#borgopass

Music video by Mario Mentrup & Volker Sattel 2012 for Tarwater: Photographed (from album: Inside the ships) (bureau b)

The Room

  One by one, they walked towards the room. Cleared of furniture it had a dank, musty smell. Its walls, floor, and ceiling were painted a matte black. Being an interior room, there was no danger of daylight entering, and perfect darkness had been achieved. Staring into the darkness, they saw incredible things. Then one of them opened his mouth, and the silence, infinite and black, filled it.  

      Early Drive

  From the kitchen window, I could see the sun rising over the hills. The lights in the house were still off, and in the dawn’s sun, the sink’s shadow decreased incrementally. I got dressed in a blue button down and a pair of khakis, and while tying my shoes, became fixated on the restored tissue that some mistakenly call “forearm.” “Forearm” offers nothing new by way of explanation. 

  At 7:30 A.M., I left for work, and driving toward the Golden Gate Bridge, the city’s white buildings blinded me, so I put on sunglasses. The moon was still visible, but fading. As I got closer to downtown, the phrase, “a theory of everything has yet to be configured properly” rattled around in what I call my “cyclotron”, but others incorrectly refer to as my “brain.”

  As I approached work, there was an increase in my stomach acid levels. “This could be a problem,” I said to myself. I almost entered the parking lot, but knew I shouldn’t go into work today. It would be more productive to take the day off and drive to L.A. instead. I needed to think, to study this acid build-up problem with all its complications and qualifications. The further south I drove, the more my stomach acid levels decreased. In the valley, walnuts waited for burlap. At some point, I switched to the coast road, and listened to the Pacific churning below. It was already 9:00 A.M, and the staff and other researchers would be in our morning meeting by now. To my left, uniform rows of broccoli and spinach flourished. Few general principles can account for what happened next. It requires an entirely new mode of explanation that hasn’t been developed yet. On a shoulder of Route 1, I made a U-turn and headed back to work. There was no reason for doing this, no hypothesis to account for it. As the car finished out the circumference of its turn, my thoughts made no motion. Driving north, my ability to think returned in fragments. After twenty minutes had passed, my mind fixated on a drawing of the elementary building blocks of matter that was in a biochemistry textbook I co-authored. Twenty minutes more and I could envision one of the large superstrings used to account for dimension theory. Pulling into the parking lot, I saw my coworkers returning from lunch. They were staring at me, wondering where I had been, but I would explain it all in detail, the acid build-up, the locked mind, the building blocks, and the superstring. I knew that they would agree with my considered decision not to go to the A.M. staff meeting. They might be concerned, but once I gave my reasons, they would understand. They’d see that my reasons were part of a set of fractals derived from the same equation, an equation that endlessly flaps its altering answer.

      The Couch

  You sat on the couch just saying my name while I sifted through the lines of the room. Let's examine it now: the room is a rectangle with probabilities everywhere, and if we follow the lines diverging from memory, we discover a table. It is made of wood and proceeds to leave off at some point - a station  following. On the table, there are a few magazines, oblong and ready. The couch, not fluffed up, is where you sit. The planes of the floor and ceiling balance a tension between repetition and despair. Interdicts keep mounting. The room is so fragile, and you are sullen, the shoulders indicating mourning. You're not aware that I am there, standing behind you.

"The Exterminator"

Digital, 6min. Directed by Seth Fragomen.