Don’t

… music will do it. It will get you over seven years of waiting for a phone call that will never come, increase the intensity of your feelings at least for the time of the piece you are listening to, drag you out of misery or draw you in, it will detach you from reality and make you plunge into great excitement, bring out an energy of your body you would never have, make you run two miles more, swing you through fear, free your brain and get you over panic. Music will interrupt your anger or carry you away. It will saturate you with a melody or drive you mad with a sound you can’t get out of your mind. Music will make you write better or make you write worse. It will improve poetry or it will kill it. Music will sharpen your thoughts. It will carry you through a movie, music will carry the movie. Music will get into your system through plugs in your ears, it will isolate you from the rest of the world and give you the concentration you need in the middle of a crowd. Music will inspire you inside your mother’s womb and smoothen the trauma of your birth. It will make you believe that it is only written for you, penetrate your body and make you feel glorious or tragic. Music will make you adapt to its rhythm. It will make you smile or cry. It will transform your car into a sound box and harass the people on the sidewalk or it will seduce them, it will drive you through the city, accompany you through the fields, the forest or over the mountains. Music will transcend you and transcend whatever you are looking at. Silence might too. Silence.

A doctor in a green coat places the top of a vibrating stick as long as a match on my skull. Do. Re. Mi. Fa. So. La. Si. Do. Acoustic acupuncture. The vibration should lead into my brain and expel the traumatic memories of my body. Beethoven couldn’t do that. Could he. The alphabet. The musicality of language. The rhythm of words. Letters. The letter. The spot. The very high note. G. The very-difficult-to-attain. The center of the universe. The seemingly-unreachable. Certainly not easy to hit. But nothing precious is.

1965. Lohengrin. Second row in the Vienna Opera house. I can only stick to my seat through the three hours of the Richard Wagner opera because I am bewitched by the Eau de Cologne of my neighbor who has invited me. Amber. Pharmacia Santa Maria Novella. Years later I will try to find the same perfume in Florence. I will fail. The preciseness of a scent in our memory can never fit the reality. But I will find something similar. As for my friend he offered me his flask. I still have it. He was the leanest man I’ve ever met. Red haired, sophisticated, decadent, homosexual and inspired. Curator of the Photo Department at a Museum in New York. He committed suicide jumping out the window of a skyscraper a few years later. Some people cross your life for the shortest possible time and have an eternal impact on you. Often we understand only much later for what reason, sometimes we don’t. There are no rules for anything. Are there.

I was stopped one day in Rome by the sound of a chorus that transgressed the gates of a monastery. Forbidden territory. Nuns in retreat. Overly high female voices were reciting a litany in an eccentric rhythm over and over again, endlessly. They seemed to talk themselves into ecstasy. I have never heard anything more spiritual. The voice, the thing that comes from inside as if it were an external element, detached from yourself. Like a stranger body. The intimate instrument. Like the guitar of John Mac Laughlin when he played us into magic, late at night after his concert, with Al Cook, a blues musician and John Marshall, the drummer of Soft Machine, at a jam session in Vienna, 1975, into the spectacular time-space-land which comes from nowhere. Into the momentum of grace. When you just stand there and listen. And listen. And become an immaterial being, a composition of vibrating particles of sound yourself. When you are transcended. When you float in universal clear-cut purity. Only music can do that. Anchor itself not only into your memory but into your system so profoundly. Can’t it. And love.

Marina Faust, 2003

1992/There is no such thing as coïncidence

SOS Medecin 47 07 77 77. Call Pagnotta. Elise 43 54 93 52. Tel. M. Margiela. Martin Margiela. Drink. Elise. Flore. 11h. We used to meet there on Sundays. 21h . Heini. Monday. Jean Weinfeld. The constructor of Bauhaus string instruments. Very lovely old man. He told me that he enjoyed his cholera attacks. They accompanied him for 30 years. Three day fever deliriums. He also told me that he did not understand how ignorant he had been towards his Arab neighbors in Israel, when he was there at the time, an idealistic young man in his twenties. He regrets. He is very lonely. He will commit suicide in a few months. I was not a good enough friend to him. The Blue Elephant. 47 00 42 00. Bad food. Buddhist Temple. Kayndrong. I don’t remember what I was looking for. Music ? Reels on Wheels. VHS renting. They have a good choice, all films in original language and they deliver. Mon Oncle and My beautiful Laundrette. Valentines Day. I must have hoped for something. Marta 1304 / 314. My grandmother’s phone number. Dakin. 38°. 39°. Tonto. The older one of my two cats. Tel. M. Pagnotta. Prince. 17h30. Margiela. 12h. Pancakes. My boyfriend is from California. He makes great pancakes. Sometimes he fails. Then they are terrible but nobody dares telling him. He is very touchy. Vienna. My father’s 80th birthday. He is 90 now. Daughters of the Dust. Nice title. What is it ? Lettre à Duras. Dr. Villiers. Vétérinaire. Tonto must not be doing well. Mons. Lombard 39638723. My banker is in the hospital. Heart attack. He was a friendly and generous man. He survives this time but dies a few years later. I have always had good relations with bankers. Fundamental. They like artists. It changes them from the everyday. Moshe Feldenkreis. Functional integration. Awareness through movement. I never tried. Cesky Krumlov. I will photograph it. One of the castles of the Schwarzenberg family in Czechoslovakia, today the Czech Republic. The Schwarzenbergs, a leading aristocratic familiy in the Habsburg monarchie. Prince Schwarzenberg will receive me in the most overwhelming 17th and 18th century private libraries I’ve ever seen. Besides the one of my father. But that’s different. I saw Cesky Krumlov under water on TV not long ago. Flood. Prince. Pagnotta. Again ? Redundant. South Coast Air Management District. Diamond Bar. 714 396 32 41. I want to go there. Sounds like a bar in an American movie. California. Diner. Lynch and Donuts. Print Margiela. Tuberculinum. Hochreith. The Wittgenstein family house by Josef Hoffman. I will photograph it. It overlooks the most beautiful green and mysterious valley. I do imagine it inspired Ludwig. Michel Cluzel. Best chocolate in the world. It is fabricated in Normandy. Social Security NR Re-Entry permit. My US papers. Tuberculinum. Always on Sundays. Lightweight Patagonia LW Synchilla Cardigan. Large. 25360 cobalt 020.  New York City. Undoubtfully. Vaison La Romaine. Double page, blank. Vacation with the family. I took my two cats. Tonto is old. He will not last very long. I want him to smell nature once more. He was born in Tuscany. I thought the south of France could do it. I think it did. August 14th. Tonto dies. I still miss him sometimes. He was the wisest cat I’ve ever met. Eleven four-leaf clovers are glued on a page. I wonder who gave them to me. I never ever found one single four-leaf clover in my life. I never will. I do not have that talent. Bad Aussee. Hotel Erzherzog Johann. 6152/25070. Frau Mayer. The Austrian countryside. It is like in the Bilderbuch. My boyfriend calls it Disneyland. In the very early morning around 6:30 am, before shooting the house of an actor living there, I swim in a pool with a few ladies and gentlemen who are all between 81 and 93 years old. Swimming seems to conserve. We overlook the majestic Austrian mountains from the pool. I am in trance. It is quite extraordinary. For a moment I forget where I am. But the memories come back fast and I remember the man who many years ago, while I was on a holiday there with friends,  stood up in a restaurant and showed us proudly his hand with the missing finger he had lost for the Fuehrer. Gretl Stonborough. Cécile Sjoegren. Funny. I have the whole Wittgenstein family in my agenda. The only one I know is Cécile. We were in school together. I haven’t seen her since 35 years. She became very pretty and graceful. No, there is also Katharina. Hervé et Marie- Séverine. 1h de trajet. Mariage. Call Reels on Wheels. Atsuo Kato. The man whom I met on a train from Viareggio to Paris in 1982 and who had all the photo equipment in his travel bag that I needed after having lost mine in a gigantic wave while sleeping on the beach two days before. He had it ready for me. He wanted to go back to Japan lighter and sold me everything for nothing, including a macro lens which will change my work in the future. He came from heaven. There is no such thing as coincidence. We still correspond and he follows my carreer closely. He is always the first one who will announce me what Chinese year we will be in.  L’Autre Journal. Marina Mahler 42 56 20 14 2017. I never met her. I’m always intrigued by other Marinas. Fumaroli. L’Etat Culturel. Livre de poche. Marcel. Marcel is my father. I probably got it for him. L’Autre Journal. Baudrillard. Viva. 703 821 31 44 or 202 955 22 74. She is the girl with whom my boyfriend will be tempted while I am in Vienna taking care of my sick mother. I will never forgive him. Boltanski. Auditorium. MAM. ARC. 19h. Brown skirt wool mom. Not my handwriting. Baudrillard. Menagerie de Verre. Martin Margiela. Defilée. Martin and his assistants are painting dots and stripes on the women for the show while people outside are out of their mind, they are too many, they can’t get in. Metro station St. Martin. We are all under ground, hundreds of white candles are waiting to be lit. Later we will nearly suffocate with candle smoke. Papier Nr.2 Nr.3. 1L Neutol. 1L Fix. Oh, no that was 91. I keep it for the reason of literary logistics. It reminds me the scene in Fellini’s Satyricon when they open up the catacombs and all the frescoes disappear in a few seconds because of the temperature shock. Leinsdorf NY. He was a good friend of my father and a wonderful conductor. One of the best interpretations of Mahler’s first symphony. Olympus Stylus. Great camera but fragile. Carlton longs. Advil. Conditioner. Shampoo. Thomas Muffins. Granola. Dr. Bronners Almond soap. Kiehl’s. When I come back from New York I remind myself of the refugees from Russia arriving in Vienna in 1968. Each of them had thirty boxes and twenty suitcases. The only thing I do not do is kissing the soil. However that’s over. We get anything anywhere now. Don’t we. Avoriaz. 9-16/1/93. I will ski again after fifteen if not twenty years. It is going fine but a friend next to me on a chair lift which is moving over a huge valley is freaking out and I decide to jump off at the last moment before it is so deep that I will kill myself. I fall on ice and am lucky to only twist my wrist. Eupat Perf 9CH Phosph Acid 9CH Arsenic Album 9CH. Romeo Gigli. The New Yorker. Gena Brown. La Suite Lyrique. Marcel. Another book for my father. Apis Mel 9CH. I must be tired. The year is nearly over. Tel. Marta. I loved my grandmother. She was a wonderful, strong and very independent woman.  I did not understand at that time how important she had been to me. Tam Tam. Einstein on the Beach. On Gilgamesh. Diletta. Lolek Photo send NY. Call SNCF. Reels on Wheels. Tel. Hervé et Marie- Sévérine. 13h. Brunch. The New Museum. Fax Elise. No price. 18h30. Robert Fleck. Jeu de Paume. 47 03 12 50.

Marina Faust, 2002