Anja Weber’s Diary……❤️
“Body, remember not only how much you were loved,
not only the beds on which you lay,
but also those desires which for you
plainly glowed in the eyes,
and trembled in the voice — and some
chance obstacle made them futile.
Now that all belongs to the past,
it is almost as if you had yielded
to those desires too — remember,
how they glowed, in the eyes looking at you;
how they trembled in the voice, for you, remember, body.”
Constantine P. Cavafy ( Greek poet 1863 – 1933 )
It’s the first day of autumn, and I’m still a tango-dancing doll. Clumsy and dull, blind, not feeling the ground at your feet. I don’t know who I am, who my parents are, where I come from and where I’m going. I’m completely nameless in this glass void, idle, voiceless, like a constrained, mummified doll of some nameless Egyptian mummy. What I remember is that voice that “Doll” called me. Everything else is sealed in the dark corridors of the subconscious.
I remember that the tango originated in the smoky Hogarthian spaces of Buenos Aires; in brothels; and that it was a game of passion. Full of eros… Bandoneo… Piazzola… onions, sailors… a woman and a man… black and red…
In contrast to the dark room where there is the smell of stale wine, tobacco smoke and breath full of alcohol from the man who holds me in his arms. Yes, I remember that and my body inadvertently giving away itself, holding back that primal human. I remember that forgetfulness of “what’s on the outside and what’s inside.” I remember the warmth. I remember the game on white nights. I remember the body I loved, as Kawafi would say. And now I aspire desperately for every wind of mine to be washed away, torn apart.
Now I feel the need to unravel some of my truth that I’ve been hiding even from myself. For my truth to scatter the sky, rip the clouds apart and make the rain wash away my body from all those smells: wine, the stale air of a café, a man who smells like hundreds of women. The man who touched my skin and played with my womb. Yes, I remember that because right now it’s all hurting so bad. What worries me about the multitude of these insane questions that are swarming in me; regardless of the light of the sun, on the first day of spring, it’s to exile this monstrous monster and surrender to life, not to rethink Ophelia. I’m eager for the light of the theatre, Anya’s colosseum of love, where dandelion blossoms and a chalice to sculpt to drink that dandelion wine. Wine is the sweetest and most venomous in the world. But it’s easing. In the flaming light of the Epidaurus from where the silent observe me: Eshil, Euripides, Sophocles, Aristofan, and perhaps even Pindar… Who knows?
To get away from the bandoneon music and that dance I never knew how to play properly. To slip in… at least in my mind to beloved Elada. I need to find that seed of primal life in me, which still exists because I feel it the way every woman feels it. To remember all the seasons and their beauty but mostly the beauty of Summer. To break sorrow and oblivion. Trying to cut the apple into even pieces, instead of neatly tidying all Eve’s apples on the shelf, allowing them to rot there and shrugging like leaves… like the skin on an old lady’s face. I’m afraid I’m dangerously clinging to the one where I don’t want anything. Nothingness of eros because we were deeply hurt, nothing of filos because we didn’t know the mother properly and for the father and we didn’t know who he was! The Sphinx’s riddle, there doesn’t have to be just one; solved by Oedipus. A man is eternally unhappy being always looking for something unknown… There’s more than one…riddle and more than one answer to Sphinx’s, there is uncounted question without proper answer…
(I wrote this epistle to a stranger. And the conclusion: “If there were less feelings and brains more, it would be easier”).
Photos:Laura Makabresku, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 2020.
