The setting sun
“I drink out of desperation. Life is too dreary to endure. The misery, the loneliness, crampedness – they’re heartbreaking. Whenever you can hear the gloomy sighs of woe from the four walls around your, you know that there’s not a chance of happiness existing just for you. What feelings do you suppose a man has when he realizes that he will never know happiness or glory as long as he lives? Hard work. All that amounts to is food for the wild beasts of hunger. There are too many pitiful people. – Is that a pose again?” “No.” “Only love. Just like you wrote in your letters.” “Yes.” My love was extinguished. When the room became faintly light, I stared at the face of the man sleeping beside me. It was the face of a man soon to die. It was an exhausted face. The face of a victim. A precious victim. My man. My rainbow. My child. Hateful man. Unprincipled man. It seemed to me then a face of a beauty unmatched in the whole world. My breast throbbed with the sensation of resuscitated love. I kissed him as I stroke his hair. The sad, sad accomplishment of love. Mr. Uehara, his eyes still shut, took me in his arms. “I was all wrong. What do you expect of a farmer’s son?” I could never leave him. “I am happy now. Even if I were to hear the four walls all shriek in anguish, my feeling of happiness would still be at the saturation point.” Mr. Uehara laughed. “But it’s too late now. It’s dusk already.” “It’s morning!” That morning my brother Naoji committed suicide.”
To my Creator I sing Who did soothe me in my great loss; To the Merciful and Kind Who in my troubles gave me repose.
Thou with that pow’r of thine Said: Live! And with life myself I found; And shelter gave me thou And a soul impelled to the good Like a compass whose point to the North is bound.
Thou did make me descend From honorable home and respectable stock, And a homeland thou gavest me Without limit, fair and rich Though fortune and prudence it does lack.
To Virgin Mary
Mary, sweet peace, solace dear Of pained mortal ! You’re the fount Whence emanates the stream of succor, That without cease our soil fructifies.
From thy throne, from heaven high, Kindly hear my sorrowful cry! And may thy shining veil protect My voice that rises with rapid flight.
Thou art my Mother, Mary, pure; Thou’ll be the fortress of my life; Thou’ll be my guide on this angry sea. If ferociously vice pursues me, If in my pains death harasses me, Help me, and drive away my woes!
José Rizal (19 juni 1861 – 30 december 1896)
Portret door Fabian Dela Rosa, 1902
„Pitt – so nannte Philipp Sintrup sein Spiegelbild, wie er es als kleines Kind zum erstenmal erblickte und mit dem Finger berührte. Die Familie heftete den Namen an ihn, und mit einer Art von Folgerichtigkeit ward nun sein jüngerer Bruder nur noch Fox gerufen. Pitt war es gleichgültig, wie er hieß. Fox dagegen wehrte sich gegen den ihm aufgehängten Namen, ohne daß er ihn vertreiben konnte. So behauptete er denn, als er in das Alter kam, wo man moderne Weltgeschichte lernt, ein Nachkomme des großen, bekannten Fox wäre sein Pate, und seinen gewaltigen Reichtum werde er einmal erben.
Schon früh begann Fox Großes von sich zu erzählen. Er stellte sich als den Helden von selbsterfundenen Geschichten hin, die er Märchen nannte, die aber außer ihrer Unmöglichkeit nichts Märchenhaftes an sich hatten, sondern der allernächsten Umgebung entnommen waren und nur in einem Tone vorgetragen wurden, der Grausen erregen sollte. – Der grauäugige, etwas hochgeschossene Pitt hörte sie mit gelangweilten Augen an, und wenn Fox geendet, erzählte er mit gleichmäßiger Stimme: ihm sei Ähnliches begegnet, nur sei alles umgekehrt gewesen; vor seinen Feinden habe er, anstatt sie anzugreifen, sich versteckt, indem er sich bewegungslos gegen den Zaun drückte, so daß sie ihn für einen Holzpfahl hielten. Während unter seines Bruders Tritten die dicksten Brückenbalken krachten, genügte ihm ein Strohhalm, sich seinen Verfolgern über das Wasser hin zu entziehen. Unter diesen befanden sich ganz unbesehen seine nächsten Verwandten, seine eigenen Eltern. Herr Sintrup zog an ihrer Spitze, und Frau Sintrup, Pitts Mutter, sonnte sich im Eingang einer Höhle, ohne sich zu bewegen, so daß er nicht an ihr vorbei konnte, um sich ein für allemal zurückzuziehen.“
Friedrich Huch (19 juni 1873 – 12 mei 1913)
Braunschweig (Geen portret beschikbaar)
„Auf herrlichen Säulen erbaut stand die Königsburg des Sonnengottes, von blitzendem Gold und glühendem Karfunkel schimmernd; den obersten Giebel umschloss blendendes Elfenbein, gedoppelte Türen strahlten in Silberglanz, darauf in erhabener Arbeit die schönsten Wundergeschichten zu schauen waren. In diesen Palast trat Phaethon, der Sohn des Sonnengottes Helios, und verlangte den Vater zu sprechen. Doch stellte er sich nur von ferne hin, denn in der Nähe war das strahlende Licht nicht zu ertragen. Der Vater Helios, von Purpurgewand umhüllt, saß auf seinem fürstlichen Stuhle, der mit gänzenden Smaragden besetzt war; zu seiner Rechten und zu seiner Linken stand sein Gefolge geordnet, der Tag, der Monat, das Jahr, die Jahrhunderte und die Horen; der jugendliche Lenz mit seinem Blütenkranze, der Sommer mit Ährengewinden bekränzt, der Herbst mit einem Füllhorn voll Trauben, der eisige Winter mit schneeweißen Haaren. Helios, in ihrer Mitte sitzend, wurde mit seinem allschauenden Auge bald den Jüngling gewahr, der über so viele Wunder staunte. »Was ist der Grund deiner Wallfahrt«, sprach er, »was führt dich in den Palast deines göttlichen Vaters, mein Sohn?«
Gustav Schwab (19 juni 1792 – 4 november 1850)
Onafhankelijk van geboortedata:
De Duitse dichteres Karin Fellner werd geboren 1970 in München, waar zij nog steeds woont. Zij studeerde psychologie in Konstanz en literatuurwetenschappen in München. Zij vertaalt en werkt als zelfstandig lectrice. In 2005 verscheen haar bundel »avantgarde des schocks« en in 2007 »in belichteten wänden«.
verschnittenes gras: du tastest
verschnittenes gras: du tastest es ab in der brust, ein grünes gefühl, prüfst die haltbarkeit von wiesen, hunger nach gärten beauty beyond production aus rotem klee, das süße ende der halme im mund ein kühles versprechen.
Karin Fellner (München, 1970)
De Duitse dichteres Claudia Gabler werd in 1970 geboren in Lörrach. Zij bezocht de kunstnijverheidsschool in Basel en studeerde theaterwetenschappen en communicatiewetenschappen in Berlijn. Zij is werkzaam in redacties en persafdelingen. Werk van haar verscheen in tijdschriften en bloemlezingen. In 2008 verscheen haar bundel Die kleinen Raubtiere unter ihrem Pelz.
mal wieder ein Stadtplan ohne Wirklichkeitsmomente
mal wieder ein Stadtplan ohne Wirklichkeitsmomente. ich zog Kreise um den Bahnhof, an dem unser ungleichzeitiges Timing abprallte wie unser Winken. das Image wurde später eingefroren, auch die gleichförmigen Krusten der Teigtaschen auf den Stoffbezügen der Sitze. es gab seit Tagen nur aufgetaute Wraps und geschlossene Pubs. hitzebeständig behielten wir unsere Pullover an, um das Bild
vom Kennenlernen aufrechtzuerhalten, ließen wir die Sitze oben bis zum nächsten präventiv angelegten Streitgespräch. alles wirkte in diesen schlecht ausgeleuchteten Bussen und Städten wie ein Arrangement unter Freunden, die ganz zufällig die gleichen Interessen hatten. Körperkontakt war eine ganz gute Konsequenz.
Claudia Gabler (Lörrach, 1970)
De Duitse dichter Marius Hulpe werd geboren in 1982 in Soest, Westfalen. Hij woonde en studeerde in Berlijn en sinds 2006 studeert hij creatief schrijven en cultuurjournalistiek in Hildesheim. Hij is medewerker aan het literatuurtijdschrift Am Erker en redacteur bij lit.07. In 2008 verscheen zijn bundel Wiederbelebung der Lämmer.
sonnenaufgänge an neuköllner schulen
liebliche reihen am zaun, am spitzen & nicht lebensungefährlichen geländer, ihr fangt ihn tagtäglich ein, den stummen hass des asphalts, die wut in der luft, die schneidende stille im herzen der straße: ihr fangt das erste wort, den blick, den atem ein: hier wird nicht mehr viel gehen, hier wird wahrscheinlich bald gesprengt: ihr wusstet’s. das geländer? wozu. & wer muss sich schon noch da hinein . . . ja wer will verpassen, was kommt. wer hätte nicht lust, zu sehen. welche angst.
