after years of trying my mother and I couldn’t establish any kind of friendly relationship with her. When she died seven years later we took over the entire house, however I never shared the house with my mother. My mother didn’t like the house and remained in her village.
When I was fifteen I began to renovate the first floor and worked slowly, room by room. At that time my much older stepbrother occupied the second floor and lived there for a few years.
So, when I was nineteen I finally moved in. The furniture was kept very simple. Just a washing basin, a stone sink, two gas burners for cooking, a big French bed in the middle of the room, wooden shelves on the wall, and that was it. The toilet was outside the apartment, and could be reached across a veranda. This house was to be my sanctuary and my abode of rescue for the next several years.
I had tried to participate in ‘normal’ life, but after a very short time I realized that it made most people deeply unhappy. The crazy philosophers and writers were also not able to point me to a real access to truth and happiness, even though together they had written thousands of books. Where were the facts and the actual reality? Only in the mind? Whose life had really been changed? Where was happiness? Where was the one who understood all this and could explain it? Most of those people whose writings I really loved had ended up in madness over their own mind. The world was still drowning in a permanent swamp of brutality due to wars, armament, and unrestrained exploitation of humans and nature. School had prepared me for many things but not for this cruel and relentless life.
So I then started looking for some other possibilities. I read books about other cultures and traditions that had chosen to live differently, some of which had for instance allowed women to have positions of power or where women influenced the society. I looked extensively into the basic ideas of feminism and ultimately, however, had to realize, after having read and studied countless books, that nobody, but really nobody had the perfect solution for the entire dilemma of the human existence, or could even explain it in a conclusive and verifiable manner. The mind seemed to permanently want to masturbate with itself in order to gain pleasure and satisfaction and thus as a direct consequence remained confined within itself. All of it just didn’t make any sense.
After it was clear that the university studies were not going to happen, I looked for a place to substitute my military service with a civilian service in a school, doing community service for severely disabled children. I let my hair grow even longer and was now dying it red with henna. I met the woman of my dreams; I fell in love with my own utopian imagination of a wild-galloping Amazon with blue eyes who danced barefoot through the city, with bells attached to her bare legs. We failed miserably in our relating after only three months, which was all about wanting to relate but not being able to. The pain of not being able to carry out a true relationship with this world threw me totally off the tracks, once and for all.
I began to fast for longer periods of time so I wouldn’t feel the pain. That made me bulimic. I would overeat three to four times a day and then throw up. I would scurry through the supermarkets in search of food that I hadn’t tasted before. I withdrew more and more. I walked around barefoot; I tied little bells around my legs. I taught myself yoga using a book that a friend had given to me. In the morning and in the evening I would practice yoga exercises for 90 minutes. In the resting pose of sawasana, I was able to escape from the perception of this world and finally feel peace for several minutes at a time. This was a huge relief.
Bulimia really had no connection whatsoever with any kind of weight problem for me. I didn’t even know the word bulimia then, and had no idea that my behavior was actually a clinical disease. Instead, it was a slow self-execution that amounted to gradual suicide. Sexual desire dried up completely. I was staying in my house, isolating myself more and more. I congratulated myself proudly that once again I had managed not to talk over the entire weekend and that I hadn’t had contact with any human being for entire three days. Most of my friendships ended. My best friend of many years prophesized madness for me and begged me urgently to stop reading philosophical books. He could no longer tolerate my life and my growing despair, and he was more concerned about my wellbeing than about his own.
I, on the other hand, could no longer stop it. Incessantly, the wheel kept turning. After the break-up with my wild-galloping Amazon a kind of madness took hold of me, which would later reemerge again and again. I simply had to be on the road. Travel! Run! So then, shortly after my twenty-first birthday, one day before Christmas Eve I took off to southern France, equipped with a sleeping bag and a small backpack. I wanted to walk the distance, barefoot if possible, through Camargue from north to south and visit the gypsy pilgrimage Saint-Marie de la Mer on the Mediterranean. An overnight train brought me to the French city of Arles, where I stood in awe before the house of Van Gogh, which unfortunately was closed. It was early in the morning, the air was cold and foggy. In the city I once again had a ‘feeding frenzy’, then began to walk to the pilgrimage. After a few hours of the hike I realized how crazy the whole thing was. There was no one on the road. I couldn’t see a thing through the dense fog, neither horse nor landscape. Only some blue patch in the sky that would appear now and then accompanied me through the uncomfortable atmosphere. I had a map that was supposed to show the way, but my inner feeling of being lost was overwhelming. I began to sweat and deep anguish and despair built up inside. A black, oppressive and infinite loneliness spread over my heart. In the late afternoon I found a barn to spend the night. I lay down in the hay, looked to the ceiling beams and was grabbed by an irrepressible urge to end my life. The thoughts were racing around in my head and I just wanted to escape this nightmarish loneliness and this feeling of being driven. I don’t know any more how I managed to survive that night. I struggled to remain present and not to give in to the destructive impulses. In the early morning I left the barn and knew that now I could turn back. My ‘goal’ had been achieved for now. I had done what I had to do.
I hitchhiked the rest of the way, arrived at the place of pilgrimage where the three Maries(3) were to be found, in the crypt below the altar room. They would be presented in May in a holy procession, richly adorned and embellished on a ship. Now they were just standing quite un-holy on a simple table, almost like a window decoration, and I couldn’t resist inspecting them more thoroughly. I lifted their robes, looked at all the rosaries, read the countless notes full with inscriptions of gratitude and inspected all the other things that had accumulated over the decades. Upstairs in the church the floors were being cleaned and waxed by industrious women for the Christmas celebration. All of a sudden I found my sense of humor again, and I had to restrain myself from doing something really stupid with the statues.
After that I went to the beach. The entire coast was totally engulfed by fog. One couldn’t even see the water - only the passionless little waves splashing so insignificantly against the shore were visible. I sat down in the sand, shaking my head, overcome by spontaneous joy and had to think of Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days’ (4). A deep and liberating laughter arose suddenly from my throat.
Nothing was happening here. And probably nothing so-called ‘holy’ or special ever happened. The place was empty, filled only with faith, just like me.
I went to the nearest café and bought four croissants, then hopped on the next bus. In the evening of December twenty-fourth I got on the night train back home, moving through the papal city of Avignon, feverish with pre-Christmas shopping.
I adored my work with the severely disabled children. I could understand them although none could speak or express themselves. I couldn’t comprehend the sorrows and awkwardness that these children triggered in most people who got in touch with them or those who avoided contact with them. They lived in a completely different world and we could not really judge their degree of happiness or misery. The work with the children and with my colleagues required a minimal amount of social engagement. In my house, however, I completely lost any kind of control over my eating habits. The toilet bowl was now my place of worship and my truth. Nobody knew or even had the slightest idea about my bulimia. I determined periods of fasting, then overate and threw up. Place and time didn’t matter.
