Ancient Things

Martin Andereggen, Machkaputtwasdichkaputtmachtultrahighprocessed, 2024 Recently (does December 2023 count as recent?) I read an article in The New Yorker about the struggle to name the time we live in. Apparently we all live in an age characterized – as the author claims – by extreme uncertainty. The text offers an entertaining firework of ideas that writers have come up with lately. To no one’s surprise Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene ranks among the most cryptic and hard-to-pronounce ones. On the other end of the scale Terrible Twenties is offered as a casual blank for the most in- different reader to project their personal flavour of a dystopian future (and present) into. I spare you the remaining linguistic brain acrobatics from the text, it’s not worth your time. To be honest, I don’t think I read the text in full back then, even though it’s a compressed piece consisting of a modest 11,000 characters. Neatly adapted to the attention span one can expect from readers in the Age of Unhingement. The reason for my failing is most likely a barrage of videos with cute dogs on Instagram, or, simply the irresistible comfort of the couch I spend my evenings in. It’s a Dema Rataplan designed the 80’s and arguably the most cozy sofa in the world. The polyurethane foam inside the leather upholstery has adapted its shape to my ass being placed in the exact same place day after day. Feeling the indent when I sit down after work is probably the closest feeling I can imagine to being back in the mother’s womb. I think of Bullshit Jobs while I stare at the white ceiling, a term coined in 2018 (is this still recent?). And since work defines the biggest part of our existence shouldn’t there be a thing called Bullshit Life? Later in the evening I think of the white rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that claims to be late, even though in a later Disney adaptation he confesses “I‘m not really late, and I don‘t really have a date. I‘m a fraud!” As you may already suspect, the words you are reading are compiled by a habitual fraudster too. Written on my phone the evening before the opening while cocooning in my Rataplan I try hard to avoid the unpleasant thought that maybe I live a Bullshit Life too? Initially I wanted to start my text with this statement: “Every thing becomes a relic the moment it is produced. Even now feels like yesterday. Even time feels ancient.” But that opening statement I typed into my notes app some weeks ago has since paralysed my further thinking. I’m hopelessly lost but can’t let go. In my desperation I open Mark Fischer’s Ghosts of My Life on my phone. The bookmark is on chapter zero (I did not finish this book, either), where Fischer uses the final episode of the great 70s BBC series Sapphire and Steel to introduce his thoughts on the future. Evil wins in this final tale and Fischer, who would decide to take his own life three years after writing Ghosts of My Life, quotes the last words addressed at the defeated heroes in the very first paragraph of his book: “This is the trap”, a villainess states before disappearing, “This is nowhere, and it’s forever.” Anna Sophie Knobloch, letter box junk space, 2024 dear , Recently I observed myself dreaming more consciously. It is a peculiar, at times eerie place where I am being beamed. It feels like I am vividly and veritably experiencing moments from the past, or rather, the past in a different dimension. I enjoy these uncanny encounters, thus they are putting me into a sort of uncomfortable bodily state - it is like I am oscillating between walls, bouncing from door to door. I sort of took a liking to imagining the intangible, exiting the material world that surrounds me most of the time. Things I usually see around seem to be defined - no, confined actually - by rectangular thinking. Wherever I look I see over- and overwritten endless codes of human sensegiving. If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, junk-space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet. There however, when I enter this echo state, things disperse into waves, less strict parameters. Time stops mattering, linearity melts into rousingly moving measures that trace back and forth into ambiguity. Logic disintegrates. What causes traces has already disappeared by the time the trace becomes itself. Everything starts making sense without asking for a reason to exist. It’s like the glossy wrapping, the skin usually holding the world together, suddenly rips; the simulation that cries out: Give me shape, give me meaning! becomes obsolete. Then, I slide back into the now, finding my fingers fumbling robotically for the device next to my pillow. Tired eyes staring into the light emitting rectangle, trying to latch onto some piece of visual information. Clearly, an odd feeling stays with me. It’s the clammy realness that hits me, while my eyes wander and pause looking through the hole in the wall called window. I grasp, it was a fabulation, a Swiss wet dream. always, A