Hoarfrost, Early and Figurative

On Saturday and on Sunday morning I was in a rather fabulous mood, which turned into what I used to consider an 'emo' mood.

It has kept up, although during the middle of the day I felt briefly cheerful, and so this evening I listened to the aria "Lascia chi's pianga" by Georg Friedrich Handel. Montserrat Caballé fudges a few of the transitions between notes, or so I think, but for the clarity and brilliance of her tones I like her performance [YouTube] a lot. The less said about the piano accompaniment from a compositional point of view, the better; there has to be a more original and striking arrangement.

In a similar vein, I looked up the lyrics in Wikipedia and found that they're tedious in the more popular version. An earlier version, however, by Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili, sounded pretty good to me:

Lascia la spina, cogli la rosa;
tu vai cercando il tuo dolor.
Canuta brina per mano ascosa,
giungerà quando nol crede il cuor.

In roughly translated English: 'Leave the thorn and cull the rose; you seek out your pain. Hoarfrost through a hidden hand will come when the heart least expects it.'

Lascia ch'io pianga [Wikipedia]

Anyway, I need to 'wind down' and go to sleep. To sound narcissistic, in the age of video calls at the workplace, amongst all the other, more important symptoms of stress, one can't help but notice if one's facial skin is in bad condition from lack of sleep.

The Second Coming (of Black Friday)

This morning, or this afternoon, I looked out the window and saw a green-leaf tree that was beginning to have clusters of golden leaves on its branches, and realized that I haven't been outside in maybe two weeks and that's why I didn't notice it before.

The past week has been stressful at work, but far more stressful for other colleagues than for me. I was just vaguely thinking of William Butler Yeats's verses:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

In the peaceful and happy microcosm of our company, it hasn't become too bad. But there are a few personnel changes, comings and goings, difficult decisions, and strikings out of people to avoid stress. Also, there is a lot of work that seems to have been suspended in the first ominous lull of the worldwide coronavirus quarantines, then restarted and accelerated as businesses try to catch up in the Christmas season to compensate for their previous economic losses and inactivity.

Of course there is also the maelstrom abroad of the US election, where the ineptitude and lack of character of the president do determine the tone of international politics; the ongoing suffering from the virus; the troubles in Belarus and the refugee camps of Greece and elsewhere; the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the shifting face of the US Supreme Court and its interpretation of the American constitution; ...

What I've been doing lately on my microcosmic plane of existence is waking up at 10 a.m. or later (or, as was the case today, earlier), then working until 1 p.m. — the company lunchtime — and taking 10 minutes to an hour to find food. But often I am still finishing my breakfast oats at lunch, because once or twice I've been so stressed that I've lost my appetite or other times I'm too busy to eat.

Then I resume working with full concentration until around 7:15 p.m., and other times still have so much to do then that I don't lose concentration then either. And as the evening news comes on for Berlin at 7:30 p.m. and Germany nationwide at 8 p.m., I listen in while doing more work, sometimes taking a break to eat or chat.

After that I watch Miss Fisher's Mysteries or an early Agatha Christie's Poirot episode or another Agatha Christie adaptation (Death on the Nile with Sir Peter Ustinov) or Dr. House out of the corner of my eye while doing more work. But on Monday I interrupted my work almost totally to watch the Emmys television awards.

Then, generally after 9 p.m., I pack up my laptop. I might exercise with YouTube videos. Then I might watch cooking or book reviews, and read news and opinions in Twitter, the Guardian and Facebook. Then I read ebooks to wind down.

Lately I've been able to sleep soon after I go to bed, although this might be after 2 a.m. But last night I did have trouble going to sleep again.

A few of my colleagues, however, are also working half or full days on Saturdays.

*

That said, I always go into what I call a 'Marxist-Leninist' phase at this time of year. The way I see it 50 retailers, all in tooth-and-claw competition to survive alongside each other and the Death-Star-like Amazon, sell the same cheap or expensive, thoughtless and aesthetically shoddy items.

These items mean millions of acres of logged forest that makes way for fields, mass agriculture, indentured servitude or regular low wages, slaughtered animals whose skin is used for leather, oil wells and tar sands. The way they are manufactured means the death of small agriculture, the death of traditional fabrication techniques and design and artwork (homemade or professional) that existed for centuries before the Industrial Age and certainly before the age of the assembly line, and also the death of the very expensive and refined craftsmanship that likely kept at a peak in the 17th through 20th centuries.

The consumers who buy the products are rarely going to cherish and keep them, and then they end up in heaps on the sidewalks like I've often seen in Berlin, or thrown in the landfill. Or the items are dumped directly in landfills by the retailers if they are still unsold at the end of the season, to keep up profit margins by artificially keeping the items rare.

Black Friday season is like an annual punch in the face. I have an income, health insurance, wonderful colleagues, and the consciousness of my employer's ultimate aim of reducing this consumer frenzy a little, which makes it better.

But the thought occurs again and again, why don't I finally do something to 'square the circle' and bring forth something good? And this year, rather masochistically: doesn't it make sense that I suffer emotionally and physically a little if I am in this sometimes good, often horrible industry?

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

An Interlude in an Italian Restaurant

Yesterday evening Te. and I cycled to eastern Berlin where our office is. The trees are still very green, but lacings of linden leaf-petals are curling along the edges of the sidewalks, and elsewhere I've seen chestnuts and acorns scattered along the chestnuts. As it was Friday, the customary madness had set in, and we were amongst scores of hipsters who had gathered to sit in front of restaurants, throng at the waterfronts, ride bicycles along the infernal car gridlock of Skalitzer Straße (where a red ambulance, a fire ladder truck, and a white-and-blue police van managed to squeeze past the compact cars and BVG public transit bus), walk hand-in-hand in parks, drink and socialize. We rattled along under the mildly grubby, postered and graffiti'd classical-style plaster façades and sett stones of Friedrichshain, bypassed the Rigaer Straße regions, and found the Italian restaurant.

We were meeting a former colleague, our manager, for the first time in person since he left the company. I sat down at the golden, lacquered table underneath the awning and ignored the red-tasseled menu for the present to look at the tree with splashes of gold (like sunlight), the beige-yellow house façade, the red-and-black-brick church that was very 19th century and oddly rural for this city district, and the dipping long tail of a magpie that swooped in silhouette beyond it. The sky was blue and the clouds wispy and few, the temperature milder than it has often been lately. To. came striding up very soon after, and Te. came back out to the table, and we had a lovely meal and conversation.

I was wound up tensely as a jack-in-a-box after what have frankly been awful-and-partly-wonderful-but-as-mentioned-also-awful weeks at work.

But by the time my pizza with its thin pieces of eggplant, crinkly champignon mushroom, wine-flavored artichoke, and grainy parmesan had been dissected and eaten, and we had talked about tons of topics — babies, bicycle lanes that had popped up during the coronavirus era, soccer, Israeli elections, Netflix, .... — I began to feel relaxed and happy again. He also talked of his partner and his family, we talked about our brothers and mother too. It was nice to glimpse the larger circle of people whom he cares for, and to know that some things are turning out very well, as we wish for him.

I naïvely said that I hadn't seen many signs of the economic depression that had been predicted as a consequence of the coronavirus. He set me straight by pointing out that people he knew had lost their jobs, and that sectors of the population would have trouble finding their first job or regaining a last job before retirement. It was a reminder that I and my colleagues are exceptionally lucky to be employed and paid well.

To a degree, I still think that I have a small right to be unhappy with how things are going, at present, in the company for which I work. But there are of course so many bright spots in it as well. I hope that finding safe ways to meet with colleagues and others again will cheer me up. My social distancing was less rigid for a while. But then I realized that even if I do not catch the coronavirus or become ill from it, being quarantined and forcing everyone I've recently spent more than 15 minutes with to suspend their lives likewise, is the type of risk that one needs to think about properly. So that's why I've felt a little tense, too.