Paul Litherland

German is so hard to learn. A million tenses, lots of rules, can’t even hear the words. ein, einer, eins, einem, eine etc etc.. All for the word ‘a’ in English. Has to agree with the subject, is modified by the object, and the dictionary is impossible, because half the words are compound.

Makes my eyelids twitch in stress.

It’s hard to achieve complete uselessness. Even as mush, flies will still feed on you. 

Audis go very fast. 

Almost all the cars doing 200+ on the autobahn were Audis, maybe a couple of Mercedes. I was trying to imagine what that would be like to hit a brick wall at that speed. 200 km/hr is terminal velocity when you are skydiving. It’s hard to picture that speed when you’re falling, there’s usually not much around you to give you a sense of the speed. Sometimes you’ll see an open parachute go by in the distance (hopefully it’s in the distance, not under you) and you can see that you are going fast, but it’s not like you can see the air going by like the asphalt does. By the way, I was not driving an Audi, rather a Fiat Punto.

Keep thinking of how the two things I’ve been photographing and painting lately are related. Clouds and Dumpsters. To me the thing they have in common is their relationship to chaos, and I’m photographing them in a way that I hope elicits a sense of isolation. But even saying they have a relationship to chaos makes me think of all the ways they are not chaotic, that they are following a certain energy of order, even in their disorder.

I guess store mixed tube paint has gloss built into it. I bought pigment and acrylic medium today because the store was closer, but didn’t anticipate that the pigment would dry a lot flatter than the ones I painted with the tube paints. I like the idea of mixing pigment and medium. Makes me feel like an artisan, even if I don’t have a clue.

Finally got a studio. A week later, I finally got the key to the studio. Started painting clouds and dumpsters. Need to get more paint. Like the company of studio mates. Italian French and German.

yup.

Am I following a dream? or do I just float with the current?

OK So I have the studio, I have the time, I sort of have the money. I have a few ideas. Now, I just need some focus. I have a series of photos of clouds, I have photos of dumpsters in various locations in Europe and Canada and the US. I have photos of things that are standing alone, in typically humourous / triste juxtapositions with their backgrounds. In fact almost everything I photograph is a photograph of something standing alone, in a context of some kind. I have photos of my relatives computers, alone in their rooms

What is the thread that ties these things together? If I toss in the performances of boxing, drumming, and skydiving, which in my mind at any rate, are about describing the disfunctionality of language, and the desire to communicate through difficult or awkward circumstances. As I think of it, they are also about the desire to communicate something clearly and beautifully but not having the linguistic tools or vocabulary to do so. Wanting a bit of poetry. Wanting to see the strength of the underdog. Wanting to explore the vulnerability of men, physically and emotionally, with the idea of understanding what it is to be a complete person. How to live without fear. Actually, it’s not how to live without fear, it’s how to continue living with your fears. How to be a man. What is a man? How to be.

Is there a single question?
Is there a question at all?

So we have

Humourous isolation
containers full of garbage from various western cities
clouds (maybe freedom)
language (having it, not having it)
Being a man
Making time for poetry

Not exactly equivalent categories.

Hmm.

Not much farther ahead than when I started.

This morning went for a swim in the Spree with Cynthia and Sarah from Australia. Well, not exactly in the Spree. In the pool on the Spree. Spree Swimming Pool

As it was relatively early, the swans that hang out in the actual river were still sleeping, their necks tucked back behind them in their wings.

Have decided to look for a shared studio space.. Somewhere to go to make work. I would just like a piece of wall and a table in a shared space. For the company.

After checking out a studio situation in Prenzlauer, I walked across the city back to the apartment, to get a sense of scale. It doesn’t seem any bigger than Montreal. It took 3 hours with a bunch of stops along the way. I guess there are more people here because the houses are mostly 5 story apartments rather than the Montreal style duplex or triplex.

My introduction to Berlin would have to be the woman who helped me bring my luggage down from the platform to the taxi stand. There were no luggage dollys at the Ost Bahnhof, where I got off. Thank you, whoever you are. 

Visited the Kunstwerke Institut, on AugustStraße. Saw some films by Richard Serra. Liked the ones of him catching lead as it falls. Actually not catching lead. Most of the time it goes by his hands. The other was of him, I’m assuming, and a woman’s hands picking up wooden shavings that have been dumped on the floor. 

On the train from Paris to Berlin, it’s a TGV and it’s like flying. The clouds rush by, especially today because they are somewhat low to begin with. Traffic on the highways appears to be moving very slowly, but it’s probably moving at 110.

What to write. I’m trying to name the question that defines my work. The question that one asks perpetually, but is so present so consistently that it is invisible. What would that question be? If I lost the question, would I still be human. Did the man on the bus to Winnipeg who murdered his fellow passenger lose his question? The question is something about what we are here for. Something standard, maybe even  embarrassingly common. What is my goal in life? Do I have a reason to be? Am I just another consumptive sponge?

Paris.

A charged city. It does sleep however. Except the Paris studio is so close to a busy road that it is hard to believe that it might be quieter somewhere else.

Went to the Musée de l’homme. A weird place, but we went to see the display of Germaine Tillion, an ethnographer who was part of the French resistance. The organization of the show was a bit bizarre, seemed a bit arbitrary, skipping back and forth from her work as an ethnographer to her time as a prisoner in Ravensbruck, which was recounted more like a general history lesson. Then there were the other displays at the museum, which seemed to have been last updated in 1990, speaking about the population of the world being 5 billion and soon to be 6 in the year 2000. What gives. Also some pretty colonial types of installations that seemed to be honouring phrenology. How the human body is measured, so you can make generalizations. A few deformed skeletons of giants, a model of Lucy, the first human, some acephalitic fetus skulls. Strange bone cancers that turn your head into a mass of bone. Rickets etc. Then a room full of wax heads trying to approximate all the different cultures. All of them male heads. Japanese, Chinese, Scottish, Irish. Seemed to be a tribute to stereotypes. So what is the matter with generalizations. We all do it. it’s just that it leaves out important differences. the hybrid, which takes two different sources and combines them into a functional whole.

Places visited in Paris:

The sewer museum: The best was the installation of stuffed rats in the diorama.

The Eiffel tower. just hanging around the bottom

The Bois de Boulogne: Good tree action

Bois de Vincennes: Not as good as Bois de Boulogne, but good for a run or something.

Jardin des Plantes: I want to go back here. Natural History museum is here. I liked the petrified tree stump and the geological map of France at 1:50,000. I would like to make a map of Canada at 1:50,000, that people could walk on.

It’s hard to make the distinction sometimes between when it’s your ego talking and when it’s your interest to follow your question that is talking. I think of the occasional tensions between me an my brothers. It’s a hard negotiation between when it’s your need for power and when you are being relentless in the pursuit of your questions. Sometimes you need establish your position or assume your power of speech in order to be able to ask your questions.

In Germany now, it’s 11:22 am. and the train is accelerating out of Sarbrucken(?) towards Mannheim. I’ve been a bit anxious about moving my stuff around, as there is a connection to make for the train to Berlin there.

In the news lately, the thing with the man who stabbed and beheaded a stranger beside him is hard to digest. Are we talking about a psychopath, or a psychotic episode. The suddenness of the cruelty is hard to imagine. I am drawn to think of atrocities meted out iin Rwanda, in Sierra Leone, in Uganda, in Germany during the Second World War. We can act psychotically as a society, inflicting unbelievable cruelty and pain on those around us.

13h43

Now on the train from Mannheim to Berlin. Looking over a German newspaper Die Welt Kompakt.. Looks like the road to comprehension will be somewhat long. Maybe longer than Spanish, it looks like my German from high school is gone, or at least buried very deep.

I was too anxious to get a dolly to help move my bike down the platform. Well partly it was that I couldn’t tell how far down the platform my car was. Then it turns out that there’s no space for bicycles on the car that I’m in. There is space between the seats that became available though. It’s a bit of a pain to move the bike, I don’t know why it’s making me so anxious. Perhaps it’s because it feels like too much. I can barely move everything in one go. I also feel like it’s a bit of a failure to not have it figured out better. What if money was no object? How would things go then?