und das folgende gieß

Nicht die vollkommende Leere. Laut a certain free, democratic, (non-academic!!) online platform, χύμα or χημεία (Ancient Greek Khemeu) becomes the Arabic al-kīmiyā, later the medieaval French alchymia / alquemie, and finally alchemy. You know, transmutation: The serious attempt to turn one base thing into another more noble thing. Typically one imagines old men with beards rather than young women. Both have glittering eyes. It’s a kind of magic, as dear old Freddy once said. This magic takes place in secret, performed with great seriousness. It rarely works out as planned. An earnest form of dreaming, tinkering with the dark arts involves getting black fingers and struggling. All sorts of elements are brought into play, from all kinds of systems. Rain sticks and zink dips, sizzling bacon fat and strips of skin / Flowers, swollen, rotted, bursting / Bugs held aloft, suspended. One highly coveted secret document suggests the following recipe: Take one part Yin and one of Yanta, smash that plate with this to create a new continent, mix carefully, allowing early C4 based Miocenal fauna (dragon blood trees are preferred) to merge with our puffy present. Titrate. Vessels result that speak for themselves and as houses for other more temporary beings : dying presents for our dying eyes, staged in a slower, industrial time that might still turn to rust if you just add water. Unsure whether they should be being looked at directly, the cry of “Vanitas!” echoes through hollow forms, turning into a song which vibrates our fleshy vessels. It’s transcient, leaving the things behind to return to Plato’s realm of forms. This domain no longer pure, the forms tremble, uncertainly becoming certain as you squint. It’s hard to focus on your own impending demise when you have to take the decline of our entire species into account on a daily basis, yet, at the end of the day you still have to get your shit together, put on a radiant scarf and look the others in the eye. Stride into the future with solid deicisons in your portfolio. Neat placements. Precise statements. Details for highly trained minds to savour and consume. Hold it. Before we swagger off into the sunset, it’s not all hubble bubble toil and trouble, you know. There’s an analytic, scienctific side to all this too, of course! We read the instructions before assembling. What do you think this is? We know that the pot became the vase rather than the other way around. Of course! Objects to preserve useful things become objects to preserve decoration only once you get comfortable. You can sculpt in your underpants, but somebody somewhere had to make them pants first. Never in the history of mankind did a potter spin pots in the desert until they all got dry and cracked up together, swallowed by sands. There’s no fossils of that, quote unquote. So you stand there with your hand on your hip in your little studio, a vessel full of warm salty water, contemplating another vessel to be filled with cold, clear water if you want it to stage flowers. But when you take the flowers out, wilted and sad, the dead water is lukewarm and salty too. Your fingers trail in the sink while there on the table the vessel stands, statua. But now it looks weird. So you decorate that too. Of course! To show off your skills, to raise a smile, to get those arrangements just right on the next level up. To forget about your fingers in the warm ichor, to forget that you and the dead plant shared a moment. And then, if you did it right, them vessels get coveted, remember? They raise prices. Inconcievably they travel on junks and galleons, coming to rest sealed in climate controlled vaults whilst simultaneously vibrating from the pages of websites and nicely bound books worldwide. Who knew? Who patterned that? Who got the patent? And as the forms proliferate, standardise - winding up as a McDonalds wallprint, an IKEA classic, a Powerpoint slide, your dust rides the stratosphere. So what’s it all about? This whole thing is just so damn strange. But for this moment we can drink together and maybe even dance in the dark, illuminated by our distant relatives.