Wind-Blown Time

Sometimes it seems that time itself is life. A kind of wind that blows past and transforms everything.
The greatest happiness is perhaps this kind of early-summer breeze: you feel the mild air on your skin, you see leaves and twigs stirring, this time that keeps brushing past you and with benevolent slowness transforms the world, people, spirits, animals and everything we carry inside, not necessarily for the better, but the transformation seems to happen slowly, and that alone is already the consolation.

I am glad to have escaped, for a moment, the tornadoes of these last months, the whirlwinds in which the sheer mass of time condenses and develops unimaginable forces. With unheard-of violence it hurls life about, inner and outer worlds can barely be told apart any more, and the acceleration, so hard to grasp, takes away the breath you need to reflect. Writing is out of the question.

Which brings us to this letter, which finally forces me to stop this whirl with all my strength and to untangle the most important things in the early-summer morning breeze.

I don't know whether you have seen it yet.
Whether I would have embarked on the project, had I known what was coming, is far from certain. From the dark winter months of last year deep into this spring, together with my collaborators I reconceived, rewrote and redesigned the website zohner.com from the ground up.

What ran for many years on WordPress (the website) and Ghost content-management systems, on databases spread across servers mostly in the USA, is now a site written entirely in HTML. No database, no plug-ins, no complications; HTML is pure text. Every page is one (static, that is, not generated at the moment you call it up) page. The shop system is tailor-made: a book, for example, can now be ordered with a single click, completely securely, through a European payment provider (instead of Stripe or PayPal in the USA) (try it here!), and course enrolments work at the push of a button.

Despite the sheer scale of it, the project has been worth it: the new site has countless advantages. It is infinitely fast, it needs no technical updates (WordPress, for example, brought out an update every few months, on top of the thirty plugins that constantly wanted updating), which cuts the technical upkeep by 95%. It is modular: a new production, a new course, a new book: they simply become a new page. Search engines find everything, at once. It is fully trilingual D/I/E. And, another sensational giant step: blog and newsletter are completely integrated into the site: every letter becomes a blog post, and this is then sent to the subscribers. No more separation between website and blog, no more separation between blog and newsletter. The Travel Mates programme, through which Travel Mates can take part in my projects and support them, is anchored in the new site as well.

The whole thing runs on a server in Germany, with a second one in Finland that looks after security and backup and restricts access to the systems through various tunnels and firewalls, so that only certain computers with certain keys can get in.

As Pippi Longstocking puts it so beautifully: I have never tried that before, so I am completely sure I can do it!

A few years ago I walked from Venice to St Petersburg. Hard storms of time have swept across Europe since and dug it over. Kaliningrad has long ceased to be a place you can simply wander through, and across the bridge over the river Narva, which links Narva in Estonia with Ivangorod in Russia, you can still get across, on foot, though only by day (then again: who would want to march into Russia at night), and after hours of queueing in no-man's-land. Here is the summer reading: The Rediscovery of the Amber Road (in German and Italian; the English edition is in the making).

One minute on the courseIn three weeks the new intensive course in creative writing begins in Lugano! If Italian is your language, or you write Italian well: a few places are still free. Enchanting surroundings, intense creative work.

For everyone interested in writing, my people and I have prepared a gift. In Italian first, the German version is in the works: Il Quaderno. You tell me what you dream of writing, and I send you a tailor-made writing exercise; you send me your text, and you get feedback from me. Free of charge, naturally. The Italian version is ready, the German one is coming shortly, and if there is demand, we’ll prepare the English one, too. A little moment of patience, please. Besides work, all of this needs … time.

The Shoal, Stratford. Photo: MZIn May: London. Together with my brother and my friend Adel I had been registered for the Hackney Half Marathon for more than a year. But even before leaving for England I knew that my knee would not allow me to start. In spite of it, or because of it: a wonderful week in London: exhibitions, theatre, long conversations.

I tell my Travel Mates about Giacometti in the Tanks of Tate Modern, about Tracey Emin's A Second Life and Abbas Zahedi's sound installation Begin Again, in which the building itself becomes an instrument, about Hurvin Anderson's painting at Tate Britain. With beautiful pictures, of course.

Belgium, in June: a heated discussion with a colleague around the question: are all opinions worth the same? We properly clashed; I voiced an opinion and defended it, and his answer, again and again, was: Yes, that is your opinion. But that doesn't mean by a long way that it's right. There are many different opinions on the subject! And so on. I have rarely got so hot under the collar in a discussion. How do you see it?

This week I experienced a sensational concert here in Lugano: the Brazilian artivist Bia Ferreira gave a glimpse into her musical work, into her life as an artist and Militant Anti-racist. Power, beauty, love, and her fight for something better than what the Lordships of the moment are trying to serve us. Your silence is part of the violence.
If you can get hold of her anywhere, get yourself a ticket and go and hear her!

Sad, cold and dreary, though, was the concert hall that captured this at once fragile and combative creature for a moment. It was not even a hall: it was the inner courtyard of Lugano's notorious LAC, en plein air. LAC, in this case, comes from the Sanskrit lākṣā (लाक्षा). It mutates into the Prakrit and later Hindi word lākh, wanders into Persian as lāk, into Arabic as lakk, surfaces in medieval Latin as lacca and is adopted by Italian, famously a minor dialect of Latin, as lacca. And that is exactly what the place was like: concreted over, sealed, every breath of nature smothered. Not a blade of grass; not even a ground elder, a field bindweed or a horsetail finds a crack to escape the dark. Into the middle of this lacquered desert of horror lands this angel of the Igreja Lesbiteriana, the lesbyterian church, and with almost unbelievable voice and virtuosity she sings of love, of the necessity of tenderness and of the smile capable of saving a human life. As always, the words and the songs were so much larger and stronger than the walls surrounding them, walls that will collapse anyway, before the last note has faded.

New Caledonia.Our friends of the Baccalà Theatre came back at the end of May from a short guest tour of New Caledonia. I had to go and look first: New Caledonia is almost exactly at the other end of the world, farther still than Australia and more lost than New Zealand.

Pss Pss, Théâtre des Lucioles, Avignon.Yesterday their three-week run at the Festival Off in Avignon began. If you happen to be anywhere in the south of France: their piece Pss Pss runs until 25 July at the Théâtre des Lucioles, every evening at 8.15pm.

Perhaps time really is life, and nothing else. All this transformation, which sometimes arrives as a breath, as a breeze, and then as a whirlwind, these winds that change everything, are what we perceive as life. Or better: time is the multiplier of life. Is it a variable, as far as our perception of living goes? Certainly. And if we set it to zero, the equation collapses.

Have a beautiful summer, see you soon at the theatre!

Markus
Lugano, July 2026