| I
zap between India, Discovery Channel and Channel 4, big yellow dumpers,
some with caterpillar treads, gigantic machines created for bed-rock
and cracked concrete. I freeze the picture and focus on the microphone.
...the feeling that the CNN news reporter, with puffs and blows, is
conveying an aesthetic attitude instead of a picture of human beings
standing in a mass of mud up to their ankles. The TV-set informs about
Palm Olive, hellicopters are whipping around the shards in the river
of mud. Con- sciousness turns to simple equations. The hard disc has
been rotating for 7200 x 60 x 24 x 356 x 3 years, the number is relative.
I imagine a fixed point of the outer edge of the disc and opt for
making it a starting- point for the extension of a median in space.
The radius of the disc x 3,14 x 11103782400 rotating laps, gives me
the distance to the snarled hair of the Indian Yogi, or the thought
of his view of time in relation to mine. ... I drive a car through
Los Angeles, five lanes in each direction, sometimes in three directions
as the highway branches off towards the sea. To the left, in a silver
coloured Buick, a lady wearing a glossy wig. A family of afro- american
origin travels in the car ahead of mine. In the rear view mirror a
wall of glass hedged in by decorative palm-trees. ... I wander through
the holy rooms of the Aztecs, pyramides, palimpsests, rock-paintings,
spray-painted impressions of hands, clothes in rags, the normal conduct
of nature, clothes given colour by the muddled slime of the seas of
mud, the resolution of the digital camera, the atmospheric dis- turbances
of the satellite transmission, the defective intallation of the antenna,
the flicker of the kinescope, the breathing of the TV-reporter. My
concentration rests together with Thelonius Monk and CNN in a tender
blues. |
"Got a cigarette?". Fear
gives the answer. "Hu-uh, no, I don¥t smoke!", two, three meters,
a second afterwards, ten meters behind my back, in third persion,
"Get out of ma face, nigger!".
The washing machine throbs
in a stupid rythm. The T-shirt impresses with its eagles and stuff,
its intensity has been retained through 18 x 56 minus an average
of 10 washes, lets say, for the sake of simplicity, 800 washes x
about thirty litres of water. My frames of reference rather con-
cern experience, when information "snaps", glides with a break from
one stature into another. My T-shirt in relation to the impression
of ten or a thousand cubic volumes of dirty water that has been
trickled through a whiteheaded eagle with stars in his beak.
|
Maybe
the problem is located closer to myself, what is acceptably neat,
or when can I think that my home is not, if you excuse the expression,
filthy? My consciousness transgresses from a slumbering, subliminal
state. A dead cat under the book-shelf, something that calls on my
attention. Like cutting one¥s nails, something that is not re- flected
upon but suddenly performed. ...The hard disc rotates under constant
progress or is it all about the context? Things are related to each
other and informations are balanced to become tangible. There are
two simple ways of handling the problem. One logical, maybe mathematical
attitude, and one non-logical. Some people think that to clean the
house every saturday afternoon is a concrete way of keeping the problem
at distance, others suddenly spot a dead cat under the bookshelf,
sort of give a jump out of surprise. - To be sure, yester- day there
was no cat there! The relation between what´s important and what´s
unimportant is a con- sciousness impossible to judge. I save all e-mail
in maps, a procedure that seems to keep away the agony of making decisions.
Conceal the important information. Some maps remain empty, while the
IN-map is filled with stuff to work over with remarks, measures to
be taken... An absolute level of abstraction is automatically created
through one¥s always being present in a constant reframing of events,
telephone calls and meetings. After the summer the presence of the
contents of the current events map will feel strangely drifting. My
unconscious movement between the "snapping" impressions is negatively
affected by the smell of too old, unpasteurized milk. |