Garden Of Earthly. A Novel.

                                                                       Preface: Geography 

Herrenhof Lanternroot of Ashmilk Schlegelian Turnipwind Mask of the Quiet Orchard Rixdorf Boneharp Lumen Acre of the Winter Jaw Natternberg Grainshadow Organ of Soft Clay Altstadt Resinbell Fog Acre of the Bent Lattice Borkengasse Humthread Cloud Acre of the Iron Pulse Görlitz Blue Spine Acre Wortfeld Stemloom Moss Acre of the Hidden Basin Schädelrain Coalwater Acre of Grey Thread Fettleibigkeit Orchardlung Swarm Acre of Bark Thought Wechselschacht Frostroot Acre of the Slow Nerve Bentpfad Strawvein Acre of the Dust Rib Grüngasse Bladelung Acre of the Tallow Crest Steinmulde Misttendon Acre of the Grain Eye Wesselheim Boneclay Acre of the Cloud Husk Pfennigfeld Nervegrain Acre of the Thorn Loom Ebergrund Sootwing Acre of the Quiet Thread Oberwinkel Frostacre of the Whisper Jawline Unterwasen Turnipflume Acre of the Dusktwist Kranichrain Clayjaw Acre of the Lost Spool Dornstuhl Ribspool Acre of the Moss Echo Stubenflut Onionacre of the Barklit Spine Hinterhaus Lanternacre of the Threadgrain Meadow Holtmark Grainroot Acre of the Ash Bloom Schwarzgrund Foglung Acre of the Wooden Pulse Wendeschacht Resinacre of the Whisper Grain Weisenhut Nettleacre of the Cloud Thread Sensenhof Rainjaw Acre of the Cold Orchard Flockensteg Barkwhorl Acre of the Soft Jaw Weilerrest Thornlung Acre of the Dusk Vein Lehmfeld Grassacre of the Deep Bone Schrothhang Stemspine Acre of the Iron Orchard Grolzug Frostacre of the Quiet Lumen Schleusenmarkt Ragjaw Acre of the Grain Word Dreiforst Appleacre of the Ash Lung Rabenklau Strawtooth Acre of the Moss Gate Kohlenrain Dustacre of the Cloud Organ Pfarrwinkel Snowroot Acre of the Bark Pulse Silberfeld Grainline Acre of the Nerve Basin Abendquell Nightacre of the Thread Pulse Weichschnabel Mossacre of the Turnip Claw Lichtergraben Strawacre of the Bone Cloud Elendrain Cloudroot Acre of the Frost Tongue Winteracker Grainlung Acre of the Hidden Jaw Hoftreppe Rustacre of the Lumen Thread Mühlenfels Ashacre of the Quiet Bone Bärenkluft Snowacre of the Spindle Field Trichterrain Threadjaw Acre of the Grain Leaf Kelchwinkel Onionacre of the Soft Echo Lampenhain Barkacre of the Frost Lobe Wurzelweg Grainspine Acre of the Gutter Cloud Birkenloch Strawjaw Acre of the Slow Lung Hofpfad Ashroot Acre of the Twisted Grain Lumpenregen Grainacre of the Turnip Wing Dunkelfeld Mossjaw Acre of the Clay Thread Nachtschutt Ironacre of the Bark Organ Milchpfosten Cloudgrain Acre of the Bone Husk Schimmersteg Frostlit Acre of the Drift Field Brechwinkel Dustlung Acre of the Quiet Jaw Tannengrund Barkacre of the Swarm Spine Federborn Grainacre of the Mist Organ Glockenacker Clayroot Acre of the Thin Word Wiesenpfahl Frostacre of the Cloud Tether Kastanienrest Nerveacre of the Bark Field Braunschatten Strawlung Acre of the Grain Spire Schäferhang Onionacre of the Snow Jaw Weinfleck Mosscrest Acre of the Silent Thread Staubwald Grainacre of the Frost Bloom Gletscherpfad Boneacre of the Driftling Moorbard Strawacre of the Fog Lung Lenzmark Grainroot Acre of the Ash Clutch Rohrwinkel Snowledge Acre of the Quiet Organ Törfelrain Threadacre of the Grainlit Bone Dornkanzel Mossacre of the Bark Tone Rostschlucht Grainjaw Acre of the Cloud Hinge Birnenhof Frostwing Acre of the Iron Vene Geistacker Cloudacre of the Apple Spine Hartschutt Barkacre of the Slush Organ Feldscheitel Grainacre of the Quiet Shard Kohlengrund Dustjaw Acre of the Mist Organ Handwiese Strawacre of the Nerve Plume Rohrschacht Grainroot Acre of the Frost Gate Haldenkamm Barkacre of the Clay Coil Lichtmoor Grainjaw Acre of the Thin Acre Schweigerrest Cloudhusk Acre of the Grain Organ Hohlenrain Snowlit Acre of the Wood Jaw Röstfeld Grainacre of the Bark Bloom Mürrenpfad Mistroot Acre of the Quiet Vein Werdergrund Clayacre of the Frost Thread Senfenhang Grainjaw Acre of the Fog Bloom Tauerweide Strawacre of the Grain Tooth Blattwinkel Mossacre of the Iron Nerve Dornacker Cloudacre of the Ash Spine Quietrain Tallowacre of the Grain Field Murmelsee Barkjaw Acre of the Frost Sinew Kettenwald Grainacre of the Dust Organ Leinpfad Snowacre of the Bark Spindle Einzugfeld Grainroot Acre of the Quiet Acre Blaubach Frostlung Acre of the Cloud Bloom Gänserain Grainacre of the Iron Husk Hoflaub Stemacre of the Mist Coil Eisenholz Grainwing Acre of the Tallow Word Gartnerrest Barkacre of the Grainlit Thread Grabenlicht Clayjaw Acre of the Frost Grain Beutelrain Mossacre of the Wooden Jaw Unternest Grainacre of the Cloud Thread Trosswinkel Barkacre of the Ash Loop Schuppenfeld Grainlung Acre of the Frost Thread Rutensteg Onionacre of the Gutter Bone Klosterbruch Grainacre of the Mist Spindle Ulmenrain Cloudlung Acre of the Bark Coil Niedermoos Strawacre of the Frost Acre Lohnwind Grainjaw Acre of the Quiet Flood Fichtenrest Dustacre of the Bone Thread Krähwinkel Grainroot Acre of the Bark Bloom Steinpfad Cloudacre of the Soft Sinew Ufersteg Grainlit Acre of the Frost Root Ochsenrain Mossacre of the Grain Husk Lamellenpfad Ashacre of the Fog Jaw Schindelturm Grainloop Acre of the Cold Acre Federacker Barkjaw Acre of the Frost Whorl Staubriss Grainacre of the Orchard Vein Ungrund Clayacre of the Cloud Husk Blattmoor Grainjaw Acre of the Thin Acre Kornfall Strawacre of the Bone Pulse Felsmutkamm Rainacre of the Mist Coil Wehrwinkel Grainspine Acre of the Frost Lumen Tiefflur Barkacre of the Grainlit Wing Rieselrest Mistjaw Acre of the Ash Cloud Schafrain Grainacre of the Tallow Echo Birkenacker Barkloop Acre of the Night Grain Hohlfeld Cloudacre of the Thin Bloom Krallensteg Grainjaw Acre of the Fog Pulse Andermoor Strawacre of the Bark Husk Strichrain Grainroot Acre of the Frost Bloom Haldenhof Cloudjaw Acre of the Moss Acre Bultscherpfad Grainacre of the Quiet Field Falbenrest Claylit Acre of the Drift Thread Ulkengrund Grainjaw Acre of the Iron Coil Treiberhügel Cloudacre of the Frost Thread Rindenwinkel Grainlit Acre of the Dust Husk Weichfeld Barkroot Acre of the Quiet Pulse Kahlrain Grainloop Acre of the Clay Jaw Talmesser Strawacre of the Wood Acre Pfostenweg Grainjaw Acre of the Frost Bloom Wallgrund Dustacre of the Grain Spine Lenzpfad Cloudroot Acre of the Ash Pulse Hügelrest Grainjaw Acre of the Nerve Bloom Offenacker Barkacre of the Tallow Coil Strahlhang Grainroot Acre of the Fog Thread Dornfleck Cloudacre of the Bone Acre Schlehenrain Grainlit Acre of the Frost Vine Talgasse Onionacre of the Drift Acre Schmelzwald Grainspool Acre of the Bark Coil Rundpfad Cloudjaw Acre of the Moss Thread Ebenrest Grainspire Acre of the Frost Coil Waldlicht Clayacre of the Grain Jaw Hagergrund Dustacre of the Cloud Coil Faserwinkel Grainroot Acre of the Silence Husk Rabensteg Mossacre of the Bark Thread Südfeld Grainjaw Acre of the Frost Acre Flechtenrain Cloudacre of the Grain Organ Atemweg Barkjaw Acre of the Thin Bloom Zargenpfad Grainacre of the Quiet Coil Weinholz Cloudroot Acre of the Frost Acre Krugrest Grainwing Acre of the Bark Spool Stralenrain Dustjaw Acre of the Grain Pulse Kehlensteg Cloudacre of the Ash Coil Bühlergrund Grainlit Acre of the Frost Acre Dampfflur Clayjaw Acre of the Grain Woof Schmauchpfad Barkacre of the Quiet Tooth Taubengasse Grainlit Acre of the Fog Acre Steinrohr Mossacre of the Cloud Whorl Halmschlucht Grainjaw Acre of the Thin Sinew Sudwinkel Cloudacre of the Grain Coil Ölrest Strawacre of the Bark Thread Frühlingsrain Grainroot Acre of the Frost Pulse Balgengrund Cloudjaw Acre of the Grain Coil Irrenpfad Ashacre of the Mist Jaw Stollenweit Grainacre of the Bark Pulse Jochweg Cloudroot Acre of the Frost Strip Regenklau Grainjaw Acre of the Moss Thread Branntrest Clayacre of the Quiet Pulse Wurfstein Grainlit Acre of the Cloud Husk Latschenrain Barkjaw Acre of the Frost Acre Stubengrun Graincoil Acre of the Dust Spine Schleifgrund Cloudroot Acre of the Lost Husk Sternacker Grainjaw Acre of the Bone Bloom Tropfenrest Barklung Acre of the Frost Coil Tiefenrun Grainroot Acre of the Cloud Acre Flackerfeld Mossjaw Acre of the Drift Coil Krähenschlucht Grainlit Acre of the Frost Husk Rohrhang Barkacre of the Grain Bloom Hadelgund Cloudjaw Acre of the Moss Acre Überpfad Graincoil Acre of the Frost Thread Schneelehm Barkroot Acre of the Grain Husk Kluftwinkel Cloudlung Acre of the Dust Acre Brüderrain Grainjaw Acre of the Bone Coil Wachtacker Barkacre of the Quiet Bloom Talmund Grainroot Acre of the Frost Echo

 
Chapter 1    

The universe began as a whisper in a mouse hole, so before there were stars there were crumbs on the floorboards of an invisible kitchen, and when I close my eyes I can feel the whole sky breathing in my lungs, tiny alveoli snowflakes collapsing and re forming in rhythms that do not respect clocks, and I say to no one that the first planet to arrive will not come from outside but will swell up under the pavement, a round dark stone pushing through the tarmac, a thought forcing its way into speech, and the old system builder from the south of the forests had already warned me, long before I was old enough to read him, that the world only understands itself when it is about to go under, so I repeat this as if it were a weather forecast, showers of meaning in the morning from the cock to the belly, scattered revelations later, thermodynamic sunsets edging the tower blocks with violet, and I see in the air not vapour but equations, quanta hopping like nervous fleas from branch to branch of the bare winter black tree bark, each transition an altar screen in miniature, each probability a tiny panel crowded with figures that look suspiciously like the creatures who crawl and grin in the paintings of the man from Bosch-Hertogen, the one who filled every square inch with birds that wear armour and fish that carry candles and men whose bodies open like cupboards to reveal other men, and I tell myself this is not madness, it is the pedagogy of the end, it is how the last days revise us, how they write in our muscles the diagram that the philosophers used to scratch with ink on paper, and while I am thinking this my stomach growls like a small unphilosophical god, demanding its daily sacrament of cabbage and stale bread soaked in broth, and I remember that the world spirit, if it ever visited the market, would come disguised as a potato seller with mud under her nails and huge tits, and I would not notice, I would be too busy counting the angles of the clouds, looking for that exact bent light which proves that the vacuum is crowded with virtual particles, and I say aloud in the empty room that when the last planet arrives it will not explode into us, it will lean very slowly against our roofs like a neighbour, it will press its cratered cheek to our brick and tile and our beams will creak as if remembering something, a conversation in an alien dialect of gravity, yet the people in the street will go on frying onions and haggling over turnips, because the end of the world is never televised in their language, it is just another pressure in the joints when they kneel to scrub the step, and if I listen carefully to the molecules in the steam above my tea I can hear them rehearsing the argument, they say, you think we are random but we are your biography, every Brownian twitch is a syllable of your name, you would see it if you wrote yourself down in integrals, and I nod, though no one is there to see, and I start to preach to the peeling paint on the ceiling, telling it that the cosmos has already finished, that we are only the echo, that the bright curve of history which the old Swabian traced with such exact and merciless patience has already returned to the point it began from, and now we are nothing but commentary, marginalia scrawled in pencil by a drowsy student of eternity, and in the corner, where the plaster has fallen away, I see a tiny painted scene as if the wall has remembered being a panel in a triptych, a little town burning, a river turning to serpents, a man with the head of a bird pushing a wheelbarrow full of clocks, and I know, with the same dull certainty with which I know the price of onions on a wet Tuesday, that my own skull is already part of that landscape, that one day the mice will walk through my eye sockets as if they were archways in some ruined monastery, and the stars will be only a rumour they hear in the rustle of old newspapers, and at the same time, absurdly, I worry about whether there will be enough flour tomorrow to bake bread, I calculate in my head the rate at which the last sack is being used, grams per day, crumbs per mouse, and I think that perhaps this is what it means for the absolute to be poor, to live always between the equation and the onion, never entirely at home in either, always smelling faintly of both chalk and cabbage, and the rain begins again, fine and slow, a drizzle that looks from this angle like the downward drift of lost probabilities, each drop a collapsed waveform, each puddle a failed universe, and I start explaining to the invisible listeners that in the beginning the world did not know it was beautiful, that is why it produced those grotesque gardens where saints stand among knife faced fruits and musical instruments turn into torture devices, because matter was trying out all the shapes it could imagine, it had not yet learned the modesty of the cabbage, the discipline of the potato, but now the situation is reversed, now every vegetable on my plate is a philosopher, the carrot knows more about necessity than any lecturer, the beetroot, when sliced, displays cross sections of the dialectic in its rings, and I lecture them all, fork in hand, that the final secret is not hidden in a cathedral or a theorem but in the way the knife passes through the fibres, the way the cells surrender without protest, as if they had been waiting precisely for this moment of division, and my tongue picks up the salt and says silently, yes, this is the movement from abstract to concrete, from concept to stew, and I laugh, and the laugh sounds slightly deranged in the narrow room, but I go on, because there is no one to interrupt, and I tell the dust on the windowsill that when the last day comes the equations will not be cancelled, they will be completed, the terms will balance like scales in a medieval painting, angels on one side, frogs on the other, and the coefficient of suffering will finally be reduced to its simplest form, but we will not notice, we will be busy arguing about the price of coal, and somewhere the great painter of nightmares will be calmly adding another tiny figure squatting at the edge of a pond, perhaps this time it will be me, hunched over, muttering about quarks while a fish bites my toe, and above me a night sky freckled with sterile moons, each one the failed copy of an idea that once thought it could be real, and my blood, sluggish in winter, will still be performing its own liturgy, red cells carrying oxygen as if it were contraband through the checkpoints of my capillaries, white cells patrolling like minor bureaucrats, and I will think, even as I cough, that here inside this damp chest a dull version of the cosmic drama continues, the struggle of form and formlessness, of order and decay, and I will want to shout to the cobweb in the corner that this is important, that the cobweb must understand that it too is an illustration of the logic of things, but I will only manage a wheeze, and the cobweb will go on catching small flies who dreamed, perhaps, of more illustrious destinies, and I will shuffle down the stairs and out into the alley where the air smells of frying fat and wet stone, and the sky above the crooked roofs will be a grey palate waiting for some hand to smear crimson comets across it, yet nothing happens, except a dog barking at nothing, so nothing from nothing, imagine, at last, ha, and I tell myself that this barking is the negative moment, the pure refusal without content, the sound that clears a space for any meaning to enter, and I grind my heel into a patch of slush and think of how many times the world has already ended, quietly, in the heads of thinkers, in the midnight fevers of mystics who saw in a cracked jug the sign that all forms are breaking, and I feel almost cheated that our own ending seems to involve so much queuing, so much small change, so many lists of groceries, and I say in my most solemn inward tone that perhaps this is exactly right, perhaps the universe deserves to conclude not with angelic trumpets but with shopping bags, not with a horseman in armour but with a woman counting coins for potatoes while the multiverse trembles, and in that moment a gust of wind flings a scrap of newspaper against my leg and I see, in the blurred print, words that look like fragments of lectures I once heard about the self seeing itself, about history examining its own skull in a shattered mirror, and I start again, from the beginning, telling the invisible mice and the cracked teacup and the damp coat on its hook that the ultimate truth is that nothing is outside this room and yet everything is, that the diagram which the old philosopher drew with such painful care across thousands of pages is now hiding in the blue veins on the back of my hand, in the broken plaster, in the way the rainwater feels cold then warm as it seeps through the shoe, and that soon, very soon, the planets will fold their orbits like chairs at the end of a fair, and the quantum fields will power down like exhausted stage lights, and all that will remain will be a faint smell of cooking and the echo of an unrecorded sermon about cabbages, probability amplitudes and the sorrowful joy of being the last poor witness of a universe that finally, reluctantly, learned to think so thus and thus I sit again in whatever chair this is, the metal cold or lukewarm depending on the weather that seeps in as a fine grey drizzle or a sheet of blank white sky that presses down on the roofs of Kröhlstrasse and the crates outside Donner’s tobacco shop and the oily puddles near the tram line, and in my head the same old problem turns around itself like a dog checking whether the floor is worthy, finally, of sleep, this question of how the whole fits together, how history and lungs and the faint ache behind my left eye when I have not slept properly can belong to one intelligible movement instead of being scattered like receipts for cabbage and soap across the table, and I remember that man from Stuttgart, or was it Tübingen or some other damp fucked over place with stoves that never quite warmed the corners, who insisted that the whole is only itself at the end when it has gone through all its shapes and chewed its own ratty bleeding tail, and I think of him while the coffee machine wheezes and spits, and the air smells of burnt beans and wet wool and tired commuters, and my fingers, little vertebrates in themselves, stiffen around the cup, the skin creased, epidermis over dermis over capillaries humming with erythrocytes that carry oxygen from the wet November air I dragged in through the alveoli, and each red cell is a tiny courier in a system that pretends to be rational, with valves and nodes and silent muscular contractions, a whole monarchy of tissues, and still my stomach complains in its dull peasant way that all this talk of the absolute is fine but where is the bread, where is the sausage, where is the potato soup that steams in chipped bowls in the back rooms of Schlegelgasse, where Lena’s shop sells onions and yesterday’s rolls and a cheese that smells like old books, and I count coins in my pocket, stupid metal universals, abstract labour rattling against lint, and the sky changes, it always changes, low cloud in the mornings when I drag my body here, liver processing whatever nameless toxin I picked up from the cheap schnapps at Meister Renz’s, his bottles lined up mute theses along the back wall, each label a promise of clarity that never arrives, and I sit and read the same few pages from that thick volume by Beiler or Beissen or whoever they say understood the Swabian better than he understood himself, and all I hear in those tidy paragraphs is that everything must somehow be necessary, even this cracked saucer, even the way my right knee grinds as cartilage erodes year by year by year, even the faint mildew in the corner where the ceiling meets the wall in this nameless cafe that has had so many owners, old Frau Hartwig with her watery eyes and her habit of counting change twice, then the brothers Dietrich who tried to sell lottery tickets and thick cigars, then quiet Soraya who painted the back room blue and filled it with plants that drooped like students in late autumn, and I stuck myself in her for a while a brief wetness that caught in the golden light soaring and soaring ah and all of them, all of us, are meant to be moments of one world that is busy becoming itself, like a joke, all jokes, this joke, that joke, I can imagine, I can imagine if I close my eyes, the water too dense, her rough hand scratching at my swollen cock then my back and yet when the wind slaps the window I just feel the draught on my neck and the grit in my teeth and the way my nails grow whether I understand them or not, keratin sheets pushing forward from nail matrix, blind insistent cells dividing in the darkness, whether I understand them or not or anything else, and somewhere in the city men argue about constitutions and trade look at their blue rimmed faces they all want it, never for one minute expect anything else from them, their pilot lights glowing, pink, purple, spiders on the ridge of their dying and living and pools of sweat, an angle, she rutted to the time and now ask whether Müller & Söhne will extend credit on paper or insist on coin, and somewhere else a child coughs in a narrow bed and little cilia in the trachea wave like grass in a storm, and all of this is meant to make sense together, the fog on the river, the ledger at Fink’s paper warehouse, my own stupid heartbeat, systole diastole, and the thought that knowledge, real knowledge, is not just cataloguing the pieces but seeing the necessity that binds them, and outside it begins to snow or rain or something between snow and rain, a half formed decision falling from a sky that cannot quite commit, whether I understand it or not or anything else, and I think of systems, and will one day position myself so they will feel my betrayal, there will be money involved of course, the way they promise shelter, whether I understand them or not or anything else, a roof against contingency, and how they are built from sentences laid one upon another, bricks from the yard at Schuster & Sohn, rough edges abraded, nice word that, fired in the same kiln, all terracotta theory, and still the wind finds a crack and whistles through, and my scalp itches, sebaceous glands overproducing, microscopic mites trudging through the forest of my pubic hair, and the waitress, is it still the same one as last year, I no longer know, they blur into one apron with different hands, different tired eyes, she brings the latte and I thank her with a voice that sounds to me like it belongs to someone somewhere else, come, come, some clerk who believes in wages and Sundays, and I watch the swirl of milk on the coffee surface, little galaxies of fat and water, molecules bumping in Brownian idiocy, and I tell myself that the mind is meant to rise from this, that there is no other material, that the synapses in which my idiotic thoughts of unity and history and necessity fire are made of the same carbon and hydrogen as the table and the stale pastry under the glass bell on the counter and I would put out my hand and cop a feel of her juicy hind in the rain and am a stale perversion, and I think of the man from the southwest, not by name, that would be too simple, but as a weather system, as that long low front of thought that rolled across Jena and Berlin and whatever other towns sold cheap ale and cold rooms with wobbly desks, a man whose own stomach must have growled and whose own bowels must have squeezed out excrement in the early mornings while he prepared to talk of the absolute movement of self mediating rationality, and I picture the steam of his shit rising in some cramped privy while outside students argued about the French, about freedom, about whether the Kingdom of Württemberg would ever pay them on time, and I feel a kind of obscene consolation that even the highest system sits on a pile of bones and muscle and digestive tract and that somewhere in my small intestine villi are absorbing sugars from the cheap bun I ate walking here, these sugars entering the bloodstream, fructose, glucose, the very fuel of speculation, whether I understand them or not or anything else, and outside the rain turns to sleet and back again while the years fold into each other, one winter like another, here then gone, here then gone, here then gone, one landlord after another at the boarding house on Sternweg where I fall asleep with books on my chest and damp socks on the floor, my breath condensates on the window, tiny droplets coalescing into rivulets obeying laws I never bothered to learn, surface tension, gravitational pull, the same laws that hold the planets in their hard indifferent ellipses while I rummage in my coat for the last coin that will buy me a thin slice of ham from old Jütte’s stall near the river, and she wraps it in paper already smeared with some stranger’s grease, and her fingers are cracked from brine and cold, and she complains, not about metaphysics, but about the municipal tax on market spaces, about the way the inspectors from Albrecht & Co come with their forms and their pens and their smug little smiles, and I nod and think, yes, institution, civil society, all of this belongs, but I say nothing more because my tongue is busy feeling the roughness of a broken molar, enamel chipped, dentine exposed, nerves fluttering like frightened birds when cold air touches them, and the sky that day is yellowish, a sickly colour that sits heavily on the tiled roofs of Nitzschgasse and Pardauergasse, and the bells in the church I never attend ring out a time that could be any time, because the years blur, and the snow comes late or early, and in some seasons the river floods and stinks, and in others it shrinks back and shows its muddy ribs, and through it all I keep circling the same thought, that the truth of anything is never that private little thing in front of you but its place in a story, and yet whenever I look up from the printed pages all I see is condensation and people with bags of turnips and cheap flour, and the reflection of my own face in the window, nose red from cold, eyes bloodshot, scalp flaking slightly, dandruff constellations on the collar of my coat, dead cells falling like imperfect snow, and perhaps that too belongs, perhaps the concept must shed its own skin, and I think of synaptic pruning in the young brain, those early years when the nervous system builds too many connections and then ruthlessly clips them, a gardener cutting branches so that the tree will grow in some coherent form, and I wonder whether history does that, whether systems of thought are just gigantic acts of pruning, killing off wild shoots, declaring some paths irrational, and I picture the philosophers as gardeners with filthy fingernails and sore backs, lugging compost in barrels bought on credit from Ketterer’s yard, and the wind rises again, always the wind, always the weather undermining the claims of the concept, draughts sneaking in under doors, muscles tensing involuntarily to preserve warmth, shivering as little rapid contractions produce heat, ATP consumed, mitochondria panting in their microscopic thousands, and somewhere a printer’s shop on Adlershofstrasse runs out of ink, and the apprentices curse and wipe their hands on their already filthy aprons, pigment and oil ground into their cuticles, and the owner, Herr Kraus, worries about prices and subscribers and the rumour that someone in Leipzig is preparing a cheaper edition, and all that economic fretfulness is meant to be comprehended in one vision, and I sit with my cup and feel a bubble of gas move through my gut, absurd little pocket of air shifting along pink convolutions, and I suppress it, tighten the anal sphincter like a good citizen, not wanting to fill the cafe with the stink of my insides, and I think, it is ridiculous, it is fucking ridiculous, that we talk about spirit when we are sacks of meat trying not to fart in public, and yet perhaps that is the grandeur of it, that the universal has to pass through this, through me and my worn shoes and my stained fingers and the faint fungal itch between my toes from cheap boots and damp socks, and year after year I come here and the coffee is sometimes thin and sometimes strong, depending on who is at the grinder, and outside sometimes there are protests and sometimes funerals and sometimes nothing at all, just drizzle and the shuffle of feet, and the names of the dealers and the streets change or repeat, Wessel & Baumann takes over where Levy & Sohn failed, and the sign is repainted and the credit terms silently altered, and young men with ink still fresh on their moustaches talk loudly about revolution or about the profit margin on hemp, and the old women with scarves tight around their swollen necks talk quietly about arthritis and the price of potatoes, and my ears, full of little ossicles beating in sympathy with every crash of cup and spoon, keep registering it, turning vibrations into nerve impulses, hair cells bending in the cochlea, ionic gates opening and closing, and all this electrical noise runs up into the same greyish mass behind my forehead where somewhere a sense forms that there must be a pattern, that these noises, these weathers, these bills from H. Blenheim & Co for candles and coal, cannot be merely scattered, and in the evenings, when I trudge back along Friedrichsplatz or Marienwinkel, past the butcher’s where a pig’s head stares blankly from the window, its eye cloudy, its snout rosy and slick, and the air smells of blood and sawdust, and the sky is either violet or black or a flat consumed orange behind clouds, I feel my bones complain, osteocytes entrapped in their mineral prison sending who knows what slow signal of wear, and my breath plumes in front of me, and I think that I too am part of this slow labour, this long years long movement of a mind that knows itself only by losing itself in people who think about the price of cabbage and the composition of bile and the direction of the wind on the river, and some mornings it is early spring, or later, or some undetermined slice of year when the trees along the canal at Kantsfeld or Fichtestrasse show little green eruptions at the tips of their twigs, chloroplasts stirring, photons being harvested like gossip at the market stalls, and my sinuses run with thin mucus, histamine released, vessels dilated, the body reacting to pollen or dust or the mere idea of change, and in the cafe the light comes in at a different angle, flatter or fresher, and the table where I sit shows its scratches more clearly, each groove a record of some previous hand, knife, spoon, each scar in the wood soaked with varnish and spilled drink, layers of use like layers of commentary on the idea that everything is connected, and I think of the old names of the towns, of dealers in second hand folios, like Reuter & Lamm, who sell brown spotted volumes that smell of mould and mouse droppings, and inside those volumes neat Latin letters talk about causes and substances and first principles, and the pages are freckled like my own forearms, melanin gone rogue in small patches, and my heart sometimes beats too hard, an extra systole, a skipped beat, some arrhythmia that makes me briefly dizzy as I stand up, orthostatic hypotension probably, blood pressure dropping, baroreceptors in the carotid sinus firing, sympathetic nerves scrambling to tighten vessels, and still I reach for the book and for the cup, as if these small gestures were part of an enormous, blind rhythm in which the city, the weather, the sweating workers in the printing house, the civil servants bent over files at the Rathaus, all participate, and there is no need to know it, no need for them or for me to say the word that would name it, because it goes on whether I mouth the syllables or not, and sometimes, walking past the fields at the edge of town where coarse rye and beets grow in poor soil, I feel the mud suck at my boots and hear the crows, black thoughts hopping on brown furrows, and I see peasants bending their spines, hands knotted around hoes, clothing patched and patched again, and their breath steams too, filled with microdroplets that might carry bacteria from one lung to another, and beneath their feet earthworms move blindly, aerating the soil, and fungal mycelia stitch root to root in networks older than our codes and laws, and somewhere a clerk at Heidenreich & Neffe writes out an insurance policy against fire or flood, the attempt to rationalise contingency, and I think how each premium paid is one more piece of the puzzle, one more effort to make the irrational calculable, and my own body meanwhile collects small injuries and repairs them in silence, macrophages engulfing debris, fibroblasts laying down collagen, scars forming where once there was smooth skin, and the weather shifts again, a sudden gust rattling the shutters of the cheap boarding rooms in Hintergasse where the drunken students sing at midnight, and thunder rolls like a thought too large to fit into any single head, reverberating between tenements and chapels, and lightning forks over the chimneys of Mörikehof, discharging heaven’s static accumulation, what bunkum, shit, nitrogen fixed in the air, raindrops fattened with whatever dust was up there, falling onto laundry hung between windows, onto the notebooks of children walking home from school, onto the bald spot growing slowly on the crown of my head, keratin sparse there now, scalp shiny, melanocytes tired, and I remember that none of this is free, that the coffee I drink is imported, carried in holds of ships owned by cunt men whose names I will never know, insured by companies with double barrelled titles like Grünwald, Peters & Söhne, roasted in a warehouse by a man with calloused palms, thin cock and a cough, distributed by carters who smack their horses on grey mornings, and all of that labour condenses into the bitter liquid that wets my tongue, its molecules interacting with taste receptors, sending signals through cranial nerves to some cortical area that stupidly says this is good or this is bad, and I think that the grand movement of the world must look like this, tiny contacts, ions crossing membranes, merchants haggling, clouds forming, snow melting, prices rising and falling, children learning to read, peasants emigrating, cells dividing, old men dying of congestive hearts while their legs swell and their nails thicken, and that there must be some point at which this ceases to be a chaos and becomes a story, some invisible dealer of meaning, not located in any street, not paying taxes to any bureau, who takes these fragments and arranges them, and as the years slide across each other with the soft shush of banknotes changing hands at Abendroth & Fils, I find that my own spine curves, that my gait shortens, that the handwriting in my notebooks trembles, alpha motor neurones misfiring, myelin thinning in unnoticed slow catastrophe, and still I come to the cafe, or some cafe, for they blur, and the same cheap wooden chairs, the same chipped cups, the same smell of overboiled milk and underwashed floors receive me, and the sky outside is sometimes a hard blue that seems to deny all interpretation, and sometimes a low grey that invites projection, and the pigeons peck at crumbs near the tram stop, their feet red and scaly, their heads bobbing, cortexes the size of peas containing whatever passes in them for certainty, and porn is just a gist of somewhere else, a sequenced arrival of a dimming spirit, one episode then another hardening then not, hardening then not, lessening and lessening, draining away some and adding to others, watch and watch, masturbating alone again, on and off, on and off, I know nothing except that I am here again with a book that tries to tell me how the world manages to be one thing and many things, and in my bloodstream platelets patrol, ready to clot if a vessel tears, and in my gut bacteria digest fibres I cannot handle alone, and at the market on Rosenplatz they sell cabbages stacked like green brains, leaves veined and layered, and the traders shout, and the clouds pass, and the prices change, and my own thoughts, such as they are, such as they can be in this patchwork of weather and hunger and worn cloth and late rent notices from the office of Binder & Krause, keep circling back to the sense that somewhere, not above but within, all of this is trying to say something, that the sleet and the aching joints and the smudged print and the coins smeared with the grease of a hundred hands belong to one slow, grinding utterance that began long before I sat in this chair and will go on long after I leave my last mark in the dust of whatever street this is, and the sky, whatever it chooses to do, rain or sun or that blank indifference of low cloud, will go on being the ceiling of it or some ragged version of a beginning I am standing in the drizzle am drizzling thinking that must have drawn electrons as little saints with beaks and lanterns, crowding along the edge of an energy level like pilgrims on a crumbling bridge, and the rain itself is a kind of quantum register, every drop a collapsed possibility trembling on my skin, and there are cherubs made of probability amplitude, round faced and badly behaved, pushing one another out of orbit while the sky hums like an accelerator in a barn, and I tell myself that if I stare hard enough at the cloud cover I will see the wave function of history, not the polite textbook one ja ja ja but the crooked, worm eaten one that describes how a thought in Jena or Stuttgart or some other place with wet roofs and bad coffee turns into the flashing sign above the butcher’s on Haymmarkt, and I think that the old wood panels in the grocer’s on Dilthey Lane, where the apples lean into rot and the potatoes sprout pale arms, are just diagrams of this, brown and green diagrams of a field that does not care about me, and I feel the wind change direction in my lungs, the bronchioles tightening a little as if the air of the day had opinions about method, and on another morning or the same morning shifted by years the clouds are higher and the light comes in sideways and I am muttering about two ways of reading anything at all, the sky, the pavement, this greasy pamphlet from the second hand dealer Haering on the corner, and one way is to treat it as if it were talking to me now, loudly, in the present, about my own mess of problems, so every grey streak across the river is a remark about my tendency to postpone decisions, stop putting everything off you cretin, you’re a coward, always too fucking scared to make a move, a moron and a coward and a fucking lousy low life scum coward Kunt and the other way is to sit in the rain like a careful undertaker and say no, this belongs to another time, the puddle has its own century, its own dead, the pattern of ripples has to be placed back among cobbles long since lifted, and then I realise that either way I ruin it, I either shove my own concerns into everything like a drunk ventriloquist with a wood cock, one eyed, Cyclops of pine or blind blind fate, or I turn the world into a museum where even the mud has a caption, and somewhere between these two botched habits there is supposed to be a better way of walking to the market without lying to myself, but I do not find it, I only find the damp scarf around my neck and the slow ache in my left knee and the feeling that my red blood cells are tiny archivists pushing oxygen to synapses that no longer trust themselves, and the weather keeps changing in a way that is never quite seasonal, a snow that feels like late thought, a heat that arrives like an unfootnoted objection, and the shop signs fade and are repainted but they always bear the same surnames, Henrich and Frank and Waibel and Stamm, dealers in books, dealers in onions, dealers in the cheap meat that sits grey in the window until the afternoon dogs begin their bargaining, and between their stalls I try to decide if I should read the old philosopher as if he were buying cabbages with me, right here, squinting at the price of the carrots, or whether I should lock him back in his century and say he had his own mud on his boots and his own wars and his own worries about being paid on time, and whichever I decide I can feel the mistake crawling over my skin like midges, I can feel my epidermis shedding flakes of error onto my scarf, my nose dripping with some overworked metaphor about relevance, and the air tastes of coal and wet stone and a little sausage fat from the stall at the corner of Haymstrasse, and I remember that the pamphlet says the philosopher hated being turned into a contemporary puppet, that he would have despised having his lines rewritten for the sake of making him agreeable to our current academic diets, and yet here I am chewing his pages like old bread while the wind pushes grit between my teeth, so I stand there and count my breaths, each inhale full of dust spores and exhaust and the faint perfume of the woman ahead of me who is buying turnips, and each exhale a small, private declaration that there must be some way of respecting the strange otherness of his problems without letting them fossilise, and while I think this my stomach growls in a thoroughly unphilosophical way, a muscular wave along smooth tissue, glands squirting acid into an indifferent cavity, and I remember I still need to buy lentils and flour and maybe some of that cheap cheese from the stall with the chipped blue counter, because the week is long and the money is not, and at the same time a part of me is still up in the clouds with saints, painting halos on quarks, insisting that the unseen architecture of this market, this city, these damp lungs, is metaphysical, not in the sense the clever ones now prefer where everything is quietly reduced to a vocabulary lesson or a sociological survey, but in the sense that there is a claim here about what is real, how it hangs together, what counts as a whole, and I feel an unreasonable loyalty to that thought, as if the cartilage in my joints were made from his stubbornness, as if my synovial fluid had absorbed his refusal to let the big questions be shamed into silence by polite empiricism, and the clouds above the tram stop look like thick white paragraphs that no one wants to admit are still being written, and yet below them the trams rattle past on schedule, the children kick at piles of leaves that have been swept into tidy metaphors by the city workers, and Rosenkranz the fishmonger slaps a dead carp onto the scale like he is ending an argument, and I think about non metaphysical readings of any old system, how every generation tries to wash the blood and thunder out of it, to say it was never really about what there is, only about how we talk, or how we agree, or how we share reasons, and I feel a flicker of temper, a little rash of anger across my forearms, the capillaries brightening as if to say enough of that, enough of the neat stories that take out the one piece that still has teeth, and the wind picks up round the corner of Beiserplatz and throws grit into my eyes so they water and sting and I mutter oh for fuck’s sake into my scarf, because I am tired, my liver is busy processing the stale beer from last night, the villi in my intestines are harvesting whatever vitamins they can wring from cheap bread and boiled cabbage, and still I am supposed to decide whether the big old system on my shelf is alive or dead, relevant or obsolete, friend or embarrassing uncle, and the more I think in those terms the more absurd it seems, like asking whether the spinal cord is relevant to the fingers, or whether mitochondria are still contemporary inside the muscle cells of my thighs, there is no outside here, the questions about freedom and law and community and mind and matter are the same questions that shape the way the butcher ties his apron, the way the woman in front of me shifts the weight of her shopping bag from one hip to the other, the way the pigeons on Dilthey Bridge organise themselves into a miserable grey democracy, 

Chapter 2    

and yet to see that I would have to admit that I am part of the same field, that my mood on this drizzling Tuesday in some unimportant decade is not just my dirty little secret but an expression, however minor, of a pattern that started long before I existed, and that thought makes my chest tighten for a moment, a sympathetic constriction of the coronary arteries, and I clear my throat and ask for half a kilo of potatoes in a voice that sounds borrowed from some other more confident self, and the man at the stall barely looks up as he weighs them, because for him the only method that matters is whether the scale is honest and the coins are not counterfeit, and perhaps he is right, perhaps all the rest is self indulgent fog, but then I remember reading that any attempt to dismiss the big speculative questions as meaningless always hides its own huge assumptions about what counts as real, and I think of positivists as people who walk around insisting they have no skeleton because they cannot see it in the mirror, and my spine cracks a little as if agreeing, each vertebrae a silent clack of protest, and the clouds over Haering Gate turn a colour that reminds me of bad photocopies of old theses, that washed out grey where you can barely read the word metaphysics but you can feel it pressing through, and days pass like this, or years, or some composite of both, winter light scraping along the tenement walls, then spring arriving with its infuriating optimism, dandelions forcing their way through cracks in the pavement like a footnote pointing out that the whole edifice is more fragile than it looks, and through all of it I keep circling back to the same fork, present or past, conversation or portrait, puppet or museum piece, and every time I think I have chosen I see that the choice has already distorted what I wanted to understand, as if the neurons forming the thought had already encoded the verdict in the pattern of their firing, and my cortex sends down little pulses of disappointment to the stomach, which responds with a gurgle and demands pickled cabbage and black bread, so I go again to Frank’s stall near the tram terminus, and he nods without interest, his hands stained with beetroot and brine, and while he wraps my parcel in newspaper I am thinking about individuation, about how easy it is to say that this thinker or that one was original, heroic, unique, and how much harder it is to admit that most of what passes for originality is a rearrangement of what an entire generation was already thinking, like the way my own face is just a slight variation on the faces of the people queuing around me, same bone plan, same muscle map, just a minor tweak of cartilage here and melanin there, and yet I insist on my own strangeness, I insist that my particular constellation of thoughts about method and metaphysics and markets and weather is singular, and maybe that is vanity, or maybe it is necessary to keep getting out of bed, to send command signals down the motor neurons to the legs, lift, step, lift, step, and the city itself seems to respond differently on different days, sometimes it feels like the kind of place that would welcome big metaphysical talk, the trolley wires humming like they are ready to conduct any argument, other times it feels flat and small and hostile to anything that cannot be priced per kilo, and on those days the rain falls in a pinched, accounting sort of way, each drop a reprimand, and I shuffle home under my worn coat, feeling the fat deposits in my abdomen push against the waistband, feeling my teeth ache with a low grade resentment, and I curse under my breath, a tired cunt or two, not at anyone in particular but at the way everything that matters has to be smuggled in under the cover of things that pass, like shopping lists and tram tickets and weather reports, and the years slide past the way dust accumulates on the top edges of books, a thin, gritty indictment that no one reads often enough, and I find that I have adopted without quite realising it the older way, the hermit’s way, I read the old system as if it belonged entirely to its time, as if it were one organism within the ecosystem of early romanticism, sharing nutrients through roots with Hardenburg and Schlegel and Schleiermacher and all the other names stamped in small print on the endpapers, and yet whenever I try to keep it there, safely bounded by the dates and the archival evidence, something leaks, some sentence about freedom or community or the unity of mind and world slips past the police of context and knocks on the door of my day, demanding entry, demanding that I notice how it maps onto the question of whether I will say good morning to the tired woman who lives next door, or whether I will pretend not to see her because I am in a strange mood, and in those moments I feel like a badly organised cell membrane, letting in big proteins that I do not know how to process, and my mental cytoplasm grows cloudy with half digested problems, and there is a temptation to clamp down, to become a positivist cell, a cell that denies the existence of anything it cannot digest in twenty four hours, but that would mean denying the original impulse that drew me to these questions, which was not curiosity or career or some abstract admiration for system building, but a need to make sense of how the weather, the market, the body, the neighbours, the wars on the radio, and the old texts on the shelf all hang together or fail to do so, and I can feel that need in the rate of my heartbeat, in the way it speeds up when I cross the tram tracks without looking because I am thinking about the synthesis of freedom and necessity, and in the way it slows when I sit at the cheap table in my kitchen with a bowl of lentil soup and a heel of bread and a sliced onion, and for a moment the whole business of method and context and anachronism fades, and what remains is the simple fact that I am here, that my teeth are chewing, that starches and proteins are being turned into something my cells can use, and yet even in that apparent simplicity the old metaphysical questions are still there, hidden like lunatic creatures in the background of a garden, grinning from the margins of the wallpaper, asking whether this ordinary act of eating is part of a larger rational structure or just a flare of chemistry in an indifferent universe, and I do not know, I never really know, and the not knowing shapes the slope of my shoulders as I wash the bowl under cold water that smells faintly of iron and algae, and then days later decades maybe I am on Beiserplatz again, buying cheap tomatoes from a young man who listens to loud music on a small radio, and above us the clouds have turned the colour of the philosopher’s prose, thick and foreign and slightly greasy, and I think, without quite meaning to, that the whole business of reading and shopping and cursing and breathing in coal dust is one long argument about how to live with metaphysics when everyone around insists they have none, and that this argument is not happening in lecture halls or in the tidy introductions I keep dropping into the bath, but in the invisible negotiations between nerve and muscle, between pig farmer and newspaper seller, between thunderhead and tram wire, and somewhere not too far from here a brain that is no longer alive has broken down into its component proteins, its patterns of firing long gone, and yet the questions it asked about method and meaning still stir in the air like pollen, lodging in my nasal passages, making my eyes water as I walk home with my bag of potatoes and onions, my joints aching with the damp, my skin itching under too many layers of wool, and I am still muttering about how not to cheat, how not to make the old thinker say what I already think, how not to freeze him into a monument that no longer speaks, and I suspect that I will go on muttering like this as long as the heart keeps pumping, as long as the lungs keep hauling in this city’s many varieties of dust, as long as the markets on Haymmarkt and Dilthey Lane and Haering Gate keep selling their cabbages and cheap cheese under skies that cannot decide whether to honour or to drown us, as long as my mitochondria keep burning the lentils into energy for more walking, more reading, more cursing, more wondering, and then one late afternoon when the air smells of wet stone and frying fat and the geese are flying low over the river like badly drawn particles in a altarpiece, I realise without any special drama that there will never be a resolution, no final fusion of present and past, no perfect method that rescues me from either ventriloquism or antiquarianism, only this ongoing oscillation, this quantum flicker between making the old words speak in my voice and letting them remain stubbornly other, and in that flicker I go on living, buying turnips, scratching at a rash on my wrist, reading a page or two in bed before sleep pulls me under like a slow dark river, my neurons firing out their last messy signals into a night that has long ago absorbed the heat of vanished suns and forgotten arguments the beginning it is always a picture, electrons wobbling through a garden painted by , tiny spectral grains moving like guilty saints between two cracks of light, I watch them in my head as if the lab were hung on a church wall, a triptych where one panel is fog, one is rain, and one is a market in late afternoon, and the wave function looks like a flock of bruised birds that cannot decide whether to land on the left screen or the right, it all depends, they say, on how you look, how you ask, how you cut the question into the body of the world, and I think of that old Swabian whose sentences fold back on themselves like intestines, method, he kept muttering, method, as if the way you slice a thing is the thing, as if the knife decides what counts as meat and what falls aside as offal, and the sky over the river is grey with a kind of bureaucratic drizzle that repeats for years, not every day, but so often that I remember it more clearly than birthdays or elections, long corridors of cloud as I walk to the stall of Frau Dilthey who sells apples that smell faintly of dust and printer’s ink, and she weighs them on a scale that squeaks like the hinge of a very old book, and somewhere between the rusted weight and the bruise on the fruit I hear again the problem, whether to treat the old system builder as a contemporary, sitting at the same chipped table, or as a portrait behind glass in a museum that smells of raincoats, and the electrons keep walking through their imaginary garden, through towers and pits and tiny demons turning spits, they interfere with themselves, they forget which slit they passed, they make patterns that look like the wings of moths, and then the wind shifts and somewhere far away in a field a farmer named Rosenzweig lifts his head because the pressure has changed and the wheat whispers about relevance, about why anyone should bother to read the dead when the price of potatoes is up again and the joints ache in the knees and the cat has worms, pale little threads curling like question marks in the litter tray, and the rain seeps into everything, into paper, into shoes, into the cartilage of the ear where the word metaphysics lodges like a burrowed insect, difficult to scrape out, so people try to wash it away, to shave it off the old man’s thought as if they were trimming fat from a cheap cut, and they say that what really matters is the pattern, the categories, the social traffic of reasons, a tidy grid for thinking that can be kept in a filing cabinet at the back of the mind, but whenever they slice out the metaphysics the electrons in the garden start to howl, a thin mechanical shrieking just at the edge of audibility, because the universe dislikes being told that it is only language, only practice, only a conversation between finite apes whose guts are full of fermenting cabbage and whose lymph nodes swell when the weather turns, and I walk again through the years past the same river, the same bridge, to the same greasy cafe called The Analytic, where the sugar sachets are stacked like little white volumes and the man behind the counter, Herr Haym, wipes the machine with the solemnity of a commentator, and he nods as if he knows that some people in corner tables like to treat the old thinker as a friend, a colleague, a participant in current quarrels about realism and community and the rotten state of parliament, as if he had just stepped out for a cigarette and would be back in a moment to say something caustic about naive empiricism while stirring artificial sweetener into his coffee, and on other mornings, when the fog is thicker and the buses sail past in slow motion, I drift instead to the Antiquarian, a narrow shop in a side street where Frau Haering keeps glass cases full of mouldy pamphlets and dead butterflies, and here the old Swabian is no longer a guest at the kitchen table but a specimen, pinned carefully in his own historical air, his problems labelled in Latin and tied to the chemical composition of the late eighteenth century, so that to talk with him you have to breathe the dust of small wars, of Lutheran hymns, of the smell of tallow candles and cheap tobacco and unwashed collars, and my fingers go numb with cold as I turn the pages because the heating never works and the years keep passing like flocks of indifferent birds, and all this time my own body is aging in tiny measurable increments, nails thickening microscopically, hair retreating, capillaries fracturing like fine red lightning over the knuckles, the immune system adjusting its clumsy algorithms to new insults, pollen, diesel, the occasional virus caught on the tram where a child coughs wetly into the air, invisible droplets containing strands of RNA that look, under the right microscope, like cursive handwriting, and the question of method persists, winding itself through fever and shopping lists, whether to speak with the old man as if we shared the same bacterial flora and economic crises, or whether to seal him off like a relic from a vanished ecosystem, and then the quantum returns, the garden now a market square at dusk, festooned with strings of uncollapsed possibilities, each little bulb humming with probability amplitudes, and the saints in the painting have been replaced by graduate students from Göttingen, all of them carrying Geiger counters and stale bread, complaining about funding while they watch particles decide where to land, and above them the clouds mutate into equations that nobody bothers to write down because the rain is beginning again, thin at first, then heavier, striking the skin with its own small statistics, droplet size, terminal velocity, impact distribution over the square area of the face, and I can feel the sebaceous glands on my nose respond with a faint greasiness, as if to repel the invasion, and I remember reading once in Frank’s stall by the bridge that an age calls for its own method, that each generation chooses how to slice its dead, and so the merchants of interpretation in this town set up their stands along the river, Dieter with his romantic onions, Violetta with her neo Kantian beans, Michael with his whirring scale that weighs everything in units of social practice, and they shout at one another on wet Thursdays about anachronism and fairness and the proper way to treat a system that believed the whole of reality could be reasoned through like a dissection of a frog, ventricles, atria, the glittering nervous system, the thin blue thread of the hepatic portal vein which in the old diagrams always looks strangely hopeful, as if it knew that one day someone would say that method is destiny, that the way you cut is the world you see, and there are years when I am sure the analytic people are right, that the only honest thing is to drag the old man into the fluorescent light of contemporary argument, sit him down in the plastic chair of a seminar room that smells of whiteboard vapour and modest despair, and ask him about non reductive physicalism, about whether consciousness can be reconciled with neurons that fire according to probabilities, about the politics of recognition in housing cooperatives and bus routes, and then I watch how in my mind his heavy face shifts, becomes a little embarrassed, as if the flickering tubes overhead give him a headache, and he answers anyway, out of courtesy, and the rain on the windows loses focus, becomes pure noise, and for a while everything seems possible, a vast synthetic project where quarks and voting systems and family quarrels all line up in one intelligible procession, until the bus schedule changes, the funding is cut, the students stop coming, and I find myself instead standing in the dim back room of Haering’s shop where a single yellow bulb hangs over a map of long vanished states, and here the method is different, here you are not allowed to smuggle in your own worries about climate change and data privacy and the price of detergent, here you must stay among the smells of horse sweat and ink and coal smoke, and you are told, sternly, that the old system is not your friend or companion but a fossil, and if you want to study it you must learn its extinct weather, the quality of the snow of 1795, its crust and grain, the way early romantic lungs felt when the mist from the river rose through unheated rooms, you must feel the exact chill that made them dream of totality, and the years advance again through my capillaries, little iron molecules bumping and glinting as they carry oxygen to tissues that by now have been replaced countless times, cell by cell, so that the body that first read those sentences is long vanished, yet the question keeps reforming inside the new flesh like a persistent virus, analytic or hermeneutic, now or then, and outside the window the wind changes direction repeatedly and the cheap plastic bag from the market whips itself around my wrist as if it were trying to individuate me, to determine my precise relation to my own contemporaries, which is mostly that we queue for discounted cabbage and tinned beans at the supermarket that stands on the old town wall, where the security guard named Henrich checks for shoplifters with an air of philosophical disappointment, and in the frozen aisle the peas glitter like discrete possibilities waiting to be cooked into actuality, and the loudspeaker plays a flat song about love that nobody listens to because we are all reading the labels for the percentage of fat and the number of calories per hundred grams, while somewhere in the overhead ducts an idea circulates that some projects were not unique after all, that what was once praised as absolute optimism about reason might have been just one dialect in the ordinary language of an entire generation’s hunger for order, and my stomach makes its small peristaltic ripples as if to confirm that hunger, and the ancient system builder shrugs in the back of my thoughts, half saint, half grocer, as sewage water swirls into the drains outside, greenish and full of microscopic creatures whose Latin names I never learned, yet they swim through the centuries without caring whether anyone interprets them correctly, and when at last I step into the evening, plastic bag cutting red lines into my fingers, I cannot tell whether the drizzle on my face is from this year or last or some year when I still believed books could fix anything, and the electrons in the garden freeze for a second under a flash of lightning, caught between particle and wave, neither and both, and the demons roasting scholars on spits in the background cackle about method, about how some people try to rescue the old man by trimming away everything that cannot be cashed out in contemporary argot, turning him into a social theorist here, a cultural historian there, a theorist of recognition somewhere else, as if you could detach the organs of his thought from the spine of metaphysics and still have a living creature, whereas the more I watch the weather work its slow corrosive business on statues and bus stops and cartilage, the more I suspect that the metaphysical backbone is not an optional luxury but the very arrangement of the bones, and that if you remove it you are left with a sack, and still the years go by in small almost invisible increments, teeth grinding at night, enamel decaying, enamel regrowing in negligent dreams, while merchants in the town rename their stalls according to fashion, and every winter the river rises a little higher, comes close to the steps outside, leaves behind greasy lines of silt and cigarette butts, and I wonder, with no particular urgency, how long the town will last, whether the particle tracks of our decisions will look, from some future balcony, like a pattern, or only like noise, and somewhere in the archive behind Haering’s shop there is a damp ledger that records the first time a reader entered and bought a thin book about a man who believed that to understand a thinker you had to situate him in his movement, in the thick swarm of his contemporaries, not as a solitary genius glowing in the dark, and as I chew my bread that tastes faintly of mould, the yeast still dreaming of sugar in my mouth, I imagine my own brain as a small library where rival methods keep arguing, one insisting that everything must be translated into present questions, into talk of neural networks and ecological collapse and labour markets for delivery riders, the other whispering that the dead have the right to their own idioms, their own weather, their own parasites and prejudices and toothaches, and between them there is no final judge, only the slow adjustment of synaptic strengths as experiences accumulate, little deposits of calcium at the synapses like mineralised opinion, and the quantum canvas grows ever more crowded, now with commuters standing ankle deep in probability, now with scholars in muddy boots trudging through early romantic forests, now with peasants measuring out grain in the market, and in one corner a tiny figure that might be me or might be someone else entirely is holding a piece of stale bread and watching the electrons decide, and the air is thick with the smell of frying onions and wet wool and exhausted arguments, and the sentence about method goes on murmuring softly in the background like the circulation of blood, never quite finishing, never quite beginning, just looping through capillaries of thought as the weather turns again and the town prepares, without reflection, for another statistically average year I keep seeing the particles as little pilgrims crawling over the painted backs of those fish in the sky, each one tunnelling in and out of the pigment as if the plank of wood were a field of potential states and the cracked varnish only the surface of some other probability, and I tell myself that if I stare long enough the electron clouds will settle into an order that explains why the rain in this street always begins just as I reach the corner by Haering’s stall and not before, why the clouds gather like committees in the upper air and then disband without resolution, why my breath leaves my mouth in the winter and hangs there like a failed hypothesis, because there must be a method in the way the droplets decide whose head to land on and whose pocket to miss, a rule that runs through the whole swarm of days, through the mornings when I walk past the cheap fruit piled in crooked pyramids outside Dilten and Sons and the evenings when the sky looks like someone scrubbed out the sun with a dirty thumb, and I think, if I could just choose between two clear paths, either talk to the particles as if they were neighbours in a village and ask them what they want, or else treat them as fossils in a museum case and work out how they lived from the angle of their tiny bones, then I might stop this constant flickering between seeing everything as alive and seeing everything as dead, and in this flicker whole years seem to pass, not marked by calendars or clocks but by the way my skin changes, the way a small brown patch appears near my elbow one year and then a thin white hair sprouts from my ear in another and I realise that my own body is a kind of archive, a shelf of dusty volumes where every scar is an old argument with the world, and sometimes I feel like some cracked voiced ventriloquist, putting my questions into the mouths of other people, into the mouths of beetles and market sellers and the occasional priest from St Zahavi’s who buys onions from Haym the grocer, and then later when I remember what was said I cannot tell which words were mine and which belonged to them first, and this bothers me less than it should, because there is a strange comfort in thinking that what I hear is always already mixed, that there is no clean origin, only a chorus under the skin, the way the gut bacteria hum at night when I lie awake and listen to the soft peristaltic waves stirring through the loops of intestine, microscopic merchants passing lactic acid from one booth to another along the villi, and above them the heart keeps thumping out its slow ridiculous drum part, not caring in the least whether I decide to buy potatoes from Revanzmarkt or stale bread from the discount shelf in Modenstrasse, and yet I keep insisting that somewhere in these choices there is a pattern, that the days when I choose cabbage align with the days when the sky turns the colour of old milk and the pigeons sit with their feathers fluffed up on the rooftop of the Brief Biography kiosk, and this alignment must mean something, though I refuse to say what, because as soon as I name it I will have turned the whole thing into a small neat lie, a little diagram that leaves out the smell of the wet cardboard, the ache in my knee, the damp creeping into the seams of my boots, all the dull stubborn facts that cling to each afternoon like moss to a stone, and I know from the way mildew grows on the bathroom ceiling that the world has no respect for my diagrams, the spores follow their own ugly expedient geometry, each one thrusting a hypha into the plaster, extracting calcium and dust and whatever else is there, they do not care whether I am trying to reconstruct their history in a dignified manner or whether I just call them a right fungal pain in the arse, they swell and branch and darken in whatever pattern suits them, and the same must be true of the little quanta flitting through painted hellscapes, where the bird headed men swallow souls and excrete them as music, which is not that different from the way a neuron takes in ions and pushes out an action potential, except that the neuron is all business, no grotesque carnival, just sodium in, potassium out, a clean refractory period, and yet when a whole sheet of them fire together somewhere behind my eyes I get a flash not of clarity but of some strange inner weather, a sense that inside the skull there are also seasons, that sometimes the thoughts drift like snow and bury everything under a soft white sameness and other times they come down like hailstones, sharp little bits of language that sting when they hit and leave small dents where they land, and on those days I walk under the real sky with my shoulders hunched, as if the clouds could read what is happening in my cortex and were trying to keep up, and I pass the stall of Old Man Haering, who sells second hand theology books beside bruised apples, and I hear him muttering that the trade has never been the same since the universities all decided to turn the past into a puppet show for present fashions, and some part of me agrees, though I do not say so aloud, because to agree would be to stand still on one side of some invisible line, the side where everything old is kept behind glass, and another part of me wants to shout that the whole point is to bring the bones back to life, to coax them into the greasy light of the market and ask them what they think of the price of cabbages, I stand in the half dark of the room talking to you my little furred auditors while the night outside folds and refolds like a badly printed map, and I tell you that the universe is a cracked bell and a bent orbit, that the planets do not circle so much as hesitate, shudder, drift sideways like anxious cattle, that every so often one of them remembers a different law of motion, some old forgotten covenant written in the dust before gravity woke up, and in that moment the whole sky tilts a fraction of a millimetre inside the skull, you can feel it squeak behind the eyes, the way a rusty hinge complains when a door that has always been shut is pulled slowly open, and I say to you that this is not astronomy, it is nearer to a kind of provincial mysticism learned at the back of a butcher’s shop where the blood ran into grooves in the stone and made diagrams of things that had not yet happened, small red constellations around the drain, and the old man in the apron muttering about necessity as he sharpened the knife, and I tell you that the same necessity now hums in the wires above the tram stop in Unterkirchen or Fehrlau or whatever name the town chooses to wear today, that the electrons moving there are not simply obeying, they are listening, they are like cramped angels pressed into copper corridors, and when the rain comes they whisper to it, ribosome to raindrop, quark to pigeon, and somewhere between the rooftop gutters and the wet cobblestones a new principle is born and forgotten before it reaches a book and I say to you, you whiskered congregation, that the end of the world began long ago with a very small miscalculation in a village called Niederholz or perhaps Scholter Mark, it depends on which clerk you ask, when a boy in a brown coat added one too many zeroes to an account for candle wax, and from that surplus light the centuries unfolded, cathedrals built themselves secretly in the back of human heads, whole philosophies rushed out like steam from under a crooked lid, and soon there were men sitting in draughty rooms arguing about absolute spirit while the floorboards under their shoes remembered the trees they once were and resented the heavy boots, and meanwhile in the fields the turnips simply grew, indifferent, spherical, each one a mute contradiction of all the grand systems, and I tell you that in these turnips there were quantum states more delicate than any thought, tiny superpositions of sweetness and rot, and that their collapse at harvest time was the first real apocalypse, the soil tasting what it had made and not knowing whether to be proud or ashamed I explain, though you are busy washing your paws, that the real story of the cosmos is a series of failed paintings, that before there was light there was already the idea of a horizon filled with blue shapes and crooked towers, a landscape without colour, just an outline scratched nervously across the void, and that when light finally arrived it did so like a drunk apprentice spilling pigment, splashing green on the place where the sky was meant to be, and the result is what you see now if you had eyes for more than crumbs, flocks of photons behaving like guilty conspirators, jumping in and out of existence, whispering to each other in the language of probability while down on the market square in Dorsbrunn the snow falls in clumps on sacks of potatoes and on the heads of people who think only of dinner, of cabbage, of the price of salt, and do not suspect that overhead in the cold, thin layer where clouds become a theology the equations are turning feral, losing their margins, learning to imitate birds I tell you that somewhere in a library that smells of mildew and coal smoke a man once wrote that what is real is what has completed itself, what has become wholly what it meant to be, and I say I understand this only when I watch the mould on the bread, how it begins as a faint green doubt at the edge of the slice and slowly realises itself into a furry doctrine, a small absolute that brooks no rival, and I think of the way history may simply be bread going stale on a vast table under a sky of gas giants, each day another layer of spores, and the mice of course do not care about this, you know only that the crust is harder than yesterday, the crumb thinner, and yet your little hearts beat with the same stubborn rhythm that guides planets and revolutions, systole diastole, rise fall, thesis antithesis, only without the lecture, without the footnotes, just a tiny warm insistence in your chests that there will be another crumb, and another, right up until there is not I lean closer to you and tell you that the gods of this age are not on mountaintops but inside measuring devices, that every time a detector clicks another minor deity is born and dies in the same instant, a god of that one event only, a brief sovereign of a single particle’s surrender, and that if you could see the sky as I do you would see not stars but a swarm of discarded monarchs, tiny dethroned divinities drifting in the cold like ash, and below them the cities spread their orange networks across the map, quietly rotting and rebuilding themselves, and in one of those cities there is a street called something like Geistergasse or Hoffnungsgang where the rain always falls diagonally as if obeying a private geometry, and in a cramped room there I once watched a painting of a tree that was also a man that was also a burning house, and in the corner of the canvas a little pig wearing a bishop’s hat chewed a book, and I knew at once that this was the structure of the universe, not the tree or the man or the house but the pig, the hat, the tooth marks in the page, the quiet desecration I confide to you, since you never contradict me, that time is not a line but a lumpy stew, that past and future are unevenly distributed like gristle and carrot, and when the spoon of consciousness dips in it sometimes comes up with a decade stuck to it, sometimes only an afternoon, and this is why some winters last forever and some whole years vanish between two sighs, and the professors speak of progress as if the pot were slowly clarifying, but I tell you it is only thickening, the broth dense with unremembered Tuesdays and broken umbrellas, and now and then a great ladle descends, war or plague or some new idea about freedom, and stirs everything until the bones rise to the surface, and they call this crisis or turning point, but the mice in the cellar only feel that the floor is shaking and a new crack has appeared in the wall, and they move their nests and carry on, their whiskers twitching in a dialect older than any constitution I say that once, long before you were born, I saw the sky split like a ripe pear above the roofs of Alt Parmen, and inside the crack there was not fire but a kind of patient machinery, enormous slowly turning wheels made of sentences, whole paragraphs grinding against each other, generating a hum that smelled faintly of linseed oil and ink, and I understood that every idea ever thought was a tooth in those gears, that even my present babbling to you is another cog slipping into place, and that somewhere a great archivist is taking notes with a quill made of comet dust, and that one day when the last word has been filed and the last concept pigeonholed, the machinery will cough, stop, and fold into a small seed which will fall back through the pear sky into a pocket of some unsuspecting peasant who only wanted a quiet walk, and from that seed a new confusion will grow, different but the same, as potatoes grow from other potatoes I tell you also about the planets that have never bothered to condense, the shy worlds, the timid globes that remain as rumours in the dust between orbits, each one a might have been with its own peculiar logic, its own style of apocalypse, and I say that on one of these non worlds there is a version of me who never learned any names, who speaks instead only in weather, and when he wants to say necessity he says drizzle, when he wants to say contradiction he says fog over ploughed fields, and when he wants to say freedom he says a sudden gust between two barns, and his mice understand him perfectly, their fur tracking atmospheric fronts like tiny barometers, and their deaths are recorded not in books but in changes of pressure I admit to you that I am afraid, not in the heroic way the old stories prescribe but in a shabby, domestic way, I am afraid of running out of matches, of the price of potatoes in the winter market at Drosslingen, of the way my own hands look stranger to me each year, more like borrowed tools, and yet this fear is wrapped around a harder kernel, a terror that the whole elaborate edifice of thought is just a decorative crust over something simple and indifferent, like sugar icing on bread, and that when the end does come it will not be trumpets or horsemen, not even fire, just a slow cooling, a merciful boredom spreading from star to star, until everything is as quiet as you are when you finally sleep, your flanks barely moving, tiny hearts exhausted from sermons they never asked to attend I say the world will end many times before it ends, that each time a certain kind of picture becomes impossible a world has already finished, that when people can no longer understand why a painting would be crowded with fish climbing ladders and men growing out of flowers and cities balanced on eggshells, then the world in which such a picture made sense is gone, buried under the comfortable soil of common sense, and a new world walks atop it, one that prefers straight lines and empty skies, and that too will pass when some other vision arrives, perhaps entirely made of numbers or of stains or of glitches in the air, and the mice will not notice any of this, they will continue to chew the edges of whatever canvas is closest to the floor, and yet in their tiny stomachs entire art histories will be digested and turned into droppings the size of seeds, and those seeds will fall into the cracks of the world and from them will grow new absurdities I confess that when I speak of quantum mechanics I do not mean the clean diagrams, the chalk dust certainties, I mean the way the kettle sometimes boils faster when I stare at it, or the way a decision hovers for days like a fly before suddenly collapsing into the one option I dread, I mean the cat that never appears on the shed roof unless I have just thought of its absence, I mean the coin that lands on its edge when no one is looking, and I tell you that the equations are only one translation of this deeper unease, that beneath every measurement there is a confusion too shy to show itself, and that in this confusion there is an odd comfort, because if the world were entirely definite our small mistakes would be unforgivable, but since everything wobbles at the foundation, our own trembling is almost dignified, almost appropriate I speak to you about history in the same breath as I speak about the mouldy carrot in the corner, because they share a method, each layer covering the last while remaining secretly dependent on it, and I say that every proclamation of a new age is just another skin that the old age grows to protect itself, like an onion that believes each new ring is a revolution, and you nibble at the outer layer and think you have tasted the whole, but underneath it there is the sting that makes eyes water, the chemical that turns chopping into boo hoo crying, and this is why there are tears whenever people talk about beginnings or ends, it is the onion remembering itself, and if the world ends as an onion it will be in a field somewhere with no witnesses, just the slow collapse of its own white concentricities into the soil I tell you that the angels the old painters imagined have migrated into bureaucracies, into filing cabinets and tax offices, that their wings have been carefully removed in the name of ergonomics, but their eyes remain, those multiple, lidless eyes, now distributed across forms and protocols and tariffs, and they see everything except what matters, they see numbers moving, currencies flowing, they do not see the mouse in the wall or the tired woman counting coins in the lamplight, and yet somewhere inside their luminous blind attention a strange justice smoulders, waiting for a different geometry of society in which each small creature, even you, will be more than a footnote in the ledger of grain, and in that distant rearrangement perhaps the word end will mean something else, not termination but revelation, like the moment when a wall is demolished and you realise there was an entire room you never knew you owned and I say all this to you while crumbs fall from my sleeve and the wind outside scrapes along the gutter like a metal tongue, and I do not know if I believe any of it, I am only rehearsing possibilities in the hope that one of them will fit the shape of the unease under my ribs, that knot of weather and memory and borrowed theories, and as I speak I watch your small bodies shift and settle, I hear the minute rasp of your teeth on the wood, and I think that perhaps this is the truest model of the cosmos we will ever have, a dim room, a hesitant voice, a handful of listeners more interested in survival than in metaphysics, yet staying because the voice has become part of the furniture, part of the predictable background noise that makes fear bearable, and somewhere outside in some town with a name I have forgotten or invented the snow begins to fall again on the cheap stalls of the evening market, on the potatoes and onions and blackened cabbages, on the heads of people who look up briefly, then pull their collars tight and walk on, thinking of soup and of nothing at all, while above them the planets continue their crooked arguments and the invisible machinery grinds on toward whatever ending it has promised itself but the words stay stuck behind my teeth like husks, and instead I ask how much for the wrinkled plums, and his fingers, calloused and spotted, count out the change while a small tremor runs through the tendons in his wrist, those pale cords connecting muscle to bone, and I remember that tendon fibres are mostly collagen, triple helix proteins twisted like tiny ropes, and I imagine each rope as a ladder between centuries, one rung rooted in some ancient hillside where a shepherd first slaughtered a lamb, the other rung in this damp little street where the rain blows in sideways and the plastic awnings flap like broken sails, and I think, fuck it, this is as good a form of cosmology as any of the grand ones, this string of transactions and ligaments and drizzle, this stubborn business of bodies moving in slow loops between home and stall and church and back again, and somewhere in those loops there is a question about how to move properly, how to walk without either pretending that every step is brand new, a pure leap into a blank future, or else drag my feet as if each paving stone had been laid solely for the sake of being preserved by historians, and I do not use those words for myself, I just feel the pull, one current urging me to talk to the passing days as if they were colleagues at a conference where the topic is always the same, another current telling me to treat them as relics from a vanished time, and my body, poor bastard that it is, just wants to know if there will be soup later, if the rice has enough salt, if the feet can stop hurting some time before the liver gives up, and it is in these small demands that I notice how the grand questions shrink down to the size of capillaries, each red blood cell shuttling oxygen like a small stubborn peasant carrying a sack of flour through the storm, microcosmic labourers with no interest in my metaphors, and yet without them no thought moves at all, no sky unfolds, no quantum pilgrim crawls across the paint, and the more I think of this the more the whole business takes on a kind of obscene comedy, as if the universe had put on a very serious face while standing on a floor made of banana peels, and every now and then it slips, not enough to fall, just a little skid that shows in the weather as a freak gust or in my head as a misplaced memory, like the afternoon when I was sure the market was on Relevanzgasse and I walked half an hour in the wrong direction before realising that the smell of fish was coming from the other side of the river, though in truth the river itself is hardly more than a sulky canal where ducks paddle through crisp packets, and yet I grant it the dignity of a river when I think about how its trickle has worn away at the stone over years I cannot number, leaving small grooves home to algae and insect larvae, little green and transparent proof that persistence counts for more than intention, and in that thought there is a hint of method too, because if anything holds together it is this slow erosion, this repeated movement over indistinguishable days, the way my own habits furrow the matter of my brain, long term potentiation and depression, synapses strengthened or pruned depending on how often I rehearse this or that line of mumbled prayer or muttered curse, and perhaps in thirty years the path of least resistance will be a single grumbling route that leads from waking to market to kitchen to sleep with almost no deviation, and someone could study this from a polite distance, tallying receipts, recording blood pressure, arranging my days like pinned beetles in a drawer, and they would claim to have reconstructed me in my integrity and individuality, as if the topography of my purchases and bowels gave them the right to say they had captured the whole, while another observer would ignore all that and talk only about the ongoing conversations in which I half participate, the public debates about what counts as real and whose suffering deserves attention, and they would barely mention the potatoes or the rain at all, and I stand between these imaginary onlookers like a bewildered dog, unsure which whistle to follow, so I follow neither and instead keep tracing my private lines between the quanta and the cabbages, between the grotesque saints in cracked altarpiece and the swollen veins in my own ankles, those bluish branches that stand out more clearly each summer, especially when the sun catches them as I sit on the splintered bench near the tram stop on Methodenplatz, eating bread that tastes faintly of metal and watching the clouds wobble like undecided jurors, and sometimes a wind comes that feels older than the street, older than all the careful facades, a wind that must have roared over empty fields before there were stalls and shops and dealers with names like Haering and Haym, and when it hits my face I get the sense, not of revelation, nothing that clear, but of a question being posed without words, a kind of pressure in the air that asks me whether this way of shuffling through days, half talking to atoms and half to ancestors, is really the only way things could be, and before I can even shape an answer the moment has passed, the wind moves on, the tram rattles in, people shove and mutter, my stomach growls, secretion of ghrelin rising from the stomach lining to nudge the hypothalamus, and the satire of so called higher faculties fall in line like obedient clerks, planning the next cheap meal, the next calculation about how many coins remain in the pocket after rent, and as I count them in my head I watch my fingers, small chipped nails, a faint cut healing near the thumb, the fine whorl patterns unique to my skin yet so completely ordinary that the butcher Lotte at Nihilisch Lane has the same little crescent scar in almost the same place, and it occurs to me that individuality is overpraised, that what matters most is the generic shape of knuckles, the standard issue vertebrae stacked like coins along the spine, the way every villager vertebrate has the same basic plan, and on some mornings, when the light comes in sideways and turns the room the colour of weak tea, I feel less like a person than like an instance of a type, one more damp scrawny mammal whose lungs fill and empty, whose kidneys filter the river inside the body, whose cartilage slowly thins at the joints, and it is not depressing, not exactly, more like standing back from a painting and realising that the intricate demon faces in the corner are made of the same strokes of dirty green and brown as the trees, that nothing in the scene was spared the same rough brush, and my thoughts about this are interrupted by a sharp need to piss, the bladder signalling with increasing urgency, detrusor muscle squeezing, urethral sphincter preparing to relax, and I swear under my breath because the toilet at home has developed a persistent leak and the water tank moans all night like a sick animal, and I make a mental note to ask the landlady, Frau Historicum, about it, though I know she will put it off with a sigh and a shrug and a story about how in her village they used to shit in a ditch and were grateful, and I will nod and pretend to find this endearing while secretly feeling my spine grind with irritation, because there is only so much nostalgia for hardship a person can take before wanting to scream that the whole bloody past is not a sacred shrine but a pile of inconsistent fucked up habits and bad plumbing, and as soon as that thought surfaces another one arrives to counter it, reminding me that if I toss out all reverence for what has been I lose the only thing that steadies the mind against the bland insanity of novelty for its own sake, the trashy slogans about reinventing oneself each season like a product line, and I feel caught again between curiosity and piety, between wanting to treat the old doctrines sold under Haering’s rainy awning as conversation partners and wanting to leave them in their mildewed boxes, untouched, like relics no longer addressed to me, and this tension seeps into everything, even how I look at the cracks in the pavement, some of which I know so well by now that I could walk the route with my eyes closed, feeling them through the thin soles of my boots, yet each time I step over them it is both a repeat and not a repeat, because the cartilage in my knees is a little more worn, the composition of the air slightly different, more diesel, less coal smoke, the bacteria in my gut rearranged by last week’s cheap pickle, and none of this feels like progress or decline, just movement, and in that movement I sense dimly that any method worth the word would have to account for the fact that I keep changing even as I pretend to stay the same, that the perspective from which I judge these shabby surroundings shifts with every new ache and every forgotten word, and yet I cling to certain routines, measuring lentils into the same chipped pot, slicing the same soft carrots bought when they are cheapest, watching the same small bubbles form around the edges as the water boils and the starch leaches out, forming a faint scum I skim off with the edge of a spoon, and while I do this I sometimes find myself talking softly, not to anyone, just murmuring questions about how it is possible that my hand, composed of carbon and calcium and water and trace metals, can hold the spoon that stirs the lentils that will become my blood tomorrow, and that this closed loop somehow hosts these absurd speculations about painted monsters and hopping quanta, about how best to walk among the dead and the living, and the steam rises in the cramped kitchen like another kind of cloud, a small private nebula that fogs the greasy window and blurs the view of the alley beyond, where the bins overflow and a stray cat licks something unidentifiable, and I feel for a moment that everything, from the cat’s rough tongue to the microglia clearing debris in my own brain, is part of a single ungainly experiment that has not yet decided what counts as success, and then the pot boils over and scalds my knuckles and I yelp and curse and turn down the heat, and the whole shimmering structure of thought collapses into the sharp local fact of pain, skin reddening, nociceptors firing, action potentials racing along the A delta fibres to the spinal cord, reflex arcs adjusting muscles before the cortex has even caught up, 

Chapter 3 

and when the rush subsides I stand there over the chipped stove and laugh quietly, not because anything is funny, but because for a second the ridiculous scale of it all, the way crowded canvas, the random rain over Relevanzmarkt, the muttered complaints of Old Man Haering, the terms of trade between my bacteria and my bowel, the decay of my knee cartilage and the slow silence of the river stones, all of it seems to be balanced on the tiny blister forming on the back of my hand, as if the universe had chosen this patch of swelling skin as its index, and I know that tomorrow or some other unmarked day I will walk again between the stalls under whatever weather the sky happens to throw down, thinking again in half formed fragments about how to approach what has been without turning it into my puppet or my shrine, and that while I am doing this my stomach will rumble and my joints will creak and the electrons will keep tunnelling under the painted fish, and no one, least of all me, will be any the wiser and I keep seeing it, the little diagram in my head, a crooked sky full of birds with electron wings beating in Planck time, quanta hopping like lice between their feathers while far below the peasants plough the brown field of probability, and I stand somewhere between them with the rain in my collar and the mud on my boots and the whole stupid sublime machine of it turning in slow circles, a wheel of beasts and angels and juridical clauses, and I tell myself that every drop of water falling from this broken cloud is a sentence in an argument I once half read in a damp room above the dealer in Kantstrasse, old Merz, who wrapped contraband volumes in brown paper and cabbage leaves and always smelt of stale beer and printer’s ink, and I remember how he laughed when he pressed the thick grey brick into my hands and muttered about the organic state as if it were a mushroom or a lung or a tumour, and I took it home and lay on my narrow bed and read until the characters on the page became little black insects crawling over one another in an intricate dance of necessity and freedom, and the candle guttered and spat, and outside the wind dragged clouds across the moon so that the whole town pulsed between light and dark like a great animal trying dream and wake in the same second, and in my chest my heart beat its stupid metronome, diastole systole, gates opening and shutting with the obstinate logic of valves, and somewhere in the courtyard a couple were fucking against the woodpile, I could hear the wet slap and the breath and then the laughter and someone saying you animal you animal, and I thought yes of course, animal, organism, the whole thing is supposed to be an organism, not a heap but a living body, which means it eats and shits and sweats and gets sick and heals and sometimes dies, always dies, and the wind carried the sour smell of smoke and meat from the Biederhof where they boiled bones for soup and talked about rights and taxes, and I could almost see the lines of force connecting the swollen bellies, the frostbitten fingers, the arguments over salt and rent, with those high cloudy sentences about the inner structure of freedom, as if every time someone chewed a crust in the rain they were performing a tiny part of some cosmic syllogism, and in the morning my tongue felt like sandpaper and there were crumbs in the sheets and I had drooled on the margin where I had underlined something about the whole that precedes its parts, and my own body was a badly assembled part, creaking knees, a back that cracked as I swung my feet to the floor, yet the skin on my inner thighs still tingled where I had scratched in my sleep, histamine blooming under the surface like tiny invisible flowers, and I thought how ridiculous it would be to imagine that this itch was also a moment of world history, but then Merz had said once, drunk in the alley behind the printshop, that there are no mere trifles for a real metaphysics, every fart at the tavern belongs to the logic of the age, he said, and he proved it by letting one rip while pointing solemnly at the church spire, and the smell rose and mingled with incense from morning mass so that for a second I felt a kind of blasphemous clarity, a sense that holiness and digestion were not enemies but neighbours in the same crowded tenement of the absolute, like the way the cathedral pigeons shat on the carved saints, white streaks down weathered stone thighs, and nobody ever cleaned them, letting calcium and guano accumulate on the faces of the blessed, geological time and bird time and liturgical time knitting together, and the bells ringing over the marketplace where Frau Klee shouted about her cheap onions and Herr Blatt argued over the price of coarse wool, and the air was full of particles, pollen grains and dust motes and microscopic spores of mould, all of them little citizens of a republic that did not know it was a republic, drifting in currents between the horse’s steaming flanks and the baker’s hot mouth, and above them the clouds moved like slow thoughts across the skull of the sky, and I trudged through it with the book wrapped in my coat, feeling as if the pages were heating my ribs, radiating an invisible order I could not fully read, the way a body is full of organs I will never see but which churn away in the dark just the same, villi waving in the intestine like sea plants, alveoli opening and closing like tiny pale blossoms, half hell garden, half anatomical sketch, the soul walking through tunnels of meat and lymph while outside the wind shifted and the first snow came in tiny flakes like ashes, and the dealers along Aufklärunggasse started muttering about shortages and tariffs and the end of everything, it was always the end of everything according to them, yet the next spring the same green shoots poked up through the shit in the ditches, the same drunk men sang the same filthy songs about magistrates and milkmaids, the same magistrates sat with their hands on their bellies and spoke of law as if it were something clean and abstract instead of a hedge of thorns around the poor, and I went on reading the same damned pages over and over, trying to see how the notion of freedom could be anything more than the space between my blistered heel and my shoe, and each year my body changed a little, more hairs in odd places, less on my head, veins like blue worms rising in my calves, my balls hanging lower in the cold bath and the skin of my hands cracking in winter, and still those sentences insisted that the living whole had its necessity, that the state, the city, the cluttered market with its pickpockets and piglets and stinking gutters, was in some sense a great plant or beast, and I would find myself on a Tuesday in late rain or a Saturday in aching heat counting the teeth of vegetables, the serrations on cabbage leaves, the concentric rings in a cut onion, as if the pattern there could tell me something about the way the council divided jurisdiction between guild and crown, as if the veins in a carrot, those pale threads in orange flesh, could explain to me why old Jorg in Hausnummer 6 had lost his grazing rights by a decree that came down on printed paper smelling of oil and glue, and sometimes in the tavern when the stove was finally warm enough to thaw the piss on the floorboards to a faint ammonia steam, I would stare at the curve of a wrist, the inside of an elbow, the small glistening triangles of sweat at someone’s neck, and think that if one were to dissect that body you would find the same logic of branching and convergence that runs through the town’s water pipes and the tangle of its laws, and my own prick stirred damply in my trousers and I cursed under my breath because it was not desire for any particular person, not love or whatever soft word they use in folk songs, it was just the body’s stupid charge of energy, ions crossing membranes, hormones leaking into blood, like a storm gathering over the fields, clouds swelling, pressure dropping, the whole apparatus of weather grinding its slow impersonal gears, and on the hill outside the town there were always those crooked trees, blown sideways by years of wind from the same direction, each ring inside them a record of some winter or drought I had forgotten, and the town scribes wrote minutes and edicts that would be filed and maybe burned in some future war, and the two sets of records, tree rings and parchment, could never be neatly overlaid, yet both part of the same obscure ledger of the world, and I thought if the whole is truly organic then nothing is outside, not my dirty fingernails, not the mould under the sink where the landlord never looks, not the mildew on the prayer books, not the itch in the crotch of the butcher’s apprentice who scratches himself while handing out sausages, pork fat under his nails, a whole greasy ontology under the respectable surface of his apron, everything circulating, everything seeping, like lymph, like rumours, like coin, like the slow drift of ideas from lecture hall to tavern to gutter, and the more I thought of it the more I saw little quisling membranes everywhere, thresholds where inside meets outside, skin and wall and border, some permeable, some brutal, and the rain kept coming in its own law, front after front, never the same cloud twice but always the same grey insistence, and years went by without my really noticing except that Merz grew smaller and yellower and finally disappeared, his stall taken over by a younger man with better teeth who knew what editions sold to the new students from Spinozaufer, sleek boys and girls with neat hair and the faint smell of soap, who talked briskly about systems and crises and never bought the cheap rye bread from Frau Klee, preferring white rolls from the new bakery on Reformgasse, and I felt my own teeth with my tongue, counting the places where blackness was creeping in, thinking of decay not as tragedy but as one more mode of transformation, calcium returning to dust, enamel crumbling into the same fine powder as plaster and bone and fallen leaves, and on certain afternoons there would be a strange stillness in the air, no wind, clouds like smeared chalk held in place by some invisible hand, and the town seemed to hover, as if all its movements had been slowed by a cosmic viscous drag, and the children’s voices in the alley sounded metallic, and somewhere a dog howled at nothing, and I could almost hear the ticking of unseen clocks in the depths of things, not the clocks in the clockmaker’s lane with their brass guts and regular ticks, but some quantum clicking at the level of the smallest bits, a random thrum of possibilities collapsing into facts, each collapsed fact another brick in the stupidly majestic cathedral of what is, and all the while in the square below my window a woman picked over turnips, squeezing them with thick fingers, judging weight and firmness, and a man hawked sour beer from a barrel, and the smell of frying onions drifted up, and my stomach grumbled loudly, peristalsis rolling along the intestinal tube like a wave through a crowd, and I thought that if I peeled back the walls and roofs and skin and clothes, what a painting it would be, guts and beams and staircases and tendons and bedframes all tangled, saints and sinners both with their mouths open, tongues pink and glistening, shouting about justice or bread or fornication, carpenters and clerks and clerics, all of them held inside the same great body whose name I could not quite bring myself to utter, because the more I read that thick book the more I felt that naming it was already a kind of betrayal, an attempt to pin down something that lives only in the movement between things, in the way a shopkeeper’s hand hesitates over a scale, in the way a magistrate clears his throat before pronouncing a sentence, in the way a boy’s foot scuffs the dirt while he waits for his mother outside the synagogue, in the way my own eyelids twitch when I try to picture the world as a single organism, muscles and nerves, synapses flashing, the whole wired mess sharing one mind that is not quite a mind, more like a field, an electric field that trembles even when nobody thinks of it, and at night in summer the sweat pools in the small of my back and under my knees, and the sheets cling, and mosquitoes whine in the dark like tiny theologians searching for blood, and when they land and push their thin mouthparts through my skin there is a brief puncture, a little local revolution where the outside pierces the inside and my immune system rushes to the border like soldiers, histological infantry deploying around the wound, releasing messengers that summon more, and a bump rises, red and hot, and I scratch until it bleeds and then lick the iron taste from my fingertip, and the town sleeps and snores and farts and dreams, and somewhere in the distance thunder mutters over the hills where the poor plant their potatoes in crooked rows, and the lightning forks in the clouds, jagged bright nerves firing in the sky’s brain, illuminating for a second the passage of a wagon on the road, the wet gleam on a horse’s flank, the shine on the wet cobbles where someone has just pissed against a wall, and the flash shows me my own reflection in the window, a brief ghastly white face with hollow eyes, then darkness again, and I think, half awake, that all of this, the blood sugar level in my veins, the grain prices, the doctrinal disputes in the faculty, the mildew blooming behind the altar, the lice in the schoolchildren’s hair, the rot in the timbers of the bridge, the freckles on a girl’s shoulders as she bends over the river to wash clothes, are somehow linked in a structure that is neither pure accident nor crude design, something more like the way a fungus spreads through soil, thin threads branching unpredictably but following some hidden nutrition, some buried pattern of damp and decay, and I picture the town from below, not from above like the map in the council chamber, but from the earth’s point of view, roots and drains and bones and coins and broken plates and lost rings all pressed together in the dark, and the worms sliding through them with blind diligence, turning corpses and cabbage leaves alike into the same black crumbly soil, and my own body one day lying there too, its cells breaking down, membranes dissolving, the careful arrangements of proteins going to fuck, as Merz would say with a grin, so much for your lofty talk, and still the clouds will move and the markets will shout and some poor bastard will be reading the same thick book, trying to convince himself that it all adds up to something like reason, something like a plan, even as his bowels churn and his skin breaks into rashes and his teeth ache in the cold, and he stumps to the market with a list in his head, turnips, onions, coarse salt, maybe a cheap piece of meat if the coins are enough, and he fingers the produce with the same hands that turned pages last night, calloused fingertips tracing veins in leaves as if they were footnotes in the grand argument, and the rain starts again, of course it does, thin at first, then harder, bouncing off barrels and hats and stall awnings, and for a moment there is that smell of wet dust, petrichor, the chemists say, oils from plants, geosmin from bacteria, the earth’s own breath rising, and the peasants shrug and pull their coats tighter, water soaking into wool fibres, hydrogen bonds holding and releasing like minor gods of cohesion, and the carts wheel slowly away, iron rims hissing on the slick stones, and my feet are cold and my nose runs and my mind is full of circuits, loops of necessity and accident, and I cannot tell anymore whether the town is the body of a god who has forgotten his own name or a diseased animal staggering along on three legs, supported by canes of habit and superstition, and in the tavern that evening someone spills beer on my lap and it soaks straight through my trousers and into my underwear, and the wet chill against my crotch makes me hiss fuck and everyone laughs, and the warmth of the stove climbs up my shins in little waves as my clothes steam, and the air is thick with smoke and grease and breath and spilt ale and the faint sourness of fear that always hangs around when the talk turns to conscription or new taxes or the rumour of some reform, and the table is sticky and my fingers leave patterns in the spilled beer, little branching rivulets running around knots in the wood, and I watch them merge and separate as if they too were citizens forming associations, and for a second I can almost feel the whole room as one pulsing thing, a single lung drawing in smoke and exhaling sound, and I take another mouthful of coarse bread, crumbs sticking to my lips, yeast and salt and rough fibre grinding between my teeth, and somewhere under all this noise there is the slow invisible work of cells dividing, capillaries feeding, synapses firing, the same organic stubbornness that pushes weeds up between paving stones and hairs out of nostrils, the same pressure that swells buds on black trees at the edge of town when the thaw finally comes, bud scales splitting, green emergence, and none of it announces itself as history, none of it stands up and says I am the turning point, I am the synthesis, it just happens, and years later someone like me sits in a cold room above a dealer and squints at a line in a book and tries to see how it all holds together, this mess of weather and flesh and paper and fear, and outside the wind changes again, coming now from the east, smelling of coal and distance and something like sea salt, though the sea is far away, and the shutters rattle and under my ribs the same old organ pumps on, dumbly faithful, moving its red liquid through my tired meat, and I think without knowing I am thinking that the whole, if it is anything at all, must be this, this endless self licking wound, this sweaty, hungry, freezing, shitting, buying, selling, praying, cursing animal that stretches from the lowliest puddle of piss in the alley to the highest polished boot in the council chamber, one body many limbs, and I am only a cell in its gut, a small, stubborn, half ignorant cell digesting scraps of thought and rye and cabbage and cheap meat while the rain drums on the roof like the fingers of a bored god, counting us all without mercy and without haste the electrons have small gardens inside them tonight like panels from a triptych cracked and rearranged over the river air so when I walk from the tram stop to the alley behind the Händler von Geist where old Frau Internalisation sells mismatched cups and damp theological postcards the rain hovers above the cobbles in discrete packets that refuse to decide whether to fall or rise until someone looks too closely and then they smear down the shop window like liquefied angels and I think how every droplet carries a whole orchard of mould spores and gut bacteria and the spent pollen that has drifted in from the fields behind the Kantstraße silos where the wheat bows its thin necks to the thunder and to the invisible charge in the clouds and all of it wants to be one thing and many things at once and the market stalls under the dripping awnings repeat that structure with cabbages stacked in pyramids and sacks of lentils leaning against crates of bruised apples while the fish at the far end stare with collapsing eyes as if mid transition between one kind of reality and another and I can never tell whether my own lungs are part of this same fresco turned laboratory whether each alveolus is a tiny chapel where air kneels and becomes blood or a black funnel where the city leaks into me so that when I exhale near the door of the Händler my breath writes thin fog letters over the glass spelling nothing anyone could read yet forming shapes that feel like answers given before the question and Herr Aporetikus behind the counter hardly looks up from his newspaper whose headlines have been rubbed out and replaced with the words external and internal again and again in different inks as if the weather bureau had given up on wind and pressure and decided only to report the state of surrender in the region of the self today heavy external with scattered internal clearing toward evening and there are years embedded in that forecast unmarked but felt in the way the roof leaks in exactly the same place every winter and in the way my fingers have grown rough grooves where coins sit before I pass them over grooves that were not there when I first followed the crooked little canal from the Friedrichshof mills to this quarter and found the Händler tucked between a bakery and a slaughterhouse smelling of yeast and iron and wet cardboard and the faint sweet rot of old pamphlets describing how reality bends around its own heart like light trapped in a drop of fat on a cold pan waiting to be reheated while outside dogs with patchy fur and visible ribs shake themselves under the eaves sending constellations of fleas into new orbits and the fleas carry within their tiny translucent bellies a whole micro history of my blood and the baker’s blood and the butcher’s blood and still no one writes this into the calendars they sell near the tram stop, calendars illustrated with peasant saints carrying scythes and loaves and sometimes a little sphere like a planet cracked open to show fields ranking themselves along the curvature of the core and above them script in faded gold saying something about how what is outside will feed what is inside and what is inside will eventually spill back out like broth from a pot that no one remembered to watch and each day blends into the next year with the same pale slurry of sky over the Wilhelmplatz where I buy potatoes and coarse salt and sometimes a string of onions whose skins rustle like pages of an unwritten treatise on how bread and wine might be forms of thought if only one chewed slowly enough until the gums throb and the saliva becomes a solvent for the quiet resistance of matter and it is strange how the tongue never tires of this grinding work how the muscles of mastication pulse on and on like rural engines while overhead the crows form black equations against the clouds then collapse back into disorder and every crow wing beats out a small act of refutation against the idea that there is any final diagram yet the more they scatter the more the pattern presses on the inside of my skull as if the nerves themselves are trying to spell out that what moves away is also moving inward that the thing thrown into distance returns as taste as fatigue as a certain heaviness low in the spine when the day has soaked through enough layers of cloth and skin and I go home by the same unlit path past the yard where the butcher hangs skins to dry and they sway in the wind like rejected hypotheses thin membranes through which the moon flickers and I imagine beneath my own epidermis a similar curing of tissue each cell stitching itself to the next in an endless workshop of repair and loss supervised by no one yet imitating with uncanny patience the way the town council keeps rewriting the statutes posted on the Rathaus wall so that what was forbidden last winter is required this spring and the people in the queue at the Brotquelle mutter as they examine the flour rations and the hardening crusts and I can hear in their throats the same oscillation between refusal and acceptance that the spores in the damp corner of my room must feel when the temperature tips one degree and suddenly there is enough warmth for sprouting and the wallpaper buckles outward like a small rebellion after which mould fans out in grey green dialects across the plaster and I lie awake listening to the slow chemical syllables of it as if each hypha were digging through past summers to reach the cool logic of some origin buried under the floorboards near the gas pipes and the carpenter ants where the grain of the wood spirals around old knots darker than the rest and the ants follow these circuits with an obvious but unreadable purpose while my own veins trace similar loops beneath the thin hair of my arms carrying crude oils and sugars in red suspension and a salt remembrance of the pickled cucumbers I bought from Frau Herzonbroke at the Monday market just after the hailstorm when the stones of ice had punched uncaring holes through the roof tarpaulins and the traders had covered their stock with ragged blankets so that for a while the cabbage heads looked like monks or patients and I moved through that improvised infirmary of vegetables feeling my shoes fill slowly with melted hail and realising that the chill climbing up from my ankle bones into my knees was the same sort of climb by which an idea forces its way from weather into flesh and from flesh into mood so that the next time the municipal loudspeakers announced shortages or new taxes I found myself nodding as if I had always known this as if the pattern of scarcity and resignation had been printed in the keratin of my fingernails decades ago already and was only now becoming legible when the light struck them from the side at the public fountain where the water smells faintly of iron and sulphur and of something older maybe bone or sea mud and the children of the Schneiderhof quarter splash in it with bare legs slick and goosepimpled and their laughter rises in bursts like improbable quanta of relief that vanish before they can be measured and I buy a small loaf of rye from the kiosk by the tram tracks and a paper cone of dried peas and stand there chewing as the evening sets itself in layers over the chimneys and the smokestacks on the horizon exhale a slow orange thinking that if all of this were painted it would need hundreds of tiny figures crammed into marginal corners carrying buckets and flags and pieces of machinery into impossible towers while great pale birds peck at the roofs of schools and hospitals and out of the opened roofs spill tiny archives of clothing and notebooks and the occasional liver or lung drifting upward as if freed from gravitational duty and yet every morning when I wake in the narrow bed with its sagging middle and the smell of damp cloth locked into the mattress my first thought is simply that my left shoulder hurts from sleeping on it and that the weather will probably turn before market day because the sparrows under the eaves were louder than usual in the night and somewhere in the courtyard a cat coughed up grass and bile and I think of bile as a small bitter philosophy manufactured by the liver held in a greenish reservoir waiting to be spilled when fat appears and the villagers at the Schlachtmarkt speak about fat with almost devotional tones noting the way it keeps you alive through hard winters the way it clings to the ribs like stubborn doctrine while the butchers hack with casual arms at carcasses hanging from iron hooks and the tendons split with a sound that reminds me of rotted branches giving way in the churchyard birch trees where last year’s storm tore a whole crown off and flung it among the gravestones and the moss has already begun to swallow the fragments of bark and twig so that soon no one will remember that there was once a vertical thrust there a reaching upward which meant something to the eye even if not to the roots and I carry these images folded like receipts in the inside pocket of my coat along with the list of things still needed this week onions again and coarse salt and cheap oil and maybe a piece of dried sausage if the purse allows 

Chapter 4   

and yet every time I read that list the letters tilt toward one another as if seeking a hidden grammar of dependence, all my longing at the wrong angle, as if the word for onion wanted to crawl into the word for salt and from there into oil until all three formed a single thick sign for the slow movement of stew on a low flame and I think the same motion repeats in the way people talk in the queue at the Wetzlarstraße depot their complaints sliding into each other until what began as one person’s irritation about damp coal ends in a shared muttering about distant wars or absent harvests and over all this the sky retains its indifference shifting from milk grey to rusted copper to a sort of exhausted blue while high above where only the migrating geese can see it currents of colder air cross and knot and unknot like invisible arguments carried on between no one and no one so that the seasons become a kind of breath moving through the district and through the cartilage of my own ribs which expand and contract to its tempo and I cannot distinguish anymore between the ache in my knees after long walks to the dealers’ quarter and the ache in the thought that the outside which once seemed completely separate now seeps inward through pores and nostrils and eyelids dissolving what I had imagined as a hard boundary around my own outline and turning it into something like the fog on the Händler von Geist window when I stand too close after walking for an hour in drizzle and my coat steaming gently as if the fibres themselves were debating whether to belong to air or to wool and Herr Aporetikus shakes his head at the stain my breath leaves and wipes it with a folded newspaper whose ink smears so that external and internal blur into a grey streak and for a moment my reflection merges with the printed headlines and with the shape of shelves behind the glass and I cannot tell if the person looking back is standing in the street or already shelved among the dusty objects under the hanging bulb that sways slightly whenever a tram passes and the whole scene vibrates barely perceptibly like an experiment whose apparatus has been balanced just on the edge of failure and yet continues year after year following a plan no one remembers drafting while potatoes continue to push pale roots into their crates and my own stomach continues to secrete its quiet acids over every mouthful of black bread and cabbage and the pulse in my throat continues to mark time like a small indifferent official stamping forms in a corridor where the ceiling leaks and the buckets underneath the drips never quite fill and never quite empty the whole thing begins or carries on or folds back on itself in that corner where the particles refuse to stay put and the animals crawl out of the plug sockets again, small beaked teapots of light with human ankles, three eyed fish dragging shopping baskets across the laminate, and someone has written on the condensation by the window that an electron does not know where it is until an old man looks at it using a loyalty card and a greasy fingerprint, and this seems reasonable because the clouds are doing that thing again, those grey hieronymite towers bending over Marketgasse like they want to inspect the price of cabbages, and some day that might have been spring or some other banal season the rain unscrews itself into discrete quanta, drops like little sealed arguments, each one collapsing only when it hits the cracked plastic chair outside Kropf and Rüblinger’s Tobacco Exchange, and I feel the ache in my left wrist where the tendons slide like slimy cords under the skin, a kind of low animal knowledge that every turn of the joint is a compromise between cartilage and gravity, and above the exchange the sign for Weststadt Pfandleihe flickers in and out of being so that if you stand there long enough you can watch the neon letters dialectically negate themselves, one red tube after another performing its quiet self criticism in the drizzle, while inside the lungs of the city the alveoli open and close, little pale sacs blooming and withering in their mucus, each breath an experiment in whether air still exists, whether gas still consents to be drawn into meat, and the pigeons on the tram wires conduct their long seminar on entropy, feathers puffed, eyes like incomplete equations, and there is the narrow lane that might be called Controversa or Kantiusgasse or some other name from a footnote, where the dealer in cracked volumes, Meister Hinrich Anti, keeps his boxes of the obsolete piled in damp cardboard, nothing expensive, nothing glossy, just the smell of lignin and old fingers, and when the mist comes down from the river and wraps the roofs it is easy to think the whole quarter is an experiment run by some distracted laboratory assistant, cells in an incubator forgotten over the holidays, and in the back of the cafe, though it might be a bakery or a butcher or a gloomy Spar with wilting carrots, there is the white buttock cheek like a moon stuck half way out of its orbit, seen only once through the gap in the swinging kitchen door when she bends to pick up a dropped spoon, white like plaster, white like the belly of a stunned fish, an accidental sphere in the geometry of the day, and it floats there in imagination for years without belonging to love or romance or any of that sentimental rubbish, more like a pale solution in a flask, a patch of neutrally charged matter that refuses to integrate into the general theory, so it becomes a sort of test mass in the brain, something to run forces past, gravitational and otherwise, and the weather keeps rearranging its props, fog sliding like lukewarm saliva along the shopfronts of Naturhof Merkel, snow laying its fine integument over the broken crates behind BrotHaus Rüdiger, sun turning the bus shelter on Nikodemusplatz into a light trap for tired skin, and meanwhile the inner organs keep muttering, liver taking apart the day’s cheap sausage with the patience of some back alley money changer, kidneys rinsing the dull beer into pale compromise, the gut lining like a wet, involuted market street where bacteria haggle over sugars, and all the while that old blue covered book from Verlag Dämmer and Sohn sits on the table, its spine like a crooked tree root, and the words inside struggle with their own survival, each concept forced to prove it is not an idle ghost but has mass, teeth, circulation, and sometimes the sentences seem to rise from the paper like the figures having a go at quantum field theory, a man whose head is a bell jar explaining renormalisation to a choir of cabbages, a bird bishop in a petrol coloured cope shovelling fermions into a sack, and it is easy, on certain afternoons when the sky has gone the colour of dishwater and the breath from the factory on Zollhofstrasse trails like a second, lower cloud layer, to believe that thinking itself is a kind of mould growing in warm milk, fuzzy, persistent, attaching itself to the cheap ceramic of the skull, and the years in which this belief repeats are not counted, they slide past in a series of non committal Tuesdays, unnamed months when the price of turnips at Markt Magdala shifts by trivial increments and the skin on the back of the hand acquires new freckled data, micro lesions, the poetry of damage, and there are always dealers, not only of books but of vegetables, cigarettes, umbrellas, second hand toasters, a whole invisible exchange system in the side streets of Weststadt, under the peeling sign for Kolonialwaren Lorenz where the dried beans crouch in their sacks like dormant ideas, under the rusted awning of Eisenhandel Belda where the nails shine faintly in their bins like patient nuclei, and through all this the strange conviction persists that nothing stands alone, that each coffee stain on the cafe table is secretly in league with each flake of paint on the tram stop, that the slow abrasion of molars over stale bread is in correspondence with the crumbling mortar on the wall behind the butcher’s, and that somewhere between the way the clouds assemble over the slope of the hill and the way a sentence can turn against itself mid clause there is a law, not a written law with articles and fines, but something like a habit in the flesh of the world, an insistence on movement, on every attempt at stability curdling into its own opposite if you leave it on the windowsill long enough, and in the cheap aisles of Discountmarkt Sophia where the tins are stacked into their provisional cathedrals, peas, tomatoes, beans, all labelled with a cheerfulness that does not match the air, I sometimes feel my bones click quietly in their cartilage, a soft protest at the weight of the discount potatoes in the bag, and it occurs to no one, least of all to the small tufted ganglion of nerves lodged at the base of the spine, that this clicking and this weight and the faint mildew smell in the cereal aisle are implicated in any theory whatsoever, yet somehow they are, they braid themselves into the quiet warfare of concepts without asking permission, and when the sky opens in sudden, stupid rain as I leave the shop and the water runs down the back of my neck, cold along the vertebrae, each droplet a tiny convex lens rearranging the view of the car park, the brown puddles, the graffiti on the bin that says DIAL EX or maybe DIA LEX if you look twice, it is as if the weather itself is trying to get in on the argument, to say that any claim about what is must pass through it, must wear the wet coat and the shivering, and the body responds with its eternal little automatic rituals, gooseflesh rising like primitive script along the forearms, capillaries narrowing, the heart knocking grumpily against its cage of ribs, that old red muscle which has never read a footnote but knows all about oscillation, systole, diastole, and above the car park a few tatty starlings perform their little failed murmuration, a handful of black commas trying to become a sentence and falling apart again over the roof of Getränkehandel Prokop, and time does whatever it does, folds, repeats, hides under itself, so that one morning in what might be late autumn or maybe early spring I am eating thin porridge at the small sticky table in Café Aurelia, watching steam rise like something escaping from a chemical reaction, and the white butt cheek reappears in memory again for no reason, pale and round as the inside of a boiled egg, detached from any person, just an object, a surface with a temperature, and it drifts across the thought of porridge and the drip of the coffee machine and the newsprint smudging the fingers until it attaches itself to those creatures again, becomes a moon in their hell sky, a luminous rump hanging above a lake of lukewarm gravy where the tiny souls paddle with spoons, and the whole thing is as indifferent to love as a kidney stone, just matter folding, matter exposing a patch of itself, and in the same breath or neuron firing there is the sudden appearance of microtubules, those tiny hollow rods inside the cells, some people say they are where consciousness happens, little resonating flutes of water and protein, but really they are just scaffolding, and the porridge cools, and Aurélia herself, who has a moustache and a bad knee, limps from table to table with a cloth that smells of vinegar, and outside on the cobbles of Theoriaweg the rain has turned the chewing gum spots into shiny fossils, and somewhere along the roof line the grey sky is trying to work out how to become its own negation, maybe by tearing, maybe by reddening at the edges, and the book sits unopened in the coat pocket, warmed by thigh and liver, its pages bristling with all the old tales about how nothing simply is, that every thing has a little traitor hidden inside it, a crack, a tendency, the way the cheap ceramic of the coffee cup already holds the plan of its own shattering, invisible hairline fractures waiting for the right combination of heat and clumsy hand, and the cells in the stomach lining know all about this, they divide and divide until one day one of them divides wrong and grows teeth, and then the doctors at Klinik Mariengrund have to go in with their stainless steel and their anaesthetics made of distilled forgetfulness, and meanwhile back in the alleys around Logikstrasse the book dealers and junk sellers argue over the price of an old volume from Dämmer and Sohn, margins sweating with the comments of some long dead reader, and above them the weather is doing its theatre again, pretending to be stable, pretending that this grey is the same grey as last week, and the pigeons think nothing of it, they continue their slow digestion of discarded bread, gizzards grinding, enzymes sluicing, tiny catastrophes of starch and protein resolving themselves in the dark, and I chew my own bread, and I feel the fillings in my molars buzz faintly when I walk under the tram wires, some small electromagnetic joke, and the words in the book that is not yet open line themselves up in advance, waiting for the moment when my corneas will refract them, rods and cones handing them over to the wet electrical meat at the back of the skull, where they will begin their own awkward version of the old motion, assertion, negation, something that pretends to be a reconciliation, though it is really just the nervous system trying to make peace between what it expects and what the sensory data have smuggled in, like a border guard at the edge of the tongue deciding whether this sourness is permitted, whether this cheap plum from Obsthalle Lichten can be allowed to cross into blood, and over the years this sequence happens again and again, summer, winter, unnamed weather, porridge, bruise coloured clouds, white butt cheek moon gliding through memory at odd hours, the book from Dämmer and Sohn changing its shape with the humidity so that sometimes it seems as if the sentences themselves are swelling, contracting, like worms in a tin, and the dealers on Controversa and Dialexienstrasse continue to supply their cracked staircases of print, and the body goes on secreting its fluids and acids like a minor factory, and the thought that nothing holds, that everything that tries to be a smooth surface turns out, under inspection, to be pitted, layered, riddled with its own undoing, grows as unobtrusively as the mould in the corner of the ceiling above the wardrobe, a little grey fan that reappears every year no matter how often it is laced with bleach, and somewhere in the distance, beyond the low roofs of Weststadt, a power station breathes out its warm plume into the colder air, columns of vapour rising like pale intestines of weather, twisting slightly in the upper currents, and there is a man crossing the supermarket car park with a bag of potatoes banging against his thigh, and his heart is doing its old two step, and his synapses are flickering with half formed ideas about how the shine on the asphalt after rain might be connected to the way a sentence can contradict itself and survive, and he does not name this connection, does not consider it an insight, he just adjusts his grip on the plastic handles cutting into his fingers and walks on under a sky that is busy dismantling its own appearance molecule by molecule, as if trying to prove that every cloud, like every thought, contains a little seed of its own disappearance quanta keep changing colour in my head as if has crept into the lab and painted little blue demons on the electrons, each one with a bell on its tail and a beak where the charge should be, and I watch them doing their tiny obscene dances in the magnet coils while outside the air is thick with a rain that never remembers when it began, some years ago or yesterday or in that season when the clouds over Kernfeld were the colour of boiled bones and the market woman on Harschel Lane kept shouting that the cabbages were not metaphysical but they still tasted like contradictions when you boiled them long enough, and I keep thinking that every particle is only the way another particle denies itself, that nothing is itself except in the moment it negates what it was the moment before, which is probably why my skin keeps shedding in invisible flakes on the tram seat, leaving a ghostly copy of me between Westhofen and the damp archway where the second hand book dealer H. J. Merken once sold me a volume that smelt of mildew and old sermons, and the woman opposite on the tram keeps rubbing her wrist where the veins show pale green under the surface, an anatomical diagram that someone forgot to label, and I want to tell her that each systolic surge is the universe trying out a new hypothesis about being, that the blood, with its erythrocytes and leukocytes and the slow drifting platelets like tiny undecided citizens, is not inside her at all but everywhere, the whole fucking street is a torso, the gutters and shopfronts and the suspiciously clean window of the Lotto office are just the outer dermis, and when the wind comes down from the hills and slaps us in the face at the corner of Rahnstrasse it is not weather, it is the negative moment of a concept that cannot quite bring itself to know that it is a concept, and I go into the cheap grocer near the tram stop where the fluorescent tubes hum like confused bees and I buy potatoes with little eyes already sprouting pale tendrils, embryonic roots reaching into my palm, each cell dividing with grim determination in the dark sack, cytokinesis as a sort of peasant theology, and I listen to the man behind the counter muttering about the price of onions, his voice full of a dull resentment that reminds me of those legends about the method, the old stories that it was nothing but a three step spell, a mechanical trick that anyone could apply to the price of cabbages or to the quarrel between two neighbours or to the structure of the heavens, and I want to laugh because the trick is that there is no trick, there is only this endless grinding movement from one thing to another, from damp boots to wet socks to the faint fungal odour rising between my toes as I stand at the small gas stove in the room that I rent above Frau Lindemann’s bakery, stirring lentils that refuse to soften, steam curling past the flaking paint like a thought that has forgotten its conclusion, years of this, mornings when the frost crawls in lace patterns over the inner side of the window and the pigeons sit hunched on the sill breathing out clouds of their own tired philosophy, and afternoons when thunder presses down on the tiled roofs and somewhere in the distance a dog starts barking at a thunderclap as if protesting against a bad argument, and I keep going back to Merken’s shop where the shelves buckle under the weight of worm eaten volumes from the Verlag of half forgotten towns, Dahlsheim, Bodenstadt, Altrupp, each book pretending to have found a way to fix the movement, to nail the idea to the page, and I know it is all nonsense, yet I stand there with my fingers blackened by dust, breathing in spores and fragments of someone else’s lungs, while I imagine that somewhere in one of these spines there is a sentence that will make the electrons quit their acrobatics for one second and hang straight like a plumb line dropped through time, and then the tram bell rings in my head again and I am back at the corner cafe where the ceiling stains look like embryonic universes, brownish rings expanding slowly year after year as if the damp were rehearsing cosmic expansion under the cracked plaster, and my coffee is always the same burnt liquid, bitter as unripe walnuts, nothing romantic, just a stimulant for the tired synapses whose axons and dendrites keep firing in crooked spirals, sodium channels opening and closing like quarrelsome mouths, neurotransmitters shuttling across the synaptic cleft in a kind of microscopic black market, glutamate, GABA, tiny dealers in the night alley between one neuron and the next, and I think of Herr F. at the physics stall in the weekly market, folding his newspaper over the crate of turnips, complaining that the new theories are all rubbish because they say a thing can be itself and its opposite at the same time, and I want to tell him that the turnip is already an argument, that the white flesh under the purple skin is the way the soil remembers last year’s rain, that the fibres in its body keep a ledger of droughts and downpours, cellulose and lignin spelling out the history of the field in a script my tongue can read only as sweetness or bitterness, and whenever I slice one open with the blunt knife in my kitchen the little spray of juice on my hand looks to me like the universe signing another provisional treaty with itself, agreeing for the next few minutes to be a vegetable and not a star, though the trace elements of iron and magnesium still gossip about supernovas in the small hours when the fridge hums in its corner and I lie on the narrow bed listening to my own peristalsis like distant thunder, the slow muscular wave of smooth muscle that pushes the day’s cheap bread and watery stew along the intestinal tunnel, villi reaching out like blind white eels to grip the passing mash, enzymes chewing it into phrases that the bloodstream can understand, and I think, without thinking about thinking, that every contraction is an argument between inside and outside, that the weather out there, the drizzle sliding indifferently down the drainpipes of Mönchsgasse, is not separate from the storm in my colon, that when the clouds heap up over the railyard and leak rust coloured light onto the wagons labelled Spedition Kraus or H. Bender & Söhne I feel the pressure change in my joints, cartilage creaking under the weight of yet another shift in the air, and time goes on like this, unmarked, one year smearing into the next like wet paint, snow and pollen and yellow leaves replacing one another on the same patch of cobblestone outside the butcher’s where pale sausages hang in the window like intestinal loops of another, larger creature, and at the back of my mind there is always that urge to sort: this is positive, this is negative, this cancels, this preserves, as if every raindrop had to declare its alignment before it struck the pavement, and in the library reading room, on those afternoons when the radiators hiss and clank like irritated ghosts and the woman at the desk stamps each borrowing slip with a thud that sounds like a verdict, I move my finger down pages where the old quarrel about the method is rehearsed again, critics saying it is empty form, defenders saying it is the very marrow of reality, and outside a gust of wind smears the dried leaves against the window, veins pressed like diagrams of vanished vascular systems, and for a moment the whole building feels like a skull, shelves as cortical folds, stairwells as white matter tracts, librarians as glial cells shuffling information, removing waste, and I, some kind of misfiring neuron, repeat the same trajectory day after day, tram, shop, room, library, market, while the seasons shuffle their cards, heat rash on my neck in that long summer whose exact year I have already mislaid, chilblains on my toes in those winters when the pipes froze and Frau Lindemann swore the city authorities were thieves, and through it all the same question keeps burrowing like a parasitic worm in the gut of my routine, is there any thinking that is not already infected by the world it tries to describe, is there any way to stand outside the drizzle on Rahnstrasse, outside the smell of onions frying in old fat, outside the abrasion between cheap wool socks and damp skin, outside the half darkness in Merken’s shop where the dead scribble at the edge of their pages about foundations and structures and the threefold rhythm that supposedly animates all this [], and even when I try to be precise, to imagine the axioms laid out like lab slides under a microscope, I end up seeing dust motes in the light beam, little exfoliated fragments of librarians and students and long vanished printers drifting between the objective and the table, each one an uninvited footnote, and I cannot keep the mystical out of it, the sense that these trivial movements, the way the wind suddenly drops at the corner where the tram turns, the way the loaf from Lindemann’s today is slightly more dense than yesterday’s, the way my fingernails show faint pale crescents at the base as the keratin cells push outward in slow unanimity, are all somehow the same movement as the abstract disputations about whether thought can ever catch up with what is, and on some nights, when sleep will not come and the traffic on the main road murmurs like a river a few blocks away, I begin to see the whole town as one monstrous triptych in the manner of , the left panel full of earnest professors with pocket watches dangling over vats of concepts, the right panel crowded with arguing shopkeepers, slaughtered pigs, half naked peasants eating soup while reading pamphlets, and the central panel a chaos of instruments, oscilloscopes, balance scales, tax ledgers, skeletons dancing with ink bottles, all of it illuminated by a light that seems to come from no sun and no lamp but from the thin strip of emptiness between one statement and its contradiction, and I am there somewhere in a corner, stirring my lentils, counting my coins, adjusting my scarf against the wind that smells of coal smoke and wet leather, while the electrons above my head leap from orbit to orbit with obscene freedom, collapsing into certainty only when some clumsy apparatus forces them to choose, and in those moments, in the instant of choice, I feel the whole history of the arguments about method flicker like static behind my eyes, and then it is gone again, replaced by the immediate problem of whether the potatoes have sprouted too far to be edible, whether the mould on the crust can simply be cut away, whether tomorrow the tram will be on time or stalled again by some invisible disruption in the invisible pattern that I keep trying, without quite knowing that I am trying, to read electrons keep rearranging themselves in the sky like tiny creatures, three eyed cherubs made of probability clouds flapping over the tram wires as I walk down to the market on another unnamed morning, and the clouds themselves are split open into triptychs where on the left panel there is always a storm over Madernstrasse, on the central one a tribunal of sparrows in black coats, and on the right a field of potatoes laid out like jurors, each with its little eye ready to sprout, and the whole thing, the whole absurd firmament, vibrates with those invisible amplitudes the dealers in Neukönigshof whisper about behind the bakery, old Mandelke with flour on his cuffs telling me that the wave function is only a guess, that really each particle is a peasant with a sack on its back trudging from one possibility to another, so that when the rain starts again over the grey roofs it is only the collapse into one damp actuality of what might have been otherwise, and I see, without wanting to see, how every droplet obeys some ancient ordinance, some unwritten Grundrecht of falling, the right to descend, the duty to soak the cuffs of my trousers as I queue at the stall for cabbage and onions and the cheap bread that tastes of sawdust and nostalgia, and there, under the plastic awning, time slips strangely, years fold into one another, I see the same woman in the same green headscarf paying with the same careful coins, and behind her the same boy with the same thin wrists and the same tired eyes, though his jacket mutates microscopic patterns like the mutation of a gene, arginine to histidine in the small invisible alphabet of his sleeves, and above all of us the cables hum with charge, as if the city were a gigantic neuron firing too slowly, and I think of those diagrams I once saw in the back of a book by Pastor Riedel, where the synapse is drawn like a tiny hellmouth, vesicles spilling messenger demons into a gap impossible to cross and yet crossed a billion times a second, and I imagine each message carrying some opinion about obligation, about who ought to move first at the crossing by the river, whether Stranz or Lüder should have yielded, whether the woman in the headscarf must always be the one to step aside near the turnips, and the whole nervous system of the town flickers with these minute verdicts, the spinal cord a long muddy street lined with signs from forgotten guilds, gold letters rubbed down by centuries of hail and gossip, while in the side alley behind the old music school little jets of steam burst from the manholes like frustrated souls, and every time they do I feel a tug under the ribs, a tiny contraction of smooth muscle, the peristaltic argument of the intestines that do not care about metaphysics, they want only the simple right to move their contents along, to take yesterday’s potatoes and today’s stale cheese and convert them, without any vote or debate, into warmth and waste, and this seems so unfair and yet so necessary, that the colon should have more practical authority than the town council in the sandstone building by the river where the portraits of dead officials grow darker each winter, streaked by damp and the breath of petitioners, and when the snow comes, fine as ground bone over the roofs of Westberg, it settles even on those stone foreheads, evening out the features, granting a provisional equality to the famous and the forgotten, and I walk past their windows with a bag of beets banging my thigh, thin gloves sticking slightly to my damp palms because the sympathetic nerves have decided, without consulting me, that now is the time for clammy vigilance, now is the time to prepare for some unseen cross examination, and in the shop on Kramergasse where Frau Amsel sells only three things, pickled cucumbers, cheap tobacco, and those little blue notebooks with graph paper, she tells me that the geese on the river have acquired legal personalities, that each feather is a signature now, authorised by some ministry no one has ever visited, a ministry whispered about in the backrooms of philosophers and card players, perhaps in Drosselhof where the ceiling is low and stained yellow by decades of smoke, and I nod because of course, why should the goose not sign, why should the kidney not countersign, why should the alveoli not be called to testify with their thin wet walls, and as she wraps my jar in last year’s newspaper I see headlines about a trial in a city whose name I half remember, something with too many consonants, and the faces in the grainy photograph are already fading, their eyes eaten away by the ink as if termites of oblivion had discovered a new pulp, yet the caption still insists that some principle was decided there once and for all, though the snow outside shows no sign of caring, it falls impartially on the guilty and the acquitted, and on the small dog that shivers by the door of the butcher, a bit of sausage skin stuck in its whiskers like an argument it cannot complete, and then, when I step back into the street, the light fractures again, quanta bouncing off the wet cobbles, and for a moment the outline of the town dissolves into a swarm of bright midges, each one a possible decree, and I recall the old tale of Meister Kalt, who claimed that the whole city was just the inside of a skull, our streets the sulci, our squares the ventricles, the cathedral a pineal gland thrusting upwards to pierce the fog, and that somewhere in this wrinkled map an impulse had started long ago, a desire to be free or to be obedient, no one could agree which, and the impulse had become flesh, had opened a mouth in a tavern, had shouted something about rights or duties over a foaming beer, and now, generations later, it echoed in the way the baker’s apprentice wiped his hands on his apron before serving me, as if my small purchase of rye represented a solemn contract between my hunger and his oven, as if the yeast itself were a citizen, swelling in the dough with its own petty insistence on expanding, and at home the bread will squeak under the knife, air pockets collapsing like tiny parliaments dissolved without notice, spores and crumbs raining on the plate like disbanded committees of taste, and in the evening, when the wind comes from the east smelling faintly of coal and distant factories, I lie in the narrow bed and feel the slow systole of the heart, the valves flapping like tired magistrates who have signed too many decrees, and I know that in each contraction a judgement is made, this cell shall live, that one shall be starved, this tissue will receive oxygen, that capillary shall be ignored, and that these judgements are older than any ordinance in the archives of the town hall, older than the faded ink of the Ordinance of Rixdorf that Herr Bammann once showed me while he counted beans, and I remember how his long yellow fingers moved over the lines, tracing phrases about property and personality, about the minimal requirements for being considered more than a thing, and how outside his little office the rain had turned to sleet, tapping on the window like fingernails of ghosts who had never met those requirements, who had remained things, burdens, counters in exchanges between those with better handwriting, and yet here I am, with my unreasonable number of organs and my unreasonable surplus of mornings, still standing in queues, still calculating whether to buy the cheaper onions that sprout already, their pale shoots like the tongues of witnesses eager to speak, or the firm ones that promise silence for another week, and all the while the invisible particles carry on their negotiations in the dusty air of the market, exchanging momentum as if they were secrets, diverging and interfering like rumours in the courtyard of the Blechschule where the children kick a flat ball and shout names of saints and criminals interchangeably, not knowing which is which, and the sky shifts from slate to tin, and somewhere on the edge of the fields a crow courts its own reflection in a puddle, convinced of some right to be mirrored, some entitlement to see itself doubled, and the puddle grants this without protest until a tractor chugs through, smearing everything into a brown common substance that smells of fertiliser and forgotten treaties, and the driver, who might be named Kolbe or Mahr, it does not matter, thinks only of the price of seed and the ache in his left shoulder where years of turning the steering wheel have worn down the cartilage, chondrocytes flattened like tenants under a new regulation, and in the small shop by the bridge the apples are bruised but cheap, and I pick them up one by one, thumb feeling for soft spots, a little inquisition of the epidermis, and the woman behind the counter coughs, a dry rattling cough that speaks of dust in the bronchi, of cilia beating themselves tired against an invisible smog of rules and spores, and she asks whether I have seen the new notice by the town board about the regulation of street vendors, and I say I have not, though I have walked past it twice, its official stamp bleeding red into the damp paper, its words about order and cleanliness already curling in the rain, and the weather reports on the radio remain studiously neutral about these matters, they speak only of high pressure and low pressure moving like armies over a map, never of how the old men on the benches near the tram stop pull their coats tighter each year, how their fingers knot slowly around walking sticks, phalanges thickened by mineral salts after a lifetime of cheap soup, or how the boys on stolen bicycles swerve in and out of traffic as if the entire network of streets were a toy model, as if no one had ever written anything about responsibility for collisions, as if the bones in their arms were not hollow tubes of calcium and memory waiting to be tested against asphalt, and yet underneath the bravado every cell continues its quiet obedience, its replication and apoptosis, its careful attention to checkpoints and damage, so that even in recklessness there is a strange bureaucracy, a set of procedures older than the town, older than the language in which the town imagines itself, and in the yellow fog that sometimes settles in the valley in late autumn, thick as unspoken sentences, I can almost see the outlines of those procedures, tall thin figures in cloaks made of nerve fibres, stamping papers with red mitochondrial seals, granting licenses to the morning to become afternoon, to the seed to crack open, to the snow to melt into brown slush that collects by the kerb outside the shop where Herr Blei sells nails and string and nothing else, his shelves a catalogue of minimal necessities, and I buy a coil of rough twine for reasons I cannot quite explain, fingers rasping against the fibres, skin cells abrading and drifting down as invisible dandruff of citizenship on the counter, and he weighs the twine with an old brass scale whose pans squeak like cartwheels on wet stones, and he tells me that the town council has changed again, that new names are painted in fading gold on the door, names like Flins and Dorr and Halber, but the price of twine remains the same, and the river continues to behave as if no one ruled it, swelling in spring, shrinking in summer, harbouring fish that gulp at the surface on hot evenings when the sky purples into something almost edible, and under one of the arches of the stone bridge there is always a small eddy where bits of wood spin in a slow vortex, like unresolved clauses circling in the mind of some absent legislator, and I watch them for a while as my feet grow numb from the cold seeping through the soles of my boots, the blood vessels in my toes constricting under orders from distant chemical messengers who have never seen a river and never will, and I wonder, though not in so many words, whether anything in this rotating world is truly free, whether the particles that ricochet in the dusty sunlight of the town square are any less bound than the old dog tied to the pump by a frayed rope, whether the girl selling mushrooms from a wicker basket on the corner of Aschhof has more room to move than the basophils rounding up histamine in her bloodstream, and then the wind shifts again, carrying the smell of frying onions from somewhere unseen, and the whole question dissolves into hunger, a simple contraction of an empty stomach wall that feels like a tiny verdict, and I follow my nose toward it, past the posters peeling from the walls, past the statue of a forgotten jurist whose stone eyes stare eternally at the bakery window he cannot taste, past the row of shuttered shops where cobwebs have spun their own sticky regulations, catching only small flies and fragments of last year’s leaflets, and I think, without thinking, that if there is any law here it is written in the way the frost draws delicate fern patterns on the inside of my window at night, in the way the heart keeps time with unmusical precision, in the way, every morning, the same pale light finds the same chipped cup on the same table, and fills it, briefly, with the same indifferent shine electrons slip sideways again this morning in a kind of damp fug rising off the cobbles, whole universes blinking in and out like bird headed saints trying to perch on the rim of a test tube, and I stand there with my cheap cloth bag, potatoes sweating in their own tiny starch cloud, thinking that somewhere between the quark that never quite appears and the rain that actually hits my neck there must be the smallest unrecorded act of freedom, a spin flipping in defiance of a ledger, as if the world were a shabby experiment run by a distracted clerk in the shop of Herr Frei und Sohn who sells thin pamphlets about the foundation of things, badly printed on grey paper, all of them stacked next to the onions and the bags of salt, and the clouds bruise purple above the tiled roofs while I remember that none of this has a centre apart from the slow beating of blood at my temples, erythrocytes dragging oxygen past the scuffed cartilage of my nose, capillaries threading little red doubts through the skin of my hands as I count out coins for the cabbage, and the woman at the stall looks past me toward the tram that never quite arrives when it should, and I tell myself that the delay is not an accident but some kind of quiet rule, the way particles interfere with themselves, the way the same droplet of rain can fall in two different futures, one where I cross the square and one where I stand under the awning outside the bookdealer on Practice Court, old Meister Mach’s, who keeps his radical texts behind the crates of turnips so the police will only ever go away with dirty fingers and nothing proven, and on those afternoons when the sky is the colour of dishwater and the pigeons look like bits of crumpled newspaper flapping along the gutters, I feel my joints creak like badly hinged doors as I climb the steps to my room above Feratu Lane, bones mineral and stubborn, calcium crystals lodged like tiny verdicts in the architecture of my spine, and I spread out the papers I bought from Mach, pages talking about how the right to breathe, to walk, to chew these coarse crusts of bread, must come from some inner lightning rather than from the bored signature of a clerk in a damp office, and the words wash through me the way the river behind the slaughterhouse carries off feathers, congealed fat, bits of unnameable tissue swirling through eddies where boys throw stones and laugh without knowing they are re arranging protein that once pulsed under a hide, and all the while the clouds thin and thicken and the seasons tilt like wobbling plates on a table in the back room of the Schwarz Tavern where they water the beer but tell themselves they are conserving the substance of it, flavours like faint memories of barley, and I sit at the rough wooden bench, splinters in my palms working slowly toward the bloodstream as if they mean to become trees again, and I listen to the men at the next table arguing about whether any law could ever be more than a frozen accident, one of them jabbing his greasy finger against the wood, leaving snail tracks of pork fat, saying that everything written in the big code at Gerichtsgebäude is just the weather from a century ago pretending to be permanent, 

Chapter 5 

words hovering above our heads like low cloud, while another insists that somewhere there must be a rule that is not just rain and custom, something that bites into the bone the way cold does in January when the water in the bucket grows a thin lid of ice and the chickens blink at it as if it were some new decree, and the talk sifts into my ear along with the smell of boiled carrots, cheap sausage, stale sweat, and I notice how my own lungs expand, pleura sliding on their moist linings, little cilia waving in the darkness of the bronchi like pilgrims in a forest, and in that obscure motion there is a kind of stubbornness that no policeman ever drafted, the diaphragm dropping like a decision from nowhere, and I think of the images in crowded panels, all those naked figures crawling in and out of instruments and fruit, some dragged on leashes by creatures with beaks, others staring upward at a sky that does not care, and it seems to me that his painted bodies are just magnified cells, each one caught in a metabolic trial, some condemned by lack of glucose, others spared for another round of division, and when the rain begins again, thin lines of water stitching the tavern window to the alley, I feel the whole city as one soft organ, streets like intestines coiling around markets where the same questions get digested over years, who commands, who obeys, who writes, who stands in line for cheap bread outside the little shop called Freiheit’s where Frau Recht sells loaves that are mostly air but still, when you tear them open, curl steam into the morning like a promise, and I shuffle forward with the others, the soles of our boots leaving the same worn pattern on the step, wet leather, traces of manure, and there is a smell of yeast and wet wool and something metallic, maybe the coins we keep turning in our pockets, maybe the iron in our blood, four atoms of nitrogen around a single bright core of decision that sometimes holds, sometimes lets go, and I watch the way an old man in front of me keeps one hand across his chest as if guarding some unseen document, veins bulging under the paper thin skin, and I think how easy it would be to believe that every pulse is already legislated, that the little valves in his heart open and shut according to a code compiled long before any of us queued for anything, yet when he stumbles on the threshold he does not fall, reflex arcs fire along the spinal cord, muscles contract with no council, no charter, and he steadies himself on the doorframe with a kind of rough dignity that no proclamation could have supplied, and later, sitting on the broken stone by the canal, eating the heel of my bread while ducks churn the green surface to tatters, I remember the pamphlet from Herr Frei about how every right begins as a gap in what exists, a crack like the ones in this old wall where moss takes hold, and how a life might be nothing but the attempt to widen one such fissure enough to let a person through, and the clouds over the warehouses are low, dragging their bellies on the rooftop chimneys, releasing a light so diffused that everything looks as if it has already been remembered, and somewhere in that grey thinning I imagine particles colliding, probabilities collapsing into single muddy facts like the heel of my boot slipping in the canal mud, and the stink of rotting weed rises up, bacterial colonies exhaling their anonymous sentences, and a boat slides past with bales of straw for the animals in Stiftung Hof, and one of the carters shouts something about permits to the watchman on the bridge, both of them waving pieces of paper as if they were small, angry weather systems, and at night, in the narrow bed under the sloping roof, the rafters ticking softly as they cool, I feel my own skeleton as if it were a kind of scaffolding erected by arguments I never heard, ribs like the curved beams of a dockyard, sternum a warped plank holding them together, marrow ticking over quietly, producing blood cells that will carry other people’s decisions tomorrow, oxygen to the muscles that lift crates, carbon dioxide back to the lungs where it will be exhaled into the city’s breath, and the wind outside shoves rain through the cracked shutter, droplets landing on the rough blanket and soaking into the weave like forgotten names, and some nights I wake with my heart thrashing, full of images of courts and scaffolds, not personal fear exactly but a sense of some vast ledger closing, lines drawn under columns that include my tiny purchases of turnips and candles, my small acts of trudging and chewing and nodding at officials in narrow doorways, and I picture, without wanting to, a room in some clean building where clerks with pale ink stained fingers draft provisions for people like me, words about obligation and security and order, and the rain on the roof becomes the scratching of their quills, and then, as if some quantum tremor passes through my chest, the terror dissolves into a dull calm, and I think instead of the way my fingernails grow, keratin layered in slow spirals, ignoring decrees, obeying nothing but the old chemical stories inherited from the bodies that slumped in fields before any of these streets existed, and in the morning I go again to Übung Gericht, where the secondhand dealer Fräulein Grundlage spreads her merchandise on a patched cloth, boots, spoons, chipped cups, old pamphlets whose titles promise the reconciliation of everything with everything, and I pick one up at random while she haggles with a man over the price of a dented pan, and the wind whips dust up from between the cobbles, sting of grit on my corneas, lacrimal glands responding without thought, tears washing the surface, and the letters on the thin paper swim and blur, yet I can still make out talk about how the smallest act, the decision to lift a finger, to step aside, contains something that no statistic can catch, and a fly lands on the margin, rubbing its front legs together, compound eyes reflecting the fragmented square, and I am seized for a second by the idea that the insect carries its own scheme of right and wrong, encoded in the way its wing muscles contract, the way it avoids the shadow of my hand, all those micro decisions flickering faster than any judge’s sentence, and then my stomach growls, gastric juices gathering, parietal cells exuding acid at the mere smell of the fried dough Fräulein Grundlage sells in paper twists, and I hand back the pamphlet and count out enough coins for a greasy spiral that burns my fingers through the wrapper, and I walk away chewing, flakes of sugar falling on my coat like a light indoor snow while the real sky darkens again, bruise coloured clouds dragging over the chimneys of Metaphysik Gasse, and in the doorway of the betting shop there two men argue about the old conqueror from the south, the one with the fox eyes and the little book about princes, they say he knew that sometimes you have to twist the neck of a law to keep a city alive, that clean hands never kept anybody from starving, and their voices rise and fall with the gusts, syllables shredded by the wind, and I feel in my own throat the fragile tube of cartilage, trachea ringed and vulnerable, and behind it the softer path down which bread and arguments slide, oesophageal peristalsis working away whether I stand with them or not, waves of muscular contraction pushing food toward the churning sac where it will be dissolved into nutrients that will later help me clench a fist or bow a head in a public square, and days pass like this, many of them, the weather shuffling its greasy deck of drizzle and fog and brief astonishments of sun, and on some mornings the light on Liberty Line is so clean that even the peeling posters on the walls look like proclamations from another, better time, while on others the air is full of soot, suspended particles swirling like half formed decisions waiting for someone to breathe them in, and through all of it there is the slow movement of my own tissues, cells dividing, telomeres shortening, microtubules assembling and disassembling in their patient, blind work, and when I hear talk in the tavern of reforms proposed in the big building on Rechter Hügel, of new guarantees and new punishments, I imagine all these unseen processes shrugging, indifferent, the immune cells patrolling my bloodstream like dull, loyal footsoldiers who have never heard of constitutions, and yet it is the ache in my knees when I climb the stairs to my room that makes the words on the wall posters matter, because if they decide that people like me must work an extra year, carry an extra load, then the cartilage in my joints will grind down sooner, synovial fluid thinning, pain blooming like a slow rose in the tissue, and I will feel every syllable of their deliberations as friction under the skin, and perhaps this is all that freedom ever is in the end, not some shining abstraction but the difference between bone on bone and bone still cushioned by a thin pad of collagen, the space where movement is possible, however clumsy, and when the first snow of the season finally comes, flakes drifting past the window of the Pantheismus-Taverne while I nurse a chipped mug of weak beer and listen to the older ones mutter about betrayal and loyalty, about how every promise from Rechter Hügel has two sides like a coin, one for the speakers and one for the listeners, I feel in my teeth the faint ache of cold, dentine transmitting sensation to nerves that run back toward the brain like small, private wires, and in that pale ache there is a kind of truth no speech ever quite reaches, the bare contact of organism and world, enamel against icy air, and the snow settles on the hats of the watchmen at the corner, anonymous white crowns that will melt as soon as they go indoors, and the whole thing, the city, the laws, the market, my spine, the tram that sometimes runs on time and sometimes stalls like a sulking animal, all of it feels like one of those impossible landscapes where fish walk and men sprout branches, except here the mutations are just quieter, cells losing their knack for repair, habits stiffening into custom, custom hardening slowly into command, and yet somewhere below all that, in the twitch of a muscle as I decide to stand up or stay seated, in the tiny hesitation before I fold my fingers around a coin to pay for the next loaf, something like a quantum flicker remains, the possibility that the electron will choose the other path this time, that the cloud will hold back its rain for one more hour and give the bread a chance to rise just a little higher, air bubbles expanding under the crust before the heat fixes them into place, an edible record of a brief conspiracy between gravity, yeast and human hunger that no decree in Rechter Hügel has yet learned how to sign the electrons do not circle, they swarm like little pilgrims in a cracked altarpiece, I see them clustering around a nucleus that is not a nucleus but a crowded village green, and above them a sky painted by that old fellow where fish grow legs and cities sprout out of the backs of saints, and the sky is always the same low cloud over the fields behind the abattoir at Machiavelli-Markt where the thin rain makes everything silver and greasy, years of the same, the same damp coat on my shoulders, the same cheap turnips in the sack, the same invisible equations humming somewhere behind the butcher’s tiled wall, and I think how the probability wave must smear itself along the curve of the river, down past the weir where the carp nose against old bottles, and up through the open windows of the Verwaltungshaus where the clerks of the higher order stamp documents that are really wave functions collapsing into decrees, I feel it in my own blood, little packets of charge drifting along capillaries as narrow as the aisles in Frau Kantig’s second hand shop, my red cells like peas rolling in a crate every time the tram lurches, the weather doing that thing again where it cannot decide whether to piss down or shine, so it does both, fine drizzle and hard light together in the square outside the Zivilgesellschaftliche Arkade , where Hawker Spinozzi sells cheap onions and mutters about everything being one, his breath like hot vinegar in winter, his fingers split and raw, and somewhere above the market roof there is the great unseen lattice, the one that keeps the whole mess from falling in on itself, I can almost see it when the fog comes in from the river and the lamps along Liberale Straße switch on one by one, each bulb a small quantised decision, either lit or not lit, no in between, though the air between them glows with half thoughts and dust, that is where the real business happens, not in the council chambers or the printed rules but in the grey zone between this lamp and the next, between this lungful of air and the one that follows, little alveoli opening and closing like the mouths of carp, oxygen shuffling across membranes, the whole thing as orderly and as obscene as those tiny naked figures climbing up ladders in the painting that hangs in the back room of Dealer Communar’s shop, the one he keeps covered with a cloth unless the rain is very heavy and business is slow, then he lifts a corner so the damp can get at it, he says damp gives colour its truth, and I watch the paint blister slowly over the years as the wind from the hills keeps bringing in the smell of manure and cheap tobacco, and as I shuffle past his window each day, sometimes with bread, sometimes with nothing but cabbage and a few bruised apples, the clouds change their mind and pile up like dirty thoughts over the Bio-Tor where the road narrows and the lorries rattle past, and I imagine that each piston stroke is a kind of vote, not the polite ticking of boxes but a dull mechanical affirmation that the whole machine will keep grinding, rods pushing, exhaust gas wheezing out like the breath of a tired animal, and my own intestines respond with their slow peristaltic shrug, muscle lining the tube in rings, squeezing processed vegetables along in waves that are as regular as the parish bells, it is all one system, the bells, the bowels, the clanking gates of the slaughterhouse, the eddies of low pressure coming in from the west, the diagrams I once saw chalked on a blackboard in the back room of the Weiler Institute, fat white lines showing how freedom propagates through the medium of institutions like sound through air, compressions and rarefactions of custom and law, and yet the actual air tastes of coal dust and damp plaster, the mist sitting in my throat like a small uncollected tax, while in the distance the radio at the kiosk hisses, a voice talking about reform and renewal but it comes through broken, full of static, like a signal that has bounced too many times off the ionosphere of compromise, and I think of the little hairs in my inner ear bent by that sound, cilia trembling, converting waves into impulses, each impulse a tiny yes or no sent along nerves that snake through the flesh like clandestine roads, and outside the kiosk there is the usual display of discount tinned beans, stacked like the towers in the old engravings of the city, and I find myself counting them as if they were citizens, as if every cheap tin had the right to be acknowledged, even the dented ones at the back, and the rain finds its way into everything, into the cardboard boxes and the folds of my skin, making me itch, which is just histamine erupting from mast cells, capillaries dilating in tiny rebellions, a politics of redness under the surface, all the while the clouds sliding overhead like heavy committees, not in any hurry to decide anything, days slipped into months, months into those soft anonymous years where you wake one morning and the paving stones on Ethische Straße have been replaced without you noticing when the work began, they are just suddenly there, smoother, a little less treacherous in frost, and at the same time the old men outside the tobacco shop of Herr Practicus have thinned out, a couple no longer there, their places taken by younger men with sharper shoes, it is the kind of attrition no one votes on, the slow legislative work of decay, protein chains in the cartilage of knees fraying one by one, telomeres trimming down at the ends of chromosomes, and somewhere in an office a clerk files away the death certificates as if they were receipts, the stamp going down with the same wet thunk as when I slap a packet of cheap sausages on the counter at Abendbrot Markt, the woman behind the till smelling of flour and sweat, her hands damp but quick with the coins, her eyes already on the next in the queue, and outside the wind shifts, bringing a sudden gust of rotting leaves down along Sovereign Allee, shoving them up against the drain where the water has formed a small whirlpool, a miniature galaxy of muck and broken twigs, I cannot help seeing spirals in everything, in the way pigeons circle above the square, in the curling of steam off my soup, in the double helix turning slowly in every cell of every cabbage on the barrow, bases pairing up like marrying cousins in some poor village, adenine with thymine, guanine with cytosine, a stubborn scheme from which all our supposed freedom sprouts like weeds between paving stones, and still the weather repeats its half promises, fog on the same corners year after year, patches of blue in roughly the same gaps, as if the whole sky were working from an old plan held in a drawer in the Planungsbüro des Absolute House, some clerk there moving isobars around on a yellowed sheet while drinking greasy coffee, not thinking about meaning, just about getting through the day, that is how the great structure keeps itself going, on habit and caffeine and circulation, blood pulled through arteries like carts over cobbles, the valves in the heart clapping shut with the same dull expertise as the turnstiles at the tram depot on Historicism Hill, everything functional and faintly stupid, and yet in the midst of the stupidity there are small flares of strangeness, like the time Dealer Nihiloni at the corner of Übungsgericht tried to sell me a box of invisible matches, guaranteed to light only when there is nothing left to burn, his crooked grin showing two gold teeth that looked like tiny suns caught in a fleshy firmament, or those mornings when the frost draws branching figures on the inside of the window at my one room flat off Dämmerungspassage, dendritic patterns like the nerves in a dissected hand, axons and dendrites touching but not quite, gaps bridged by neurotransmitter, molecules hopping the void like peasants jumping the trickle of a stream, I lick the condensation and it tastes of iron and dust, and I think of how my own tongue is covered with papillae, small fungal hills crowded with taste buds, each one a bureaucrat registering a flavour, sour, bitter, salt, as I chew the same cheap bread from the same baker whose name I never fully catch, something like Reformer or maybe only Riefmann, flour on his eyelashes like pale ash, and as I walk back from his stall the clouds have arranged themselves into something that could almost be an emblem, heavy mass to the west, thin streaks to the east, a sort of weather heraldry over the clock tower, banners of vapour signalling fronts and pressures that no one voted for, and under this damp coat of sky the streets are full of little negotiations, dogs tugging at leads, vendors yelling discounts, a child whining for a sugared roll, and beneath all this the slow grinding at the joints, cartilage wearing down, enamel on teeth chipping, the acid in the stomach rising in little surges whenever the talk on the radio turns to foreign parts and new arrangements, every plan promising more fairness if only the right structure is erected, a new scaffolding of offices and committees and checks, and in my head the electrons are still darting, indifferent, smeared over possibilities, while in the painting in Dealer Communar’s back room the tiny figures crawl forever up and down their ladders into the swollen fruit and the monstrous birds, and in the far corner of the room, on the chipped windowsill where the paint curls like old parchment, the bottle glows faintly again, that ridiculous little bottle that contains the whole collapsing universe swirled into a bruise of light, galaxies turning like specks of dust in cheap vinegar, and I tell myself for the thousandth time that when they come with their offers and their contracts and their briefcases full of numbers I will refuse, I will refuse the coins and the notes and the electronic blizzards of credit, I will refuse the mansions in Neurath and the apartments in the upper ring of the Black Ring Strasse and the promised dinners in the mirror palaces of Doctor Kessel and Frau von Bracken, I will say no in a voice so small it sounds like the chittering of the mice, because how can you sell what already includes the buyer and the contract and the banker and the hunger that drives him, how can you trade the phase space of all possible bargains, the wave function of every negotiation, for a handful of cabbage and stale bread, and yet it is cabbage and stale bread that I still buy each Wednesday at the Markt am Kanal where the wind blows iron filings through the air and the woman with the red scarf, whose name changes each time I ask it, sometimes Hedda sometimes Marina sometimes Frau der Sache, wraps my vegetables in a page torn from an old philosophical catalogue so that I go home with potatoes covered in the names of dead systems, and the bottle waits for me as I come up the stairs, sweating, my lungs contracting like bellows, bronchioles burning a little, alveoli exchanging their quiet agreements with the oxygen, and I imagine the same gas spinning in tiny clouds inside the bottle, forming stars the size of bacteria, whole nebulae no bigger than a crumb on the floor, and I lecture the mice about this while I peel the potatoes, I tell them that the real catastrophe will not be the fire or the flood or even the political decrees from the Office of Absolute Deletion in the district of Kleinischein, it will be the moment someone believes that the universe in the bottle can be completely measured, pinned, reduced to a final table of constants, as if you could list every quark by name, little Joachim, little Philomene, little Zax and Katarina, each with their spin like a personality trait, each obedient to a statistic drawn up by some exhausted clerk in the Ministerium für wahrscheinliche Ergebnisse, and the mice stare at me with their dark bead eyes and I think perhaps they understand because their hearts flutter at a rate that mocks all these human enumerations, 600 beats per minute, tiny metronomes ticking against the skull, and I imagine the same rhythm pulsing along the filaments inside the bottle, planets born and dead in the time it takes my own slow heart to attempt one clumsy contraction, and outside the window the weather will not decide, snow that cannot quite commit to falling, rain held back as if some celestial accountant is still checking whether the fields deserve it, and the sky over Holmbach and Niederstunden and the crooked hill of Meisterwald is a bruise like the inside of the bottle only larger, and in that sky I sometimes see the curling towers and impossible organs of cities, ladders leading nowhere, birds with human legs buying candles from the stall of Professor Lichten and Frau Nebel, and I tell the mice that this is quantum mechanics, that every obscene little hybrid creature in those paintings is a superposition, a cat and a flute and a soldier and a turnip all at once until the viewer looks at it, until the eye collapses the horror into one stable nightmare, and that the end of the world will feel like that, not a single bang but a slow embarrassing observation in which all our half formed possibilities, my own pathetic half lives in the stairwell and the market and the back room of the Antiquariat von Groll, are forced to choose, to become one thing, and in that instant all the other versions of myself, the one who sold the bottle, the one who smashed it in a fit of indigestion, the one who drank it like cheap schnapps, will vanish, and only this stubborn fool peeling potatoes and lecturing rodents will remain, and sometimes while I am talking I notice her, or I think I notice her, the girl in the next room or in the corridor where the tiles sweat in summer, she may be undressing or she may simply be taking off her coat with the tired motions of anyone coming home to too much air, and I glimpse, perhaps, the pale plane of her shoulder or the shadow of fabric sliding down, and I tell myself that it is simply another experiment in visibility, that her movements are like particles passing briefly through a cloud chamber leaving traces on my retina, ionised streaks shaped like long vowels, and I insist to the mice that this is all part of the lecture, that nothing here is about desire, that even the thought of her skin is to be catalogued along with the names of distant towns, Oberlach, Tiefenring, the Café Monismus where I once pawned my last book for soup, the second hand shop Emporium der Endlichkeit where Herr Sester sells cracked plates printed with scenes of the Last Judgement in which all the sinners are wearing overcoats stamped with the logo of the latest ministry, because everything must be folded into the theory, into the collapsing star above the last Christmas market, I tell them about that as well, about walking through the December stalls of Altplatz when the air smelt of burnt sugar and sausage fat and damp wool, and strings of cheap lights hung over the heads of the crowd like a failed constellation, and how I looked up and thought that each bulb was actually a distant sun already dead, its light only now arriving to be wasted on plastic tinsel and knock off nativity scenes painted by the children of the factory workers in Fernstadt, and how the bottle in my pocket at that time, smaller then, or perhaps I was larger, gave a little shudder as if it resented being carried among so much commerce, and I imagined all the universes inside it holding their own winter markets, tiny stalls set up on electrons, shoppers made of nothing but probability buying little figurines of me, the idiot with the bottle, and refusing to pay with anything but imaginary currency, and I explain to the mice that this is what people call spirit though they use other words, that the capacity of something to hold an image of itself, to picture its own ridiculousness, is the beginning of the real catastrophe, because once you can see the end you begin to stage it, like the boy I saw in Niederhafen lighting matches in a barn already dry as a sermon, or like myself when I trace with my finger the maps of imagined invasions across the mould on the ceiling, fleets of spores advancing on the crumbling plaster city, and in my mind the planets rearrange themselves according to rules no astronomer in the Academy of Herrscherkunst would accept, Mars aligning with the cheapest turnip in my pantry, Saturn’s rings turning into the metal rim of the chipped saucepan where I boil cabbage until its cells surrender and split, membranes dissolving, vacuoles releasing their sad stored water, and somewhere in the building pipes groan like prehistoric animals trapped in sediment, and I tell the mice that these pipes are really the arteries of a giant whose heart beats slowly beneath the city, pumping not blood but old arguments through the radiators, that every time I feel the warmth come on in winter it is because the giant has remembered a dispute in the Tavern zur Dialektik and is muttering about it in his sleep, and when the warmth fails it is because he has grown bored with us, and the mice scratch and I scratch and I think about the immune system, at least that is what I call the itch, an army of white cells patrolling the thin borderlands of my skin, peasant soldiers in the service of a crown that never shows its face, marching through capillaries named after saints and traitors, the Rue von Hohenheim, the Gasse der Ungesagten Dinge, and along these little roads the molecules of cheap beer wander, muttering, and all the time the bottle in the corner glows and dims, as if breathing with another rhythm, some cosmic diaphragm expanding and contracting as clusters form and die, and I swear sometimes I hear a crowd inside it, shouting, the roar of beings tromping through their own streets, throwing stones at the skull of some other fool who talks too much, who stands in the middle of their square explaining that everything they see is only one possible arrangement of their own misunderstanding, and the stones hit his head again and again, each impact a local adjustment in the gravitational field that ripples up through the glass, nudging my own thoughts a little, giving me headaches that I mistake for prophecy, and when the pain gets bad I lie down on the floorboards, splinters nudging my back like small insistent questions, and I watch the dust motes dance in the light from the window, each mote a planet, each planet crawling with creatures that think they are important, and I whisper the names I have invented for them, Koenigreich der Blinden Forellen, Stadt der Umgekehrten Glocken, Republik der Verschluckten Silben, and I promise the mice that none of those worlds will ever be sold either, that it is not only the bottle I will keep from the merchants of Brackental and the emissaries of the Hyperbank, it is also the dust, the crumbs, the mould, the sweat on my neck, the murmur of her breathing when she passes the door, if she passes the door, if she is not simply a figment produced by the bottle or by some other organ, my brain folding and unfolding like a wet shirt, neurons firing salt and electricity, synaptic gaps bridged by traces of yesterday’s market and last year’s snow and the smear of gravy on my sleeve, and in this hot cracked skull I stage the end of the world every night for an audience of mice who pay me in droppings and discarded whiskers, and I accept their currency because it is the only honest one left, and I tell them that when the real ending comes, the great implosion or expansion or quiet switching off, it will look not like fire from heaven but like a sudden clarity in this room, the bottle will become perfectly transparent, the dust will settle in exact patterns spelling the names of all the things I failed to understand, the squeak of the floorboards will line up with the ticking of my heart, the fumes from the cabbage pot will map themselves onto the motions of the farthest galaxies, the girl in the next room will or will not be undressing and it will finally not matter which, the fabric falling or not falling will be only one local fluctuation in a field that has already decided to withdraw, and I will sit up slowly and look at the mice and say, there, you see, it was always like this, we were always inside the bottle, the offers of money were just echoes from another curvature, and the refusal I was practising was the only real thing I ever owned, and then I will reach for a crust of bread, because even at the end of all this somebody still has to eat and I feel somewhere between the two, half particle and half grotesque, my own skin spotted from the winter, little keratin outcrops like failed policies, nails yellowing around the edges, and as I trudge through the slush on Vertretungsreihe the slush itself becomes a medium, half ice, half water, crystals breaking and remaking at the edge of zero, like the hesitant promises in the leaflets that blow around my ankles, pamphlets about new Councils of This and Committees of That, soaked, ink running, their slogans leaking into the gutters, nutrients for rats and mould, and the mould spreads in my kitchen too, dark hyphae threading through the bread bin when I forget to close it, spores rising whenever I slam the cupboard door, drifting like unregistered citizens into my lungs, my immune system doing its quiet policing with cytokines and T cells, no warrants, just chemical recognitions, and the great grey sky above the estates does its own patrol, moving fronts like invisible battalions, rain as a strategy of attrition, eroding stone, swelling wood, breaking down the sharp edges of statues until the faces of the old heroes look blurred and sheepish, and all the while, year after not quite named year, the same procession along Zivilgesellschaftliche Arkade, second hand clothes on wire hangers at Ethik & Söhne, cracked boots, army surplus coats, the same old faces at the soup stand run by the parish, broth thin as argument, hands wrapped around plastic bowls, steam rising like a weak incense toward a god that does not trouble to vote, my own stomach making that low gurgling complaint that sounds to me like a small parliament arguing in the dark, and in the kidney’s twists the nephrons quietly rework the blood, filtering ions with a precision no ordinance ever achieves, sodium here, potassium there, grace in miniature while the big institutions drag their feet through mud and compromise, and in between rain showers the light sometimes comes in hard and gold, slanting across the tenements in a way that makes even the laundry lines look official, banners of underwear and grey socks between balconies, each sock a small republic of holes and darned patches, cotton worn thin at heel and toe, fibres frayed like the nerves of the old women who lean over the railings and gossip about prices, about the rising cost of potatoes at the Metaphysicum Co operative, where the clerk with the crooked spectacles always seems half asleep, though his hands flick through the ledgers with a speed that reminds me of enzymes snapping bonds in a strand of starch, and outside his shop the pigeons keep their own accounts in grease and droppings on the statues of abstract virtues in the square, Liberty with a streak down her cheek, Equality with a beak mark on her nose, and the air smells of wet stone and fried onions and exhaust, a soup of hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides, tiny particles of tyre and brake, all entering my nostrils whether I consent or not, cilia waving in their beds of mucus like bored constables, trapping some, letting some pass, all this going on while a thin drizzle starts again, soft on the back of my neck as I stand in line for discounted carrots at the Machiavelli-Markt stall, the vendor shouting about special offers in a voice that rasped itself raw years ago, his vocal cords scarred from shouting, 

Chapter 6 

folds of tissue thickened by constant strain, nothing romantic about it, just collagen and habit, and somewhere far above this whole damp procession the high atmosphere crackles with invisible particles from the sun, cosmic rays shattering atoms, generating cascades of secondary particles that streak through roofs and skulls and concrete council buildings alike, changing a base here and there in a strand of DNA, sowing tiny errors in the archive of cells, and those errors sometimes grow into tumours in the livers of old men who once dreamed of better arrangements, masses of cells ignoring the old rules of contact inhibition, piling up in obscene autonomy, new self appointed states inside the body, confiscating blood supply, issuing their own ugly decrees in the language of uncontrolled mitosis, and I walk past the public clinic on Notwendigkeitsstraße where the queue stretches out into the drizzle, people coughing into scarves, children picking at scabs, posters on the walls inside with smiling nurses and slogans about taking responsibility, about being partners in care, and the floor smells of disinfectant and old fear, cells dying under fluorescent light, bacterial membranes ruptured by cheap quaternary ammonium compounds, and outside again the clouds have lowered, scraping along the roofs, tugged by fronts explained on weather bulletins that never mention the feeling of the damp seeping into your socks through cracked soles, or the way the wind always seems to turn against you when you carry home a sack of potatoes from the Genossenschaft des Alltags, or how in the little park by Weber Bridge the trees have learned to bend just so, branches twisted to accommodate the prevailing gusts, cambium layers thickened on one side, a slow adaptation that no one wrote into law, it just happened, ring by ring, while in the offices along Reformgasse men and women drafted statutes about traffic and signage and allowable noise levels, their pens scratching over cheap paper, ink like coagulating blood on the page, and when the day ends for them the cleaners come, women mostly, folding themselves around bins and desks, vacuuming up the flakes of skin and bits of eraser that lie like a pale snowfall under the tables, and their muscles burn with lactic acid as they climb the stairs, mitochondria panting, and they think of nothing structured, only of getting home, of something hot in a chipped bowl, of what is left in the cupboard, rye bread perhaps, cheap sausage, maybe a bruised apple from the discount pile at the corner of Historismus und Praxis, the apple still running its own little internal politics, ethylene gas whispering from cell to cell hurry up, ripen, rot, fall where between the tunnelling of electrons and the fat sky fish in a painting floating over a crooked village roof I feel the morning condense around my skin, a kind of eccentric weather driven by probability amplitudes, drizzle shaped like wave functions, clouds folding and unfolding like diagrams of possible worlds, and I say to myself that in this cracked little town of Sankt Machia, where the baker sells stale rye from a crate marked Kantfeld Imports and the wine dealer in the green coat calls himself old Franz von Panlogos even though his licence reads something else entirely, the air is full of these invisible calculations, branching futures, decaying pasts, as if the fog itself were an equation, and I walk through it with my cap pulled low and my fingers sticky from last night’s onions, thinking of how the tiny mitochondria inside my cells, the little peasant power stations, keep swapping charges like black market coins in the alley behind the Zwilling Gate, and I suppose that every heartbeat is a kind of measurement, a collapse of options into the one drab path that leads me again to the market square where the pigeons gossip about bread and the women from Spinozagasse haggle about cabbage and leeks, and the rain is not really rain but a slow interrogation of the soil, asking it whether it will consent to bring forth turnips again this year, asking my worn boots whether they will hold together between one season and the next, and in the corners of my vision there are always these things, tiny grotesque engines with bird heads and pot bellies, standing in for the machines in my own head, the synaptic gears, the serotonergic pulleys that drag some thoughts out of the mud and let others sink back, and days pass in this diluted light, years perhaps, although I cannot say exactly when Franz von Panlogos started giving credit only if you pronounced the name of his shop correctly, nor when the wind over Jena Bridge began to smell simultaneously of roasting chestnuts and stale revolution, I just know that the pattern repeats, the clouds rearrange themselves into organic diagrams, branching networks like nerves or rivers or the rough veins on the back of my hand, and in the inland weather of that hand blood pushes along the arterioles in turbulent bursts, red cells squeezed like commuters through capillaries, all the little nuclei carrying their spiral codes in silence, while in the outer weather the bells of Saint Aurelia ring for some reason connected to a feast I always forget, and the sound wobbles through the damp air as if the very medium were uncertain about its task, like a quantum field trying to decide whether it is wave or particle or just the smell of boiled beetroot escaping from the window of Frau Nihila on the corner, and when the wind turns from the hill it brings with it a faint dry taste of paper, as if the forests had given up and turned into pages at last, pages full of patient diagrams of the state and its sinews, and the men in brown coats at the back of the tobacco shop murmur about freedom the way the butchers murmur about the price of fat, cutting it thin, weighing every slice, while the membranes in my gut negotiate their own trades, letting sodium pass, pushing sugars into the bloodstream without any consultation, and there is barley soup again in my bowl with a single strip of old sausage, wrinkled like the fingers of the river women who wash linen at the ford, and I spoon it in mechanically, thinking that there are societies of bacteria in my intestines who know more about communal life than the loud talkers in the Biergarten know about rights, that each microscopic flagellum is a citizen of some swirling polis under my ribs, turning its little motor in a broth of lactic logic, and above all this, on a higher plane, the clouds keep rearranging like a council of indecisive cherubs, sometimes forming something like a map of the principality, other times shrinking to a single bright hole above the steeple where you feel you could slip through into another medium altogether, where gravity is just a rumour and the fields of the town are parcels of charge rather than wheat, and in this long unspecific corridor of years that smells of wet wool and boiled potatoes I keep moving past the same dealers, the paper dealer at the corner of Divisiongasse and Organicstrasse who sells tiny notebooks ruled like prison yards, the lamp oil dealer called Frau Praxis who counts each coin twice before dropping it into a box labelled Foundation, and none of them know that inside my skull there is a parliament of images, the three headed fish, the hollow men in armour eating peas with their helmets on, the crooked houses that lean together like conspirators, that these things keep arguing with the equations I once saw chalked on a damp wall near the rail yard, symbols that promised a world of clear necessity and statistical mercy where nothing really happens until it is observed, where even the clumsy flight of the sparrows over Zivile Wiese is just a cluster of probabilities flapping, and as the months unspool into years the weather writes commentaries on its own passing, a late frost scribbling over the hopeful shoots of turnips, a summer rain underlining the broken tiles on my roof, while my own epidermis cracks and heals, sloughs away in flakes that become part of the dust on the shelves of Herr Machfeld’s book stall, and he sweeps them up at closing time without knowing that he is tidying away the footnotes of my existence, and all the while the little cilia in my lungs wave rhythmically, beating time to some inaudible metronome, moving phlegm in slow columns, and this tiny bureaucracy of tissues continues its labours indifferent to the grand words written on posters near the town hall door, metaphysical slogans about the organic unity of the people and the necessity of law that curl at the edges in the drizzle and are pecked by sparrows for no reason I can see, and in the butcher’s queue on cold mornings I hear people speak the same phrases with different emphasis, necessary, organic, right, order, as if they had all been to the same invisible school run out of the back room of the Kantfeld Tavern where a man called Professor Absolon is said to sit in the dark talking about how freedom must coil itself inside necessity like a fern inside a fist, and I picture this fern, unrolling slowly in the damp woods above town, each cell stretching by osmosis, water drawn up the xylem, chloroplasts readying themselves for the thin sunlight when it manages to puncture the constant cloud, and I know that this humble plant on the rotten log understands that supposed reconciliation better than the drunk men at the tavern who shout about the state while their livers quietly fibrose, star shaped stellate cells laying down scar tissue in tiny silent conspiracies, and day after day I carry potatoes home in a bag that cuts my fingers, thinking of the tension between the need to eat and the vague words they pin to the noticeboard about virtue, and every once in an uncertain while the sky tears open in a storm that feels like a commentary on everything, lightning rattling over the crooked rooftops, rain hitting the cobbles so hard that you think the town will dissolve into its own quarry, and in such nights the quantum world inside my head shows a ladder with no rungs planted in a field of cabbages, farmers looking up as if waiting for an angel of administration to descend and explain why the price of salt has risen again in the stalls of old Frau Necessitas, whose chalkboard always says there is no alternative, and my spinal cord hums with signals, efferent and afferent, without philosophy, muscles contract, sphincters tighten, peristaltic waves knead the cheap bread into chyme while outside the wind moves plastic sheets over the half finished houses in Reformstrasse, and I cannot say whether the construction ever ends or whether the scaffolding has become a permanent citizen like the dogs that lie under the bench near the tram stop, tongues lolling, their brains running simple loops about warmth and danger while human brains in the same square spin elaborate stories about progress and historic mission, and one winter with no clear boundary from the others a fog settles for three weeks, turning the town into a diagram of outlines, and I stand in the square trying to remember the colour of the town hall, as if its essence had evaporated, and at that moment I feel my proprioception loosen, my arms become approximate, my feet are rumours, and the only stable thing is the slow pulse in my ears, systole diastole, calcium ions clicking their approvals in the myocytes, and I think that if the world outside is so conditional, so smeared, then perhaps the only state that matters is this internal monarchy of cells, each governed by rules it did not choose, yet all together forming this shuffling peasant who buys onions and cheap offal from the Jenaer Tor Markt, who occasionally looks up at the posters announcing the new ethical reforms from the council of Organische Einheit and thinks they sound like recipes for a soup no one will ever really cook, and it snows again, or maybe it is the same snow repeating itself in cycles, crystals growing on window panes like abstract laws, always six sided yet infinitely variable, and chickens in the yard scrape at the frozen dirt with their blunt claws, their crop full of grit and kernels, and inside each feathered breast heart muscle ticks away without reference to the decrees from the town hall, little actin and myosin filaments ratcheting in their own ancient dialect, and the clock on the tower coughs out another hour into the grey, and more years may have passed or less, because the price of cabbage goes up and down and the men at Franz von Panlogos’ wine barrels grow thicker around the middle, necks flushed, palms dry from counting, while the children of Spinoza-Gasse grow into new butchers and tailors, their cartilage plates closing, epiphyses ossifying, the metaphysical growth of the town recorded only in the changing shapes of noses and the new names carved into the wood of the Kantfeld Tavern tables, hieroglyphs of bored apprentices who have never heard of electrons but feel their nerves fizz when the thunder rolls across the hills, and I keep moving through it like a neutrino through a planet, barely interacting, sometimes bumping into a notice about civil obligations or a sermon about the organic state pinned outside Saint Aurelia, most times just carrying my string bag of potatoes, my cheap lamp oil, my stiff bread, the endocrine Pelican in my bloodstream adjusting cortisol and insulin levels according to stresses such as whether the rain will ruin the laundry again or whether the rumours about new levies on grain are true, and the sky presses down with its uncertain weight of vapour and forgotten comets, and under that sky the town organises itself into streets and habits, dealers and places, Machfeld’s stall under the arcade with its second hand pamphlets that talk about the necessity of law in sentences long enough to be weather systems, Frau Praxis’ corner shop with its smell of pickled cucumbers and soap, the yard of old Herr Historicus with its junked carts and relic ploughs, the whole thing like the cross section of a termite nest, corridors and chambers and a queen somewhere who never appears, while the real rulers are perhaps the mildew spores on the cellar walls, waiting for their chance, or the tiny silver fishes in the river below Jena Bridge, flicking in schools like thoughts through a mind that does not yet know it is thinking, and it may be morning or evening or some undifferentiated hour of a long year when I notice that my fingernails are copying the crescents of the moon, that keratin remembers something about cycles, that the creases on my knuckles have turned into maps of territories I never voted to join, and in that damp light over the square the ghost of a bird thing flaps across my vision again, carrying in its beak a measuring rod, as if about to test the alignment of all these shabby houses with some invisible ideal plan, and the clouds above it shear into patterns that look exactly like the diagrams the men in the tavern once traced in spilled beer, trying to explain to nobody in particular how freedom could live inside a structure of laws like a seed in a husk, and the rain answers them by soaking their hats and running down their necks, redistributing the warmth of their bodies into the gutters, and in some obscure correspondence my kidneys adjust the reabsorption of water, nephrons working in parallel like modest civil servants, glomeruli filtering the town’s philosophy out of my blood so that what remains is just a trickle of salts and urea returned to the river, and the swans near the weir do not care, they arrange their feathers with the same care as always, white as belief, their down layered against a wind that carries, faintly, from the noticeboard at the town hall, the latest proclamation about the duties of citizens in the great living structure that we supposedly are, words flapping like laundry left out too long in a weather that cannot decide whether to clear or to close in, and I go on buying my onions and stale bread, my bones slowly decalcifying in a quiet revolt against the demands made on them, osteoclasts and osteoblasts arguing in whispers along each trabecula, until one day or year or era I find that the steps up to my lodging require more breath, my alveoli less elastic, yet the posters about the organic vitality of the whole have grown bigger, brighter, more insistent, so that in the square you see more paper than stone, more slogans than pigeons, and still the pigeons coo and defecate on them without grasping the irony that others in the Kantfeld Tavern would so eagerly explain, and the sky fish continue to swim by in my peripheral vision, their scales etched with tiny mathematical symbols, their bulging eyes reflecting the warped streets of Sankt Machia, and I follow them in my mind through layers of cloud that are also layers of meaning, each droplet a particular life, a particular cell, a bit of stale bread, a whispered argument at Franz von Panlogos’ barrel, and the whole storm somehow, inexplicably, still one thing moving across the peasant fields, soaking the cabbages, darkening the turnip leaves, drumming on the hat of Frau Praxis as she pulls her shutters closed for the night that may be any night or all of them together, while the electrons do their jittery dance in the copper wires of her lamps, and the quiet, uncomplaining quantum of light jumps from filament to air, illuminating for a moment the jars of pickles and sacks of flour that are, in the end, the only metaphysics anyone in this town can actually eat the electrons do not move they gossip in spirals round the fat nuclei painted by that old in my head, pears and devils and swollen fish with candles stuck in their mouths drifting across a chalkboard sky, quanta as little owls fluttering between one probability and another while the damp air over Moltke Markt smells of turnips and wet wool and cheap tobacco, I am standing somewhere in that drizzle thinking that the smallest particle is not a particle at all but a hesitation, a stutter of being, like the way her white butt cheeks once flashed in a badly lit stairwell behind the bakery on Kesselgasse, pale as two cold loaves dusted with flour and gone again behind the coarse brown skirt, and the rain kept falling as if to erase the glimpse, as if to fold those pale curves back into the fog of generality, and I remember that some teacher from the Braubach Academy, maybe old Dr Gunthelm with his nicotine fingers, once said that the whole question is whether what we think can ever get its muddy boots into what we do, that thought must be more than a lantern held up in a storm, it has to be the storm itself, yet my shoes leak and my socks cling to my ankles and the theory runs ahead of me like a stray dog, laughing, while I am stuck counting coins under the striped awning of Frau Jacobo’s stall, two onions, three potatoes, a cracked cabbage leaf, my fingers numb and pink, capillaries dilating, tiny smooth muscles in the vessel walls contracting under the cold, and still somewhere inside the neurons there is this ridiculous theatre where positrons sit in the gallery whispering about purpose, where swollen blue men paddle in an acid sea under a sky of equations, where a single misfiring synapse in my temporal lobe paints a ladder of hands reaching from the cobbles of Marktplatz up into the cloud, each hand with a little market stamp burned into the palm, Theory Approved by the Gilde der praktischen Männer, and the cloud itself smells of boiled beetroot and stale beer, somewhere between one autumn and another, I cannot say which year because it is always the same brown water running along the gutter, the same slush of leaves, the same arguments outside the Löwenstube about whether the pamphlets from Professor Fichtelein actually change anything or just let the shoemakers swear more elegantly about their taxes, my breath condenses in small white philosophies that vanish before I can formulate them and yet the body goes on, the villi in the intestine stroke the bread I ate this morning, the starch breaks down into sugars, little hexagonal plans for survival, and the blood shunts it all round my chest where slow chemical fires keep the lungs steaming under my coat, I listen to the wind scraping loose tiles along Schaumburgstrasse and I think that maybe this is what they meant by practice, that the world practises itself on us every day, repeating the same experiment with marginal variations, a little more frost on the cart wheels, a little less money in my pocket, a new crack in the window of the Wittlich bookshop where Herr Reil sells discount metaphysics to clerks and soldiers’ widows, each crack another diagram of pressure and failure, the glass tracing invisible lines of force that no one intends and yet everyone lives in, and still at the back of my mind a chorus of invisible professors argue whether any of this proves that concept can push history forward or whether it only commentates, like the drunk man at the corner of Posthof muttering the score of a game he never played in, and in between their quarrels I count out rye loaves and calculate how many days until I must go down to the coal yard of Master Spinozzi, where the black dust coats the alveoli and the cilia wave like underwater grasses trying to sweep away all that fine grief, mitochondria panting in the dark of me as they turn oxygen into the faint heat that lets me stand in yet another queue and listen to the sleet drum on the canvas above, years pass in this way or maybe they do not pass at all, they just pile up in layers of weather, here a winter with a cracked blue sky over the river and my fingertips split from cheap soap, there a summer where the flies dance in the butcher’s window and the exposed flesh sweats under its thin coat of sawdust, and somewhere between them a spring where the idea that the world could be otherwise flares up like static in the wool of my coat, my skin prickling, hair shafts lifting in a tiny uprising of keratin, and then subsides as I bite into a hot potato sprinkled with salt stolen from the table of the Branntweinhalle, steam blowing out of the broken skin of the tuber like the breath of some minute locomotive of progress, the whole thing ridiculous and sacred, starch turning to sugar turning to movement, and I hear in my ear that untraceable voice saying the point is not to contemplate potatoes, the point is to change the kitchen, but the kitchen belongs to someone else, to the landlord on Geistgasse, to the municipal council and its cobweb of regulations, to the invisible capital flowing in from foreign dealers like Herr Kantaro in Königsmarkt who ships in barrels of doubt and sells them as moral improvement, and all I can do is rearrange the cutlery in my head, spoon on the left, fork on the right, a small revolution of placement that no one sees, meanwhile inside my skull the glial cells gossip about axons like washerwomen, wrapping them lovingly in fatty myelin so that the signals of discontent and dream move faster, forty metres per second of mute resentment and wild speculation pulsing along ivory tracks, and at the same time in the street outside the butcher’s a child spills his bag of cheap apples, echoes of red planets rolling in the dust, I watch them wobble and bruise and think of tiny gravitational fields, curves in space, while wind rattles the posters for the latest lecture at the Akademie für Bürgerliche Verbesserung by the famous Herr Teoricus von Praxisberg, who arrives in a hired carriage, makes statements about the necessity of aligning principles with action, and leaves before the soup runs out, his shoes never touching the thawing mud where my feet have sunk all morning, and it seems to me that thought behaves like that too, arriving in polished sentences, insisting on its universal competence, then slipping away into the print shops and salons, leaving us to haggle over herrings under a sky that cannot decide whether to snow or rain, cumulonimbus like uncompleted treatises rumbling over the tiled roofs, and still the body goes through its shifts, gonads quietly manufacturing seeds for futures that will never be planted, sebaceous glands pushing out their greasy commentary across the pores of my nose, taste buds eroding under cheap spirits, all this practice with no theory at all, pure habit, while inside the habit some crooked speculation still tries to link the way a cloud breaks apart over St Jacobi’s tower to the way a concept splits under pressure from experience, like the way my plan to save coins by eating only lentils collapses when I smell meat roasting outside the Roter Esel, fibres contracting, fat sizzling, my salivary glands secreting unphilosophical floods, and I recognise in that involuntary rush the same energy that pushes men into the streets when prices go up or wages go down, an uprising of glands and nerves dressed up afterwards in slogans bought from publishers like Meyer & Fichtelein on the corner, who sell both tracts about universal duty and cheap notebooks for shopping lists, so that side by side on the stall lie the great resolves of the age and the scribbled records of cabbage, soap, salt, lamp oil, anonymously itemised, and I walk between the stalls hearing how liver enzymes and municipal decrees conspire in silence, how the rate at which my kidneys filter urea has some secret bearing on whether I will join the march tomorrow or stay at home polishing the stove, and in those moments the world feels strange again, full of hybrid creatures, parish clerks with fish tails, butchers with beaks, shopgirls whose skirts turn into bird cages, yet all of them counting something, coins or sins or calories or signatures on petitions, every count a little measurement trying to trap the formless in a grid, and high above them on a wobbling tower of barrels a thin man with an ink stained collar waves a pamphlet and shouts that the age has changed, that spirit has broken into the workshop at last, that the difference between thinking and doing is now abolished by decree, though he still needs someone to carry his trunk back to the boarding house on Albrechtstrasse where the wallpaper peels and the bedbugs conduct their own quiet experiments in reproduction on the soft skin between his shoulder blades, eggs laid in neat rows like marginal notes, larvae hatching to the rhythm of his carefully cited conjectures, and meanwhile I am in line again at Frau Jacobo’s stall buying flour and onions, watching the way her hands weigh the goods, the exact slide of fingers over brass weights, her knuckles swollen and red, each joint a record of years of argument with cold air and wet sacks, her cartilage worn yet precise, and I think if there is any theory worthy of the name it must kneel here among the cabbage leaves and the slush, because the cartilage does not care for slogans, it cares for load and angle and repetition, microscopic collagen fibres aligning like soldiers under repeated strain, osteoblasts spurting out tiny repairs, and the snow that begins to fall on the black wool of our coats is both beautiful and inconvenient and ultimately indifferent to all such considerations, crystals forming according to silent symmetries, each one temporarily unitary and then broken underfoot into the brown universal paste that fills the street, and somewhere in the midst of all this I remember the pale flash in the stairwell years ago or weeks ago, those white butt cheeks briefly illuminated by a neighbour’s door opening, a tray of washed shirts steaming behind her, no name, just a curve of flesh framed by cracked plaster and the smell of cabbage soup, and it seemed to me then not an invitation or a promise but a fact, a small concrete protest against all abstractions, an insolent pair of hemispheres insisting on their own unarguable presence in the damp air, and I have been half convinced ever since that any doctrine which cannot make room for that obscene and innocent flash, for the way cotton sticks to wet skin and then peels away with a tiny sigh, is already false, however coherent its diagrams, and so I drift through these weather years listening to my own organs whistle and clank like cheap machinery, lungs creaking, joints popping, stomach growling under the weight of coarse bread and turnip stew, while rain drills on the tin roof of the Dreifeldhalle where once they held a great public disputation about whether the world could be transformed by the right kind of thinking or whether it was all in vain, and I stood at the back, damp hat in my hands, and watched the mouths move on the platform like strange anemones in a glass tank, lips forming syllables about reason and will and duty, tongues darting behind the teeth, spittle glistening at the corners, uvulas trembling in passionate emphasis, and I thought how the audience coughs and shifts and passes wind and fights sleep, yet later will repeat snatches of those phrases as though they had arisen without any of this mucous apparatus, pure and bloodless, when in truth every idea that survives has slogged its way through mucosa and muscle, through the grinding of molars and the peristalsis of intestines, and outside afterwards the fog hugged the river so tightly that the gas lamps drew halos around themselves, yellow wounds in the grey, and a thin drizzle soaked the pamphlets clutched in our hands, ink bleeding, arguments dissolving into blue and black streaks on poor paper, while under my ribs the sinoatrial node ticked on like a small stubborn editor refusing to stop the presses, and all the while somewhere beyond the warehouse roofs charged particles raced through the upper air, cosmic rays cracking into nitrogen, invisible fireworks above the slush and the muttered oaths of men whose boots leak, and I thought perhaps in the end the dispute between what we think and what we do is only another local squabble in a bigger weather, like hagglers in the fish market shouting under a storm that does not hear them, and still I went home with my bag of onions and my cheap bread and a head full of nightmarish gardens where saints and sinners, butchers and schoolmasters, pamphleteers and washerwomen all sprout extra limbs and tower over fields of cabbages, and somewhere in a corner of that impossible landscape two small white moons rise from a crumpled skirt and vanish again into the general dark, leaving behind only the persistent, foolish conviction that the world must in some way be made to fit that moment or that the moment will go on quietly corroding every orderly scheme like a drop of sour rain on soft stone, while the years, obedient as red blood cells, swirl through the narrow streets of my veins and out again into the blue haze over Moltke Markt where the onion skins blow, small curling negations of every final word I notice that the electrons are badly drawn I am standing in the drizzle outside the Plötzensee Passage market with a sack of potatoes and cheap onions cutting into my fingers and it comes to me that if had painted a cloud chamber it would not be neat straight tracks but a chaos of little saints and monsters colliding in spirals of vapour, each halo a probability wave, each beak and claw a skewed trajectory, and I think that the sky above me, the grey wrinkled sky that smells of coal dust and cabbage steam, is just another cracked panel in some triptych of observation where the smallest quark is a hunched figure carrying a bell on its back and the bell is ringing inside my blood, in my capillaries that fork like country lanes around the village of Falkenbrunn and the wet cloth on my shoulder is a whole damp province of failed experiments, and somewhere in the muddle of that thought and the drip from the roof gutter I see her again at a distance, not here but folded into another day, running up the back stair in the Haus der Sieben Linden, pale thighs flashing like twin equations in the stairwell gloom, and the fabric of her skirt rides up just enough that I catch the white curve of one butt cheek, stupid phrase, stupid flash, like an error term in the calculation, sexy white butt cheek, too bright and absurd against the cracked plaster, yet it fixes itself in me like a diagram I will not admit to, an asymmetry on which the whole apparatus of reason secretly pivots while the wind keeps shifting along the canal and the crows hop like black punctuation on the tram wires, and I am supposed to be thinking of right, of the way the world pretends to knit itself together with rules and signatures, Schulze of the Long Bridge talking again about licences and ordinances, his breath sour with stale beer as he presses the cheap pamphlet into my hand, Die Freiheit des Bürgers, printed at the press of P. K. Lupp in Oldstadt where the river bends like a bruised arm, and I nod because that is what people do when a dealer of ideas leans close under the awning, nod and think of other things, of tiny synapses sparking between cortical islands, of how the axons in my spine fire when I heft the sack a little higher, of how each muscle fibre contracts like a frightened shrine animal in a frame, and the rain gathers in small bulbs at the tip of my nose, surface tension and gravity and all the equations of falling written in a single drop that lets go and slides down over my lip and into my mouth, tasting of rust and distant soot and the neighbour’s soup steam, and days pass like this without names, one after another but not in a neat line, more like a flock of starlings twisting above the slaughterhouse, the pattern never quite repeating yet never entirely new, and in the middle of it somewhere the question keeps returning, not as a clear phrase but as a weight behind my forehead, the question they fuss about in the Schwanenstube where Kraus the bookseller and Frau Doktorin Liese Nelken argue over whether what appears can ever be more than a scrap torn from the thing itself, whether the right to hold a crust of bread in my hand is welded to some invisible structure that stretches from the council chamber to the last crow on the last bare tree, and I chew my rye roll while my stomach folds it into mush, enzymes breaking starch into glucose, little hexagons of possibility that seep into my blood and feed the brain that pretends to watch all this as if from outside, as if the watcher were not just more tissue, more wet salt and lipids, and the smoke in the tavern curls upward like faint auroras, and in its slow tangled rising I see again the pale arc at the stairwell, the single gleam of flesh, but now it is not attached to any person, it is just a white crescent drifting through the air like a badly rendered moon, glowing from some interior logic of embarrassment and hunger, passing behind the head of old Meister Vogl as he declaims about duty and the need for a foundation, his beard catching crumbs, his hands red from the cold, and outside the cobbles shine with thin ice that cracks under cart wheels, and the carts are carrying cabbages to the square where I will later buy two, counting my coins, feeling callus on thumb and forefinger, skin thickened layer on layer like bark, keratin and collagen and the fat yellow web beneath, and somewhere under that the blood hums, a low current, ions traversing membranes, sodium potassium pumps never sleeping, and the whole thing, the market and the tavern and the staircase and the city alleys around the Jakobkirche, feels less like a place and more like a diagram smudged by greasy fingers, a half legible plan for how a person is to be threaded through laws and habits so that the random jolts of bosonic weather and private excitation do not tear the pattern apart, and on another morning that is not precisely another, fog sits in the hollow of the Gürtelgraben, a pale soup, and I walk through it with a sack of turnips from Karla’s stall, the weight pulling on the small muscles between my shoulder blades, and as the droplets condense in the hairs on my wrists I remember that in each drop there are microorganisms swimming, cilia beating, strange mouthless mouths taking in the world, and I think of their tiny rights, their blind collisions, and of how any rule that claims to be complete must somehow include the circling of these flagella and the tired lift of Karla’s arm as she wipes her nose on her sleeve, and then the thought veers again with no reason back to that flash on the stairs, that white half moon, as if it were the centre of gravity for a whole system of abstractions, as if the chart of obligations and permissions secretly turned on the friction of skin against fabric, cloth against wood, the friction that slowed her brief upward run, and I feel my own thighs ache in sympathy on the cobbles, muscles complaining under their load of root vegetables, lactic acid souring the fibres, and the fog thickens until the streetlamps are just blurred eyes, and in those eyes I think I see the old diagrams that Professor Lindhardt sketched on the board in the damp lecture room behind the Hôtel Dietrich, circles within circles, one for the solitary creature, one for the social, one for something bigger that had no obvious face, like the background hum in the quantum field, and he spoke of how what is right could not be merely what I prefer or what Karla prefers or what the town council mutters over its sausages, but something that weaves through all of them like a weather system, and as he talked a fly crawled across the windowpane tracing its own erratic law, and I remember even now the tiny black oval of its body, the see through wings jittering, and the broken paint on the frame, flakes like fish scales, and I wonder what law accounted for the heat slowly leaking from my body into the bench on that day, the faint smell of wet wool from my coat, the way the skin on my palms stuck momentarily to the parchment of my notebook, and in the corner of my vision a girl in a grey dress took notes with furious precision, her wrist bones sharp, tendons working under thin skin, and once when she bent forward to pick up a dropped pencil the fabric of the dress tightened across her and I saw the faintest outline of twin curves, white underneath grey, and the heat rose up the back of my neck so suddenly that I lost the thread of Lindhardt’s sentence, and now it returns to me with the fog in the ditch, jumbled with the odour of turnips and the slow drip from the iron bridge, returns as the feeling that every system that pretends to be clean hides a little stain somewhere, a bright distraction, a patch of flesh where the variables go to misbehave, 

Chapter 7 

and the wind changes and brings with it the smell of frying onions from the Schöner Stern canteen and I realise I am hungry, my stomach folding in on itself, villi waving like soft weeds in a stream, pulling in what scraps of sugar are left, blood thickening slightly with cold, and I hope there will be enough coins in my pocket for a bowl of something hot, lentils maybe, crust of rye, and the thought sits beside the other thoughts without rank or order, right next to the notion that the city itself is some monstrous nervous system, tram lines as axons, market squares as swollen synaptic gaps where messages are shouted and bargained, courtyards as dark nuclei where decisions calcify, and above it the clouds roll and thin and roll again, a slow white circuitry of condensation, and decades seem to pass between the fog at the ditch and the next time I am aware of standing in a doorway counting coins, though I know it is only another nameless afternoon, and the doorway belongs to a second hand bookshop on the Gänsegasse where E. F. B. Krauter sells remaindered tracts on the proper grounding of authority that nobody really wants, pages Foxe browned at the edges, and he is trying again to convince me that without an absolute anchor everything dissolves into whim, his tongue catching on his false teeth as he says it, and I nod and feel the plaque on my own molars, film of bacteria, biofilm, microscopic republics, each cell dividing, each quorum sensing, and I half listen to his words about firm first principles while thinking of how the plaque will one day thicken and inflame the gums and the immune system will send leukocytes to chew at the invaders and the whole mouth will throb as if an internal neighbour were hammering on the wall, and he shoves a pamphlet into my hand, printed by the Rüstig brothers at the Black Bear press, thin paper smelling of oil and dust, and I slip it into my coat pocket next to a small paper bag of dried peas and a shrivelled apple, and step back into the street where snow has started, slow lazy flakes like scraps of unwritten doctrine drifting down, and they melt on my cheeks and eyelashes, freshwater beads sliding into the corner of my eyes, and I blink and in the blur I see the staircase again, not as it was but as some painter of grotesques might have rendered it, stairs bending, balustrade twisting into a serpent, and at the centre still the flare of white flesh, glowing in the dim as if lit from inside by some shy phosphorescence, and the cheeks are no longer simply cheeks but two moons over a landscape of carved demons and court officials, and I feel a pulse in my groin that is not noble, not abstract, just blood and nerve and a tightness in the fabric of my trousers, and I mutter something under my breath, fuck this, as if scolding my own tissue, and an old woman passing with a basket of leeks glances at me as if I had sworn at the sky, and the cold gets into the joints of my fingers so that the knuckles ache, cartilage complaining, tiny crystals in the synovial fluid shifting with each flex, and I am thinking of cartilage and peas and staircases and pamphlets and the way the snow thickens on the stone lions outside the courthouse when I bump into a handcart and knock over a crate of cheap turnip heads, they roll in slow wobbling arcs on the slush, pale bulbs, some with thin tails of root still attached, like a cluster of truncated skulls, and I kneel automatically to gather them, my trousers soaking through at the knees, cold wet seeping into the fibres, and the cart owner, a man with red cracked hands and a cap pulled low, swears once, then shrugs, tells me to leave it, that the weather will spoil them anyway, and walks off, leaving me crouched among rolling turnips as snow falls on my bent neck, and for a moment I imagine that from above, from some lofty balcony of the system, this whole scene would look like one small variable adjusting itself, one minor correction in the statistics of market waste, a blip in the ledger, but inside my skin the sensation is total, icy water up my shins, cold air in my lungs, the acid burn of embarrassment in my chest, and somewhere still that dim afterimage of white curves against wood, like the negative of a photograph I never took, and I stand, brush slush from my hands, fingers numbed, and head toward home along the river where the ice is not yet solid, only a thin scum that folds and refolds as the current moves underneath, and the surface reminds me of those diagrams again, the ones that try to show how freedom and structure interlock, thin membranes flexing over deeper flows, and I think of my own skin as such a membrane, holding in the hot churn of organs that do not care about pamphlets or foundations, heart pounding autonomously, kidneys filtering, intestines kneading their slow boluses of cabbage and cheap sausage, and overhead the sky turns the colour of dishwater as evening settles, and each window along the riverfront pops into amber, little squares of private metabolism where people chew and argue and itch and dream under portraits of officials and saints, and the snow pauses, then resumes, then turns to a fine rain, droplets so small they seem almost theoretical, like the limit case in some equation on continuity, and the years layer themselves in this rain, in this fog, in the steam from pots and the smoke from the brickyards, without me ever being sure when one ends and another begins, only that sometimes my knees hurt more on the stairs, sometimes my hair in the cracked mirror at the inn looks thinner, threads of silver near the temples, and sometimes when I carry potatoes from the stall of old Frau Marit I have to stop halfway up the Rosenstieg to catch my breath, lungs burning, and even as I pant and feel the rasp in my throat I am thinking in some corner of my mind of fields and operators, of how each inhale is a small claim on a common substance, a right to borrow a little oxygen from the rolling chemistry that loops from tree to chimney to cloud, and back again, and how someone somewhere will say that this claim must be justified, grounded, written into law, and the law will pretend to stand apart, neat and dry, while my chest heaves and the sweat between my shoulder blades cools under my shirt, and the old woman below at the stall wipes her nose again on her sleeve and counts her coins, lips moving, and the river moves, and somewhere far off a lecture room fills with the smell of damp wool and chalk dust as Lindhardt or someone like him draws yet another triangle on the board, corners labelled with words that promise to stitch all this together, and in the back I imagine the grey dress again, the fabric shifting, the ghost of twin white curves beneath, and I do not for the life of me know why that small flash has lodged so firmly where more serious things slide away, only that whenever snow falls or potatoes slip from my grasp or a pamphlet is pressed into my palm with a plea to respect the great coherence of it all, the memory of that pale geometry edges into the picture as if to say that flesh and fabric and the creak of a stair are also part of whatever they think they are building, that the so called system runs through the softest places first, through cheeks and thighs and the damp crease at the back of a knee, through all the small zones where skin rubs on skin and heat is generated, and that somewhere between the quantum twitch in a synapse, the swarm in a cloud, the cabbage in my sack and the snow on the lion’s head, there is a single long equation that no one will ever quite finish writing electrons always begin it, flickering like tiny guilty saints in a sky where the clouds have eyes and the eyes are equations and the equations keep leaking into the drizzle outside the shop so that when I stand in the queue at Morgenfeld’s paper stall and smell the cheap ink and the damp wool of other coats I am also measuring amplitudes, the probability that this droplet or that gust will collapse into something like a pattern, a constellation of broken umbrellas along the tram line, and somewhere above the roofs a grotesque bird with three beaks and seventeen wings is made of pure Hilbert space, coiled superpositions perched on the chimney pots of Altenmarkt, and I think of how the world keeps trying to divide itself and fails, how it mutters about matter over here and law over there, and yet the rain touches everything with the same cold tongue, slipping between collar and skin, and under the skin the capillaries listen in silence, little red rivers pushing oxygen, and the oxygen does not care about constitutions or tax decrees from the offices at Greifenstrasse where the clerks stamp forms under portraits with unreadable eyes, all the same the clerks breathe and their alveoli open like pale flowers in a fog, and the fog rolls over the wheat fields beyond Niederwinkel where the dealer Scholz once sold me a pamphlet on the collapse of certainty, a thin grey thing wrapped in brown paper that smelled faintly of onions, I read it later by a window that looked out over a courtyard where a cat disembowelled a sparrow in slow motion, blood bright as a new hypothesis on the cobbles, and above them the sky broke into fragments of blue and bruised yellow as if someone had taken a palette knife to a fresco of the last judgement and forgotten to reassemble it, time passing in uncertain packets, mornings when the frost made each cobblestone shine with the arrogance of necessity and others when the thaw turned everything into conjecture, boots sinking into slush and leaving prints that refused to line up with yesterday’s routes, and in my head the streets of Lindenhof kept rearranging themselves, Marktgasse sliding under Pfarrplatz like tectonic plates, bakeries tunnelling into butchers, and I walked through it all as a provisional particle, sometimes wave, sometimes discrete, spine curved under the weight of cabbages and coarse bread from Frau Liese’s stall, the cabbages packed tight like small green brains that have never heard of doubt, their leaves layered with a logic of their own, veins branching and branching, each cell full of chloroplasts that have no patience with metaphysics, only light and dark, and I would slice them later with the same knife I used to open parcels from the bookseller in Rabenhafen, Herr Kappel with his badly folded catalogues and his habit of enclosing extra flyers on the new science of nerves, pages filled with diagrams of axons stretching like winter trees and synapses winking in the void like tavern lamps, and all the while the weather kept interfering, snow that would not fall when it should, rain that arrived sideways, suns that rose tired and sat low on the shoulders of the houses, as if even the star had begun to suspect that meaning would not be provided at the usual hour and that every promise of structure would have to be earned by walking the same streets again and again until the soles of my feet knew more about contingency than any councillor in the tall buildings on Veritasplatz where they argue about the shape of freedom with their hands while the cleaners at night tip out bins full of crumpled resolutions, the cleaners with their swollen knuckles and their slow mitochondria burning sugar into the grey air of the stairwells, and somewhere in that same air a memory of the smell inside the anatomical theatre at Westufer, dried spirit and dust and the faint sweetness of long removed organs, I sat there once as the demonstrator from Rosenheim split open the thorax of a donor whose name had been lost, the ribs spreading like a hesitant gate, and the heart, slack as a used glove, lifted out and weighed in the palm, the students scribbling in their notebooks about valves and septa while outside, I am certain, a drizzle began that would continue at least in my head for years, blurring the outlines of everything, even the stone statues on the bridge over the canal at Hohengasse where the fish underneath drift like undecided ideas, not quite biting, not quite gone, and in the market there they sell cheap pickled herring, grey loops of muscle rolled tight around onions, and dark rye bread that falls into crumbs when you look at it, crumbs that work their way under fingernails and into pockets where they mingle with ticket stubs from trams and lectures and one visit to a travelling exhibition of paintings after at the Hall of Civic Instruction, that was a bad season for memory, rain blowing through the cracked windows onto scenes of thin men carrying worlds on their backs while birds in helmets pecked at their shoulders, and a woman with a fused torso and the head of a fish stared out over a landscape made of broken spoons and severed ears, and I stood there thinking of charge and spin, wondering if each monstrous hybrid was a diagram of forces instead of sins, if the blue demon with the ledger was only a crude representation of conservation laws, every entry balanced, no torment without an equal and opposite correction somewhere in the system, and from the ceiling a draught descended, cold as a theorem, making the paint crackle near the nails, and I could hear the cough of another visitor echoing against the stones, each cough a percussion of lungs inflated and collapsed, alveolar surfaces slick with fluid, and outside the building the wind had picked up and was dragging litter into small vortices near the statue of Councillor von Haller, whose bronze finger points eternally down the road toward the pawnshops of Untertor, where on Thursdays the peasants come in with bundles of tools or a single worn coat to exchange for coin, their hands red, nails ridged, skin split into tiny canyons lined with black soil, and in the damp light the coins shine for a moment like captive suns before slipping into sacks behind the counter, and I watch, or I remember watching, as a woman in a laced bodice leans over a crate to retrieve something and the fabric pulls taut across her hips, the curve of one pale buttock glimpsed where the chemise rides up, white as if it had never seen the sun that nevertheless beats down on the tin roofs of the stalls, and in that instant the whole apparatus of laws and offices and lectures seems to contract into the bare fact of skin stretched over gluteal muscles packed with fibres that contract through the sliding of actin against myosin, calcium ions spilling like rumours inside the sarcoplasmic reticulum, and no one around her knows that a universe of molecular negotiations is the only reason she straightens so smoothly and walks away, hips moving with a rhythm that is not promise or invitation or anything so sentimental, only the indifferent grace of a mechanism too well practised to notice its own probability, while nearby at the vegetable stand they argue about the price of potatoes from the north and the rain that spoiled half the crop, and the dealer Kolmar slips me a leaflet on the latest proposals from the committee on public instruction, the paper already going limp from the moisture in the air, ink spidering at the edges, and I stuff it into my pocket where it rubs against the rough cloth of my coat and the slightly greasy surface of a cheese wrapped in waxed paper, goat cheese with a rind textured like old skin, and somewhere in some office an official draws a line through a line in a report about the shape of institutions, and his wrist bones rotate, radius over ulna, cartilage gliding with a soft click under the skin, tendons braided like ropes on a harbour winch, and in another part of the city students in a dim boarding house sit bent over tables covered in crumbs and candle wax, arguing in low voices about whether freedom is an emptiness or a fullness, one of them picking at a rash spreading up his forearm like a crude map of new territories, another staring out at the courtyard where snow falls so slowly it seems to be reconsidering the ground, and I walk past their window later with a sack of turnips over my shoulder, the sack fibres cutting a red line across the muscle that will become a bruise, the wobbling of each step travelling up through the joints, through cartilage, synovial fluid, bone, to the base of my skull where the vertebrae sit stacked like small temples, and I can feel the brain inside, that wrinkled soft engine, sulci and gyri folding weather and law and hunger into patterns that I mistake for necessity, and the wind at the corner of Heiligenstrasse smells of coal smoke and sliced beetroot and something metallic like a storm that has not yet arrived, and on some other day or the same one, the clouds over Steindorf arrange themselves into banded layers like muscle tissue seen under a microscope, striations running parallel until they twist suddenly into a vortex and empty hail onto the tiled roofs, small spheres of ice that pockmark the cabbage leaves in the allotments behind the brickworks, and over all of this some municipal clerk in a report calls it a minor incident, damage negligible, while a man at the edge of a field lifts the limp body of a hen that did not survive and sees, as he turns it over, that the skin is thin and blue where the feathers have parted, the veins a branching script under the surface, and the hen’s eye is a dull marble now, but once its pupil dilated to track a grain of maize, once its heart beat fast with catecholamines when the fox came near, and the fox himself is somewhere in the undergrowth right now, licking old blood from his teeth, his tongue rough, papillae bending with each stroke, and overhead crows whirl like misprinted letters above the black river, and at the quay in Neuacker the bargemen unload crates of books and sacks of flour as if they weighed the same in principle, units of mass obeying the same tug of gravity that drags the rain down and the smoke up, and when I buy flour from the miller’s daughter in the arcade, her fingers dusted white as bone, I notice the tiny scar on her wrist where once a blade slipped, the scar tissue shiny, collagen fibres reorganised into some new alignment, and I think about how everything is like that, torn and rewoven, fields redistributed, offices merged, doctrines reversed and then claimed as if they had been the plan all along, while the sparrows in the gutter keep bathing in the same puddle whenever it rains, shaking drops from their wings in small eruptions of physics that no decree can repeal, and the butcher on Winkelgasse hangs sausages in loops from hooks that shine with a cleanliness achieved by boiling water and strong hands, and in the sausages fat and muscle are packed together so tight that the bacterial colonies within must wage chemical wars to expand, secreting enzymes, dividing, dying, and yet on market day the strings of meat look festive, like garlands strung across the entrance to a festival of modest appetites, and under them pass schoolboys with ink on their fingers, copying out passages on obligation and right, and beggars who cough into their shawls, flecks of mucus flying invisibly into the air where they hang suspended until a draft sends them spiralling into the nose of some councillor who will later sneeze during a speech on the necessity of coherence, his diaphragm convulsing, intercostal muscles pulling, a violent assertion of contingency that makes his monocle jump and the assembly titter for a moment before resuming its grave progression through prepared points, and outside the hall the weather has shifted again, a wind from the east flattening the grass in the commons outside Unterfeld and driving thin sheets of rain against the glass of the small shop where I buy vinegar and onions and a few wizened apples, the shopkeeper’s wife folding paper bags with hands whose joints are swollen with age, cartilage thinned, osteophytes nubbing the bone, and yet she moves briskly, calculating prices faster than I could diagram the forces in a pendulum, and someone in the back room coughs a deep, wet cough that speaks of lungs lined with fluid, cilia drowned, and a spoon rattles in a cup, thin porcelain singing a tired note, and I take my bag and step back into the street where the paving stones shine with the same wet conviction they had years before during another rain that carried different rumours but the same trace elements, nitrate, soot, fragments of words from council edicts, particles of ash from burned petitions, and the air smells of yeast from the brewery and diesel from the new lorries that have begun to appear with their blunt noses and grumbling engines, pistons sliding in cylinders, fuel spraying in controlled explosions, valves opening and closing like the tiny doors in the hearts we cut in the theatre at Westufer, and somewhere beyond the brewery, beyond the tram depot, beyond the last row of houses with their damp cellars and their wallpaper peeling in little curls like abandoned hypotheses, a line of poplars marks the road out toward the villages where the soil still puffs up around the boots of men who carry spades over their shoulders and think in terms of seasons instead of clauses, men whose stomachs rumble in octaves of fermentation, bacterial cultures chewing plant fibre into gas and short chain fatty acids, and at their tables they eat cabbage and potatoes and dark bread and sometimes a sliver of pig fat, licking salt from their fingers, and they talk of the frost and the price of seed and the whim of the tax collector from Schinkelburg who arrived once on a grey horse and measured their fields with a rope that was not entirely straight, and in the town the same rope now hangs coiled in a warehouse, fibres fraying at the ends, smelling of mould, while above it on the wall someone has chalked a sketch of a creature with three heads and wheels for feet, and beside it an equation that does not quite balance, as if to say that whatever they planned for the measure of things has not yet caught up with the trembling of electrons in the cheap bulbs that flicker on and off above the stairwell, casting everyone who passes as both angel and debtor in rapid succession, and in the corner a spider has spun a web whose geometry is ruined each morning by the first wind from the open door, threads snapping, the spider clinging, beginning again with an indifference that would look like courage if anyone wrote it down, but no one does, they are too busy tallying crates and counting coins and rubbing the chill from their fingers that are full of capillaries, red cells, plasma, platelets sliding past one another like small anonymous citizens in a state that does not know its own name, and the sky outside is the colour of dishwater and the years move through it like slow fish, barely visible under the scum, until once in a while, by the stalls at Untertor or in the echoing hall at the civic instruction building or on the bridge where the statues gaze down at their chipped plinths, there is a moment when everything seems to line up, the angle of light on a white cheek, the weight of a cabbage in the hand, the distant thunder over the hills near Rabenhafen, the cramped script of a clerk in a ledger, the tick of a pulse against the inside of a wrist, and it all feels, for a second that cannot be measured in clocks or syllables, like a pattern that almost knows itself and then lets the rain wash through it again in the beginning the particles fall out of the sky like tiny guilty peasants from a panel, spinning with a sly inner light as if every electron carried a miniature confession booth inside it, and I count them under my breath while the rain strokes the slates of the old roofs in Kreuzmarkt and the clouds bruise themselves along the hills, and somewhere above this damp little town a parabolic equation is trying to say good morning to a pigeon, and the pigeon refuses, merely turns its oily neck, while I stand by the stall of Händler Kropf with his pale cabbages and his crumbly onions and his miserable apples that look as if they know too much about original sin, and I think that if the universe is quantised then so are these vegetables, discretised lumps of necessity, packets of hunger, each with a wave function that collapses the moment some woman with raw hands and a wool scarf chooses one and not another, and the world shrinks a little when she does that, and yet somewhere else it swells, and the air smells of old potatoes and wet straw and unwashed wool and I mistake this for metaphysics, or for weather, which is the same thing, cloud systems like thought experiments, low pressure moving in from the west with a sack full of unresolved contradictions, and later when I drink thin beer at Gasthaus Luginsland and look at the stains on the table I imagine them as probability clouds where the past has not yet decided what it did, and I feel in my gut, literally in the loops of intestine, peristaltic waves pushing yesterday’s bread and turnip mash along the glistening pink tunnel, that there is no strict border between the way yeast ferments in my stomach and the way a figure steps out of a book stall on Badgasse and into the drizzle, the same slow necessity, the same creeping pattern, cells dividing in the crypts of Lieberkühn, village boys spitting on the cobbles, old Herr Dreispitz at the paper stall muttering the price of pamphlets in a voice that sounds like the grinding of distant millstones, and over years, or what feels like years, because the calendar is only a rumour that circulates with the bread wagons, I walk the same triangle between Marktbrücke, the damp colonnade of the book dealers, and the back street where Metzgerin Frone sells her cheap sausages, and every step is an experiment in an eccentric physics, where quanta come with muddy boots, and the sky is not a vacuum but a crowded tavern of forces, and gravity is just the local habit of things falling into the same story, so that every foggy morning smells of coal smoke and boiled cabbage and the faint metallic tang of coin, and my skin prickles where the tiny nerves fire along the dermis, micro arcs of lightning under weathered epidermis, signalling nothing more glamorous than cold feet and the need to piss, which I do in the crooked latrine behind the alley near Buchhandlung Terenz, steam rising like a spectral diagram, as if my bladder were an alchemical vessel releasing its pale spirit, and it seems right that spirit should stink, should have urea in it, nitrogen and regret, little white crystals drying on stone, and I shuffle out again past the posters for lectures at the Akademie zum Brennenden Busch, where somebody with a serious jaw will explain why the world is an equation written in invisible ink, and above the torn edges of the posters the sky goes on acting like a gossip, passing low rumours of snow from hill to hill, and my lungs draw in this chatter, cilia waving, mucous membranes lighting up with microscopic grains of soot, alveoli opening like thousands of tiny mouths that never speak, only exchange, and I think of how the town itself breathes, traffic of carts and boots, exhalations of bakeries at dawn when the loaves crack their crusts, the thin chalk marks of dust in the light shafts under the Flussgasse bridge, and the years stack themselves like loaves on shelves, crust to crust, and I am there each late autumn when the wind hits the corners a certain way, bringing with it the smell of wet dog and cheap tobacco and the melancholy of unfinished manuscripts in the back rooms of the printers, and I buy stale rye bread from Frau Kandlerin, who never looks up from her chipped scale, her wrists red from cold, and I know precisely how the capillaries lie under that skin, branching like small red trees, endothelial cells flattened by the pressure of the world, platelets drifting, waiting for a cut, and this vision, half anatomical, half folkloric, walks beside me as I cross into the quarter around the old observatory where the students argue with their arms and coats and hats, and the wind steals their words, scrapes them along the cobbles, rearranges them into new theses that no one signs, and my mind is full of diagrams drawn in charcoal on damp walls, circles within circles, an arrow that always points back to the point where it started, an absurd clock whose hands mark not hours but the repetition of market days, radishes in spring, cherries that never quite ripen, turnips again, and in between these cycles the little quantum jumps of incident, a glass smashed outside Wirtshaus Zum Blauen Karren, a dog giving birth under a wagon, pink wet puppies like unspoken sentences, their eyes glued shut, fur still a hypothesis, and I crouch and watch one tiny ribcage vibrate with the arrhythmic first attempts at breathing, the diaphragm contracting under thin skin, skeletal muscles still learning their limits, and lightning in the far distance turns the clouds into crumpled paper, painting over everything with quick filthy brushes, putting a fish head on the baker, attaching a chimney to the back of a cow, and in this ridiculous laboratory I count my coins, thumb rough copper, scratch marks from countless exchanges, and decide whether today belongs to the luxury of half a herring from Händler Spiess or to a sack of chestnuts that will roast in the iron pan and crack their shells like minor revelations, and in the shop of Antiquar Brendel the dust is so fine it behaves like a new element, hovering in brown light, and I am sure that each mote has a position and a momentum that cannot both be fixed by the parish register, so Brendel shrugs when I ask after some lost tract, says maybe it came, maybe it did not, things pass through here the way storms do, you can feel them, you cannot keep them, and I nod as if we are both priests of an order that worships the random shuffle of wagons in the street, the regular irregularity of footsteps, and sometimes in high summer when the river shrinks and exposes its stones like old teeth, and flies stitch the air above the shallows, I lie on the bank and stare at the freckles on my forearm, at the hair growing in accidental spirals, at the small scar near the wrist where a dog once mistook me for something edible, and I see in all of this an absurd geometry, a set of laws muttered by someone who likes to hide, and above me clouds go past like slow pale fish carrying villages on their backs, and the sun, that indifferent overseer, sends down its little packets of energy, photons like anonymous coins dropped in every slot, and the chloroplasts in the leaves across the water drink them in with their green mouths, turning light into sugar the way a gossip turns air into trouble, and I think of intestines again, of villi standing like forests inside the small bowel of the town, absorbing every rumour, every crumb of bread, every half sentence heard at the Schiefermarkt, and turning it into something that can be stored in fat, in memory, in the trembling network of nerves tying my spine to my hands as I lift another crate of beets, dirt under the nails like a signature, and on another nameless day in another not quite distinguishable year, I am back in the narrow shop of Händlerin Krohn, where candles and cheap cloth and buttons hang like strange fruit, and a woman in a coarse linen skirt bends to pick up a fallen spool, and there it is, the sudden white arc of her buttock under shifted cloth, just a glimpse, just a pale planet behind worn fabric, and my brain, that traitor, files this among its meteorological data, along with pressure, humidity and the price of beans, a bright involuntary figure in the otherwise grey ledger, not love, not even desire organised enough to call itself by that name, just one more image, like the memory of hailstones in late spring bruising the peas, or of the frost that once etched ferns on the inside of the window in Zimmer Vier at Gasthaus Hader, and her body, or the fact of a body, becomes for a moment another aspect of this lunatic physics where flesh is just one more way for atoms to gather, white skin no different in principle from white chalk on the schoolroom slate, except that my breathing stumbles a fraction, heart rate ticks up three or four beats, sinus node firing a little faster, electricity in the tiny nodes of muscle, while outside a gust of wind pushes rain sideways and slaps it against the shutters as if the weather itself were scolding me, and I step back into the street with a bag of lentils and two onions, simple math of survival, and I cross paths with married couples, apprentices, widows with raw hands, each carrying in their viscera, in their spleens and livers and slowly failing kidneys, their own private experiments, and no one writes these down, there is no ledger for how the stomach turns when the first snow falls early, or how the cartilage of the knee complains on the third day of rain, but I feel it all as if the whole town were one animal with many disputing heads, 

Chapter 8 

and one evening, or maybe three, maybe spread out across several autumns, I sit under the awning of Café Zum Letzten Licht, which is less a café than room with cracked cups and grainy coffee substitute, and from here I can watch the shadows argue along the wall opposite, carts squeaking, cats moving like low ideas between barrels, and I take out a crust smeared with cheap fat and sprinkled with salt, taste it and find in the crystals a kind of metaphysical grit, sodium ions entering the channels of my tongue, glutamate pruning the synapses of my preferences, and I think, if the universe wants to know itself it will have to come through mouths like this, chipped teeth and bad gums, and I feel clever for an instant, then clumsy again, because my boot leaks and my toes are wet, and in the window of Buchhandlung Seliger some new pamphlet lies half hidden behind a stack of devotional prints, and its title suggests that everything may be otherwise, that the basic elements are not what we thought, that substance and thought are entangled like lovers drowning in the same river, though of course it does not say lovers, I do not say lovers, it is enough that the ink curls in a certain way, that the letters look like hooks in the flesh of possibility, and I know that in a week that pamphlet will be gone, taken south by a student with bad hair or north by a pastor with a trembling hand, and the arguments inside it will disperse into sermons, into tavern debates, into the quiet mutterings of men walking alone near the old city wall, while overhead the crows measure the wind with their black wings, and far below, in cellars sweating with moisture, potatoes sprout blind shoots, creepy little white limbs reaching into the dark, searching without knowing for air, for direction, for some impossible sun, and all of this goes on and on, seasons rubbing against one another, springs that smell of thawed manure and damp hopes, summers thick with flies, autumns that crumble like stale bread, winters that press on the lungs, and I move among it like an unlabelled reagent in a faulty experiment, buying cheap cheese from Hofmann at the edge of town, where the road runs out into fields and the sky has more room to perform its muddled chemistry of light and vapour, and Hofmann’s hands are cracked and smell of sour milk, and under his fingernails there is a persistent line of dirt that looks almost tattooed, as if soil had written something in his skin, some equation whose solution is always hunger, and my own skin itches in the dry wind, histamine release, mast cells misreading the world, and still I walk back to the narrow streets, the leaning houses, passing the same alleys where paint peels in the same stubborn way, and I feel as if all the motions of my blood, the churning of my gut, the firing of my synapses, the faint ache in my knees when the barometer drops, are only local distortions in a larger field, eddies in some river of meaning that prefers to remain opaque, and somewhere a bell strikes some hour that refuses to name itself, and somewhere a girl wipes a table, and somewhere a man sweeps the steps of the Postamt, and the dust rises in little spirals that catch the late light, and for a fraction of a second everything trembles, as if the whole town, its stones and drains and roofs and tired bodies, had become a single particle squeezed through a slit, spreading itself into a pattern no eye here is prepared to read, and I think, or the thought thinks itself, that this is enough, turnips and cheap beer and sore feet and occasionally the sudden shocking flash of a white buttock in a poor shop, weather moving like a slow hand over our backs, pamphlets arguing in the dark, and under it all the ceaseless conversation of cells, sodium, potassium, hydrogen, tiny charges passed from one molecule to another like stories across the market, and that whatever name the serious men give this, whatever diagrams they draw in chalk at the Akademie zum Brennenden Busch, it is already being worked out in the way my stomach growls, in the way the rain forgets itself and becomes snow halfway down, in the way the town sleeps without agreement, each house a small experiment whose result no one will ever publish electrons gather in little stained glass congregations like pilgrims lost inside a orchard, each one a speck of probability humming at the edge of visibility, and I stand there in the blown out morning light where the clouds have that fatty grey fringe that looks like unrendered paint around the rooftops of Altmarkt and the narrow crooked alley behind the Pantheism Arcade, and I am thinking that spin is just another word for the way the wind twists the washing on Frau Nihla’s balcony, shirts flapping like frightened quanta, discrete and yet somehow smeared into a single shivering field, and every time the drizzle starts again over the cobbles by the Twilight Passage the whole town feels like a half finished panel from the Prado Annex, figures stuck halfway between vegetable and angel, and the crowd in the square becomes a set of flickering waveforms that collapse only when someone shouts my name, not my real name, the one they gave me in the Theory Practice yard, but the nickname the dealers at the Historicism Market use when they want me to carry crates of black bread and onions and those thin bottles of cheap spirit whose labels peel off in the rain, the paper sagging like old flesh, and the air smells of yeast and wet stone and burnt oil, and somewhere, under all that, the faint trace of detergent on linen, the molecules of surfactant wrapping themselves around grease globules as dutifully as any catechism, and I feel inside the skull the slow march of microglia, those tiny white rooks of the nervous system picking at dead synapses, while on the pavement a stray dog scratches at its ear in a rhythm that matches the ticking of the clock in the Axiom Café where the ceiling is painted with a clumsy imitation of heaven, little blue orbs and badly drawn birds, and I think, the retina catches only photons and the brain invents the rest, this market, this drizzle, this woman crossing the street with the white plastic bags from the Relevance Co operative, potatoes knocking together like soft stones, and her skirt riding up just slightly in the gust so that for a second there is the pale curve of a buttock like a cold moon above the stocking line, smooth and ghostly, then cloth settles again and the wavefunction of her body returns to opacity, and I do not call this love, only a passing configuration of flesh and geometry, like the way the pigeons on the church roof rearrange themselves into temporary parables, and years go like that, unlabelled, mornings of fog sliding down from the Kantianerhügel, afternoons of heat where the asphalt in Division Lane sweats tar and the stallholders at the Markt für Bio-Produkte wipe their necks with the same cloth they use on the vegetables, streaks of green on brown skin, chlorophyll and human salt mingling, and in between I sit in the back of the Dialektisches Kino, a thin place that sells tickets on crumpled scraps, and the projected light is not images but integrals, sums over paths that atoms might have taken, and in one of those paths I am apparently a man whose bloodstream carries about five litres of warm saline solution packed with red discs and white assassins and fats that came from the cheap sausages at the Kiosk der Zivilgesellschaft and from the greasy sunflower oil in which Frau Nihla fries her potatoes, and she sprinkles them with the kind of salt that clumps on damp days, you have to crack it with the back of the spoon, and outside it is raining again, of course it is raining, fine as dust at first, then bigger drops that hit the paving stones like micro impacts from a tired cosmos, and all along the façades of the Bio-Staatsviertel the gutters belch out a brown froth that smells of compost and fried dough, and the little art dealers who rent the corners of the arcades pull plastic sheeting over their canvases, all those landscapes of invented valleys called Machiavellistraße and Freiheitsbogen, painted with cheap pigments that flake under the thumb, as fragile as an epithelium, and I stand hesitating near their stalls feeling the quiet thudding of my own heart, this muscular pump in the centre of the chest constantly labouring over its wet arithmetic, systole, diastole, repeat, while thoughts try to assemble themselves into something like a principle of order and then dissolve again in the steam from a pan of cabbage soup being served to workers from the Reformers Hof, who eat with their hats still on their heads, steam and sweat mingling, and the steam curls upwards in patterns that remind me of the little souls in who climb out of chimneys and into the cold sky, except here the sky is a manufacturing ceiling of low cloud that never quite tears open, always holding some surplus of water in reserve, and the crowd in the square already has stones in their hands though no one has yet said why, the stones are just there, part of the weekly choreography, as ordinary as the baskets of turnips, and I feel somewhere behind the forehead the flicker of electrical storms, tiny action potentials sparked by sodium gates in membranes thinner than onion skin, opening and shutting with the mindless obedience of panicked peasants, while my feet carry me past the stall of Herr Ledger, who sells little icons on pressed tin, not of saints, no, but of diagrams, triangles intersecting circles, labels in a cramped script that no one reads, and his daughter sits on a low stool shelling beans, her hands working quickly, skins popping open with these little wet sighs, and the beans fall into the bowl like white teeth, and the whole scene is perfectly normal except that behind it I see the other painting, the hidden version where the beans are small galaxies and the bowl is the event horizon of some domestic black hole, everything falling inward, and the weather does not change, only rearranges its grey variables, and in all of it there is this faint hum of a system trying to see itself, like the way my own gut microbes rearrange their populations according to what I can afford that week, more cabbage, fewer sausages, greater fermentation, extra gas, the belly swelled slightly under the rough shirt, while across the road at the Notwendigkeit Taverne the men in muddy boots shout about prices and bread and the rumours from the Staatstheater, and none of them cares that every shout is an exhalation laden with water vapour and carbon dioxide, each molecule spinning and colliding in patterns as intricate as any fresco, and in the back room of that tavern there is sometimes a woman who leans on the narrow window sill to smoke, and the smoke drifts around the pale lower curve where her dress fails to cover what might be called a cheek, white and full as if carved out of milk, not a symbol, not a promise, only a form, a reflective patch on the grand oily canvas of the day, and the boys in the alley pretend not to look, they kick a ball made of rags and rope, and she taps ash in absent circles while the clouds roll by over Froschstraße, where the pavement vendors have laid out small plaster statues of angels with chipped noses, and the dealers from Hahnenstraße haggle over them, talking about weight and price, the mineral content of plaster, the way it crumbles in the rain, and the rain keeps trying to erase everything, the chalked prices, the dog mess, the faint red smear where last autumn the crowd threw stones at some fellow whose theories they did not like, stones hitting his head with a wet crack that sounded not like justice and not like accident but like the sound of a melon dropped from a cart, and he curled on the ground with his arms over his skull while the air filled with the taste of iron, and the weather went on as if nothing had happened, wind detaching a poster from a wall, pigeons landing and taking off in stupid little hops, and in the months after that I sometimes felt a tenderness in my own scalp as if tiny fragments of rock still embedded there were working their way outward, though no one had touched me, it was someone else whose name I have forgotten, if I ever knew it, and in the evenings after such memories I stir the pot of lentils in my narrow room overlooking the Markt der Mythen, where stalls close late, canvas flapping like tired lungs, and I think only of the rate at which beans soften, the slow diffusion of heat from the bottom of the pot to the top, conduction and convection like rumours moving through a crowd, and the years slot together indifferently, cold winters where my fingers crack and peel, where the skin splits along the creases and tiny threads of blood appear like annotations in the margins of some crabbed book, hot summers where flies colonise the butcher’s awning and children chase each other between the barrels outside the Postamt, and someone is always painting something on some wall, saints or devils or merely patterns, overlapping each other as the plaster flakes, and I walk through it all as if inside an enormous workshop where reality is forever being primed and overpainted, reality smelling of linseed oil and boiled cabbage, and my own lungs continue their blind exchange, oxygen in, carbon dioxide out, little sacs of tissue opening like mouths in the dark interior, and above the roofs the swifts cut their tight arcs against a sky that never fully commits to blue, and I imagine for a moment that each bird is a kind of equation written in chalk and then smudged by the thumb of the unknown painter, and there are dealers in that sky as well, clouds trading shadows, light sold off by the centimetre, so that some afternoons the statue in the centre of the square, the one of the Reformer raising his hand towards something invisible, looks like polished bone, and other afternoons he is as dull as bread crust, and under his feet old women arrange carrots and cabbages, the smell of soil rising from the crates, and the soil contains dead skin and hair and the powdered stone of churches bombed decades ago, and I breathe it, we all breathe it, and the art school at the edge of the city, the one near the Nihilismus-Brücke, sends out its students in paint stained coats to sketch these scenes with charcoal, capturing the slouch of the men at the Tor der Zivilgesellschaft, the tilt of the woman’s head as she leans over the cheese stall, the bend of a white arm reaching for radishes, and occasionally one of those sketches ends up in the window of the small gallery on Freiheitsstraße, where the dealer, a thin man called Herr Specter, arranges them between reproductions of famous panels, filled with hybrid beasts and swollen bellies and crowds throwing stones at hybrid prophets whose heads split into fruit, and I stare at those windows in the thin evening rain not because I want any of it, I cannot even afford the bread rolls in the little basket by the door, but because the glass itself holds a double world, reflections of clouds floating over painted flames, the faded real mingling with the gaudy unreal, and my own face somewhere in the middle, tinted green by a cheap fluorescent tube, brows knitted because the wind has brought grit from the construction site at the edge of the Bio-Viertel and it stings the eyes, and my tear ducts respond with their simple chemical, salty and warm, and a drop runs down the side of the nose, and I wipe it away with the back of a hand darkened by market dirt, and the motion leaves a streak like a brushstroke, and above all of this one could say there is an order, something like a composition, but I do not, I only feel the damp in my shoes and the ache in the hip that comes when the air pressure falls, and I count the coins in my pocket for barley and onions and maybe a strip of gristle heavy meat from the end of the butcher’s slab, and a woman passes in a faded coat, holding her skirt against the gust so that again there is that brief pale curve at the hem, the glimpse of white that has nothing to do with doctrine and everything to do with the way cloth rides up on wet thighs, and someone behind me laughs too loudly, and somewhere further off a stone hits something hollow with that same melon sound, and the clouds roll on above Altmarkt and the Nihilismus-Brücke and the Reformer’s statue and the narrow stall of Herr Ledger where diagrams tarnish quietly in the damp, and the cells in my fingertips continue to divide or to die, indifferent, and the electrons go on gathering in their little congregations of probability, saying nothing, saying everything, under a sky the colour of rinsed bones the eccentric physics begins on a Tuesday that might be a Friday in another cosmos where the electrons have tiny painted wings and crowd together in the corners of the room like pilgrims in a altarpiece, a thin drizzle outside, streets slick, the tram wires humming in a register somewhere between prayer and tinnitus, and I am thinking that each raindrop contains the whole sky folded inside it as if the universe had a habit of hiding itself in small wet things, and at the same time the atoms in my fingertips are exchanging virtual particles with the chipped enamel mug on the table, so that the boundary between skin and crockery is only a polite fiction agreed upon by exhausted bar staff and minor civil servants, and in the café at the corner of Schlegelgasse and Dealer Schiller’s old tax office the fluorescent tubes tremble like souls in a low resolution Judgment Day while she bends to pick up a fallen spoon and the curve of her sexy white butt cheeks flashes for a second above the waistband of cheap cotton trousers, not an epiphany, not a revelation, only one more local turbulence in the cloud chamber of the day where charged glances leave thin tracks through steam and gossip, and somewhere far away in the same instant a neutrino slips through my skull without even saying hello, though the crowd of thoughts in there already throws stones at itself with bored precision, pebble after pebble, thunk after thunk against the inside of the bone, and the pigs down the road, rain dark on their bristles, shovel their snouts into the black mud as if searching for the missing concept of breakfast, the sky the colour of dishwater, the queue outside Dealer Hölderlin’s market stall thick with people waiting to buy cabbages that seem to have grown out of sheer stubbornness in a soil that has forgotten its own name, and I can feel in my gut the slow peristaltic wave moving yesterday’s beans along their inevitable spiral, intestinal villi like tiny devotional hands lifting molecules of glucose into the bloodstream so that thought can go on pretending to be separate from digestion, and the weather changes, or says it does, a wind from somewhere doctrinal pushing clouds into hexagonal formations that look like diagrams of competing systems pinned above the bed in some forgotten student room where the radiator clicks and night buses drone, and years pass like that, or minutes, hard to tell, I keep walking the same three streets, Schillerstrasse, Kantmarkt, little crooked Fichteweg where Dealer Jacobi sells bootleg pamphlets and potatoes from the same damp cellar, the air sometimes sharp and metallic, sometimes swollen and yellow as if the sun had started to rot, and the city moves around my cartilage and tendon, synovial fluid whispering in my knees with each step a faint editorial note about mortality, the crows on the chimney pots conducting their own dialectic in hoarse croaks while down below the butchers hang strings of sausages, small clotted universes of fat and memory turning slowly in the fug of sawdust and gossip, and the crowd in my head, which looks exactly like the crowd in the square if you strip them of umbrellas and replace them with concepts, keeps pelting my skull with gravel, each impact a question about what anything is doing here at all, though no one bothers to answer, and at the edges of vision creatures poke their noses into the weather, a fish with a candle in its mouth riding a bicycle of bones through the fog on Lindenplatz, a stapled together choir of open throats singing through the drains when it rains too hard, the puddles reflecting not the buildings but some distant carnival of errors where planets sprout legs and walk quietly into the river, and somewhere in this mess she passes again, plastic shopping bag cutting into the soft flesh of her wrist, cheap trainers splashing through the runnels along the kerb, and I notice quite mechanically the motion of her gluteal muscles under the thin fabric as she steps up on to the pavement, the pale curve of those sexy white butt cheeks an accidental luminous patch in the grey statistics of the day, not sacred, not profane, just there like a stubborn data point in a series no one ordered, while in the same breath the alveoli in my lungs open like tiny flowers thirsting for oxygen, capillaries tightening around them in an embrace older than weather, older than cartography, and I think of how the city is only a lung turned inside out, streets as bronchi, stalls as alveolar sacs where coins and curses exchange like gases, and above it all the clouds are busy failing to decide between rain and snow, each droplet a committee divided between phases, some choosing ice, some choosing fall, and the quantum rules insist that their hesitation is not merely poetic, that somewhere in the possible sky the stone the crowd throws at my head both hits and does not hit, but here it does, here in this particular afternoon that might be last year or next harvest, the first rock glances off the top of my skull with a sound like a badly tuned bell, skin splitting in a shy line, blood starting its sticky commentary down the side of my face, and I am aware of the crowd only as weather with fists, climate with anger, pigs squealing from the alley where Dealer Schelling has stacked boxes of rotten turnips, pigeons exploding from the eaves like discarded thoughts, my cerebellum quietly recalculating balance while the frontal lobes scramble to frame this impact as something other than a random correction issued by the street, and I remember, or imagine, a lecture hall that may never have existed, boards covered with equations about motion and necessity, diagrams of orbits and pendulums, chalk dust hanging in the shafts of light like the ghosts of unattempted experiments, and someone saying that freedom is a matter of understanding the necessity of things, that once you see how the stones were always going to arc through the air at that speed from those hands under this low and sulking sky you can nod as they hit your head again and again, each blow another full stop that never quite arrives because the sentence drags on, commas smeared with mud and saliva, and between the blows there are ordinary hours, market days, laundry days, cheap bread from Dealer Feuerbach’s stall, crust too hard, crumb too damp, butter that tastes faintly of iron and cow breath, my teeth grinding slowly down as enamel gives way micrometre by micrometre, shards of myself swallowed with each mouthful, digested, turned into the red sludge that pulses along arteries, the same arteries that pound hot behind my temples when the crowd begins to gather again, muttering, stone weights heavy in their palms like coiled arguments, and overhead the clouds perform another painting, this time a triptych, left panel full of pigs with human faces rooting in cabbages, central panel a city square flooded with milk, right panel a narrow room where someone sits at a rough table counting the bones in his hand, metacarpals articulate under skin like a secret script, and electrons continue their pointless dance between the nuclei of calcium and phosphorus, while in the midst of all this she pauses by the butcher’s window to peer at the cheap cuts, the offal arranged in tired heaps, the white of her butt cheeks just visible when she shifts her weight to one leg, fabric stretching, and I notice how the light from the cloud smeared sky runs along that small exposed curve like water seeking a drain, my optic nerve firing in its usual blind enthusiasm, rods and cones converting her into impulses that sprint along the fat coated wires of my nerves, synaptic clefts flashing with neurotransmitters, glutamate, dopamine, serotonin, the whole stupid choir, none of them particularly interested in theology or aesthetics, just little chemical couriers racing to keep consciousness pretending it knows what it is about, and still the weather will not settle, one day a warm mist smelling faintly of manure and frying onions, another day a knife of wind down the long axis of the street, old newspapers flapping like failed manifestos at the pigs’ feet, their trotters pressing old vegetable leaves into a kind of accidental collage on the cobbles, green and brown and grey, and at the edge of this collage my own boots, cracked leather, salt line halfway up from some forgotten winter, toes slowly leaking, nails growing at the slow geological pace of protein assembly in the nail matrix, keratin spiralling out of its own logic while the mind chases other spirals, spirals of argument, of cause and effect, 

Chapter 9 

of why Dealer Kunt on the next corner insists that nothing can be known in itself yet still sells potatoes as if their starchy cores were the most solid fact in the district, and between his stall and Dealer Schiller’s stand of cheap pamphlets the air thickens with the smell of boiled cabbage, frying fat, old socks, wet dogs, and somewhere in there the faint chemical signature of her skin as she slips past, a little trail of soap and sweat and laundrette steam, and I am suddenly aware that my own endocrine system is busy, hypothalamus whispering to pituitary, pituitary ordering the adrenals to do something about the general situation, cortisol levels rising like an accusation, the body preparing for either fight or flight while the mind does neither, simply watches as the crowd down the street begins to thicken again, voices jostling, someone shouting about betrayal, someone else about pigs in the council offices, and the stones pile up in their hands as naturally as clouds pile up above the river where eels turn their blind bodies in the dark water, muscles contracting in long waves like arguments you cannot quite finish, and puts a small boat there on the river, a boat shaped like a cracked skull, tiny figures inside drinking soup and reading leaflets from Dealer Fichte about the nature of the I, and overhead sparrows fight over a crust so light and dry it might be made of first principles, crumbs drifting down on to my hair, sticking in the crusted patches where yesterday’s blood has not quite washed out, scalp skin knitting itself together molecule by molecule, collagen fibres weaving like a slow invisible basket while I haggle over the price of onions with Dealer Jacobi, his hands purple with cold, knuckles swollen, fingernails rimmed with soil, and all the while some commentary ticks over inside me about how each price is both contingent and necessary, shaped by harvest, by flood, by gossip, by the way the pigs broke through the fence last spring and ravaged the seedlings, by the way the city council changed the market tax, by the way the clouds decided to hold back or pour out, and secretly by the way the crowd will later this afternoon decide again that my skull is the appropriate surface on which to test the trajectory of small stones, and there is no final account that spares me, no chapter where someone explains why the electrons in those stones, in my bone, in her sexy white butt cheeks, obey the same indifferent equations while the pigs grunt in the gutter as if everything were a perfectly natural consequence of what they are, and I stand in the middle of the square with a sack of potatoes, a crust of bread, three limp carrots, and the wind pushing against my ears so hard that for a moment the roar of air becomes a kind of music, a rough hymn to necessity, clouds dragging their bellies across the rooftops, and somewhere behind me the first stone lifts, arcs, and falls again toward its appointment with the soft, astonished surface of my head in the half light where the particles do not so much travel as twitch from one probability to another like nervous peas in a chipped bowl I keep seeing that painting which no one has finished yet the one where the sky is a lid made of bone and the pigs wear cassocks and little gilt spectacles and out beyond the market of Klagwitz where Kuno the book dealer sells only blank pages wrapped in brown paper I am standing with a loaf under my arm counting the intervals between thunderclaps as if they were experiments, I say to myself if the electron can be here and not here and the soul can be a thin vapour in the lungs and also a crack in a stone then it is not so strange that the same street repeats for years with different rain, my feet in the same puddles breeding the same bacteria, tiny rods clinging to the cracks of my skin, multiplying every time I forget to wash, the shopfront of Frau Mendel’s vegetables becoming first a geometry lesson then a theology with cabbages for planets and carrots as spears of judgement, and I notice how in the crowd there is always some girl bending to lift a crate and the cloth of her skirt pulls tight across her pale backside and for a moment the world is only that curve, exposed to the drizzle, a pair of white cheeks like twin moons rising over the crate marked Kohlrabi, and then I am ashamed without knowing why, the shame like a drop in blood pressure, the baroreceptors in the arteries squeezing, and over my head the clouds perform a slow experiment, evaporating and condensing as if they were thinking, and I think too of the invisible diagrams the professors of Altenbruck draw on their blackboards, the way they say reality is not static but a restless commentary upon itself and that somewhere between the pig in the gutter and the cathedral in the distance there is a secret instruction, a rule that coils like a helix through the marrow, while my own marrow works in silence churning out red cells that live their brief ninety days then burst like overripe berries, and all the while the market stinks of onions and damp wool and there is a hum in my ears that might be the wind and might be the beginning of a crowd, and I remember another day which is also this day because it has the same grey light and the same swollen knuckles on my hands where the synovial fluid thickens with age, I am walking past the print shop of Master Riedel who only sells engravings of disasters, ships folding like paper, cities burning, and in the window there is something new, a sheet where the world is sliced into three long ages, the first with beasts and priests, the second with kings and meat, the third with factories and tiny men carrying ledgers, and I cannot say why this division troubles the back of my throat, perhaps because my own years have never felt like ages, only like a slow accumulation of receipts and crumbs, the villager in me counting pennies while the so called absolute rustles its skirts somewhere above the roofs, and I lift my collar against the drizzle and think of how the molecules of water slide over one another, how their hydrogen bonds form and break in trillionths of a second, and it seems to me that history must be like that too, nothing solid, only a swarm of little grab and release movements between people who sell and people who buy and people who smash the windows when prices rise, like the evening at the fairground of Bohlen where they stoned the fortune teller, I remember the first pebble as just a joke, tossed by that boy with the harelip, and then a second, and then the bigger stones that made the sound of cracked crockery on her skull, the crowd tightening like a muscle, and my own heart pound pounding so that the sinoatrial node must have been working overtime, little cluster of cells firing away as if to prove that life was in earnest, and the pigs that had been penned up for slaughter broke loose then and ran screaming between legs, slick with mud and fear, their pink flanks splashed with brown, and one of them shoved me sideways so that my temple hit the side of the wagon and for a second the whole field snapped to a point, quantum collapse they would call it in those pamphlets from the Society for Natural Philosophy that Herr Krautmann sells beside the stale tobacco, the wave of possibilities resolving into one sharp nail of pain in the side of my head, and when it passed the air smelled of iron and fried dough and rain on dust, years later or earlier I cannot say since all the summers blur into the same swarm of flies over the same heap of spoiled turnips at the back of the Zorniger Hof where old Madam Zorniger keeps a shrine made of bottle caps and candle stubs, picture of a man with calm eyes tacked above it, some thinker from the foreign cities whose name I never remember, they say he found a way of making the whole chaos of things look like a single sentence, an immense breathing sentence that passes through wars and plagues and cheap bread and dear bread and the particular ache in my lower back when I bend too long over sacks of potatoes, and on some mornings when the fog lies low on the fields like a defeated army I think I can hear that sentence murmuring in the air, syllables made of crows and chimneys, and I feel the hair rise on my forearms with static, tiny muscles tugging at each follicle, and then I sneeze, three times in a row, the histamines flooding the mucous membranes, and after that I can only concentrate on the cost of cabbage and whether the baker at Niederstieg will still give me yesterday’s rolls for half price, and somewhere in between the sneezes and the rolls there is a flash of bare whiteness as some woman ahead of me in the queue adjusts her shawl and her skirts ride down just slow enough to show that smooth dividing line where the two halves of her backside meet, ridiculous that the whole universe can narrow to that moment of pale flesh in the grey morning, but nerves conduct what they like, sodium gates popping open along the axon in sudden little cascades of notice this, notice that, while in the churchyard behind the stalls the worms keep calmly digesting whatever last year’s crowds left behind, and the crows hop from stone to stone like black punctuation, commas in the continuous muttering of the wind, which smells today of manure and tomorrow of coal smoke and another day of wet linen, and in all these days there is always some talk on the corner about the world changing, about a new system from the cities of the north, from Starnburg or Jenenhof or perhaps from that dark red house near the river where Doctor Fichtler used to live before he ran off with the glove maker’s niece, they say the new system turns everything inside out, makes the king a kind of servant and the servant a kind of king, and that in the end even art will be nothing but a stepping stone, a sketch in the margin of some greater logic, and I picture the paintings in the guildhall of Eisenmarkt, the way the saints and pigs and merchants all crowd together on those panels, little hellscapes commissioned by men who sell nails and sausages, and I wonder whether the saints know they are only a phase, an early draft of something colder and more complete, perhaps a hall with no images at all, only blackboards and thin hands drawing circles, while outside the wind keeps doing its experiments on the trees, stripping the leaves one by one, the chlorophyll breaking down into duller yellows, then browns, and the whole thing rotting into a kind of greenish paste that smells not exactly bad but tired, like a philosophy that has been repeated too often at the Stammtisch, and I chew my crust and think of my own joints, the cartilage wearing away grain by grain, osteoclasts nibbling at the edges of bone, osteoblasts trying to patch the gaps, and the balance never quite right, so that walking to the market of Dorpfelt in the rain feels like carrying two sacks more than before, and yet I go, because somewhere between the stall of old fish and the kiosk where Herr Seifert sells cheap prints of angels with very human haunches, round and white and a bit too near the edge of the frame, there is a sense that all of this, mud and hunger and clouds and half glimpsed buttocks and the sudden sharp crack of a stone on someone’s skull at the yearly fair, is being folded into a pattern, not by any god with a beard but by the thing itself, the world inhaling and exhaling, observing itself in mirrors of shop windows and puddles, and I am one of its smaller observations, a bit of nervous tissue wrapped in an old coat, registering impact after impact, sensory data like pebbles shouted at my skin, some of them real pebbles, for the crowd in the narrow lane behind the tannery has turned ugly again, prices up, wages down, all the usual reasons and none of them really reasons, one boy throws a clod of earth, another throws a shard of roof tile, and then the stones, fists of the hillside themselves, and I am swept along though I do not know who we are angry at, only that the air is thick with breath and curses and the sharp smell of fear, cortisol spiking in our bloodstreams, hearts hammering like smiths, and someone shoves me from behind so that my forehead meets the whitewashed wall with a solid thud, and for a moment there is a ring of light, a halo of photopsia as the neurons misfire, and I think absurdly of the halos on the saints in the guildhall paintings, how serene they look, how clean, nothing like this chaotic shower of sparks inside my skull, and as I slide down the wall I see between the bodies a glimpse of the butcher’s daughter leaning from an upstairs window shouting at us to go home, her skirts rucked up, her legs bare to the thigh, the lower curve of her backside lit by a stray shaft of sun that has somehow punched through the clouds, her skin almost painfully white against the soot of the wall, and a stone meant for someone else flies wild and bangs off the brick just below her, sending dust across that pale surface, and she jerks back with a cry that is not quite fear and not quite laughter, and the crowd howls, not in pity but in some raw delight at the collision of flesh and dust and anger, and in that howl I hear the same note as in the sermon last week when the new curate tried to explain why suffering is necessary, his voice rising and falling like a badly tuned bell, and my own blood trickling from the cut on my forehead tastes metallic on my tongue, iron from the haemoglobin, same iron as in the nails for the gallows they built last autumn, same iron as in the ploughshare that broke in the field near Kersch, sending a shard into old Balthasar’s leg so that they had to cut it open and pull out the rusted piece, I watched the surgeon do it with his stained apron and his quiet humming and the flies crawling on the windowsill, watched the tendon fibres gape like frayed rope, watched the fat gleam yellow around the wound, and felt the soles of my own feet sweat inside my boots, sympathetic overreaction of the autonomic nervous system, he said, as if naming it made it cleaner, and outside that same afternoon the sky looked like a painting again, slabbed with purple and green as if himself had come back to smear pigment across the heavens, tiny naked figures with bird heads tumbling in the clouds, and all the while in some lecture hall in Starnburg or maybe even farther away men in black coats were arguing about whether all this, pigs and stones and white buttocks and aching bones and gaudy sunsets and cheap onions and the thin line of spit that sometimes hangs from the mouth of the idiot boy who sweeps the tavern yard, whether all of it can be understood as a story with a beginning and an end, or whether it is only an endless middle, and I walk home under that lurid sky with my basket of potatoes and rye, nerves still jangling from the blows, and feel inside my chest the myocardium working steadily, fibres contracting in tidy sequences, as if indifferent to crowds and systems, pushing blood through capillaries no wider than a single red cell, through my brain, through the little patch where a bruise is already forming under the skin, purple like that smear in the evening light, and the wind smells now of pigs again, real pigs grunting in the pens behind Hossner’s yard, rolling in filth, their own excrement breeding whole civilisations of microbes that live and die without ever knowing of our arguments about history, and somewhere a bell rings the hour though I have lost track of which hour it might be, and the sentence that is said to contain everything continues without punctuation in my head, folding the pain in my skull and the memory of her pale cheeks dusted with brick powder and the wet noses of pigs and the distant talk of new systems and the price of cabbage and the colour of the sky into one long unbroken thought that nobody but me will ever hear as the clouds gather again in looping, fish-bellied strata above the roofline of the Old Resin Market where Händler Broszat stacks his moulding canvases against the wall and the pigs in their wet pen grunt in that low philosophical way pigs sometimes grunt when the rain becomes fine enough to blur the wooden slats into trembling lines, I feel the whole square sliding sideways in its own logic, as if some unseen clerk were pulling at the corners of reality with cold fingers, rewriting the boundaries between stall and citizen and thought, and in that slippage the pale surface that sometimes appears, that smooth white arc glimpsed between the folds of a skirt or in the tilt of a washerwoman leaning to retrieve a dropped clothespin, becomes less a piece of a body than a kind of lens through which the world folds and refolds itself, a small curved moon of a different order of matter, and when light hits it the rain seems to split into a spectrum of thin colours that would have painted as tiny sorrowful spirits clinging to the droplets with translucent wings, and the world behind them, pigs and turnips and rotting onions and the distant river of black water, trembles as though it has been translated into an alphabet of soft curves and bruised shadows, so that even the stones the crowd carries in their hands—palm-dark, slick with rain, cold as principles—seem to hum with a low electromagnetic murmur as if each one contains a history of attempts at coherence, and in the midst of this the wind hustles through the alley behind Katerfeld’s bread stall, shaking the old posters from their nails, curling their edges like burnt leaves, and I remember a winter so cold the beer froze in the barrels and the pigs huddled in piles steaming like low-lying furnaces, their breath mingling in one great animal exhalation that rose into the rafters and became frost on the beams, and in that cold my bones began a soft argument with themselves, osteoclast and osteoblast misreading one another’s signals, calcium taken, calcium given, a microcosm of those same slow feuds the dealers conduct when they argue over the meaning of the century on the wet steps of the Assembly Gate, and the market women, their fingers swollen from brine and cold, whisper gossip that travels in the air like ions crossing a membrane, low electrical charges passed from one mind to another, and somewhere a girl bends to tie her shoe and the rain catches the pale underside of her thigh so that the world seems to contract around that small white crescent, not as desire, not as symbol, only as a moment where the skin reflects the entire grey sky in miniature, a convex mirror of the town’s confusion, and that reflection becomes part of everything else, the hum of pigs chewing, the slow pulse in my neck where blood thickens in the cold, the way the stones in the crowd’s hands knock against one another with the dull patience of inevitability, and as I move through the square the smell of frying barley cakes mixes with the scent of rust from the old iron drain where last year’s storm tore away half the grate, and beneath that drain water gurgles over stones smoothed by time into round shapes like tiny planets rehearsing their orbits in the dark, 

Chapter 10 

and the pigs keep snorting in the mud, snouts rooting with a logic older than any of the systems the pamphleteers scribble on cheap paper, and above them the clouds break open in a long rip that looks like the tearing of a canvas, and through that tear light comes in with the colour of diluted milk, soft and almost embarrassed, falling directly upon that pale arc again, someone stepping over a puddle, skirt catching in the wind, an instant of exposed whiteness that glows like a small captured sun, and the rain intensifies so that the blows of the crowd are swallowed by it, stones hitting skulls with a softened, muted percussion like fists hammering on wet clay, and the skull rings with that watery thud, each impact sending little waves along the meninges, cerebrospinal fluid trembling as if stirred by a spoon, and the world tilts again, pigs scrambling, the canvas rolls tumbling, Händler Broszat shouting into the wind with his coat flapping like a torn flag, and the sky seems to breathe in and out, a great lung pulling the town toward some centre out of sight, and the pale curve, damp now, smeared slightly with rain and dust, disappears beneath coarse cloth as quickly as it appeared, but its after-image lingers like the phosphorescence that clings to the eye after staring into a lantern, a white ghost of form that mixes with the coloured droplets hanging in the air, droplets each containing tiny refracted pictures of the pigs, of the crowd, of my own hunched shoulders, of the stones that even now continue to rise and fall like a primitive arithmetic, and the entire market seems caught in the oscillation between collapse and coherence that the pamphlets at the back of Dealer Frobinius’s booth try desperately to explain, diagrams of cycles, arrows that chase their own tails, tiny stick figures drowning under symbols they cannot read, and in my muscles I feel the slow burn of lactic acid, fibres twitching under my soaked coat, the cold threading itself through tendon and joint, chondrocytes murmuring their small complaints under the patella, while the pigs squeal and the crowd roars and the rain clatters down, turning the cobbles into a dark mirror in which that pale crescent of flesh appears again, faintly, as a warped reflection, an omen or an optical trick or simply the world turning a small piece of itself inside out, the way a mollusc reveals a soft surface for one instant before retreating into its shell, and above it all the clouds knit themselves back together, hiding whatever truth was momentarily visible, leaving only the smell of mud and onions and pig breath and cheap tallow burning in the lanterns as the stones rise once more in the hands of the crowd and the sentence of the day continues without pause, carried forward by wind and water and the hoarse sound of pigs crying into the deepening dark again in the crooked light of the alley where the rain comes sideways like an experiment gone wrong in some provincial laboratory of clouds, the sky a bad painting of its own equations, and I tell myself that the smallest particle is not a particle at all but a shy intention in the dark, a probability that blushes when it is looked at, a village rumour about presence whispered at the edge of the field, and if I stare at the damp bricks long enough they rearrange themselves into the crowded panels of , those tiny men with bird heads tipping buckets over their own feet while trout grow wheels and roll into little taverns called Kammerthal and Wanselin where the wine is watered down and the coins are always slightly sticky, and in the middle of this absurd anatomy of matter someone has drawn a circle on the floor and told me that within this chalk boundary the world finally understands itself, although my own neurons crackle like frying fat when I try to follow that, their axons thin as winter roots searching for a pocket of sugar, glial cells swollen with gossip, and my stomach interrupts with its heavy animal logic, asking only for bread or a cabbage from the market in Rixdorf, no philosophy, just something to ferment quietly in the dark and swell the crowds of microorganisms who already hold their own assemblies in the folds of my gut, voting, perhaps, on how melancholic I will feel at six in the evening when the clouds sink over the tiled roofs and the wind drags plastic bags along the tram tracks like bad ghosts, and I remember that in some obscure lecture hall they once said that the absolute needed art the way a lung needs oxygen, not because it lacked anything but because it could not quite see itself without colour, without sound, without the strange stiffness of marble pretending to be flesh, and I nodded dutifully while the capillaries in my fingertips filled and emptied in tiny red tides, but now, years or moments later, there is only the chipped doorway of a shop called F. N. Baumnagel, dealer in used instruments and cracked porcelain, and inside an old radio hums at a frequency that makes the hairs rise on my forearm, each follicle like a little antenna searching for the station where spirit speaks in a dialect of static and collapsing stars, and above the counter they have pinned a reproduction of some late medieval hellscape, bodies intertwined with musical instruments, fish swallowing bells, the whole scene like an exploded cell under a broken microscope, organelles rushing out into the street and buying turnips, and the air outside smells of wet wool and petrol and overripe pears from the stall on the corner where Frau Kessel sells whatever failed to sell yesterday, and I think that if time really were a straight line none of this would repeat, yet every season brings back the same faded poster on the tram stop, the same argument between two men in Starkenplatz over the price of onions, the same pulse quickening in my carotid when the wind shifts and a murmur runs through the leaves like a half remembered theorem, and I stand there with my cells dividing in a slow democracy, each mitosis an unrecorded vote for persistence, while far above the crows map out invisible geometries, black points crossing a grey continuum, and maybe this is the only proof I will ever have that the world thinks of itself, the way the murder swings in a loose parabola over the roof of the Schweglerhof slaughterhouse where the pigs arrive squealing in the dawn rain, their pink skins already a kind of involuntary philosophy, nervous systems scrawling panic into the chilled air, sensory neurons firing like tiny terrified prophets, and in the same hour the baker in the alley near the river, Herr Lobenstein, kneads dough with forearms dusted white, the gluten chains stretching like arguments that refuse to break, and when he slides the loaves into the oven the yeast die in a soft, useful apocalypse that perfumes the whole quarter, and I walk through this warm fog of sacrifice knowing without knowing that somewhere in all this repetition there is supposed to be a pattern that is more than a pattern, a reason that is more than a reason, and yet what I actually notice is that my left knee clicks now when I climb the three steps to my rented room above the Metzger Passage, cartilage wearing thin, collagen fibres unbraiding like tired thoughts, and the ceiling there stains itself slowly each year into a map of invisible rivers, damp tracking the history of a roof that has never entirely believed in itself, and when I lie down I can feel my heart tapping its own patient Morse code against the inside of my ribs, four chambers rehearsing the old story of separation and reunion, systole and diastole like day and night in a forgotten town, and into this rhythm I sometimes insert the notion that there is a great curve running through all our small errands, a line that bends beyond the hills of Kammerthal and the marshes near Winterweg and through the dust on the shelves of the bookshop where Herr Beringer keeps his unsold monographs on systems no one reads anymore, their pages already warping at the edges, cellulose drinking the moisture of decades, fungal spores preparing their quiet festivals between the lines, and if I open one at random my eyes skid over sentences that promise that everything that has ever happened was necessary, that even the way my fingertips chap in the cold and the way I miscount my coins at the market, handing over too much to the woman at the potato stall and pretending not to notice, were all foreseen in some impossible ledger of forms, yet at the same time a vein throbs obscurely behind my left eye and a small rash blooms on my wrist because I forgot the cheap soap from Wanselin Apotheke does not agree with my skin, histamine seeping into the tissues like bad rumours in a village, and I think how ridiculous it is that any grand explanation should have to pass through such petty channels, through mucous membranes and digestive tracts, through aching teeth and soft corns on toes squeezed into boots bought second hand from the market at Arnsbruck where the wind never stops and the stallholders shout over it with voices like cracked trumpets, and over all of this the weather keeps folding itself, skies thick as congealed broth one week, then thin and bright the next, sunlight falling on the river so that each ripple looks like a decision being made and unmade, electrons jittering between shells, jumping in improbable obedience to laws that no one in the alleyways has time to care about because they are too busy counting cabbages, plucking chickens, scratching at eczema, stirring pots, yet even in the steam that lifts from those pots the same physics shivers, molecules spinning their brief, stupid dances, and occasionally I imagine, without wanting to admit I am imagining anything at all, that somewhere in the clutter of Kammerthal and Wanselin, in the shadows behind the pork counter at Schweglerhof or in the damp corner of my own room where silverfish write hieroglyphs in the paste behind the wallpaper, there is a point at which all these motions, from quark to crow, from bread yeast to tram schedules, align like magnets in a field, a quiet click that no one hears when the world’s scattered panels fit together for a second the way the craftsmen meant them to in some cosmic workshop that smells of oak shavings and boiled glue, and then slip slightly out of place again so that the grotesques and saints and peasants and pigs in the painted scene go on bumping into each other, tasting cheap wine, trading turnips, throwing small stones at abstract targets they cannot name, while the sky above them, and above me, and above the muddled roofs of Rixdorf, continues to experiment with colours that never quite dry so on this particular winter morning that might be any winter morning in any year since the years fold into one another like wet paper stacked in the back room of the Baumnagel shop I find myself drifting along the crooked stones of the Hauptgasse where a kind of Christmas market has been hammered together overnight by men with chapped hands and wooden mallets, the stalls leaning as if the wind had already interrogated them and found their answers unconvincing, candles guttering in the brittle air, the smell of boiled wine thick with cloves and the sharper sting of singed sugar rising in spirals that resemble the diagrams I once saw chalked on a blackboard in a drafty room in Starkenplatz, simple lines that insisted that the smallest pieces of the world refuse to sit still and instead vibrate in cold invisible theatres between being here and being there, and as the light from the candles shifts across the faces of the vendors their features seem to smear into one another, noses drifting into cheeks, eyes doubling as if the wave function of their expressions had not quite collapsed, while the pigs penned at the back of the street grunt uneasily as though they can smell the physics in the air along with the roasting chestnuts, their breath misting upward in soft clouds that twist into odd geometries before dissolving into the larger grey breath of the sky, and I notice that above the gingerbread stall the flakes of snow settling on the canvas roof melt in little circular patches that pulse outward like rings in a superposition, each ring briefly reflecting the tiny Christmas lights strung between poles, lights that flicker not because the wires are loose but because the electrons inside the thin copper are performing their jittery winter ballet, hopping from state to state in microscopic lantern shows that no one here pays any attention to, certainly not the children chasing each other between the barrels of spiced apples, their cheeks red from the cold and from excitement, their woollen mittens soaked, nor the old woman selling paper stars that fray at the edges, nor the men gathered around the brazier warming their palms over the crackling sticks that hiss when the snow hits them, little bursts of steam rising like the ghosts of forgotten syllables, and between the stalls someone has set up a wooden nativity scene where the painted figures lean awkwardly, colours peeling, the sheep looking more like swollen turnips on legs and the baby in the crude wooden manger staring upward with an expression that seems slightly bewildered as if it too senses that the air above it is thick with particles spinning in and out of certainty, and as I stand there with the cold creeping into my boots and the smell of pine resin in my nose I feel the entire street humming at a frequency just below comprehension, a low tremor of winter electricity, the lanterns swaying as if pushed from the inside by invisible hands, the snowflakes above them not falling in straight lines but in hesitant zigzags, twitching as though they are choosing between competing worlds, and somewhere behind me a choir begins to sing, not well, their voices raw and cracked from the cold, but something in the wavering harmonies vibrates against the pattern in the air, aligning for a moment with the pulse of unseen particles that jitter like nervous angels between the roofs, and I think how strange it is that the market with its cheap ornaments, fried dough, chipped mugs of hot wine, shivering pigs and cracked nativity figures should be breathing the same law as the distant stars grinding through their ages, protons fusing unimaginably far away while here an onion seller argues loudly about the price of his produce and a girl drops a wooden toy in the snow and laughs as she picks it up, brushing flakes from its face, and all around us the air glitters faintly with the cold mathematics of the season, floating diagrams no one can read, threads of probability tangled with the smell of cinnamon, tiny luminous quanta flickering between the falling snow and the warm breath of the crowd, and the whole street seems to tilt softly as though some deeper rhythm beneath the cobblestones has shifted, pulling every stall and lantern and pig and painted nativity figure and every trembling electron in the wires into one vast slow sentence that the winter sky mutters to itself without stopping air over the market is thin and metallic, like someone has smeared quantum foam across the December clouds and left it there to curdle, and I stand by the sizzling cart where a man with a red wool cap, who calls himself Meister Korda as if that were a philosophy in itself, hurries onions into oil so hot that they jump like particles at the edge of certainty, and the smell of frying fat, stale bread, cheap sausage, bruised cabbage and old rain climbs into my nostrils and rearranges the universe in little greasy hierarchies, while somewhere behind the roofs, behind the chimney stacks and satellite dishes, the invisible equations are muttering about probability, about how every flake of steam that rises from this pan could have gone another way, another epoch, and I keep thinking that the whole scene is painted by a Flemish hand that never learned to stop, a of cracked concrete and plastic crates, a sky filled not with angels and demons but pigeons with mangy necks and the faintest outline of a supermarket sign, and I feel time stretching into years even though the queue shuffles only a few steps, because it has always been this queue and always this hunger, slow and repetitive, the stomach an old bell with a single cracked note, and the man in front of me drops a coin, it spins, a small silver orbit, I imagine it tunnelling through the pavement into another layer of reality where the same cart hisses under monsoon clouds and the same greasy bread is being torn by another pair of hands, my own perhaps, or some peasant with my jaw, my anxious tongue, and while this thought gathers dust in my skull the wind changes and pushes the smoke sideways so it curls like a diagram of uncertainty, each swirl a tentative proposition about the absolute that nobody will read, and the woman in the green coat ahead asks for extra sauce and the word extra sticks with me, it hums like a metaphysical insult, as if the world had a core and then unnecessary drapery, as if these stewed peppers were superfluous to the bare fact of caloric intake, yet the tongue demands them, that damp red muscle vibrating in its cave, lined with taste buds that are really just specialised epithelial cells, chemical receptors grown out of ancient cravings, and so the mystical question of why anything exists at all is briefly reduced to whether the hot oil will burn the bottom of the bread before the onions soften, 

Chapter 12 

and in that reduction I feel a kind of crooked grace, as if the great secret has always been that the holy and the trivial are the same phenomenon glimpsed at different distances, like galaxies that look smooth from afar and dissolve into broken rock up close, and years seem to pass between one stir of the pan and the next, summers with flies thick over the gutters, winters where the snow clogs the drains and hardens into a philosophy of its own, stubborn and indifferent, the lampposts sweating rust, my fingernails growing in slow spirals of keratin that remember every cold morning they have scraped coins from pockets, every paper bag they have torn open, and somewhere in that spiral memory there are the names of dealers and bookmen and dusty shops, Keller & Söhne with its mouldy pamphlets on the corner of Friedhofgasse where the old man in the brown waistcoat mutters about system and necessity as he weighs potatoes, Caritasdruck on the hill where they sell remaindered monographs next to bulk rice and cheap soap, the travelling broker who calls himself Hofmann but signs receipts as Nettel because he claims that every identity must keep a reserve name for the night, all of them half merchants, half apostles of some stern idea that cannot quite pay the rent, and their catalogues and price lists flutter in my head together with the recipe for turnip stew and the strange conviction that the world only becomes real when it is written down and then eaten, ink turning into glucose under the assault of saliva and amylase, the digestive tract a long dark commentary that knows nothing of its own wit, and overhead the clouds are pale intestines across the sky, knotted and gleaming, and down here the oil pops and spits like protons insisting they will not be pinned to a single place, so that each droplet on my skin feels like a tiny experiment in embodiment, positive result, yes, this is a body, it registers heat, it flinches, it will scar if pushed far enough, and meanwhile the queue exhales steam, a collective organism whose lungs are wrapped in polyester, cotton, fake fur bought on discount from the stall run by Frau Bischoff, who swears her coats are real lamb but whose eyes flicker with the same unease as a particle observed too closely, and some Christmas or other stumbles through the scene, not a date but a recurring fever, lights hung above the street like small defective stars, the speakers on the lampposts coughing out carols that sound like instructions from a forgotten experiment, and the air smells of burnt sugar, cinnamon, rotting leaves, and in that smell I can feel years layering themselves, the cartilage in my knees grinding a little more each season, the melanin in my skin rearranging after every exposure to indifferent sunlight, cells dividing, making copy after copy until the original text of whatever I once was is almost illegible, and still I stand in this queue as if the pan at the front were the centre of a slowly turning universe, its edge the orbit of desire and necessity, because the brain requires something to circle around, a nucleus of grease, a star of browned onions, to keep its electrons from flying apart into pure anxiety, and in some impossible upper register, where the equations and the angels share a grammar, there is perhaps a notion that every sizzling strip of meat is a local manifestation of a universal hunger for form, that the molecules in the fat are older than history, carbon chains forged in dead suns, now snapping and reconfiguring under this street flame tended by a man whose left eye never quite focuses, whose arteries are surely lined with the same lipids he sells, and I watch the sausage split as it cooks, the skin bursting, pale meat pushing out, and I think absurdly of fault lines, of the crust of the earth cracking under pressure, magma rising like gravy, continents shuffling across geological tables, while under my own skin the capillaries dilate, my blood thickens with anticipation, insulin already whispering in the pancreas about incoming carbohydrates, and all the while the weather shifts with that stubborn central European caution, a drizzle that never quite commits, a sun that leans out for three minutes and then retreats, so that every day for years becomes a variation on this tentative light, this half finished decision, and in that wavering I sense some absurd doctrine of history, a claim that nothing ever changes except the angle of the smoke and the names printed on receipts, that the inner logic of the stew is the same as the inner logic of the state, each ingredient needing the others, each one losing itself in the overall flavour, and this thought tastes both profound and idiotic as I shuffle forward two more steps, feeling the grit under my soles like a kind of coarse arithmetic, each grain a unit of fact, unreasoned, immune to theory, and my stomach growls audibly, a low mammalian protest that cares nothing for dialectics, only for the simple circulation of ATP and the maintenance of body temperature, and I remember reading somewhere that the intestinal epithelium renews itself every few days, cells being born and sloughed off in a constant, wasteful generosity, so that the lining that once digested the bread of last winter is long gone, its proteins recycled into other tissues, maybe the rough skin on my knuckles, maybe the thin hair on my forearm now catching little flecks of oil, and there is something obscene and comforting in that, the way the body erases and rewrites itself without consultation, as if it holds the secret that the mind keeps trying to articulate in footnotes and never quite does, that permanence is a fable told by hungry men to distract themselves from the smell of burning garlic, and now at last I am close enough to feel the heat of the cart directly, the metal a small sun, the handles wrapped in cloth darkened by years of sweat, and the vendor looks at me with that habitual impatience of someone who has seen too many faces to bother remembering any, and asks the same question he has asked since the world was young, with or without, which in his mouth is not about metaphysics but about mustard, yet it clicks somewhere in me like a switch on an old machine, as if I were being asked whether I want contingency or necessity, spice or bare survival, and I say with, because of course I do, because the tongue has its own speculative appetite, and he slaps a piece of bread on the greasy board, cuts it, opens it, pushes fried onions, meat, sauce into the cavity, a crude ontology of layers, and hands it to me for coins that feel already unreal as soon as they leave my palm, and I step aside, breathing the steam, biting into the heat, crumbs falling onto my coat, and for a moment all the elaborate nonsense about spirit and structure and the end of art recedes behind the simple fact that the jaw moves in a rhythm older than language, that the teeth crush and the tongue presses the paste of it all against the hard palate and the throat accepts, an obscure act of trust performed thousands of times a year without ceremony, and I chew under a low sky thick with history and exhaust fumes, knowing and not knowing that this bite, this swallow, this quiet, peasant meal at the edge of a noisy street is everything and nothing, is an accident in a long causal chain and at the same time the exact point where the whole invisible architecture of the world chooses to show itself, briefly, as hot food cooked in the open, as fingers burning slightly on cheap bread, as a smear of mustard on the lip licked away, as the body keeping itself going for another day in which the clouds will once again rearrange into unreadable diagrams above the stalls, and the pan will once again hiss like a low cosmic background, and the names of dealers and printers and forgotten authors will drift like smoke through the alleys of my head while my stomach, blunt and faithful, waits for the next necessary revelation the air above the tramlines flickers like a bad equation and I keep seeing little creatures scuttling between the electrons, tiny monks with fish heads and bellies full of probability, every morning or maybe it is every decade the same fog presses down over the roofs of Altstadt Relevance and I go out with my basket to the market where Frau Methode sells bruised apples from a crate that might have been standing there since the twilight of some forgotten enlightenment, the cloud ceiling low and grey, a sky made of dirty cotton and unsolved problems, the old church tower leaning slightly as if to listen to the buzzing in my skull, and I am walking and not walking, the pavement wet or maybe dry, the years folded together like damp cardboard, and in the shop window of Nihil & Son the mannequins are dressed in coats sewn from star maps and receipts, their glass eyes following the slow drift of my own thoughts as they stagger after a question of relevance, that old question, the one that sits like a cracked cup on the kitchen table at dawn while the kettle shudders and the gas flame licks blue against the iron, the steam rising in spirals that curl around the dust motes which are not dust but little Planck devils spinning on their own axes, each with a notebook and a quill tracing out possible worlds across the bare plaster of my lungs, where the bronchi branch like family trees and market streets and philosophical systems, the cilia waving like pilgrims along the roadside in some imaginary Swabian village whose name I can never quite remember, something like Görlitz am Geist or maybe Staufen an der Freiheit, and in all of them there is always the same baker, old Meister Trankult, whose hands are thick with flour and whose eyes shine with the dull wisdom of someone who has spent a lifetime kneading dough and metaphysics together until the crust cracks just right, you bite in and there is the soft interior of necessity, the crumb of contingency, and outside the rain turns to sleet or maybe it is just grit from the road thrown up by passing carts, each wheel a revolving diagram of subject and object crossing over, merging, separating again, leaving faint grooves in the mud that hardens overnight and crumbles by noon, 

Chapter 13 

and somewhere behind the butcher’s stall, in the narrow alley where the gutters carry off peelings and lost prayers, there is a small black door with the name Praxis scratched into the wood, and when the wind hits it just so the hinges squeal like a dying idea, a thin metallic cry that gets caught in the folds of my cortex where neurons fire in chains, sodium channels opening and closing like shutters in a town that is always expecting a storm, and the storm does come, sometimes as a sudden downpour on a Tuesday that might be in May or November, sometimes as a heat that climbs the spine of the city and makes the windows sweat, the plaster peel, the old men on the benches outside Café Kantiger complain about their joints grinding like badly oiled dialectical machinery, and while they argue over whose pipe tobacco is cheapest the pigeons hop in patterns that look suspiciously like Venn diagrams, feathered intersections of hunger and habit, and I think about how each feather is a miracle of engineering, barbs hooking into barbules with microscopic discipline, proteins assembled step by step from amino acids drifting through the blood like thoughts across the page, and then I am in the butcher’s after all, though I never remember opening the door, the smell of raw meat and sawdust, Herr Begriff standing behind the counter with his apron smeared a respectable brown, not red anymore, time and oxidation doing their slow work, and he is wrapping up a thin cut of something nameless for a woman in a heavy coat, her hair damp with drizzle, her hands cracked from soap and winter, and he looks up at me once with an expression that says nothing and everything, a blank verdict on the collapse of all systems into the daily requirement of calories, the body demanding its tribute of proteins and fats while the mind wanders in circles around the question of method, how to proceed, how to get from this sulky morning to the next without losing the thread, and outside the weather changes again, a faint snow dusting the cobbles, or is it ash from some distant fire, there has been talk of mills closing, of factories burning, of pamphlets printed in cellars by men with hollow cheeks and bright eyes, but none of that touches the old woman selling onions under the arch of the Spinoza Gate, she sits on her stool, her shawl pulled tight, the onions piled like small worlds in their papery skins, each one a layered universe waiting to be sliced open, the knife revealing pale concentric rings that sting the eyes, the tear ducts responding with their ancient reflex, saline solution washing over the cornea, little rivers of private history running down the face into the lines etched there by endless seasons of rain and brief scraps of summer light, and somewhere on the other side of the square the clock in the tower of Historicism ticks in a rhythm that does not quite match my heartbeat, though sometimes late at night when the streets are empty and the lamps hum with an electrical melancholy the two rhythms drift into temporary alignment, systole, tick, diastole, tock, and for a moment there is a suspicion that everything might in fact be ordered, that the clatter of carts and the cries of market traders and the flapping of pigeons and the faint rustle of worms in the soil beneath the cobbles are all moving according to some secret score written in a cramped hand on brittle paper and stored in a drawer in the back room of the bookshop of Herr Praxis, where I go once a week or once a century to buy a stale roll and a second hand tract about the failures of the previous century, the shelves leaning under the weight of forgotten polemics, the pages foxed, the margins scribbled with exclamations by hands long returned to carbon and nitrogen, their bones sifted in the same earth that grows the onions, and the young assistant, if he is young, time does strange things to faces in that sepia light, asks me if I want a bag and I say no, I have my own, the same frayed cloth one with a faded picture of some cathedral or factory on it, and I step back out into the muttering day, the sky now the colour of old dishwater, the clouds dragging their bellies along the hills beyond the town where the wind turbines of Machiavellistischer Grat turn slowly, cutting the air into conceptual slices, while up above them somewhere the electrons and quarks are still dancing their shy, jittery gavotte, popping in and out of focus like guilty thoughts, and I imagine a vast triptych hanging behind this whole scene, painted by some long dead master of crowded nightmares, a left panel of swollen fruit and thin saints, a middle panel of pig headed bishops and riding beasts through ponds of probability, a right panel of black fields dotted with white towers, each tower a vertebra, each vertebra a small prison of bone housing the quiet electrical storm of the spinal cord, where the signals go racing up and down like messengers who have forgotten their orders, and I stand there somewhere near the hinge, half in one panel and half in another, my hands cold, the bread in my bag still warm from the public oven by the river, and the river itself crawling under its own thin sheet of ice or perhaps showing its muddy back to the grey sky, depending on whether this is autumn or spring, I can never tell, the seasons slip around each other like eels in a bucket on the stall of old man Natur, who sells fish and opinions in equal measure, the scales shining in the weak light, the fins still twitching a little with leftover neuromuscular static, calcium ions refusing to get the message that it is over, and he tells me as he wraps up a cheap bony carp that the world is organic, that everything grows into everything else, that the town and the river and the hills and even the pale factory chimneys on the horizon are all part of one great body turning slowly over in its sleep, its skin made of roofs and fields and forests, its veins the railway lines and drainage ditches, its breath the mist that spills down into the valley at dawn, curling around the ankles of the early workers like a tired cat, and while he talks I notice the way his knuckles are swollen, the skin stretched shiny over the joints, cartilage worn down by years of gutting fish, the osteocytes in the bone sending their mute complaints through the lacunae, tiny telegrams of pain, and I think of how even this is part of the same slow unfolding, molecules wearing out, hands stiffening, ideas hardening into habits, the way the woman at the corner stall keeps arranging her turnips in the same spiral pattern, year after year, as if to mimic the twist of galaxies or the double helix of some stubborn peasant gene that refuses to be modern, that insists on simple soups and rough bread and the old stories told in kitchens smelling of cabbage and damp wool, and in these kitchens there is sometimes a radio murmuring in the background, thin music, snatches of news about distant capitals where others argue about foundations and freedoms, but here the real question of foundations is whether the floorboards will hold another winter, whether the nails have rusted through, whether the joists are being nibbled by invisible jaws, and freedom is something about choosing which stall to visit first, whether to spend the last coins on onions or cheap tobacco, on candles or a small tin of sardines, the oil glistening under the weak bulb as if it were some precious distillation of sunlight smuggled in from warmer latitudes, and through all of this the mind shuffles, staggers, tries to keep its balance on the slippery stones of the alley of Snuffisch, where the snow turns to slush and then to a sheet of ice and then back again, depending on the mood of the cloud herd passing overhead, each cloud a slow, ruminant beast chewing on currents of air and the fumes of chimneys, and sometimes in the evening when the shops are closing and the shutters come down with hollow metallic sighs, I walk past the statue in the square, the one they erected for the Reformer with the stern nose and the unreadable eyes, pigeons sitting on his shoulders like unpersuaded arguments, rain streaking his bronze cheeks in ruined tears, and I wonder whether he too once stood in a narrow room somewhere, thinking about freedom as he chewed on a crust of bread and wiped his fingers on his trousers, the crumbs falling like small failed projects to the floor where the mice of unintended consequences snatched them up, and my breath fogs in the cold air, each exhalation a brief ghost, a small white cloud born from the warm damp of my lungs, the alveoli collapsing and inflating like tiny forgotten churches, their walls only a single cell thick, fragile and diligent, oxygen slipping across into the blood where it binds to iron atoms in haemoglobin, the whole body a caravan of red, moving, always moving, even as I stand still in the square and the years creep around me like fog, and there is a moment, or perhaps there are countless such moments stacked on top of one another like plates in a cheap café, when the town sounds grow faint, the shouting by the tram stop and the clatter of crates and the bark of dogs and the distant whistle from the factory yard all dim as if someone has closed a heavy door, and I can hear only the slow thunder of my own heart in its bony chamber, valves opening and closing, muscle fibres contracting in obedient synchrony, and for a second it feels as if the whole elaborate edifice of market and church and bookshop and butcher and fish stall and tramline and river and cloud is hanging by that rhythm, tick, tock, systole, diastole, and then the rhythm skips, just once, a little stumble, a missed beat, and everything wavers at the edges, the outlines of the buildings blurring as if seen through water, the cobbles tilting slightly, the statue bending toward me with a creak of bronze and forgotten demands, and the taste of iron rises in my mouth, metallic and thin, and the air feels suddenly thick as porridge, it will not go down, the diaphragm pulls and pulls and the lungs fill only halfway, and in that half I see all the little creatures running in panic across the collapsing scaffold of particles, the quarks scuttling for cover, the electrons abandoning their orbits like frightened birds leaving a tree cut for timber, and a name comes to mind, some old name picked up long ago from a cracked page in the library of Weltschmerz Gasse, perhaps it is the name of a town or a painter or a forgotten saint of the organic worldview, I cannot tell, it shivers on the tongue and then slips away as the square drifts backward, the sky tipping forward, grey and heavy and full of unasked questions, and the last breath rattles like a loose stone in a tin bowl, not heroic, not tragic, just another small weather event in the restless climate of this town where the mind has wandered for so long, where the stalls will open again tomorrow or next year or in a century, and onions will still be peeled and fish gutted and cheap bread broken, and someone will stand where I stood, under the leaning tower of Relevance, squinting up at the clouds and wondering, vaguely, pointlessly, beautifully, what any of it was ever for 

Chapter 14 

I keep talking because if I stop the bottle might notice me and then the whole packed universe fizzing in that crooked green glass in the corner of the room will tip sideways and drag the mice and the bed and the loose floorboards and the entire damp city with its leaning tramlines and the smell of cabbage from Frau Möller’s pan into some tight singular point that hums like a trapped bee, so I go on naming things, piling them up like sandbags against a flood, saying to myself under my breath Aurora Marburg, Kleinmarktgasse, the alabaster hinge of the east, the pale stair up to the attic of St Giuletta, Pfitzner the radish seller, the black canal behind the copperworks, the sack of potatoes sweating in the stairwell, the cracked fingernail of the sky over Braubachstrasse when the clouds shear in late afternoon, and the mice, grey as unripe figs, line up along the skirting board and listen, their whiskers twitching like little accelerators of dust, while in the bottle three billion galaxies rotate around a seed of silence and every star inside it sheds photons that seep out of the glass as a faint lemon glow and cling to my ceiling where gardens sprout among mould stains and in one corner an upside down saint is being swallowed by a fish that has my mother’s eyes and my father’s tired shoes still tied neatly, and I remind myself that I will never sell it, not to Zarendorf with his pockets full of tall thin notes smelling of ironed linen, not to Frau Kirchner from the auction house who once leaned close and said I could eat meat every day if I let her take it away, not to the distant voice of the Bank of Europa that arrives sometimes in the radio hiss and murmurs about infinite credit, non terminating sequences of figures blooming on cold screens, because the bottle is the only pulse that is not yet counted, the last lump of the world that has refused interest, and my own pulse answers it, seventy, eighty, ninety beats when the trams shriek past and the city’s nervous system fires and I imagine every sodium streetlamp as a neuron and every alleyway as a synapse flinging rain and footsteps from end to end, and then, without warning, it becomes winter again, it always becomes winter without permission, snow arriving as if some invisible hand had scraped the sky with a blunt knife, the flakes fat and directionless over the roof of the old Heiligenberger brewery, over the boarded door of the Kunsthalle where they once showed pictures of flayed pears and singing iron, over the shoulders of the girl across the courtyard who is maybe stepping out of her dress behind the cracked curtain, though I do not look, or I tell myself I do not look, only catch the ghost of movement in the reflection of the bottle, a pale suggestion where two surfaces meet and separate like membranes in mitosis, the cytoplasm of the air thick with cooking steam and the sweet, almost rotten smell of onions, and while her fabric slides in some other coordinate system my mind is elsewhere, in the swirling of electrons around hypothetical nuclei that are also tiny bells tolling in the corridors of the Leibnizschule, in the story Meister Blum told about the invisible city under the paving slabs where every discarded thought goes to seed, growing roots of copper wire and branches of cracked porcelain, and somewhere between those roots is painting another impossible fruit whose rind is the skin of my own left hand, rash blooming on the knuckles in red constellations that itch exactly where the Milky Way curves across the dusty glass, and I think, in a brief precise way that feels like a pin pushed into cork, that my epidermis is an observatory wall, keratin domes, sweat glands as tiny telescopes, then drift again into naming, always naming, saying to the mice look, here is the list, here are the coordinates of my refusal, the reasons why I will not take a single coin for that trembling bottle in the corner, and I reel them off like half remembered saints’ days, like small obscene prayers under the breath, Meister Klotz the wooden leg who offered me a gold watch for it one night near the slaughterhouse, Madame Odrada who promised a passage on a ship or a procuress deal, slaughterhouse pudenda, the rise and fall, the rise and fall, my salt tears, the paper hanging in the window of the junk shop on Hufengasse with the printed words RATIONAL ACQUISITION in three languages and a drawing of two hands exchanging a cube of light, the men from the Directorate with their white gloves and their smell of photographic chemicals who arrived once during a storm and stood in my doorway and spoke of preservation, of cultural assets, of secure vaults beneath the river, and somehow their faces were already overlaid in my mind with the faces of angels in the bottle, angular, indifferent, each iris a slowly turning machine, and in one of those machine eyes I swear I saw a fragment of haywain rolling across a plain made of chewing gum and cigarette ends, with tiny figures copulating with broken violins and plucked geese, and such images shake the marrow in my bones so that I feel my vertebrae as beads on a string, little fossils clicking when I bend to stir the pot on my single ring stove, peas and cabbage again, always peas and cabbage, fibre passing through the long intestine in patient peristaltic waves, microvilli extracting whatever thin sugars they can, and the mice listening to my stomach gurgle as if it were a prophetic drum, while outside the sky over Niederkirchnerplatz turns the colour of dirty milk and the pigeons behave like badly programmed automata, walking little square paths in the frost, and time, which in respectable houses proceeds in sensible minutes, here comes in flurries, in backwards leaps, in long stretches where I stare at the condensation on the window and every droplet contains a tiny reflection of my face, multiplied, smudged, a congregation of witness heads watching as I turn again to the bottle and mutter that the wavefunction of the entire inside must be collapsing and uncollapsing constantly, every instant an experiment, every glance from my retina a mild violence, thirty trillion rods and cones eating photons like hot bread, sending electrical gossip along optic nerves that smell, in my imagination, of scorched sugar, until somewhere behind the eyes a miniature committee sits in the dark and decides what to call reality, and that committee, I tell the mice, that committee is the true parliament, not the shouting men in the distant Reichshaus, and if I were to hand over the bottle to any dealer from the list, to Carminius from the Brückentor or old Stadler with his ledger of sins, that committee would dissolve, the bottle’s inner parliaments would be replaced by the one that sends troops and invoices, and the mice nod as if they understand, or perhaps they are only sniffing for crumbs of bread, or perhaps the bottle itself, in which entire mountain ranges rise and crumble in the thickness of an afternoon, has begun to project tiny gravitational whispers that tug at their whiskers, so that they sit closer and closer to the green halo, and on some days I am sure that their fur is speckled with starlight when they dart back into their hole, and on those days the girl across the way is only a shadow passing her window, an eclipse in a cheap cotton shift, the faint line of her spine hooking my peripheral vision like a fishing lure, 

Chapter 15 

and my blood responds, quick flood through the capillaries, pressure against the inside of skin, but I shove that aside, I stack it with the other forbidden questions, the ones about why my hands tremble when someone says my name in the stairwell, why my dreams smell of sawdust and rosewater, and return instead to my catalogues, to the sacred enumeration that keeps the city upright, saying Jakobusstrasse, Passagenhof, the statue of the armless boy behind the pharmacy, Professor Lauda’s ink stained fingers, the blue bruise on my left thigh shaped like a map of the Holy Roman Empire, the discarded lottery ticket that blew against my ankle last Thursday and whispered all its losing numbers in a voice like my grandmother’s, the rusty key that appeared one morning in the sink with no explanation, the chicken liver sizzling in Herr Brechtel’s pan downstairs sending its metallic perfume up through the cracks, the feel of a single grain of salt between forefinger and thumb magnified under my mental microscope until it becomes a mountain range of transparent knives, and through all this the bottle sits patient, sweating a faint mist in summer, crusted with rime in winter, its interior expanding and contracting as if the multitudes inside were breathing with my own diaphragm, which continues its mechanical rise and fall even when my mind is off in other districts, wandering the colonnades of imaginary academies where I lecture to rows of attentive mice about the ontology of cobblestones and the moral status of gravy, while chalk diagrams behind me show parabolas made of sausages and integrals crawling with worms, and at some point the lecture spills into prophecy, it always does, I begin to speak of the end, of a time when the angels in the bottle will lean their many elbows against the inner glass and push, hard, all at once, and the surface tension of existence will snap like a string too tightly wound, so that everything in here will trade places with everything in there, the mice will find themselves squeaking in vacuum between asteroids shaped like old loaves of bread, the trams will circulate inside the veins of a giant dressed in frescoes, the girl across the courtyard, whether clothed or half slipping from her clothes or wrapped only in a towel that smells of cheap soap, will become a constellation on somebody else’s ceiling while creatures crawl out of the cracks in my own, and me, I will stand in the centre with my saucepan and my stubborn refusal and say no, no, I will not sell, not now, not when the sky is already bargaining with itself, cloud fronts offering rain in exchange for thunder, not when each snowflake is engraved with a clause and each raindrop contains the face of a collector, no, I will keep stirring these peas, watching them soften, watching the steam rise and blur the edges of the bottle, because if I ever allowed the world to buy itself back from me the bargain would be irreversible and there would be no more lists, no more rambling inventories to offload the weight of days, just a dull smooth surface where once names scuttled, so I go on, mouth dry, tongue thick with the ashes of unspoken bargains, murmuring Rostheimerplatz, the iron footbridge, the box of yellowing invoices labelled Geistige Güter in Herr Stadler’s cellar, the cracked heel of my own foot, the callus like a small continent, the sound of pigs being driven at dawn along the riverbank, hooves slapping mud in odd polyrhythms that might be the heartbeat of a larger creature dozing below the city, the smoky sourness of cheap schnapps on the breath of the man who tried to buy the bottle with a joke about destiny, the moment I saw, reflected in the curved glass, not my face but a mask with no mouth at all, just a smooth expanse of skin where speaking should be, and I understood then, or thought I did for a second before it slipped away, that the bottle had never been mine to sell, that I was only its temporary cough or orgasm flux , its brief stammer of refusal in a long sequence of attempts, and the mice crept closer, and one of them, bolder, ran a circle around the base three times as if tracing an orbit, leaving tiny footprints in dust and black shit pellets that when I squinted looked exactly like a row of letters spelling out a name I almost recognised, a name from some old lecture or some thick grey book about reason and history and the way art dies and does not die, and perhaps that is why, when night comes down like a stage curtain painted with murderous thunderstorms and the bottle’s glow is the only light left in the room, I lie awake listening to the murmur of all those inner worlds still refusing to collapse into a single final answer, and I promise the dark once again that I will not betray them, that I will go on naming and stirring and breathing as long as my cartilage holds and my blood cells ferry their little red loads along their vascular tracks, as long as there is cabbage to chop and cheap bread to chew and mice to lecture and snow to melt on windowsills, because somewhere in that endless, absurd recital the true shape of the thing is hiding and curled, a sleeping animal at the bottom of the bottle, and I am not yet ready, no, not yet, to let anyone crack the glass and wake it