This is the Anthem.
This is the Anthem.
This is the Anthem.

What would Pete Steele say.
He's in that line with Duerer and HBG.
I looked him up and realized I saw one of his last concerts: I was pregnant. He was so fucked up. So drunk he couldnt find the mic. I just saw a clip of him where he talks about music being his job - and how much he respects the working class, how they get up in the morning and take pride in their work.
This is all I ever cared about - or at least - related to - as much as I could see my own version of life, I could see - into life - in my own way - with a strength I never doubted was my own - like a sword - you weild - that is part of you - you will be buried with it. So when working class people with no background in art, with no education, with no primer, or push or whisper - about whatever the fuck they should look at - what they should like - stood - and stared - and stopped - and gasped - and proclaimed with joy - WOW - at what they saw - there was no analysis - no - always a gut reaction. Without a gut reaction any anaylsis will not be good and a gut reaction - its a connection - not a disconnection. They did this - the postman - and my grandpa - who became a greeting card salesman after being an egg salesman and a camera sales - supporting a family of 6 at age 12 when his father died - he dropped out of 8th grade and had to start somewhere - all this out of their normal routine - regular life - only then had I felt that I had done it - I achieved - what `I was meant to achieve - which is to connect two powerful things, what lies - under the surface - unseen - unwritten - the invisible - under the earth, behind the skin, behind, what's behind, me...always in an intuitive with my hand - the hand I was born with.
The language is intuitive
Even architects, to make anything must first draw, without thinking, even if it's the largest comission on earth.
So the postman gets it - where a super collector might just - get nervous.They can become conflicted sometimes. They see great work, but are ego driven and are obssessed with status and rumor - and do you really want those people at your table? Some artists do. Like Geroge Condo - he just goes to parties, celebrity parties, then acts naive, and says he had never heard of Kanye West. Also Matthew Barnet, former fashion model. That will do it. That's really what he and Bjork had in common. We always had this sort of spar - over projects - he wanted to get certain high profile models involved, or celebrities, in his pieces - and I would say: why. How do you know they will fit the role. He just wanted the visiblity they brought, and I rejected that. But that is in some ways, with some, not all, all they brought. Because models, and model types, are projection screens, they are in fact, empty on the inside, that's their job. To be so neutral and passive, so as to form and conform to the shape desired - they are only there as hat stands, however the designer has cleaved their vision to hang fancy hats.
My friend Paul saw a work I SAVED from Sotheby's (post mortem great collector - slash and burn) from my first ever solo with Marianne Boesky - let that be known since Sotheby's called around 7 times questioning that fact - it was idiotic - severely - please fire all of them because they re-write facts with glib PR material pulled out of their stressed over educated clueless assess - I had to deal with Gabe Catone - the art advisor - telling me in confidence that "Marianne only dropped you from her gallery because Rachel Feinstein said she refused to show there if you were there" Rachel - the great Copycat - talentless model wife of a famous blah blah painter (sorry John you are a good painter but you absolutely cannot draw - it is not your passion) - no offense to John or Gagosian - I call this out because none of these people can take it all for free simply out of jealousy - but that was the driving currency in their little hearts...You can see how stupid it is at the start - and why - intuition is the real substance that binds truth together - into a force that sits there beofore on a wall, in a space, like a great peak. Paul Brainard, he saw that drawing - and he knows my career - and he said - wow - Jeanne (Greenbeg) bought from that show? I'm suprised it wasnt too - you know - edgy for her. Jeanne is smart, and has impeccable taste. Sometimes, taste, for the postman and the not good but great collector - is absolutely one and the same - becaise in real art - so it is good art - appreciating it is a very simply the recognition of truth. It gives back to the viewer, click - the viewer sees it - in it - and in a moment can see it in no other way. And that's it. THAT'S ALL. So is art then, just the stripping away of all the babble to get to the unadulterated light? Oh it's hard to be here and listen to Pete Steele rising back up out of my being ---- I forgot - it's such a strange feeling to forget a core part of your own self as if he were a friend, like...Duerer. Montaigne. Rabelais. But they did not sing in my time like Pete did. And suddenly I feel:

NOSTALGIC
A concept I always hated. Like hippies. Will always. And the modern new age Bouge "Boho" Yoga version is horrid.
There a lot of them these days. Crossed with corporate interest. What am I doing here. Wow did my parents not give a flying fuck about any part of my life. I was right when I was 15. And I tried to make that fact wrong for the rest of my adult life...until now - when I see it all clearly again. As if I am 15. Hello 15.Youa re with me forever.

Wake up
It's Christmas morn
Those loved. Have long since gone
Six feet
Beneath me sleep
Black lights
Hang from the tree
Accents
Of dead holly
Red water
Red water
Red water chase them away

I cant
lose
you

Saw a clip of PS talking about how he better look good on stage - in shape - not fat and flabby with "tits hanging out" but he could hardly perform - and the band carried on like absolutely nothing was wrong, nothing happening. He died not soon after of sepsis. No idea how. He was 49. And he drifted away - into nothing....but had been so important to my studio and was from Brooklyn. Had been a trash guy. Became a rock star. Was so fucking talented. And people come to my studio...and want early works. I made it that far? Where I could die of sepsis - or am I dead already of sepsis - the infiltration of a dowbward arc - superimposed and perceived - like a net to catch me - stop me - arrest me - burn me - pre-maturely. Confidence is key. I had no idea Type O Negative was so close in friendship to Pantera and Phil, died before Pete Steele, also pre-mature. He became fat and fucked up from drugs. I loved Pantera.
I always joked to my friends (Matt Barney, Ryle, their whole crew, Vinny Castiglia, what other sundry metalheads) that we'd end up in an old folks home - listening to Pantera - so - are we there already? When I saw Matt in Vienna - the ONE fucking time he extended himself publicly in my direction - having taken so much - or maybe - that's someone's self centred concept of "exchange" - lopsided - he spoke in detail about the Beyler foundation - how all his works will be left there and custoded - that uber powerful collector and he having arranged this - some years ago - high maintenance indeed - and I'm sitting in this thermal bath - Oberlaa - thinking only of the water and me, my body, the piece I will do - what I cannot plan, cannot expect and I'm awed at the level of support he has...what it takes to keep alive - Total Excellence - something I have - but I'm a shadow in the room - cutting corners - confused as to what support really means, never having really had it - hardly with any sort of lense that could recognize it - it seemed - the only alternative was to be a viscious self interested creature with no talent at all....
But this is what I wanted to say

Hey Bacchus
She hates me
Hey Bacchus.....
She hates me
She said
Well burn
Forever
Well burn
Together

I listen to this, and feel he is so alive. It sucks. I'm struggling with bizarre weight gain, lack of motivtion and a split soul. So much cruelty to contend with in truth and clarity at a later age...If you die young, you never have to face these things, you are just terrified - and man up - then die - never knowing?

The horror: of insecurity - and wisdom. These two things put together create some greek condition not but not yet described by the ancients - homer, socrates, euripides, aristotle, thyuddices, didordorus scisculus, and plato - Sothebys rhymes with some of these, and this is the horror I face - at the cruel hands of petty, mean jealous, hysterical and mistaken - me - for a bourgeois object of inheritance - I cannot express how cruel it is to warp my identity based on the most brute and shallow prejudices- me for being female - me - for being beautiful - me for being the spawn of an assumption that in truth was a monster - this turns all these presumptions - the monied assumptions - into horrific stabbing and mutilating swords...trashing my identity - devaluing my work - my life-energy - i am dissolved in a cloak of self doubt and despair - that my being has been broken by more and more hands who never cared - but who pretended - and who assumed - i would be the objecto of a legacy - and lineage - one that in truth never existed and was only ever abusve. This is heart breaking at a soul level - I look and my work and it seems almost foreign to me - as if i - my exisstence had no import - no worth- not even substance - not even - the beauty of something ephermeral - it makes me feel like a lie - when I knowI am in fact - the strongest of truths.

and here in this place where i faced death - a kind of elysium - also fleeting - of a different life - once where i gaze form the outside - my identity shattered - no one to hold and to love me to prop me up for what i really am - waht i carry wherever i go - i cannot climb that ladder - that power - i cannot bind to the big money in any way that i understand - as iwas so exploited and abused by all those around me - those who pretended - in spurts to be the ones who cared. My heart broken, cannot create - the beauty that I am. I feel consumed by the gaping jaws of misogyny - it was all posturing - all fake - that someone would fixate on destroying me, again and again and again, at a certain point - a person must lose their will to live, and they become like an empty box, silent, their voice - lost - out of any dilogue - in desperate need of exchange - with the truths that sustained them. Voices lost - scattered, shattered - and my own, i cannot find my bearings, my coordinates, a ship in the fog - where when you call out - you hear nothing - the fog has no dimension and consumes you like a sponge. Isolation. It's a killer. A place where you cannot thrive, or create. Impossible space. I think I am describing a landscape from a Beksinski, or Soutine, they are similar, but I am in it. Lost.

The horror of Hamas. Day one, I cannot express in words - my understanding.
For the record- my former French dealer unleashed her deepest rage - on me - for calling her - justifiably - an anti-semite. I have zero tolerance for self hating Jews. Who betray their own - and me - for not conforming to whatever bizarre image she had built - based - on my looks? And non Jewish parentage (father's side.) Zero, zero tolerance. "I could never take you to Dubai." That rang continuously in my head. That this difficult person, always cutting a little extra off, here and there, whining about - fair and complex production costs - but over paying on everything unnecessary (stupidity) - screeching - etc. psycho gallerist behavior - basic - was called out for exactly what she is.
I have zero regrets. It is just interesting to see - how blindly others follow - and the Jewishness of my work - ignored - never spoken of - for - fear - of reprisal - no seat at the table for a Jew, eh?
Happy Pesach to all. My daughter is a teenager. I think of the hostages. I know what psychotic people are like. I know what Hitler is like. I grew up with it, was raised by it, and was hated for who I am.
Never mess with me on this point. Look at what happens now, thanks to all those self-hating Jews trying to ingratiate themselves into what they perceive to be a "more desirable" non Jewish world. Go eat with the scum of Russia, and the funders of Hamas and Hezbollah. None of them have any respect for you. What you sell is a parking spot for their money. Might as well be watches. So you waste your breath denying your birth for a momentary glance, while their real energy is put into huge, nefarious projections, aims and goals, that would anyways destroy you.

It's not a good investment.

I just returned from the most fucked up surprise.
Baba Jaga.
My Dinner with Andre. Her name is Dorota. My name is Chloe. My Dinner with Dorota.
Poland is – deep - never shy. Never superficial. If anything - afraid of saying the wrong thing - lest it be superficial. It can be jealous, petty. But never superficial. It wants to win. Really win. No matter how much it has lost. No matter what has been said - if ill seen, ill said, there may be anger, a bit supressed. Some jealousy then. OK. Jealousy that has deepr machinations.
The blood in the ground - boils back up. In rage - in eyes. Questioning, always asking, eyes that ask. Besseching eyes - rather - not - rather penetrating and wanting to know.
I'm about to digress: forgive me. Forgive me. I did not know how hurt. How trapped. How scared. What courage it took for you to step through my door. My idiot of a former assistant had absolutely no right to be there in our presence. None, none, whatsoever. So I swear - I swear onthe blood in my veins - that something so sacred to me - will never be shown, revealed, said, in the presence of someone so unfuckingworthy.
How carefully you prepared.
You had to get stoned.
How you wanted me.
This thing i saw - suddenly - you saw me as such a prize - so special - so outside - your every dream...
when all the while - I saw - in the extreme - as something.....I recognized - while you - were in awe. This is the terrible mistake. The terrible gap. The terrible leap you had to take, to cross the threshhold. How you prepared. And I did not honor: this fragility. Because I didnt see it. Because there is so much of it in myself. And so it is true - that I saw you in me - that we are the same - but not for you. FOr you I was a prize. And you sandwiched it all in the AM as if this was all the space and time you had to hold your breath to be in that magic space - of mermaids and fishes.
If only I was the dumb manipulative kind. A real gold digger. Aren't we both lambs, in our terrible shyness. Only that raw desire cut through - it shot through me like fire - your gaze suddenly changed - right into me - from one thing - to the other - and I ran. I ran like you, like a baby lamb. So that's all we were doing all that time, trading off - being each other. You, a scoundrel, me, The Other. The Sea Creature, The Alien. Are you really fit for a golem? No, it's something effervescent, and then hot. A state change - so fast - once you were in a door opened and I did not expect it - my walls so thick and guarded - all steel and iron - what welding torth does it take to cut through the doors and to my heart - you had it - and I ran.
Poland. Nothing is taken for granted. Not money, not stories. Not food. Go further east and you will not waste the flesh - of that apple. Everything is eaten. Every last bit on that core.
Baba Jaga aka Dorota. She said: someone's female line is cursed. This pronouncement of a curse. Who? What? Why? Where did it come from?
My line of "strong women" are in fact a bunch of paraplegics wrecked by men. Or themselves. Broken and stupid, like cogs in some dumb machine. Fueled by self hatred - from what. Blockades to good fortune, connection: real relationships. The glue that creates strong bonds - that builds forward - that is fruitful - that creates. They are dark empty houses - howling wind tunnels - they have woken up everyday to their Misery as their bed companion and shrieking lonliness as childish tantrums and bane. What role models. Role-models. The mannequins that surround me. The crowd of ghosts in the closet. Prohibiting joy - at every level - no strong hands - nothing to lift me - see me - laugh with me - no strenth. Just - a cracked, fanged, drain, to suck the life blood from my very heart.
And then me. All of a sudden - the focus turmed totally to: me. What...?I was confronted by my good husband. The husband I am worthy of. She said "this is possible for you now". Having spent a lifetime avoiding weddings, crying, feeling so existentially lost and uncomfortable at the prospect of such a thing. And I walked into this room a stranger! I was late! I came in silently! Muttered a polite:Dzien dobry. How could she touch this nerve? This horrific undeserving. This seismic, gaping hole that makes everything on the surface - fragile.
I faced him. A woman played him. Unbelievable - to feel and see this - in front of me. Some feeling I have never felt before. Can I stay there lingering in that space - forever? I woke up sweating last night - back to my usual tryst - with anxiety - soaking wet. I took all my clothes off. Worried, worried, worried, about things some people never fucking think about. Ever.
This ended the 7 hour session of all of it - I - a stranger. But, I also had to hold hands with an actual dude who she said raped my mother. This was strange. As a young child - not knowing what rape was - but I suppose - I must have - this moment concerns me to this day - I asked my mother how it was possible that she could grow up and not be raped. Jesus any sane mother would have hit the roof at this question. She acted like I was asking about the weather.
So, to this dude, who in this situation - and say - thank you for creating me - even in violence. Even in war. I had trouble doing this. I held his hands so tight like maybe he would hold me up, I was terrified, just, unable to bear his stare and allow anything to transmit - because I could not actually forgive that. Uneasy is not the word. Terror - yes - terror. How do you thank someone for creating you in violence. I suppose I must not feel defined by that violence. But I do...My eyes wandered around the funny room with the crack in the paint - one crack. I imagined blood seeping out, a wound in the wall. With this group circling around - orbiting - like the drunks in that constellation by Bela Tar - all one organism - of Time -a time creature - shaped a flattened and curved by violence. One terrible proclamation was made, it rang so unbelievably true: "success is a product of shame." My worst suspicion was actually bleated out in a clear sentence - by this stranger I call Baba Jaga but her name is Dorota - how witchy and powerful she was. And my "mother" just couldn’t and wouldn’t get over the rape - I stood by her - she clung to me - clung - to my haunches - hanging on me - and I supported her… I support you. I support YOU. Creepy. How could I want to spend time with my biological father - who was a rapist - I thought only of how unsafe this is - the concept here of forgiveness - fundamentally - dangerous - forgive what? it is not a person; it is not a father- it is a force - a creature - a thing - that infects time - time is bent by this thing. I gripped his hands - unconsciously - as if I would fall - so scared - knowing he was only playing a role - but maybe the real him would save me from the role him - because his gaze was hard - it was so hard to look into his eyes. They were like a wall - the wall the role built. If you were to see into each other - you would fall. Oof to hug him, I did, he tried, but I almost choked. It was so hard. To run, to run! I ran, I ran. I run, I run. I run; I am so afraid of what could happen. When do you stop running. For my daughter, she should not run. Oh, but she needs someone there - both the role - and the real one. And this thing I wrote - a dialogue (song) between myself and a courting devil came to me - and does:
"see how the outer sun: hungers for the inner one."
I have much work to do. My terrible suspicion - shame makes success is so true - it's like - a form of flight - to touch the stars - to know they are there for you more than piece of bloody pulp fronting as a guardian on the ground. In the back of my father’s car - trapped - at night - begging some god to save me. Praying to the sky. It's all I could see in the frame of the window a child lying back there, looking up - the black night, and the stars. I begged. I remember, begging in my mind so hard- to make something happen - that would free me.

I look at exhibitions now, and shows in galleries, and most seem terribly weak. Like, decor at some store. A kind if piddling, fading, bloodless group of crumbs. "Will this work?" I cannot tell you how much it hurt me that my own ally and lifelong friend trashed a work at auction - in a rage - against what I don't know - against - a collapsing world - what hung with Beuys, what hung with Cecily Brown and Laura Owens. Oblivious to the importance and the power, now as then. Unaware of what a drawing even means. Scared, just scared - and all of this hysteria started - because I called a dealer - no longer mine - an anti-semite. I confided this fact, and paid for it - in spades. I could have omitted that information. I could have lied. I could have made a bunch of shit up. But then again, the importance of showing in places like the Albertina, the Leopold museum, is unseen. With Sara Lucas, Louside Burgeois my "show buddy" - just a fixation on this dealer. Hysteria. It makes dealers to be like a disease. And really genuinely disgusts me. What in the actua; fuck are you doing for me - as opposed to doing TO me? Indifference, incoherence, lack of communication, lack of effort, lack of understanding. I am sick and tired, of being the punching bag of angry, jealous, mediocre forces who try for a lifetime to be relevant - like an artist. I cannot tolerate jealousy in any form. But there it is - everywhere. "You were born to suffer." Who in the fuck says that to a person, to a child, the one with the bright light, the one with the talent. Not a word of encouragement. And so you grow, and see, more of same, vultures, to pick at you, eat and dine with you, and offer, no words, ever, of encouragement. Your individuality - is secondary - to their fear.

When I was in graduate school I imagined 12 potential husbands. Later I read "Ill Seen Ill Said" by Beckett. I thought it uncanny that the little peeks - sharp and clear - a lace cuff - way to a home made of stone - I realized later - was it a neolithic tomb? They all have a sea view - like hers - on the high rocky mounts - open to the stars, at the atlantic edge - she too had 12 - or 8? Suitors. As many as there are planets - she is the moon. I was thrilled - to understand this. Beckett never says it - describes it. Those tombs - always cast in moonlight. I have a good photo of myself - naked by a fire - the night was full of a gigantic, bloated sphere - unbelievably huge, as it rose - I took off all my clothes - and with to friends - I got photographed by our favorite burial mound - the one we call "The King". The one I always return to. I thought - if Heidegger expanded - there would be a condition of being-with. And if that is true - how would he describe that condition. Being-With. Because, his book is Being * And * Time. Sein UND Zeit. Does he ever really address - the And. The And as a stte of being, and a state of Time. In Beckett - it is All Time. The return - of the king. A perpetual motion, in all 12 of those men - in the distance - they approach - then recede - every night she goes, and sees, and waits, for something that never arrives. Like the ghost-woman in Sinéad's song: for Jackie. So she roams the sand - waiting - for her Jackie O. O, Of Some Father. O, aphostraphe. And when Sinéad died I cried in the shower as I sang the entire length of the Lion and the Cobra blasting it so loud, the entire album inscribed in my heart it gave me so much strength as a lost and lonely teenager, alone. The suitors never step to the shore. They belong the the boundary of the ocean and not the land.

My train to Warsaw was stopped by a suicide, in the pitch black of night. Really dark. I was amazed they announced they had hit a person. A chatty ticket lady gave us cookies, said it had been a woman. It was so strange to be sitting in the thing that had killed her. Technically, we had all killed her, together. There is never a chance, I was told, for a train to stop. And the driver and crew must get out to see what they hit. Confirm, and then bring in the whatever team who must investigate. We had to jump to a train on paralell tracks. So spooky as I'm writing about Szaposzcznikow and Beksinski - just sent this strange photo image Beksinski made of a woman lying on reailroad tracks with her mouth open. And I have this odd book published of drawings made by a railway worker who maintained the tracks near Madanjek. People would jump and one drawing, which stays in my mind, is what of a hand. A severed hand. He drew on scraps of newspaper and anything he could find - to bear witness, to the truth. And somehow they were preserved and published into this obscure thing that I found, and own.

I am struggling now - under pressure - to publish a serious book with zero backers - at the moment - it feels very wrong as so many people are asking for a new damn book. And those who don't understand the profit the energy and the public desire - bury their heads in their myopia. This is not a space for bitching, but that is what is happening today. I won't lie that lack of visibility and jealousy and a difficult life, make their mark on one's confidence - even when you know, that you were bron to create. So, the Golem, is and will always be, a good friend of mine.

I'll tell you what felled me. Not that I did the impossible, not that I became an epidemologist, not that I saved something marked for death with no known means to lure it back - in the middle of growth, and development - when it should be brimming with life and joy - all this aside - I will say - that in these horrible years - which I did not understand - I did not feel anything. It was only in the aftermath. Somehow I was affected - somehow - the impression it made went so deep - that it was the reflection - in this awful mirror - not of me - but of others - that no person ever asked: are you OK. No one. Not a soul. Defintely no family. But the process was ongoing. The recovery - long. Careful. Delicate. Unchartered terrain. Against the warnings and the terror of the words of the best doctors who understood the brain and this thing best - I will never say them. I will never tell them. I will only carry them. Because they still resound in the possibility of the future and no one should ever, ever have to hear such things. Like walking on glass, so carefully, so gingerly. with the shame and fear and the pressure of the expectation to rejoin the living - as if - nothing had ever happened. I wont forget that swim coach who literally threw her into the deep end of a swimming pool because she had heard she had swum in the Netherlands. These were traumatic things. A little girl who had rode alongside trucks to school who now was winded after pedalling for 10 minutes. It. Took. Years. As if I could have written this - in this field in inexplicable terror and indifference. In the words of my exceptionally gifted friend, who has won so many emmy awards; had it been some other mother - she'd be dead. He said that recently. And only recently could I accept - that he was right. I'm not scared of that, I'm not in awe. I'm only in awe - at the indifference and blidness of a world who could not utter these three magic thins: Are. You. Okay. I had to take her to Venice. I had to take her to openings. She was in a state of shock, and recovery - both - as we walked the canals - she walked alone. The thing that Beowulf had the courage to dive into - only she saw - she experienced - Grendel. Only one collector - offered a cup of tea. It was magical and fabulous - and noble in her bearing - always she is this. I only now understand the akwardness of emerging from a black cocoon with wet wings. And it i not my akwardness but the akwardnes of those - who have never faced death. And I would fall, I would stumble, I would break my wings. With things like Instagram and Facebook blaring the details of faux processes, studios and a lot of paint. Drawing is always this timelapse thing of an illustration taking shape. I have yet to see anyone do a real drawing on instagram. My studio being my most private sector, I spoke about other things. Foreign affairs. Stupidity. Life. Not everyone is PT Barnum and those platforms sell the lie - the illusion - that you are there with the artist as they create marvels and wonders. The Man Behind The Curtain. Oz in his laboratory. The Alchemist at Work. I would rather watch a silent movie. The Golem: 1921. I remember some critic named Max who I never really got to know - he came to the studio. I didnt understand why he was there. Did he want a tour? I was in the middle of working. He just stood there. Didnt ask questions. It's like, cut yourself and let me see whats under that skin flap. I can't do that. I won't. I have never been a fashion model who can talk for hours about nothing, and themselves, whatever they have borrowed from others. Heidegger isn't their thing. But their skin has always been - a surface to look at. And they make it so easy. They show, and show and show and show - they show off, because there isn't much there. Pfouf. That Rachel Feinstein and I were best friends all of college, I was laughing when recently Gagosian was blabbering about her Northern Renaissance influences - actually she was modelling with Clique agency and that was my major!I thought: did she take this from some internet press release - of mine? I'm naive. I don't see jalousy when it's standing there green in my face. I suppose - I don'y give AF as I don't see color. But when I do I'm always angry at myself - for not seeing it. Should I? Be more strategic - make paintings of birds. Joke. Nah. I stick with the Chabad - thanks. They are the ones who deserve credit for literally bringing the dead back to life in the most historic of Synagogues - was it by chance or destiny that we were in Lublin? That first meal. In that historic Yeshiva. Completed in 1924 with the photos of the Rabbis of Poland and Ukraine all around. They brought us back into the world of the living. After beating the odds. Lieder des Ghetto von Morris Rosenfeld. Illustrations by EM Lilien - my unsung hero!

We are both orphans. In truth. In that moment - we were not. But I bolted. And so did you.

Celine, Genet, Homer, Nietszche. I saw the grave of Proust at Pierre Lachaise. A memorial for "All The Poles Who Died for France." My friend laguhed. He joked, "Do you think Poland has a memorial for the French who died for Poland?" Of course not. We talked about Petain and the Vichy government. As we walked the streets I said to my daughter, "See all this beauty? Imagine if it was bombed, like Warsaw." Of course, all the finery and food of Paris, Germans can't cook for shit. A crude assessment, but, they would have wantonly wreck Paris - they wanted it as is. And Petain was this little sheep-poodle. Hitler had some kind of fixation on Poland. A place to build camps. A place to extend territory that was already mixed - liek the city of Gdansk - it was ruled under a German Polish cooperation - so it's not like you has German speaking areas in France. There is a strange push back, lined with a bit of terror at the mention of Poland. Some mix of - fear and something else. Are they still afraid of the Russians who seized it - from whom they had to run? I know a handful of Germans who say: "oh yes, my Grandmother/Grandfather was from an area there (now Polish) I shoud visit." But they don't. It's like - this forbidden zone. Well the camps are there. How many Germans are visiting them? None that I know. That would be an intersting mandatory field trip. Survivors sometimes visit camps. They come full circle. But interestingly, I never met a German who willfully has done this, and openly discusses it. It's as if the border contains the pain, and it's Polands issue. Poland does actively work on it. The Jewish comunity is involved with rememberance and digs that continue, where they find mass graves. They have them in Germany too. But they are not digging them up. Intersting how the Russian destruction of that great dam in Ukraine revealed the skeletons of German soldiers, mouths open, they looked so expressive, like they were screaming, with their helmets strapped tight, to their heads.
My friend just described a fun wedding. I go to no weddings. I have a ways to go.