Beginnings

Dear Didem!

I want to begin with lines from a letter by somebody else, migrating letters so to say.

Today, as I type this, it’s exactly 90 years, since Virginia Woolf has written them. By chance the 16th February 1930 has been a sunday as well, just like in 2020.

Two nights ago Vita was here; and when she went I began to feel the quality of the evening - how it was spring coming: a silver light; mixing with the early lamps; the cabs all rushing through the streets; I had a tremendous sense of life beginning; […] I felt the spring beginning and Vita’s life so full and flush; and all the doors opening; and this is I believe the moth shaking its wings in me;

It’s interesting: she’s speaking of a moth, not a butterfly. A creature most vivid at night, a being from a realm in between. In the streets of Vienna the smell, the air, and the light had already changed in the last days - perfect time for departure. But when I try to get clear about my current situation and feelings, then I can’t say, it’s pure joy, not at all. At the moment everything’s contradiction, but: it’s in motion and this is why it makes me feel alive.

In our constantly interrupted Skype call a few days ago, my impression was, that the doubts from your Viennese trip have not vanished. I’ve told you about that saying from Ingeborg Bachmann - also from a letter, by the way -, in which she speaks of Vienna as “Stadt der Halbheiten“, city of half measures, of compromises as well. And I’ve let you know, why I leave.

Now, however, I want to figure out, what Vienna can offer you. So I’ve spent my last days with the question, what it is, that made the city my place to be for almost 20 years. One answer has to do with the moth and with in-between-places. There still exist some bar-like venues in Vienna, that are somehow fallen out of time and space: they seem to be open all day long and it’s night there all day long! Really unique people get together in this demimonde - from Elvis-imitators to persons who still celebrate monarchy, from pimp-like guys to leopard-pattern-wearing dolls in their sixties: it’s a wrecked, shabby world, dead in a very vivid way, completely beyond good and bad.

I‘ve always loved that very Viennese “Halbwelt”, that realm of flesh-and-blood-ghosts. It’s typical of the city’s way to encounter death. And farewell. Embracing it somehow.

So I say farewell for the moment, spring is coming and there’s that moth inside of me.

I’m very much looking forward to the time with you, Didem!

Yours,

Carina