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people stare carefully


Sometimes thinking feels a lot like sinking. Bellerive Wharf. March 2011.

I’ve been tired, oh so tired for such a long time now.

I seem to recall a time – somewhere about 1993 or so – where I wasn’t so tired all the time. Is this was it is to be getting old?

Is it fair that we’re ‘getting old’ at age sixteen?

Spring is like a perhaps hand, e.e.cummings

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and from moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.
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Comments

Carola said…
This feeling I have often. Good description. You don't focus just on your self, there are three more people, I think that makes you (and me) tired.

Live is not fair. You are getting old(er).

Spring is starting here. That makes me tired too. Frühjahrsmüdigkeit. Do you know what's that?
19 March 2011 at 09:41
Kris McCracken said…
Spring Fever?

I think what I have is more like Weltschmerz.
19 March 2011 at 11:48
Carola said…
When spring fever is the same than springtime lethargy, than yes.

Weltschmerz, I like this german word, it is typical for Germanness.
20 March 2011 at 07:51
Kris McCracken said…
Off the top of my head, here are some of my favourite German words that I use because there really isn’t an English equivalent that is quite the same..

Blitzkrieg, Doppelgänger, Ersatz, Gemeinschaft, Gesellschaft, Götterdämmerung, Kitsch, Lumpenproletariat, Realpolitik, Schadenfreude, Sturm und Drang, verboten, Wanderlust, Weltanschauung, Wunderkind, and my very favourite…

Vergangenheitsbewältigung!
21 March 2011 at 15:12
Carola said…
Oh, you have got a lot of German words. Why or how do you know them. I didn't know that these are used in English. Do others understand them?
Ersatz, Gemeinschaft, Gesellschaft you use this, realy?
I know the very famouse Kindergarten.
And what about Krisenherd and Zeitgeist?
22 March 2011 at 08:03
Kris McCracken said…
A large part of my German vocabulary is due to the choices I made at university. In both Political Science and History, I’d always had an interest in German theorists – Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Marx and Engels, Horkheimer and Adorno etc – and they routinely retain many words, as direct translation into English is either impossible, or would dilute their meaning.

My honours thesis concentrated on the work of Habermas, so that really solidified it. Also, a large amount of work that I put into my (unfinished) PhD thesis concerned changing electoral patterns in Germany, so again, more German words!

Thus, I am known for dropping the odd Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft into conversation. I don’t use Zeitgeist though. Primarily because I am a snob. Zeitgeist was picked up by a lot of the pop culture commentators in the late ‘90s, so now a lot of people use it incorrectly. This annoys me, so I don’t use it.

Oddly enough, my ‘conversational’ German is abysmal. I’m too embarrassed to say anything beyond ”Guten Morgen” or ”Sprechen Sie Englisch?”
22 March 2011 at 08:51
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