Instead of Tripod¹

Instead of: Distinguished places transform into sites of destruction when no history passes over them anymore: as soon as history takes place in other, not distinguished places, one beam of sunlight is sufficient to transform the scorched earth into a concentrate that stores new life for future forays—beyond the erased memory of marching in single file to paradise. Through such a reduction, the nightly fire in the desert can appear as an effect of the dwindling power to blossom. Thirst, whether great or small: quenching and extinguishing it overcomes the primeval era of irredeemable commandments, until one’s head is heavy enough to test firm ground. We see our address books go up in flames, and we seek a place to be distinguished between the mouth of the river Indus and the source of the Danube. While the banks of the river broaden towards the horizon, and Heraclitus’s medium becomes the sea, the forgetful messenger rushes from one white spot to the next on the map of knowledge: war remains the yardstick to measure peace! The first measuring point of the fertile area to be gained acupunctures an island’s neuralgic link to the mainland, until the path into the world of defined obstacles seems controllable. There, where the centrifugal sites of the state of being awake force the concentrate to the periphery, thus making the balance necessary for stasis possible in the first place, the stored marking is shifted into its chronic and declinable state. The inflection point gained is this displaced moment, replaced by memory, which somebody followed beyond a black spot, even though, etc. The next mark is the next altar that encodes a community, until the witness called up remembers that the dream, from which nobody was supposed to wake, has an end, too. Naturally, every fixed point is set in relation to a second and third one, and of course hopes are raised at the edges of the desert and the inclined plane.
      Instead of tripod [Stativ]: For the one waking up, two points have to suffice to find his balance. Where the measure of weight and the dust of the desert fade away from the dazed head, brightness spreads over the erased landscape. Calm hands are called for: until the priest of measuring finds the point where the lines of the ideal draft converge, he asks the marriage broker to hold his anti-reflector. Assuming that “yes, I do” would have to be said without a solemn question about a solemn will would demand the performance of the solemn utterance—who can guarantee, in the face of all that elevation, that the visible horizon is a section of the circle in whose center is not only a middleman? Accidentally exact? That would have to be checked. For that, a secure stand must balance out the uneasy hand that the one awakening requires to straighten his horizon.
     Dative instead of tripod [Stativ]: On the way to three-leggedness, a defendant appears and does not turn his hand between desert cartography and river extension. Whether a black, white, or gray spot, whether addressee, sender, or messenger, the task of the third extra is to confirm the “yes, I do,” thus relieving the datived participant of the decision, which he in turn makes for the next one, blah, blah, blah, until the story goes round in circles. He who stands in the dative [Dativ] rather than the tripod [Stativ], regardless of his ability to balance, is given his due—standing in for whom? As long as no final number is thinkable in the sequence of numbers, with or without Chronos, a gap in the system of inflections remains, an overlooked case that integrates the case of cases into perpetual motion. Europe antistatic! The third measuring point finally polarizes the space in which the experts of a cosmogrammatical case study meet via switching roles in order not to abstain from a sign of overall agreement: a case falls out! The tripod is put up in a different place. The metal tip of the telescope foot penetrates a bridal veil. The cloth tears until a gust of wind takes along the shreds, as if to assert a testimonial of a repelled denial: never again accusative! In case of doubt, for x! The next trial against unknown will dispose of the doubtful elements of his case.

Halcyon Days, Cologne 2013, p. 335

[1] In German, the word for “tripod” is “Stativ.”