It’s worst in spring. All through the winter it’s packed in fabric, rubber and leather, often grey and numb in the cold. But then comes the day when the sun shows that it can do more than simply flop around as a pale yolk in a milky winter sky, a sorry scene that had prompted one to wonder if this star were needed at all.
Solar Power. We feel it on the arms, the face, on the nape of the neck. We close our eyes and feel as though the happiness hormones in our body are leaping. Spring – it’s as if there’s something leaking/flowing somewhere. Prima vera. Finally, we do it. In a fit of over-confidence we unwrap it for the first time: for instance in Venice, for instance on the Grand Canal. Seconds later they are swinging from side to side, two white blotches above the petrol-blue of the lagoon: they look like boats, boats with toes, five pieces on the left and five on the right, as a rule anyway. What irritates us at the very outset is the striking difference: while the smallest toe looks like a negligible add-on, a joke, the biggest one sticks out high and arrogant into the spring air like an over-loud assertion. What on earth is Nature thinking about? Does Nature think at all? One cannot know everything.
But the feet – what an unmotivated here-and-there at the other end of us! Do we feel them at all? Not so well, actually. So it’s well possible that they aren’t really our feet.
A couple of years ago someone released a crocodile into the lagoon. Great excitement in all Venice. Soon after, one noticed how the monster devoured the musicians at San Marco square – together with violin and piano. After a few days, though, the crocodile got entangled in an octopus trap and went down in pathetic fashion. But who knows, perhaps it had laid eggs earlier on. Perhaps the lagoon is full of crocodiles lying in wait of someone who will dangle his feet over the water. The pain would doubtless be proof that it had negotiated with our feet. Only the feet would naturally go missing then. Can one stand on pain as well as one can on one’s feet? One does not want to know the answer, preferably not.
Now here, now there, now here now there over the nervous waves of the lagoon. From above, it appears almost as if one is screaming across the water. In Venice that would be practical. There’s water everywhere, almost everywhere. It’s as though the city wants to remind us that we have not fallen out of trees, but emerged instead from the water – in the form of amphibian pioneers. We concentrate, create primeval wrinkles on the brow, strain the neck, spread the fingers – but, no, we don’t feel the amphibian in us anymore; impossible that we can now fall into the water and cuddle with crocodiles under the keel of the vaporettos. The water is no longer our medium; it hasn’t been for a very long while. We’ve lost every sense of how to move in it – nothing illustrates this better than our art of swimming, which looks embarrassingly clumsy even when world champions are showing off their aquatic skills.
For that we now have feet. They swing from side to side over the oily mirror of the lagoon, two pallid gondolas that have stayed in mourning all winter long. More than any other ship the gondola brings its driver to a position that makes it seem as though he is screaming across the water – and, though this, simultaneously illustrates that we cannot go over the water. Not even once. What had the good God been thinking of? Does the good God think? The Bible says he strikes and punishes, but does it say anywhere: God reflects? One must not know everything.
Perhaps the feet think, the feet that dangle above the emerald puddle of the lagoon, now here now there, now there now here. Question is: will we notice or learn something if our feet think? Perhaps our feet contemplate on us when we are asleep – secretly. Perhaps they are giddy at the moment from constant swinging. Perhaps, just perhaps, they are not our feet. One must not know everything.
One thing is clear, though: In spring it is particularly bad.
First Publication: 8-9-2011
Modifications: 17-2-2012, 20-6-2013