Impressions

Impressionistic paintings are very nice. Everyday impressions, on the other hand are like Koans.
My favorite impression from a few weeks ago was, when my dog ran straight into a parked mountain-bike because he was watching another dog. This was a real exciting live Zen lesson.
This is what we do all the time. Sometimes we are really distracted by looking at things but most of the time it is our thoughts that interfere with the here and now.
Today I walked the dog through Bauernbergpark. At the lower end of Rosseggerstraße there is a junction with a traffic light. When I arrived there, another man was waiting on the other side for the lights to turn green. He almost missed it because he was so concentrated on his mobile phone, writing a message. So my dog is not the only one.
Myself, I keep running into these bikes very often. I have learnt to avoid that but I struggle to keep up the discipline.
There are many impressions on a single day. We keep passing through little moments in other peoples lives, as Pirsig used to say. It makes me feel tired.
I have to meditate.
Good night.

The Return of the Bauernbergpark Man

He is back. He has moved his sleeping bag to the pavilion. Of course I am too much of a coward to ask him where he has been and that I am glad to have him back.
However, it is a bad time to return. Winter is coming. It will not be his first winter in the park, though.
I am back in my warm office, but I shudder. He is still out there, maybe feeling warm.
This is a strange world, indeed.

Junker

Although you might expect something else, Junker is a young Austrian white wine. Nothing else.
I have just dined exclusively well, I might say. Some beef with vegetables  and noodles, accompanied by two glasses of Junker and followed by a "whitie" which is a brownie with white chocolate. I did all this in my favorite restaurant and had a chat there about Bruno Latour and about Kopenhagen.
I have a fresh haircut and I discussed psychology with an Austrian, a Japanese and a Kosvar this afternoon.
I should be rather happy.
However, I am confused, and I have good reasons for it.
It is the dynamics of life that cannot be beaten by a single Junker or two.
Sadness and darkness on one side, hope and joy on the other side. The tension is sometimes unbearable.
So maybe tonight I will order another Junker and raise my glass to the Bauernbergpark Man.
He is definitely gone.
He is a symbol for me, a symbol of ambivalence, a legend and a sad thing nevertheless. Maybe the statue of Pan on the lower edge of Bauernbergpark is also a statue to him.
I am drifting away, as so often.
Today it is only the fault of the Junker.

Order

As soon as we give it a name, it looses its innocence.
As soon as we apply a metaphor it looses its universality.
As soon as we squeeze reality into the tight concept of an order it becomes an abstraction, a model a caricature.

Still some of us believe in an order out there for sheer comfort.
There is order if you keep on looking for it, but even the nice low entropic crystals have tiny faults in their structure.
Order is death. Order is the end of time.

However, we are the representatives of order and complexity.
Therefore we not only incorporate it, but we
also make it wherever we can.

In the end it is an illusion, a ghost in the all-encompassing flow of eternity.

Sometimes it is all we can cling to.
Sometimes it strangles us.

And chaos?
I do not know much about it.
Therefore I keep quiet and tidy up my desk.

That is all I can do.

More of Autumn

The leaves have fallen. Most of them have fallen to the ground. First they were bright yellow and brown. Now all of them are wet from the rain and have acquired a uniform dirty brown color.
I still do not know where the Bauernbergpark Man has gone to. Even the last tiny heap of gravel that he had left on a rock next to the street is gone.
Sometimes, when I walk past one of his favorite park benches I think I can smell the wet clothes of the Man.
However, he is gone.
This autumn I have been close to the Grim Reaper myself, not because I was close to death, but because of someone else I know. Although his vicinity has some ugly aspects, such as the uniform dirty brown of the fallen leaves, it is also something peaceful and quiet, that he promises beyond this ugliness.
So that's what autumn is. And if the Man has left his autumn behind somehow, I know that he is somewhere, where he does not have to cry, where he does not need to shiver from the cold or run around screaming like a maniac.
Still, sometimes because of his absence, I wonder if the sun will rise tomorrow. Anyway, winter is coming, and the sun can hide behind the clouds for a while.