Compagnia
dell Imbuto Confuso

Sketches, rehearsals, stage directions

  • while she jumped around the fire
    like a wild woman /
    the brain slices
    curled up merrily / I
    could not help but think of / as she
    invited me
    to her apartment to eat asparagus

    we cannot determine the figures
    without a
    location associated with them

    since the connections between
    these and those places
    are taken out of time
    they fall into each other at the
    same time as
    that which belongs to them / such
    as the figure of my aunt
    as she leaps like an elf
    from one blossom to the next

    as she burns the brain specimens
    cut into wafer-thin slices
    in the front part of the garden / which
    at the urgent request of
    her superior she carried in a heavy
    suitcase on the last train
    that left Berlin in 45 from the Charité
    to her home village in Hesse

    where the suitcase remained in her
    attic
    for decades
    because in the new era no one was
    interested in the
    brain slices of criminals / the insane
    and other
    unworthy lives anymore

    with the ashes, she fertilises her
    asparagus patch, which, she says, is
    without comparison / in the whole
    neighbourhood
    in the whole neighbourhood

    we cannot determine the figures
    without a
    location associated with them

    while she jumped around the fire
    like a wild woman /
    the brain slices
    curled up merrily / I
    could not help but think of / as she
    invited me
    to her apartment to eat asparagus

    with the ashes, she fertilises her
    asparagus patch, which, she says, is
    without comparison / in the whole
    neighbourhood

    in the whole neighbourhood

  • no / I say to my wife / I don't want him to
    go
    he's not an apparition / not a fantasy
    not a wound of Christ in life format
    nor a surreal image on my part
    his appearance is / I say to my wife
    a hyperreal event / an accumulation
    of what is happening
    so to speak a penance in true sense
    making amends

    my uncle's digestion is certainly
    still impeccable today
    not bad / I say to my wife, for someone
    who hasn't been among
    the living for almost exactly 70 years

    but that has never stopped him
    from making himself comfortable with me,
    eating from my plate
    and drinking from my cup / he likes to
    walk with me, sits in the
    front row between the students and rocks
    his leg in boredom

    no / I say to my wife / I don't want him to
    go
    he's not an apparition / not a fantasy
    not a wound of Christ in life format
    nor a surreal image on my part
    his appearance is / I say to my wife
    a hyperreal event / an accumulation
    of what is happening
    so to speak a penance in true sense
    making amends

    while we packed our
    bags and thought
    about how Texas John emigrated to
    the promised land
    always fleeing from the agents of anarchy
    who like sandworms,
    pierce every layered surface of time
    from right to left and
    from top to bottom
    and have devilish fun doing so,
    shifting the slices of the brain at will

    my uncle's digestion is certainly
    still impeccable today
    not bad / I say to my wife, for someone
    who hasn't been among
    the living for almost exactly 70 years

    no / I say to my wife / I don't want him to
    go
    he's not an apparition / not a fantasy
    not a wound of Christ in life format
    nor a surreal image on my part
    his appearance is / I say to my wife
    a hyperreal event / an accumulation
    of what is happening
    so to speak a penance in true sense
    making amends

  • who laid his heavy hand
    on my
    child's breast / that
    I wriggle like a beetle on my back
    with my little arms and my
    and my fat little legs
    that the agents screamed
    with delight

    if the agents of
    anarchy would be properly
    dressed
    and immediately
    refrained from fidgeting
    everyone would
    probably listen to my father's
    story attentively

    but this way
    they shake their moon-sized
    heads
    tap with pointed fingers
    against their waxy
    temples / but no / no son
    of the king and the beautiful
    Lilofee / never united with
    the water god
    united / who a thousand times
    shed a thousand and one tears
    for his sake / I speak
    of him the little Anselino
    who fathered me / gave me
    his name / God knows
    not only one
    a thousand and one for
    each agent
    one and none at the same time

    if the agents of
    anarchy would be properly
    dressed
    and immediately
    refrained from fidgeting
    everyone would
    probably listen to my father's
    story attentively

    who laid his heavy hand
    on my
    child's breast / that
    I wriggle like a beetle on my back
    with my little arms and my
    and my fat little legs
    that the agents screamed
    with delight

    if the agents of
    anarchy would be properly
    dressed
    and immediately
    refrained from fidgeting
    everyone would
    probably listen to my father's
    story attentively

  • because I had deflowered some woman
    whose name she did not say
    on the passenger side / which is not true
    but she insists on it /
    I had bitten her on the neck
    and she is keeping quiet about the rest

    aims / as he has learned / over
    the rear sight and front sight
    at her neck / says later / as if he
    had lost his favorite animal
    the three other victims
    are slaughtered in the dining
    room
    Ernest fires at close range / the
    second loads / the third cries

    for over twenty years I visit him
    once a month
    we sit opposite each other for
    three hours
    I / I and the murderer named
    Ernest /
    four victims / three killers each
    sentenced to life in prison
    some say a rope around the neck
    or 2000 volts chased
    through the body of the convict
    until death occurs
    would have been better /
    the three other victims
    are slaughtered in the dining
    room
    Ernest fires at close range / the
    second loads / the third cries

    because I had deflowered some woman
    whose name she did not say
    on the passenger side / which is not
    true
    but she insists on it /
    I had bitten her on the neck
    and she is keeping quiet about the rest

    40 years earlier
    they would have severed his head
    from the rest and sliced his
    brain into the finest slices / like those
    my aunt burned in the front
    part of the garden
    while I was visiting Ernest in the
    detention center
    she lent me her car. / a sky-blue
    Opel Kadet / the seats finely diced /
    on the passenger side stained
    by dark spots / which was my fault / says
    my aunt /

    because I had deflowered some woman
    whose name she did not say
    on the passenger side / which is not
    true
    but she insists on it /
    I had bitten her on the neck
    and she is keeping quiet about the rest

  • I shouldn't worry about /
    says the uncle / that she has
    reproached me again
    and again
    of not having noticed
    my blind spots

    the uncle has been dead for
    decades
    which
    as I have mentioned several times
    does not prevent him from
    appearing to me with
    the most beautiful regularity
    his appearances are
    neither imaginary
    nor unreal or surreal / nor a sign or
    miracle but
    rather and exclusively hyperreal

    I shouldn't worry about /
    says the uncle / that she has
    reproached me again
    and again
    of not having noticed
    my blind spots

    his appearances are
    neither imaginary
    nor unreal or surreal / nor a sign or
    miracle but
    rather and exclusively hyperreal

    the uncle has been dead for
    decades
    which
    as I have mentioned several times
    does not prevent him from
    appearing to me with
    the most beautiful regularity

    I shouldn't worry about /
    says the uncle / that she has
    reproached me again
    and again
    of not having noticed
    my blind spots

    the uncle has been dead for
    decades
    which
    as I have mentioned several times
    does not prevent him from
    appearing to me with
    the most beautiful regularity
    his appearances are
    neither imaginary
    nor unreal or surreal / nor a sign or miracle but
    rather and exclusively hyperreal

  • that we pull the orange
    skin off their flesh
    I loved / to cook jam
    on summer evenings
    when my aunt
    strolling through the garden
    in her negligee
    like an elf she jumps from
    one blossom to another

    before my eyes she pauses
    in her leap
    while I push the stacked
    twice folded slices of sausage
    into my mouth
    this is also a pause
    only vertically aligned
    against the absurd idea
    of a completion of one kind or
    another

    that we pull the orange
    skin off their flesh
    I loved / to cook jam
    on summer evenings
    when my aunt
    strolling through the garden
    in her negligee
    like an elf she jumps from
    one blossom to another

    we no longer need to discuss it
    no writing a novel is
    just as impossible
    as composing a symphony
    or to paint a triptych
    everything else / drawings /
    songs
    poems / above all
    especially the poem torn
    out of
    the middle
    without beginning without end
    persisting at the same time
    dissolving into countless
    blind spots

    that we pull the orange
    skin off their flesh
    I loved / to cook jam
    on summer evenings
    when my aunt
    strolling through the garden
    in her negligee
    like an elf she jumps from
    one blossom to another

  • This is a poetic statement:
    “Poetry is the
    decoding and recoding of
    what we actually are:
    agents of a multiple nothingness.”

    It takes a certain amount of time,
    say four to five decades
    per person, a series of centuries
    God knows,
    maybe millennia /
    from person to person, to find
    out if we have taken
    a few steps towards poetry.

    Poetry is to be understood on
    the basis of poetic
    in its etymological meaning from
    Latin poeticus,
    from Greek “relating to poetry”,
    literally “creative,
    productive”, from poiētos “made”,
    verbal adjective of poiein
    “to make”.

    A poet, then, is one who becomes
    an active agent by
    dividing the
    nothingness into something that
    is, as well as it is not.

    This in my mind, the active
    surrender
    to the multiple nothingness,
    leaves me with only
    one question to ask.

    A question to be objectified,
    the object to
    be deconstructed, the particles
    thus dissected
    to be formalised, the forms to
    be composed.

    There is no other object than
    the conditions of
    my bodily perception as it
    has taken place in
    my organs,
    from the digestive tract to the brain,

    from the sixteenth
    month of my birth, when my
    father implanted
    his telling into my fertile flesh,
    until today.

    The question reads:
    “How do I stage the act of
    splitting the multiple
    nothingness into something
    that is, as well as it is not?”

  • I hugged the one of whom
    Henry Miller said
    he was the only analyst
    Nietzsche would
    ever have agreed with

    would they ever get by
    with half a turn
    would not open their mouths
    so wide / now
    like crystals they burn

    to pull over their rubber
    masks
    in the middle of the night
    and dance around my bed
    since my father works for
    the Americans
    he doesn't mind all that
    any more

    it must have been in April
    45
    a few weeks before the war
    was finally over
    others follow

    would they ever get by
    with half a turn
    would not open their mouths
    so wide / now
    like crystals they burn

    I hugged the one of whom
    Henry Miller said
    he was the only analyst
    Nietzsche would
    ever have agreed with

    certainly
    Arno knew all about the
    agents
    also with the masks
    that reach down to the
    navel
    to me and the others
    included the three
    seven sleepers
    we had adopted

    pat each other's
    rubbery cheeks
    laughing and crying
    a violent waving of our
    arms
    legs and other limbs

    I hugged the one of whom
    Henry Miller said
    he was the only analyst
    Nietzsche would
    ever have agreed with

    would they ever get by
    with half a turn
    would not open their mouths
    so wide / now
    like crystals they burn

  • they are nothing but their laughter
    their stepping and trampling
    with contorted faces
    their staggering and weaving
    their naughtiness
    their being in love with everything
    that from the inside out
    intermixes excessively

    he says / their masks reveal the
    nothingness of meaning
    that everything arbitrarily follows
    the equally valid / a kiss /
    a rubbing of the outer
    limbs / inserted into one another

    the laughter they let out as if
    mockery and scorn
    were being poured over me
    the uncle says that this is
    their natural form of appearance

    they are nothing but their laughter
    their stepping and trampling
    with contorted faces
    their staggering and weaving
    their naughtiness
    their being in love with everything
    that from the inside out
    intermixes excessively

    I say to myself
    that the uncle must know
    for so many reasons
    the uncle studied theology and
    tells me
    that I should think in terms of
    the fundamental
    of movement / yawning / the
    fluttering of the tongue
    the fingers, even the innermost
    limbs

    sure / it seems to you / as if
    they are laughing at you /
    but
    but what you / you
    have told, whether you are sleeping
    or eating or stacked the stones
    on top of each other
    is completely meaningless to them
    the agents of becoming
    are not interested in anything / except
    in that moment / in which
    movement
    became flesh, grasping itself in
    the mask of man

    he says / their masks reveal the
    nothingness of meaning
    that everything arbitrarily follows
    the equally valid / a kiss /
    a rubbing of the outer
    limbs / inserted into one another

    they are nothing but their laughter
    their stepping and trampling
    with contorted faces
    their staggering and weaving
    their naughtiness
    their being in love with everything
    that from the inside out
    intermixes excessively

  • It is quite absurd to find
    the whole gallery
    of ancestors in the aesthetic
    subconsciousness
    of all humanity, as it is stored
    in the multidimensional


    latent space. At least
    humanity so far. I am talking
    about the ancestors
    about whom my father was
    silent, the whole
    paternal clan in which he, the
    bastard, had


    nothing to say. All the more
    he spoke to me, every
    day late in the evening, from
    my sixteenth month
    on earth until I was two years
    old. 8 months, an
    eternity for such a small child.


    The aunts laughed
    their heads off. Literally. After
    1948 there were none
    left. And the king went into exile.
    The dwarf king, 1.48 meters
    tall. That they had to change
    the statues,


    otherwise he, my father's father,
    would not have been
    allowed to join the military. King
    or not. The aunts
    laughed their heads off. He
    had to climb on a
    chair to poke his dwarf king's


    tentacle into my
    grandmother's belly. This is how
    slave children are
    conceived. Poor little Anselino.
    That's what he told me,
    the story of the lost child. And the
    fact that he told it


    to me was for me both the most
    horrible and
    the most beautiful story.

  • There are three main levels
    on which agents
    can be perceived. The term
    levels is used in
    reference to the neurophysical
    realities of our physical
    being and imaginative perception.

    First, the interaction
    of bodies as fluted by agents
    eliminates what we
    used to call individual identity.
    Identifications in terms
    of right or wrong, good or bad, are
    no longer possible.

    Second, by eliminating all normally
    valid values, the fluting
    of the agents is embodied in the
    figures of comedy.
    Incidentally, sexuality is the reference
    point of all comedy, since it
    is the drive that transforms our
    habits into ridiculous gestures and
    behaviors.

    The third level is that of narration.
    What happens through the
    involuntary interaction from one body
    to another, fluted by the agents of
    anarchy, must be described
    as an act
    of subjectivation.
    Subjectivation will only happen if one
    surrenders to the infinitives as
    they are almost materialized in the
    agents: to becoming and all the verbs,
    adjectives and nouns derived
    from it.

  • Three layers unfold, where agents weave,
    In bodies of flesh, senses shift and blur.

    The first: we are fluted, no longer distinct.
    The concept of the individual fades,
    No fixed self, no lines between right and wrong.
    Identities dissolve like smoke,
    What was solid is now fluid, always in motion.

    In the current of time, we bend and break,
    Agents of anarchy, undoing every boundary.
    No rules hold us, no chains confine.
    We rise and fall, open to the vast unknown.

    Second, comedy emerges in the space left behind.
    Sex, the catalyst, unravels our expectations,
    Habits and gestures transformed into absurdity.
    Laughter erupts where meaning once stood firm,
    Now everything is unstable, constantly shifting,
    As the agents make playthings of our convictions.

    In the current of time, we bend and break,
    Agents of anarchy, undoing every boundary.
    No rules hold us, no chains confine.
    We rise and fall, open to the vast unknown.

    The third: narration begins, a story unfolds,
    Through the collision of bodies fluted by agents.
    Surrender to becoming, to verbs and acts untamed,
    A new subject emerges from the chaos,
    Unnameable, unbound, in a constant state of flux,
    Where being is nothing but change itself.

    In the current of time, we bend and break,
    Agents of anarchy, undoing every boundary.
    No rules hold us, no chains confine.
    We rise and fall, open to the vast unknown.