The animal in my blind spot
Essay by the Berlin-based writer Paul Bokowski
I have this pet. It lives with me. It is a curious creature that spends its days sitting beside my desk, staring at me with a persistence I sometimes envy. It looks up at me pleadingly, waiting for me to give it my attention. A clever animal, it glances sideways at my screen and at the keyboard. And when the cursor stops moving and the keys fall silent, it ventures closer, gently takes my sleeve between its teeth, and tugs me away from the computer and into play.
This pet of mine also has a keen sense of time. It’s especially keen when time’s running out. It’s as though animal and time were connected. As if they were in cahoots and plotting against me. Then it creeps up on me, lures me away or intercepts whenever I briefly step away from urgent matters. It knows how to watch the clock, and how to make me forget it. We romp, wrestle and roughhouse, and by the time I come to my senses, it’s already getting dark. I hurry back to the computer, only to discover that the work has multiplied, that it has spread and grown. And now the emails, texts, and invoices I should have written long ago are have turned into forced apologies and empty promises.
And yet many people are envious of my pet. I understand why. I am deeply grateful to have it. Everything I have ever done well in life, I could have managed on my own, but with it by my side, things came more easily. Many people I meet, people I get to know, assure me that they had one too when they were young. A pet just like mine. Exactly like mine. They praise it and tell me how lucky I am to have held on to it. They gaze at it with such nostalgia and become so melancholy that they fail to hear me when I tell them that an animal like this is also a burden. It never knows when to stop and cares about nothing. It also likes to creep up on me precisely when the cursor finally starts moving. It is all the more likely to grab my sleeve when the keys at last begin to clatter. It tugs at me so insistently that I have to fight back—and far more often than I would like, it gets the better of me.
I tell them: his animal has moods of its own. It comes and disappears like the tides, only less predictably. It has a rhythm that no one can quite fathom. It sometimes disappears, quite often, when I need it the most. I have to wander through my flat, look in every corner, peer into every nook and explore every last hiding place, but it keeps eluding me. You have to look for it in the most inaccessible places and in the most obvious ones. You have to be prepared to leaf through piles of notes, shelves full of books, entire libraries, sketches, albums and galleries, and never despair, not even when you come up empty-handed every time. You must never forget to look in the very last paragraph, either. Not just once, but again and again. And there is something else you should try, even when time seems not to allow it: sit with it, let it stew, sleep on it. Hold on to the hope that it will return of its own accord. It might be right on the tip of your tongue, lurking in your blind spot, just beyond the edge of your vision. Tomorrow, it might be sitting somewhere it wasn’t today. I have this pet. It lives with me. It’s a remarkable creature.
Paul Bokowski lives and works in Berlin. His novel Schlesenburg is now in its third paperback edition with btb Verlag.