iamdoing

There are birds singing, but I don’t know if they are real or a recording. More people walk left-to-right than right-to-left. If I am looking are the people doing something? Do they need to look at me to be doing something? The people passing, pass. Is this doing nothing – to report? Not many people seem to care with their eyes. Of course I am not -ing’-ing anything when I am writing I am writing and I’m trying to do that quickly to catch up with what might be being done.

More people have bags than not. I am not hidden, but I am not on the catwalk. I am lower down than the people walking past, sat on a marble floor, opposite a shop: Amsterdam, Toronto, Milan, Los Angeles, Warschau. None of this feels present. People who look down at this page do not seem to mind especially – maybe they thought it was a drawing, which they would have minded more. I hear the birds again. I am doing hearing, they are doing singing. If it is they. If I am looking they are being written.

I look at my watch. 14:42.

The train is coming, the train is coming, the train is coming.
The pen is held, the writing is written, the page is standing, the block note is leaning, my hand is holding, the ink is sinking.
The train is coming, the train is coming, the train is coming.
The suitcase is standing, the suitcase is leaning, the suitcase is seated.
Close to where the suitcase is sitting, the sitter is standing, the concrete is sitting, the station is leaning, the people are waiting.
The train is coming, the train is coming, the train is coming.
The pen is going, the nose is dripping, the drop is rolling, the fluid is falling, the fallen is sinking, the ink is spreading.
Thinking of the coming, the people start shuffling, the sitter starts wobbling, the station stops leaning, the suitcase is waiting.
The train is coming, the train is coming, the train is coming.
The writing keeps keeping. I’m writing the seeing, I’m citing the seeing, I’m see-citing. The train is coming, the train is coming, the train is coming.
The people who are waiting look at where it’s coming. Nobody is seeing what has all the time been coming. And nothing is yet coming. They are looking at the becoming.
In their looking at what is coming, my writing is becoming.
The suitcase is waiting, the suitcase is waiting, the suitcase is waiting.

I am not. I enter H&M observing myself. I observe that my right eye, is observing  the other customers, and my left eye is observing the cloths and goodies in the store just like any other customer. There is a continuous touching and letting go. Hands touching cloths and then letting go, touch & let go, touch & let go, and so on. There is a continuous sound of metal clicking on metal as the women and girls pull cloth hangers out of racks and then place them back . What is touched most are all things red. I take the stairs, very deliberately searching for the baby department. I observe in my mind that there are things that my eyes want to see and very deliberately seek out. They want to see very certain things and I observe that when they see them, I feel a certain satisfaction when they absorb these images. A shop attendant comes over to me asking what I am doing? I am writing and that made her suspicious. I explain the exercise. She’s o.k. with what I am doing. She’s a bit curious even, but for me it’s hard to be observing myself and writing and talking and explaining what I am doing and looking at cloths and people at the same time.  I come from an almost well to do family in Indonesia. 30 years ago there was a trend of women wearing fake jewelry and trying to get them to pass as real diamonds or whatever. Sometimes they had copies made of their real jewelry and would wear the fake ones on parties, while the real ones were kept safe in a safe; this was a trend related to the first trend, …but significantly different in nature. But in both the jewelry functioned like chamber, antechamber and the outside. What I see happening in H&M and outside of H&M, lets say the Albert Hein, is completely different: women and girls wearing rocks of glass as though they are 10 carat diamonds. Now, this fake jewelry is in no way meant to deceive people in thinking that they are real. A cashier in Albert Hein flashing her bling in front of my eyes does not convince me of  her social power, nor has she that ambition, but she does take pleasure out of her bling, and that is what it is about for her. Maybe she is aware that play and pretend are much more fun than having to really live the highly political lives of the bearers of giant diamonds and rubies.  In the 1990’s I lived in China for 1 year and it seemed to me that in the whole of China there was not a single mirror to be found (of course there were a few, I am exaggerating here). I lived in Guangzhou, which is 3 hours away from Hongkong, and once you crossed the border to Hongkong there were mirrors everywhere. The women in China felt miserable. I am not trying to say that the lack of mirrors caused this unhappiness, or I am not quite trying to say that. All I know is that a teacher who lived through the cultural revolution once said to me that she so desperately longed to put on lipstick, that she and some other girls would gladly risk a death sentence in order to feel pretty just once.