Several Times on a train in question


Berlin Early fall

To give you an idea of the scene, the location, the light, the people, I would have to work differently. Not with words, at least not with language in the first place.
I'd prefer speaking images. It is difficult at this point to keep from commenting.
This picture here is by no means innocent. Time has stopped. The boat sails without moving. The thing is, nothing else happens. It's a call for a random site, which is based on the aspiration to make present, not to present. Persisting with a point until it happens. Until it appears as a difference, as place. Lingering. Meaning learning to wait, to glide over the landscape without realy touching. Each new unfliring establishes the lingering site. As the changing of what is infinite into a defined expand. As place. Ces terrains vagues.


Brooklyn. Late fall

A Greyhound dying in each room. Nothing returning welcomes you, or, leaving, releases you. Memories fill the room which is simultaneously emptying at the same rate at the same time. Elvis refferences, overflowing ashtrays and Velvet Underground music playing in the background. Thinking of what we're doing here? We are not doing much better anyway ! This tomorrow is not of the day which was yesterday.


Brooklyn. Spring.

A crossroad where ideas wonder which road to take. These are just words and words can be reversed and replace each other, but whereas can the life they represent be reversed?
Editing, rewinding, mostly forwarding, assembiling, pasting, mostly cutting, forgetting, and continuing on with the story. You think there are rules for the game because you are a child.


Summer in Rotterdam.

Still in it. Still in it, but for how long? Everything is happening on an inferior level, as you have already been told. And it's that of fear!


Late summer. London.

On all sides nowhere. There are no more simple images. Only an accumulation of images with no farewell in sight. Your piss running down your leg and smelling bad on the concrete where it remains for days. Or simply: the moment ones life becomes the trace of a journey, it appeals to the idea of fate and that the quest forms an order in itself.


Fall. Vienna.

Scences shot at random, stuffed with continuity errors. All these smooth doubts you've been developing over time - dislocated and timeless. You wish you'd been over that. Thinking and speaking: odd game - that's life. Hosts and hospitalities: odd game-that's….
After a certain time of absence you realize that even now amazed and bedeviled and to chart new directions. The location where one finds oneself during the dropping of the atomic bomb is frequently a shoppingmall - a carriage road that takes you to the edge of the unknown - a leap into space.


Late fall. New York

Mental Ground Zero. In these streetscapes there is always the sensation of being underneath or between spaces. This place is without explicit function, simultaneously disordered, decaying and alive. Movement through the space is a flow over over-invested images. Images are constructed to dame reality. Freedom here it seems means. a homogenized way of life, an uniform cultural behaviour.


Christmas. Mexico City

Earlier, happily, your refusal to see me or to answer the phone opened my eyes. I now see for what it was that I have cheerfully accepted the banning.
This is a year when a word has come to obsess me. Another one on my personal spellcheck. It tends to be one of the words I use and think about often. I look it up in dictionaries to discover it's roots: The need to be somewhere else, or better- exileration.


Spring. Bologna

Pay attention, a large crowd is passing by! Kits fly - planes crash. Flat walls - rain falls. Chorus: Poor here - millionairs. Never misspell parallel. Overthought, overheard, overfelt. Overs. Was it really that? No doubt, it has always been like that. This is universal wisdom. Faint brief cry and imediately inspiration and slow increase of light together reaching maximum together in about ten seconds…… Silence and hold about five seconds.


Summer. Rotterdam

It seems that each image buries the preceding, but none has really perished.
Images fall successively from more or less distant realities. Nothing stays for very long - but we have been told that we are all more or less aware of the road we travel.We are not ourselves anymore, because each of us has been severals.
Sensous panic, mental travels. Or the Lovers Discourse. Several times on the train in question, guarding a flock of windows, between geographical areas, with no reason for ideological commitment. The pace of change seems to be compressing time itself.
And I wrote you a postcard to tell you there is no room to write anything on a postcard.


Late summer. Berlin.

Flashback. No resistance, no play, no access to anything but to the access. No authenticity. No accountability ( what for?), Ooh, what style to be played?
It would seem that changes in the rules are my closest experience of reality.
Assumptions about change tell me what I believe the change is supposed to bring, which in turn reveals much about what I believe one is supposed to do.
And again, the rooms I inhabit become transitrooms, everything is moving. The everyday is meant to convey a sort of structured mobility, constructing a space that includes forms and trajectories of movement, change and stability .


Fall. Berlin.

Journeying: a spacial movement. What has been sold is the actual change of place itself. Mobility - a privilage? The citizen/alien as refugee or exile or traveler organizes his desires and dreams of belonging by re:presenting a certain range of experiences, thereby offering the possibility for deep, affective investment among a community of like-minded others? Is space being really subsumed by time? Is there a new logic of space that requires even greater contestation than in the past? Maybe contestation is what is required. Then one would have to consider the strategies involved within the contestation and the role of thought within those strategies. To think no longer means to define, rather to arrange, to connect, to make possible, to give space to. And thus we arrive in the same place we was just tried to depart from: At the edge of a forest of gray laurel.


Spring: Brooklyn

Summary: There is this other idea, they were talking about it at the Greek deli near the station. Something referring to circular thrust, something about no voids, just the displacement of one thing or substance for another. You were confused by the whole thing. But displacement is a nice heading.
You expect to hear the crippling effects of your leaving town, meaning the inevitable details of broken hearts, mine or their's? The moment you think you are experiencing the present, we've already moved on to the future. And that future is now.
This moment now is superseded by the next now and the next now…. And in turn you find yourself having to shout because you don't know exactly how far away they are, how difficult it will be for them to hear you.



p.s. Without planning on it, I pushed reply and found myself at the beginning of a narration - that implies something just ended. No conclusions only considerations. Paths and rhythms one can adopt within this undertaking. An intersection channeling a boundle of dialectics. A kind of traffic jam of questions.

Heimo Lattner