Karoline von Günderrode, Orchestra, and Soft Peach Trees

Today I read about Karoline von Günderrode, a German Romantic poet of extraordinary talent who died at twenty-six—
a woman who drove a dagger into her own chest by the riverbank.

Wasn’t she afraid? What on earth could have outweighed her fear? Betrayal of a beloved one?

Or simply impatient, pushed by something I don’t have a name for?

Extreme acts. Extreme tools. The extreme ending of a romance.

I start by imagining her hair style.
It couldn’t have been an elegant updo.
But maybe… who knows?

Erika in The Piano Teacher wore her hair pinned neatly in an updo.
Madness carried out with elegance is… incredibly breathtaking.

Very dangerous. Like an orchestra.

Did Karoline von Günderrode do the same?
Sweep her hair back, put on a muted silk blouse, tuck a dagger into a handbag.
But—did women even carry handbags then?
Did she wrap the knife in a towel on her way to the riverbank?

She must have been certain.
Her heart, like the dagger, neither hot nor cold.

Women betrayed by love.
Women with pinned-up hair.
Women who love through letters.
Why am I so drawn to them?

I’m tired of writing overly philosophical, self-destructive sentences.
There are already too many of those in anyone’s head.

What I want now is something raw. Immediate.
Goodbye to sentences that linger like passing lovers.

I will write only sentences like scorpions—alive, missing limbs, unflinching.
It doesn’t matter if no one reads them.

Today, boredom made me imagine my own death.
Maybe because of the story of a woman whose name I can’t spell.
Trying to define feelings or trace their origins feels pointless.
The origin of emotion is a contradiction.
Emotions have no roots, no legs.

No hydroponics. No ghungroo anklets.

History exists, yes—
but only as rings to be tasted.

(I despise when people use the term “roots” to refer to the history. Roots feel far too rigidly vertical.)

And the strange thing is: only those who have touched the bottom of emotion can call them rings.

Or those who grew up watching it nourish.

Otherwise, they’re just wrinkles.
Wrinkles to be smoothed with cold cream.
Praising no shadow—only light.

What lies at the end of light?
A brighter light?
Soft peach trees?
Or a darkness like black coffee?

I don’t even like iced black coffee, yet here I am, drinking it as I write.
Cappuccinos in small cups cool too quickly—and they’re expensive.
Neither hot nor cold.
I’m still afraid of dying.
Especially since the black coffee here, in this café where I sit, tastes perfectly fine—even with ice.