And Today

An unemployed idealist who has fallen into an absent-minded dream, regains consciousness in the employment office and proceeds to decorate the space of his gratuitous existence with illusionistic wall-paintings. In order to survey his work afterwards, he builds a high-seat - from there the perspective centre of the space appears as a bend in the horizon. This bend is the centre of the picture, and the man as his own best friend would like to fly there, according to the motto: L'état c'est moi. The centre of the picture as a bend is also characteristic of a simulation which shows the horizon, though only in thought, as a closed circle. If the bend is a model of reality and the circle is a model for the flight from this reality, then the unattainable border of the interior forms for the idealist a negation of the model, and not of reality.

If the naive observer has difficulty and gets stuck and has trouble getting on because he also wants to fly, he must try at least to jump. And now he realizes, in place of a leap of thought above and beyond the horizon, that there are four white hares on a second high-seat. Perhaps a transformation has occurred. The poles between which this must have happened, however, remain variable. We assign them the variables x and y. Every non-participant may determine his own value for these variables. Every further step after each engagement sinks the previous step in the quick-sand of possible history.

As long as there is a shared, ideally central point of escape for this possible history, conflicts over its true development can be avoided. This is a concession for the fact that the canvas, the screen or the wall where the beautiful illusion is projected is impenetrable. The horizon, cutting a fully adjustable vertical in the cross-hairs of the central construction, remains, in spite of its apparent flexibility, round.

Texts Without Verbs, Cologne 2002, p. 142