Waking, naked, today, feeling my body about me like a little collection of apples (bright; bruiseable; subject to time's arbitrary sweetening, softening, drying, rotting trends), for a disarming moment I couldn't place my consciousness: where was its seat, this morning, as the sky paled and brightened blueward following the set of a big whole moon whose night had been punctuated in the middle by an hour of starry dark? My heart yawned, its vacuum drawing the question in and annihilating it. Here I am, here I am, in the hollow at my core – which flickers back and forth between being a broken grief-pit and a happily vibrating shaivist emptiness. Rising, then, wincing to rediscover the pain of my right ankle, which I turned yesterday on the ice, I remembered, just before my cousin's voice began speaking into the telephone downstairs, that I was in Vienna.
I've been here two days, having played the poor post-soviet card in order to cook up funds through an EU program to come for a conference. It's good to be with cousin X, to share briefly in her brilliant world. Yesterday in the early afternoon we heard a performance of one of the string quintets, K. 515: ecstasy, nasaputaspandana, the Europe-dream somehow transmuted into Bhairavi/Bhairava, or cosmic laughter like in that Milan Kundera book. Tonight she wants to take me out to eat at a lamb/rakia place she likes. She courts me with her city; I resist, but not without pleasure.