Reading The Loop by Jacques Roubaud, part 10
It has been over a year since I last posted in this category.1 It has also been over a year since I read in The Loop. I don't remember much of what I've already read. I don't remember much of what I've already written. I could go back and read. That would be ~135 (dense) pages of Roubaud's book and nine blog posts. I might go back and read the blog posts.
In fact, I will do so now, so here is an interpolative link to them.
Ah yes, scratching the frost on a window and a fig tree. And ah yes, even my first post warns of likely failure of this project. So, after a year-long pause in the "action," here is another attempt at Reading The Loop by Jacques Roubad:
map 1: §15 -> I§77 -> §15 -> I§78 -> §15 -> I§79 -> §15
map 2: pp. 64, 65, 247, 248, 65, 66, 248, 249, 66, 67, 250, 251, 67
"And it was a unique moment in Germany: a sort of historical no-man's-land in which the reign of the defeated had come to an end, yet that of the victors . . . had not yet been established" (67).
Jacques Roubaud spent some time in East Germany in the early part of 1990, shortly after the Wall had fallen. I spent two weeks in Hellersdorf in eastern Berlin in the early part of 1991, shortly after unification (the Wall fell on 09 November 1989; unification happened 11 months later on 03 October 1990).
Roubaud saw piles of brown coal covered with a little snow. I saw piles of brown coal covered with a little snow. Roubaud saw pock-marks left by bullets in the façades of buildings. I did not, though the buildings by which I was surrounded—tall, featureless, "socialist" blocks of flats—did remind me of death in that I felt as though I were an ant in a cemetery. Roubaud was reminded regularly of moments from his childhood (of course he was—that is the conceit of The Loop). I was still living my childhood, and living in one of Europe's largest cities reminded me in no way whatsoever of growing up on the plains of Nebraska. I was not old enough, or experienced enough, or smart enough, or attentive enough to see how both places were empty and how both places were full. Roubaud may have written about the social-political-historical import of that "historical no-man's-land" elsewhere (he had gone there on a writing assignment, after all). I wasn't, at the time, aware enough really to comprehend either the importance of the moment, or of my privileged place within it (as part of the first ever group of foreign exchange students to stay with families in what had been East Berlin). Besides the above-mentioned, here are some other things I remember about those two weeks:
- the smell of that brown coal being burned
- walking through the snow, late at night, alone, after visiting a friend, and listening to the Jesus Jones album Doubt (which contained the single "Right Here, Right Now")
- going to see an exhibit of animatronic dinosaurs (an exhibit I would see again at the Riverside Zoo in Scottsbluff, Nebraska)
- being told about how a fellow exchange student, who was of Asian descent, had been chased through the streets by a group of skinheads
- watching Spaceballs dubbed in German in a very nice apartment in the city center (and how the "Jam the radar!" joke didn't work)
- taking a drive into the country to visit a dam
- talking to an 11th grade English class about growing up in America, being asked the question, "What means 'fuck you!'?" looking to the teacher for guidance, seeing the teacher give me the go-ahead, talking for ten minutes about all the various uses of/for the word fuck, and ultimately explaining that the lead singer of Depeche Mode, when he yelled "Fuck you!" during the concert (which the entirety of that 11th grade class had ostensibly attended) was not commanding the crowd to copulate.
- But, having been inspired by the "Reading Der Mensch Erscheint im Holozän" project, I decided to give it another go.