Pardon my German

A rat in the snow. On this Berlin street, a freezed rat. The thing and the idea of it, all at once. The dead animal on the snowy ground, sprinkled with icy dots; a black sign on a white page.

I stop to look at it. And now I’m on a plane, looking down at the fallen postcard. A black and white photograph on the blue carpet, like a little door in the sky.

In the book from which the Bauhaus postcard (showing Oskar Schlemmer’s abstract dancers) fell, George Steiner speaks about the Post-Word world we’re living in. He’s saying this from a place called 1989, and now I’m opening the little door in the sky under my feet and entering the corridor that begins at this precise point in time. I’m with Steiner distrusting all those Freudian excesses of explanation, but, anyway, I surrealistically enter the little Bauhaus rectangle where a postcard used to be and fall through a vertical corridor made of nothing but language. It’s not unlike dancing.

It’s not unlike those Berlin underpasses where the walls are full of ripped-up words revealing yet more words underneath. “Je est un autre”, famously wrote Rimbaud. “I is an/other”, tentatively translates Steiner. And I’m on a train to Porto, and our car has no electricity; when we get to a tunnel, everything becomes so absolutely dark and quiet it’s like we’re flying inside our heads. As we come out of it, the light is sharper than ever — and on this luminescent page, it comes back to me. Wrapped in that black-and-white language called German, a dead rat.