Grau, Rot, Liver and Smoke
The first morning was muggy and grey, the kind of dull grey that bleeds into the sky from the soggy edges of modern buildings. Members of my group hung around in a scattered formation near the corner store. A meeting point, a starting time, an aching, dizzy feeling in my stomach.
My pace sped and slowed awkwardly according to the girls I walked beside through the heavy, warm air. Sally told me her shoes were no longer white. I took a look. Canvas flats saturated with street. I was strangely and silently envious. This grey churns and mingles. It drips and swallows and spits back up and out again.
“I don’t think I can swallow even once more…” an introduction to John O’Meara, Joe Kim, and soft, thick, coagulated organs from a slaughtered baby cow. Again, the dizziness was flung into my own, and the night before rushed to the back of my eyelids. The heady grit of iron and blood clung to my teeth and the space between my lips and gums like John’s fingers to his glass of Kryptonite.
Later, brass letters hung against liver-colored marble send me to another night. Slogans, numbers, dates and chants line the dimly lit red walls behind the clouds that rise… or fall. “Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu veränden.” Pieces of his face and words are visible in gaps beneath the layers; his chin, his kommt, his brow and veränden. A palimpsest.
The next stairwell represents intellectual development, maturity, knowledge, and progress. We hope to rise, but we fall. We’ll just fall today, because it’s the quickest way. My action? I walk behind, look up, look down, move my pen and sigh, consider something. Perhaps I’d like to stop or to turn around, but of course, I surrender to the gravity of the Weltgeist.
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