I was just in the kitchen of a stately, clean, organized apartment – even the foosball or kicker table was beer bottle free – shared by about 7 or so mostly students in Leipzig Germany, in the East of that once divided country, standing, talking to a prospective environmental engineer about time. How was your week?

I hadn’t been in Germany in a while. My new book, a collection of short stories, Hotel Stories, yes this is a plug, it will be available in February, begins in Germany. I actually wrote the first story there, living with a bombshell blonde (a blondeshell) philosopher, in Berlin. [When we got into fights I would annoy her by reading from Emerson, his “illogic” would drive her wacky]. I was visiting a friend of mine, the painter A, who has a studio in Leipzig, where there is an international art scene centered around the great contemporary artist, Neo Rauch (who I think I’ll blog about sometime here), among others.

I was reading a biography of Heidegger on the train going into Leipzig, the 9:00am train that arrived in the station for me to get on at 9:00am, and I was finally beginning to understand Phenomenology, a philosophical movement of the early 20th Century that leads into Heidegger. Quickly, and with my new understanding vivid, it says that the way you experience something in your consciousness is the experience and the event to be analyzed, you don’t have to ask yourself what actually is happening. (That might not be exactly right, and I don’t really agree with it, but it’s nice to have a hook to hang a word on that I’ve often read but never could grasp before). Staring outside the train window watching the beautifully designed energy-providing windmills, kindof like modernized, formalized, cleaned-up Giacometti stick figures, facing front, and nature rhythmically working their up reaching arms with its breath, until the last figure away at the end of the array, was practically still, I did let the feeling of a “phenomenon” rush me.

Heidegger wrote about time and history, and about dasein or “being there” as it was translated to me on this trip, although I don’t think Heidegger liked that definition. I had a short time in Leipzig considering the long time it took to get there (about half of which is just getting to JFK airport in NYC). There was something good about that tho, as I was explaining in the kitchen, it was like a frame around time, highlighting it. We have more control over time than we think, and considering what an eternal strange and powerful enigma time is, that’s pretty cool. For example we can waste it. And there’s no need to worry about the by-products of the waste. There are no time landfills.

My friend A met the girl with three noses at a party. She has similar hair to my ex-German girlfriend, all a mess of blonde fluffy snakes but pushed up and held together by subterfuge and centrifuge, and she had sewn in three false noses into her hair especially for the party. She was the only one I met to mention “the history” of Germany, when she was talking about a lecture she attended about the meaning of home. Maybe it was the Gluehwein (hot wine punch), or the orderly traditional daily holiday present giving that the roommates had devised and even roped my friend into participating in, but the girl with three noses inspired me to make up my own old German folk proverb, which I’ve roughly worded in English as follows.

We need three noses; one to sniff the past, one to snort the present, and one to smell what’s ahead.