You are walking through the rooms of an immense house or perhaps a mansion—at any rate, some physical structure of seeming enormity separated into rooms and containing a great many things. You sense with an odd certainty that all of the things that you are looking for and ever will be looking for are somewhere in this building. But when you try to think of particular things, nothing comes to mind. And the things that you see as you walk around are not necessarily uninteresting so much as they are interestingly unnecessary. You also sense that nobody else is here, that even if other people were allowed here, there is no reason to think they would consider entering. You are on an uninformative and self-guided tour of a personal but unfamiliar museum.
Some rooms contain far too many items that appear, like the rooms themselves, arbitrarily concatenative. You trip and stumble your way through one of them wondering what will ever become of all this stuff and what any of it has to do with you. The occasional item that draws your eye is difficult to approach and you lose track of it in your weaving and climbing amongst the other debris that seems to form the very floor of this room. And there are so many other rooms to search, so many items to sift through. You can’t possibly get to all of them! You wonder for a moment how many items you will never touch upon until realizing that your wondering is guaranteeing that there will be that many more you will miss out on.
One room contains nothing but ornate Christmas cards pasted to the walls and ceiling and in countless precarious stacks. You read a couple of them in the nearest pile. They are addressed to and signed by names you do not recognize. Paper mountains inked with a myriad of messages and greetings whose continued existence in this room only draws them further and further away from the ephemeral meaning they all once shared.
In another (excessively large) room, you find only a stack of 14 unused flowerpots.
Spying upon another more interesting room has you wondering whether it is full of cotton or cotton candy. But you needn’t wonder! You may walk right in if you like, and, in doing so, you find yourself in the midst of a cloud. The overwhelming amorphous hazy vagueness leaves you surprised at the solidity of your every step across the floor from which you feel so disconnected. But exhilaration quickly gives way to boredom.
Some other room, sometime later: a casket of eyes.
This is immediately followed by a room that happens to be next Thursday afternoon.
The next one is entirely green. Sitting in it, quiet as a daisy, is a green antique harpsichord. You wonder for a moment if this is the only room with a harpsichord or if there are perhaps all kinds in all manner of colors to be found throughout the premises. One day you may even think about playing one of them! But once you peer into that tick-tock mechanism, then you shall never again.
Until now, you heard only the dull sound of your footsteps, but presently you can hear a train in the distance. Somehow, it never completely passes by—it’s seemingly forever in the process of passing by. On the far side of this room (which is now a different room from before or the same room changed), there are two statues that appear to move due to the placement of several hidden strobe lights. You would like to take a closer look at them to be certain they’re not actually moving, but the floor of this room is a chaotic mess of wooden boards. You contemplate putting some time and work into this room. But you are not a carpenter. And, without any tools at hand, you would really need to be a magician—the sort of magician that we don’t think really exists rather than the sort of magician that does exist who tries to fool people into thinking they are the sort of magician that we don’t think really exists—or, what perhaps comes to the same thing, you would need to be inordinately lucky.
You notice that the ceiling of this room is actually a sky full of stars. Not a real sky full of stars. Rather like a planetarium. Still, the idea of looking at a sky full of stars produces thoughts similar to those you might have if you were looking at real stars. You realize for a moment that looking at the stars in the sky is like looking at various moments in the past history of the universe—all distant moments, all distant objects visually converging into one. But this way of looking at things is just that—a way of looking at things. An interesting way of looking at things, perhaps—but what can you do with it?
What can you do with any of this at all? What is the point of looking at any more rooms? What could you do in those rooms in the face of this whole universe with all these stars, inauthentic as they are? A world of worlds in just this one mostly empty room…
But right next door, there is another room—and it just might have whatever you’re looking for, something you didn’t know you were looking for. Just a little beyond…
The nighting pond beyond this façade also congeals, becomes itself a façade, a ceiling, an inevitable reflecting surface. Still you might somewhere hear ghostly sister selanna calling for you to go under, to lose yourself, to enter solitary, to submerge into that rippling twilight, that yonder where the stranger wanders…
{ } VK Arkiv 