Well-Kept Ruins

I remember, is this what you call remembering?

- Hélène Cixous

Walking briskly, our Stroll takes us past the Dom, we don't go into the cathedral, nor the cloister, now left and left again to the corner where through a window we see the tombs in the pretty garden of roses and tombs-all archbishops-old tombs eternally young garden roses don't count the centuries, peace slumbers here, a little dream in time’s strict enclosure, instead we walk a hundred metres further along the square, immense, as usual, an esplanade vast as a ream of white paper champing at the bit for the lines and signs to be set down, we'll come back, let's keep moving along the Hegerstrasse we'll be back, past the Hegertor, at the same brisk pace, as if we're in a rush, Mama, as if she knows where we are going, advances with the firm gait of her sturdy shoes, I don’t know how to say this in German, this is a word for my mother, a word with go and god, something martial, that knows our destination, ‘it’s as lovely as ever’ we think, a sentence that shows our state of mind and in the air, something uplifting, a breath of wind that seems by definition to be part of the City, part of Every City, yet we don’t expect such beauty in a geographically chilly Hanoverian city historically watered by a few rivers of blood and streams of tears like my mother's genealogy that it be full of flowers and beautiful up above is a sign, each time this sentence pops up, it is our whole human condition that, with a sigh, we are reminded of, hence this is the same sun that shone on the ramparts in the Iliad, Canto 3, of which I speak, the morning when I arose softly weeping, writes Helen the White of Hand, in a dream in which I watched myself weave a great piece of fabric on which I would depict the battles between the horse people of Troy and the bronze-