Fun and responsibility: I couldn’t help but wonder

What do you lose when you turn the things you experience into narratives? People are happy or annoyed when they appear as protagonists in the stories you tell. And even if they sometimes feel represented differently than they would like, they usually feel secretly flattered “to be a protagonist in a movie called life.” But what happens to you when you see your experiences primarily as a source of telling and re-telling? And how can you challenge yourself to demand a bit of immediacy despite the constant search for stories?

When I meet people I don’t know yet, I sometimes feel that they approach me with a certain expectation, a prior knowledge. Maybe they have read something by me or heard me read aloud, maybe they have also heard a story that I repeat over and over again (like an old man in the local bar), from a third person, like an “urban myth”: The The city spins its own fables and I am just the mouthpiece of the stories that arise on their own, »tales of a city«. It’s no coincidence that my (more or less secret) dream job is actually a neighborhood resident.

Nevertheless: What is left when your whole life becomes a story that you tell others or yourself? Writing is also a form of obsession, a substitute addiction – and like most addictions, the ultimate solace, at least in the moment itself. But what are the side effects? I keep thinking about the man who made it a rule to write down everything he encountered. He didn’t live long, or at least he didn’t notice much of it anymore. Typing had replaced living.

A new friend recently said to me, “A 16-hour car ride with you to Italy. Great, then I’ll finally hear the full text.” Shortly after crossing the Swiss San Bernardino Tunnel, we stop at 6 a.m. at the “Autogrill” motorway service station, which runs like a bridge across the road, and eat pizza , which we dip in olive oil: it tastes heavenly. Then we order a cappuccino for 1.50 euros. The cars speed past below us, continuing on to Genoa in the right lane; in the left lane back to Switzerland, towards the San Bernardino Tunnel. Fortunately, neither of us has heard the “full text” yet: completeness is an illusion anyway. The full text – the very last point – “full stop” – “la petite mort”.

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I always forget at least one note that seems groundbreaking to me, especially in its absence. I get in a bad mood, rack my brain, and when the thought doesn’t actually come back (not, I hope, “like the scales fall from my eyes”), I write down a placeholder phrase in my iPhone note function: “Forgotten note.”.

Unforgettable are the places where you forgot the “really important note” as if you had been awake for a second: Sonnenallee, which passes me as I sit on my bike, roughly at the height of “City Chicken” (I prefer “RISA”). . Or the stony path up to the Italian village of “Bellissimi”, the cicadas chirp penetratingly. The regional express to Prerow, I hear “Mister Postman” by the Carpenters. A flash of thought that makes you wake up as if from a long sleep, and then it’s gone again – but not the memory that there was something there that you had annoyingly forgotten.

It’s probably like the anecdote about a famous film director who wakes up in the middle of the night and has a brilliant idea. In the dark, he writes down his brilliant idea on a piece of paper that he placed on his dessert table and then blissfully falls asleep again. The next morning he looks curiously at the piece of paper and finds three words written in scraggly writing: “boy meets girl.”. The same thing happened to me recently, in my case it said the dictation function was set to German and didn’t understand me: “Turtel” – What was meant was: “Turtle”.

I think of the “sawed virgin” magic trick. In 1921, the “grand illusion” of a woman stuck in a box and cut through with a chainsaw was created publicly for the first time. The method became known in the same year under the slogan “The Great Divide”. A patent has been filed for the technique of “dismembering a person who is completely visible at all times.” The trick is particularly spectacular when the audience is allowed to saw along. Some bloody accidents are recorded historically. Sometimes I feel like I’m publicly cutting myself up for the entertainment of others. Sometimes bloody, sometimes not. It is a self-imposed (lazy) spell. My friend J. says: »You don’t always have to show everything about yourself in your texts. Just show the tips of your toes.”