One key unlocks all of the doors to the house.
No use can be found for the second key.
But the third key works as hoped…
You lift the lid and there, under your nose and at your fingertips, is an entire world.
A world of worlds!
A finite space suddenly becomes an endless trail, an assortment of words and pictures and countless items, far too many and far too much content for you to ever comprehend, too much for you to ever know what to do with it all, a strange myriad of mysterious otherness that is nonetheless already a part of you somehow, and now that it is open and available to you, you do not know what you would do without this necessary nourishment!
How burdensome the whole history of humankind can sometimes feel! How are you—one person!—supposed to deal with or take into account all of the brilliant, creative, hard-working geniuses and their towering piles of accomplishments?
You can’t even squeeze them all into your, at present, most leisurely life! How can you be expected to make the time for even a handful of the undiscovered work of countless unknowns who might be worth seeking out, understanding, championing?
You can’t, of course! And you’ll drive yourself mad trying. You can only hope that you might occasionally turn your eyes in the right direction and see a new sun shining, its light altering your view of familiar objects and conjuring new ones you’re still not sure exist—like a strange moon in the sky where there should be none.
Among the piles:
Books, photos, paintings, drawings, collages, notes, personal papers, documents, postcards, greeting cards, a pocketwatch, a smoking pipe…
You are simultaneously depressed and grateful for all of these things, these things that once belonged to somebody, these things that someone went to the trouble of saving only for them to sit here in this locked trunk in this hidden room in a house of unknown location.
Why should you be the one to find it here? You suddenly feel responsible for it but what shall you do with it? What was all of this meant for? And aren’t you inadequate for whatever that might be? How could you possibly have the time to explore all of this?
And yet, isn’t this precisely what you were looking for, hoping for—a project, a purpose, something meaningful to work on? Don’t you have nothing but time? The sad truth of it is: you desperately need it, and it doesn’t need you at all.
Did you truly have the key all along and simply not remember it? It’s certainly possible. But lots of things are possible without being able to see through that darkest black to the time before you arrived here. Much worse, you are beginning to feel that, if you could remember, it might completely annihilate you.
A postcard, a travel diary, an unmarked photograph, a collage, a brief treatise might just be items that you remove from a trunk and wonder about for a moment before trying to stuff them back into the overwhelming container that you might prefer to forget. But do you really forget? Or do you just decide to give up in the face of the endlessness of everything?
The various writings and pictures seem to offer unlimited directions to head in—yet as you pay closer attention to the contents of a few items, you are already finding connections among them—connections that are beginning to form pieces of a puzzle, many puzzles—puzzles whose outcome might depend upon how you’ve steered—unlike the pieces of a manufactured puzzle which is meant to be completed in only one way no matter how one gets there. (The pipe, however, seems to be just a pipe.)
Some people spend their superfluity on the strangest things! There is so much here to pore through!
You are looking for something that might offer information about the trunk itself and its contents. You find two slim booklets that have the same cover and title but different texts within. Furthermore, their title offers a curious juxtaposition to the words on the trunk.
Von Kriege: The Man Who Did Not Exist
In your time spent up in this room, you have found it unsettling to see the old Ansonia clock nearby helplessly waiting to perform the activity that justifies its existence. You open its small door with its tiny doorknob, wind it with the key you find inside, and set the pendulum in motion. You do not, however, move the hands of the clock since you do not know what time it is. And you do not care. Your concern is not with knowing accurately the time but with being mindful of its passing. The tick-tock of the clock brings a sort of reassurance that the world is not frozen and relieves you from the burden of being the only focus of action. Once set in its course with your help, the clock goes about its work quite independently with no regard for you and yet simultaneously becomes a strange companion and witness to this otherwise silent journey to unexplored unknowns…
As you open the first book, something like a smile spreads across your face, and your thoughts turn for just a moment to the second key and to some fuzzy faraway location where you seem to be heading and where a soft, ceaseless undulating fills your ears.
{ } VK Arkiv 