The World at My Back by Thomas Melle

Author:Thomas Melle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2023-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

21

The wounds healed more slowly, the scars accrued more quickly. There were more stays in clinics, more attempts to confine me, Haldol treatments, self-motivated discharges. The time drew near . . . But which time? I didn’t know that I was sick; ironically, I revised a couple of pieces about my 1999 bout for Raumforderung, my first collection of short stories, fixed a word here and a word there, thrilled by the precision I was able to attain. I churned out another two or three pieces that at times made no sense at all, and only related the crassest details, like “Kippy Game 2.” Indeed, I was then obsessed with Martin Kippenberger, also one of the undead, who I thought I’d spotted in the Morena Bar. I bought a photo book, an exhibition catalogue, and two scholarly works about him, read them in a scattered kind of way, wrote and scribbled in them, laughed myself silly, and saw my own hysterical-alcoholic activities mirrored in his works and life. Where was he now? There he was! Over there! Gone again. Oh, they were all coming to help me out, they were still there, those good, old, undead spectres.

I started drawing again, obsessively. As a young student I’d done some painting and drawing, mostly faces, sometimes urban scenes, focusing on technique first, and then on distortion. Now I wanted to extravagantly live out my talents as an all-round artist, painting wherever I could, using a copy of the taz to compose a remix of Kate Bush’s newest album Aerial (nice that she was back again from her fortress; I was so happy, many greetings!), I left the taz lying at the San Remo Upflamör, and that evening recognized the remix in a DJ set by T. Raumschmiere. The way everything was connected! Thank god they hadn’t kicked me out of Maria, the way they recently had out of Blumfeld and Mia. At Blumfeld a security guard just grabbed me from behind, lifted me up, and carried me off; I hollered, I let loose a loud yell, and Distelmeyer interrupted the concert he was giving. At Mia, in Hamburg again, the doorman threatened to break both my arms. That’s no way to do your job, guys. In my room in Kreuzberg, referred to as my “studio” —much like the psychotic in Sven Regener’s Herr Lehmann—I created a sculpture out of some clothing, an iron, paints, duvet feathers, clothes hangers, and newspapers that at some point turned out to resemble a mouse-like monster. A mouse? What was that supposed to mean? Snip, I shortened the electrical cable on the iron, tail gone, mouse dead. A Turkish neighbour across the way watched all this skeptically, and then closed her window, which was covered with aluminium foil, forever, it seemed to me.

A fit of rage soon took hold of me, for no particular reason, and I tore the sculpture to pieces. Then I carved a double version of Beethoven’s destiny motif from the Fifth Symphony into the wallpaper above my bed.

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