“We all know what an emotion is until we are asked to define it.” Jan Plamper

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“Ferns are older than man and woman, older than right and wrong. They are sexless and have neither seeds nor flowers.” Rachel Cusk

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“The imagination (of the artist) is not a creatio ex nihilo.” It draws on “empirical reality” even where “dilettantes and the subtle” cannot see the bridge between art and reality. Essentially Adorno

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“Always take the initiative. There is nothing wrong with spending a night in jail if it means getting the shot.” Werner Herzog reported by Casey Neistat

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“Caught between the twisted stars, the plotted lines the faulty map.” Lou Reed

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Parasitic wasps feed their young with other insects. Digger wasps paralyze caterpillars and then lay their eggs on the caterpillars. The larvae eventually live off the caterpillars, which are also still alive.

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When the psychoanalytical transformation of reform gymnastics was all the rage in the New York moment. The motto was, get off the couch and get on the mat. The transfer also worked according to plan. The reform teacher with the rank of physical exercise master acted as a mother substitute, for whose sake the practitioner redeems himself by fulfilling the required workload.

The Art of Manifestation – From Nana’s Notes

Of course, even in Ederthal, Goya isn’t the only one for me. In 2000… a new lecturer catches my attention. Vernon comes from Albuquerque, in the U.S. state of New Mexico. The richly born Germanist seems almost larger than life in the academic idyll of Landgrave Philipps University. He is a man of quick decisions. Since our first night together—which turned out differently than he had expected—he has considered the equally polyglot and polyamorous colleague as his fiancée. He has miscalculated. Naturally, he ranks behind Goya, in whom the North Hessian superpower CC is embodied.

Vernon served in the American armed forces as a lone fighter and sniper. Nothing connects him to the imploded figures striving for a quiet existence on the fringes of the main battle lines in the small university town. My massive, flickering sexuality confuses Vernon, yet he believes he can shape me and make my submissive side the centerpiece of our connection. He’s not the first with such ideas, but he is certainly the toughest among the inexperienced players.

Vernon grew up on a ranch of Dallasian proportions. Women and horses occupy the same line in his considerations. He has just tried, once again, to educate me. It didn’t work. I am not angry at the cowboy. After all, I want nothing else but control. To control your opponent is the basic, says a Chinese proverb.

“Let’s keep playing,” I beg in my mind, and Vernon bites immediately.

“And if I…”
I answer contentedly:
“Then you do it exactly like that, and I’ll remember it when I’m an old woman and no one wants to do that with me anymore.”

I write that, yet I have something else in mind. I want an iconographic situation with an unusual setting—at the moment without penetrative sex.

While I think about how best to bring Vernon in line, lust drives me up the walls again. I retreat to a room in the dead wing of the university, which originated from a Franconian monastery. I wedge the door handle with a chair. A ripped-open tin of fish smells rotten. A half-blind mirror leans against the wall. I memorize a line from Joyce: “a maid’s broken mirror” seemed to the poet the signature of Ireland.

Cobwebs devour insect mummies. Woven sarcophagi. Works of art of nature.

I slip out of my jeans and pull my panties down to my knees. I lean on an antique desk and bend forward. I forbid myself to touch myself. Instead, I strive for complete manifestation. I succeed for the first time. I experience a premiere in the clutter. I am not merely playing with a thought. I am not merely giving space to a fantasy. The thought creates a second reality in which the subject believes they can experience everything possible for humans. The manifested space looks like the real one.