Hammerspace: Double Vision

An artist-writer, artist-psychotherapist, artist-professional-dreamer, artist-CGI-worker and artist-video- gamer were asked to reflect on the sensation of space. Is it possible to get lost or to lose oneself intentionally? Text as solvent of the self. ‘I’ have not disappeared, ‘I’ am permeating the text, but am shattered, bent out of shape. Kaleidoscopic subject: ‘I’ am everywhere. Narcissistic- paranoid tendencies or monstrous empathy? Particles of the reading subject blow through the text like grains of dust, adhering to the corners, slits and concavities. Sanding edges, expanding gaps. There is grinding and rustling. Flaubertian phobia of silting. An amateur scholar adrift in an ocean of sheets. Osmotic pressure. What remains of a Rembrandt torn into four equal pieces and flushed down the toilet? The reading subject is flushed. Polluting the text, being polluted in turn. A watermill to wet her petals. And now, dear reader, for your intellectual toilet, here is a little piece of soap. Turning corners in slippery corridors, swift-footed. She has long abandoned laboring to remember the read. Words and sentences later; a catalyst, a musical or cinematic cue, a focus lens. Visitations. Glancing through the spy hole, the hallway, pre-space, deliciously round. Starring eyes of the intruder, large and horse-like. Violent desire to wash one’s hands. Slipping from words to meanings with a lucid inebriety, effervescence, an iridescent ebullition, coming out on the other side cleaner. Earworms tap their little feat, singling out and circling in on bits of phrases seemingly arbitrarily. Ventriloquism. She is a vessel. Other winds rush along. Receives her in a rhythm she didn’t know she missed. Warmth spreads from the mind to the senses. – Anna R. Winder Understanding the way someone’s mind works or, more precisely, understanding someone’s reality is important, especially in psychotherapy. It is essential to remember that we often use the term reality to describe ‘one truth’ or an ‘objective truth’. Without wanting to get too philosophical: that isn’t the case, or at least not in psychotherapy. My starting point to understanding someone’s reality is often a conversation. Communication or rather the way we communicate is a way of presenting our own reality to others and/or comparing realities with others. When realities align understanding, empathy, friendships, kindness etc. are formed. When realities don’t align we are often confused, flabbergasted, uninterested, interested, doubtful, mean, aggressive, etc.. While trying to understand other realities, I pretend to be a detective. For me, it is easiest to start with a specific event or problem. What would I have seen if someone had filmed the situation? How is the person involved describing what happened? What language are they using? How would their best friend and/or their worst enemy have acted in or described the same situation? How did the situation make the person feel? What evaluation lead to this emotion? What experiences are the basis for making these assumptions (and so on...)? The space that opens in my mind is usually filled by pictures and still lives, small scenes and words. While seeing these images, I cannot receive any visual inputs from my own surroundings. It feels like the scenes running in my head overtake all my visual capabilities. Something that might come close to a physical representation of the space that opens in my mind while thinking about other minds is similar to an amphitheater. Or a smart board/interactive display used in an early 2000 crime drama series like Bones. I don’t think it’s possible to fully understand anybody’s reality. We are not blank pages and are not capable of letting go of our own experiences and realities. These will always influence how we perceive anything. Even other realities. – bunny-turtle A step is a step is a step is a step. A steps distance does not abide to the laws of reality, a hundred little ones could be not more than an inch. One step backwards sends you tumbling down the wall of a ruin, in a motion somewhere in between Gandalf’s fall into the depths of Khazad-Dûm and the Loituma Leek Spin - eternity in a split second. Maybe falling outside of dreams is the same sensation? But you wouldn’t end up in the Egyptian underworld, rows and rows of dead bodies in a giant Ikea shelf stacked up to infinity, in all directions. I peek out and see the x and y axis disappearing into a distant fog. Z must be the same, just obstructed by the piles of dead bodies. A figure lamenting about being in the right place, the relation of time and space and one’s place in eternity. Or I end up on a motionless beach, quite the opposite to the foamy place-of-origin Le Guin paints in my mind. In dim light, cloudy mist denying any identification of time and space, I barely notice the movement of the waves around my ankles. The area loses itself in a fog (of war) in all directions, similar to the one before. Here’s a cloaked figure, hip-deep in water. They are crouching over, a piercing look over the shoulder, through an eye hole in a skull mask, reading again from a book. This time-space around inaudibly, tho. Next one is Lindisfarne before the assault, but it somehow looks like Böcklin’s Toteninsel. The tourist ferry passes the scenery and we go overboard. I am swimming towards the island, not really moving on the water, feeling cold seaweed stroking my belly. In panic I am constantly checking for the faces of the Dead Marshes that I somehow expect to be there. – Professional Dreamer Das Bewegen im 3D Raum fühlt sich an, wie ich mir das Gefühl beim Übersetzen von literarischen Texten vorstelle. Eine absolute Kamera, in einem nicht kontinuierlichen Raum, die ein Bild sucht. So wie das zu entstehende Bild von dem 3D Raum bedingt ist, ist die Übersetzung an die Bedeutung des Originals geknüpft und muss gleichzeitig die Anforderungen der Sprache des zielsprachlichen Textes erfüllen. Beim Übersetzen kann es also nur Kompromisse geben. Und die Gefühle, die beim Bewegen und beim Übersetzen entstehen, sind die des Verhandelns. Immersion entsteht vielleicht dann, wenn man die Wörter tun lässt, was sie wollen. – Fabian Heitzhausen Heartbeat syncing the global cooldown‘s clock, breath held, the hunchback‘s miserable fourteen inches of diagonal awareness stalk toward its justice bearing prey of light. The target‘s gruelling mitigation abilities forebode the micro- contractions looming with each surely disappointing swing. Go for garrote. Nothing. Another opportunity dies in a viscous soup of aimless entropy. I see Edward twitching around the fourteenth inch of space, an obscenity blurting balloon still stuck to the half rotten mug he calls his face, frozen in drift. Fuck! Do we share this hell or is it mine? The rectangular tunnel starts to dilate as the crouched spine rectifies into a backward slump. With a neck now bent across the backrest, I stare into my overhung receptors and those thick flakes of snow behind the glass, a sinking cone of bright. It‘s a scorcher out here and I should‘ve left the Vale a lifetime ago. I love the pit but this.. I catch my breath under the thuds of the rage vein, rolling tremors from temple to temple. Pearls of sweat busting between my naked back and the fabric of this prison, a red suede slipper chair. If the bleed took effect before the scene souped up and if we do share this mangled time.. If their time is right and it‘s just mine that‘s fucked. I‘m done for. If not... I slam to the floor and get buried by an arabesque of hectic red numbers. Tectonic impact fading out through me, indecipherably. The affair appears to have rubber banded back into place, but bears no resemblance to the one we left. Gavinrad, the fool we were about to gank, zaps out of the picture. The lag triggered time warp slung him from the grid like a cosmic trebuchet. Instead it‘s Garroshchad squatting over my steaming carcass, jeering at me with his hideous rose colored plate boots and cockroach shoulder pads. What a far fetched guy. The shiftless brain of a gastropod, entombed in a dashing, low-poly rubenesque meat suit. He seems to have snuffed out my midnight petroleum in a fanciful deluge of grief, seeping a tranquilizing gauze. Clenching my butt at the gods and this ping; deep down I reckon neither could‘ve slaked those strikes. I drink it in, unplugging all but one sizzling tendon from the control panel. Severed umbilical cords now dangling alongside the contortion atonement form. One last corpse run before the bed bugs bite. If, if, if, I‘ll... Edward‘s beguiling pink whispers slice into my fading consciousness like a dead-man‘s handle. Soothing, dulling howls of the spirit world, lacerated by a chirping racket on the window sill. He can stay longer after all. His parents are out of town and the folks he was about to join in the storming of the Belgrade National Assembly turned out to be all talk. It‘s spring and we‘re going Stratholme. – Jones Hall