The text originally belongs to two different multi-channel video installations. The video-works and the text is under revision.

The order and probability of the text is random or accidental.

I have been traveling in Tlön, Uqbar and Orbis Tertius, where I, as a member of the priests collegium, was a judge at the lottery of Babylon. I got lost in the library of Babel, searching for The Book long after it was found. At the universities in Ambrosia and Münich, I have been studying the geometry of fantastic literature, and mythological angst in the Eleatic aphorisms, but it has lead me nowhere. I can remember every crack of the walls of the Adobes, but I can not remember what brought me there.

In the beginning of my journeys, I only had to close my eyes, and the most magnificent images, tastes and sounds would reveal for me.

Two years ago it was wonderful, I had only to close my eyes, and my head was humming like a beehive. I saw faces, trees, houses, a Japanese woman from Kamaishi bathing naked in a tub, a dead russian whose innards were slowly being drained through a gaping hole in his stomach. I rediscovered the taste of couscous, the oily smell filling the streets of Burgos around dinner time, the smell of fennel from Tetuan, the whistling of greek goatherds. I was moved. That feeling has vanished.

Some one is looking for me again. Soon there won’t be anywhere left to hide. I think I will start to record a diary.

In this village, there is a long street passing all the way through. It is probably coming from far away, but for all I know it starts in the outskirts of the village. If you walk all the way out there you will see nothing but cornfields. Just before the cornfields is the last building taller than three stories before the next village. That is where I live. I don’t have anything particular to do. Earlier I would have been reading, studying God knows what fascinating subject. Knowledge and my shoes are all about vanity. Every morning I put them on and walk through the village to the last building taller than three stories before the next village. On my way I salute the ones I meet, I know most of them, they respect me. I own two buildings taller than three stories, miles of cornfields; I have a beautiful wife, younger mistresses and good shoes. I guess I will have to leave soon.

I do not need to do anything these days, and I have all this spare time that I may or might fill. I have searched, found, and will soon have too leave it again.

I have come and gone.Over and over. I do not know neither why or where. I only know there was nothing to tell. I have been gone for a while, and I will not go back for a long time. If ever. I dont even know what back there may or might be. The places I have been, I do not know the name of. And the people I have known, I do not know anymore. I have felt connected, but I have always had to move on. I am neither the master of my destiny nor its executor, I only coincide.

Thus the beast lives unhistorically, for it gets up in the present like a number without any odd fraction left over; it does not know how to play a part, hides nothing, and appears in each moment exactly and entirely what it is. Thus a beast can be nothing other than honest. By contrast, the human being resists the large and ever increasing burden of the past, which pushes him down or bows him over. It makes his way difficult, like an invisible and dark burden which he can for appearances' sake even deny, and which he is only too happy to deny in his interactions with his peers in order to awaken their envy. Thus, it moves him, as if he remembered a lost paradise, to see the grazing herd or, something more closely familiar, the child, which does not yet have a past to deny and plays in blissful blindness between the fences of the past and the future. Nonetheless this game must be set up for the child. He will be summoned all too soon out of his forgetfulness. For he learns to understand the expression "It was," that password with which struggle, suffering, and weariness come over human beings, so as to remind him what his existence basically is--a never completed past tense. If death finally brings the longed for forgetting, it nevertheless thereby destroys present existence and thus impresses its seal on the knowledge that existence is only an uninterrupted living in the past [Gewesensein], something which exists for the purpose of self-denial, self-destruction, and self-contradiction.

...like a garden with dividing paths branching in and out through a fractal pattern in a monstrous complexity which in certain moments may give a feel of clarity before the whiff of a most logical period kicks sand in your eyes...

The one whom travels for a long time through desolate areas, will be be longing for a city. Finally he arrives in Isadora, a city where one manufacture exquisite binoculars and violins, where the stranger, when he wavers between two women, always finds a third, where the cock fights escalates into bloody feuds between the spectators. All of this he was contemplating when he was longing for a city, with a difference. The city he was dreaming about contained him as a young man; in Isadora he arrives when he is old. At the square there is a low brick wall where the aging men sits, watching the younglings pass; he himself sits there among them. His lust and longing has already turned to memories.

Tor Markussen has seen all that is worth seeing, he has traveled to Tlön, Uqbar and Orbis Tertius, he has made love to every woman worth making love to, and he has never owned a thing. He does not obey the laws and limits we deem as our natural boundaries. He will never return, not because of his grandeur, but because what was, does not apply to him anymore. He operates on a complexity of levels with a precision beyond. My reality may be but one of a perpetual series of possibilities in his realm, and may or might exists in mine as one of many possibilities.

Soon someone will find me, someone who can tell me where I am going, or what I am seeking. If I am lucky, it is someone coming to continue my Quest in my place. I am longing for the day I can rest, recording my diaries while waiting.

In Rebar there was a man whom was always sitting by the chess-tables, waiting for an opponent. He sat in the sun, every day, and seldom did anyone sit down to play. That did not seem to worry him. He was studying the shadows from the trees surrounding the square, never leaving until the sun set.
The days when winds from the ocean arrived, I usually sat down for a game. We seldom looked at each other and never spoke during the game. If we for some reason did not finish, he would remember the arrangement of the pieces until I wanted to continue.
From my neighbor I was told about when he was a musician. He was highly regarded and rewarded by his listeners. He had apprentices coming from all over, but he wanted control over the elements in silence and noise and started studying to create a universal system, which was supposed to explain all the possible variations, and possibilities from which music was to be created.
After years and years over he had perfected a system, which included all that, his ears were able to perceive, and started composing new music, which overwhelmed his audience.
Shortly after he retired and started playing chess. He did not understand the tactics and won every time.

And he'd developed his own theories about magic too - that magic was a language, a way of understanding and manipulating power, and that as techniques, physics or political rhetoric’s were no more or less magical than the occult simply because they were couched in rational terms. |