1 F

 

Ich sage dir einen Satz: Das Leben, das in der gesamten Bibliothek und in der gesamten Menschheit besprochen wurde, heißt: „Die Zeit zu genießen und niemandem Unrecht tun.“ Wenn du das gefunden hast – den Genuss der Zeit – dann kommst du auf die Idee, dass du nicht alles in dieser Welt ernst nehmen solltest. Das ist mein Leben. Das ist der Satz. Vor vielen Jahren war ich in einem Seminar in Hyderabad, in Indien. Es waren dort mehr als 11 000 Philosophen, Politiker und Wissenschaftler aus der gesamten Welt. Am Ende hatte ein Mann gesagt: „Wissen Sie was... – drei Tage lang haben wir hier gesucht, was es so gibt, was real ist. Aber real ist

 

2.1 F

 

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2.2 F

 

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2.3 F

 

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2.4 F

 

 

2.5 F

 

zZz Zz Zz

 

2.6 F

 

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEeeeeeeeeee Ee e eeeeeeeeeeeeee eeee

 

2.7 F

 

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2.8 F

 

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2.9 F

 

 

2.10 F

 

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2.11 F

 

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2.12 F

 

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2.13 F

 

 

2.14 F

 

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2.15 F

 

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2.16 F

 

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2.17 F

 

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2.18 F

 

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2.19 F

 

 

2.20 F

 

 Vv v

 

2.21 F

 

oooooooooo

 

2.22 F

 

r r r rrrr r rrr rr r rrrr r rr rr rr rr

 

2.23 F

 

bBbbbbbbb

 

2.24 F

 

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEeeeeeeeeee Ee e eeeeeeeeeeeeee eeee

 

2.25 F

 

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2.26 F

 

 

2.27 F

 

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2.28 F

 

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2.29 F

 

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The situation where a person creates something in private and through an intimate relationship and releases it into the world only when it’s done, detached and independent, is much more agreeable to people. The performer plays the part he prepared. He’s in the same position as a mask in a carnival parade, he adopts or rather realizes and embodies his notion of the mask he is wearing. But I don’t have a mask, and I’m not so sure of my part – I’ve never tried it as a part – the mask of a tiger is behind me on the windowsill (yes, in the room Ondřej is sitting in there is a fake window and in it glass fortified by wire, the window leads into one of the rooms with the video). Yesterday, Hana and I had lunch in one of the smaller rings in the center. I was worn out from the previous days because I had this feeling that I was committing violence on the stories I had collected from various people here on the spot by translating them into dictionary terminology. Maybe this is actually the best evidence of language that’s used to talk about itself talking naturally, whatever clichés there may be, sometimes yes, even though not that many [just now a HICCUPPING KID walked by me and hiccupped his way into the next room, and now he’s hiccupping his way back again past me and disappearing into infinity], when I take it and transform it, in any case it isn’t fiction that’s created, but merely plain verbal violence. Decomposition. Devastation. Perpetrating it was not only mentally unpleasant for me, but literally physically as well. I had digestion troubles and the shits. The assumption then was not confirmed, fiction isn’t created. Whoever translates my life into their language, or differently: whoever identifies and defines me in order to have power over me, to categorize me, is raping me. When I was translating those short life stories into unbiased language, [UNBIASED?!?] it proved what the worst moment was: those original sentences, stories, self-reflections, are merely the suspense, the hesitation before the next step. They contain something flawlessly unfinished, floating, inconstant, summarizing and anticipating simultaneously, they’re just an element of the continuum. A stick in the stream that got stuck but now floats on, a leaf. A car which stopped but now is moving again, stopping at an overlook and the journey onward, a chestnut on the street, or Sunday room cleaning where the order will dissipate during the course of the week, the adjustment of a watch, a glance at your cell phone, a gulp of water, one trivial intake of breath out of a million intakes of breath, one heartbeat in the middle of the day when you place your finger on your artery and then carry on. The moment this ephemeral particle is translated into another language, all motion ceases, goes out, disappears. The life of the person talking about himself evaporates and gets extinguished in a foreign language. News from his life translated to a foreign language goes out, becomes a mere act of speech which alone is lifeless and without continuation. The original story rewritten into a text which retained a trace of life, which reflected it, which doesn’t transform into a lie nor fiction, is like a yawn. Like death in a non-idiomatic language. Which arouses unpleasant surprise at the absence of movement, body, voice. Fiction is creatio, the art of creation, transcription isn’t fiction, just the anaesthetization of that which lived in representation, in linguistic rendition. I take another apple and cut it in half, I’m chewing and listening to how the teeth crush the pulp and skin, I swallow and that whistling silence sets in again, and muted sounds from my surroundings that the earplugs let through manage to break through at times. I can hear people talking around me and I recognize that it’s a language I don’t understand. I look into the monitor and suspect, or rather see peripherally, that there is a man and woman talking together on my left-hand side about five meters away from me. I made my way through half of the apple I’d prepared and swallowed it whole.

It hasn’t been that long since Tan came into the room, saw me sitting here and so he waved to me. Even though I’m trying to concentrate just on the text and I don’t turn away my gaze, my peripheral vision informs me more than enough. Tan didn’t give up on his efforts to say hi to me, he came all the way up to me and kept waving. I still didn’t react and having to resort to physical assault, he tapped on my shoulder. I couldn’t take it anymore and turned towards him, returned his wide grin and indicated that I had earplugs. I think he didn’t understand, but he gathered that he shouldn’t disturb and left. My writing isn’t dependent on visual contact with the keyboard.I’ll close my eyes now. Many more sounds than I’d thought are eaching me through the earplugs. My hearing has alwayhs been oversensitive anyway. With my closed eyyees I have a feeling that I’ve lost my balance. That my head is like some bal;oon I have to balanxce out very carefully. I’ve also figured out that I need to go pee. Someone just came now who speaks German, but he’s disappeared into the next room. When I close my eyes, all bodily perceptions intensifty. Before, I didn’t notice I was breathing, now I can hear it. I;m taking in relatively short and shallow breaths. I straightened my back and had the feeling I would fall out of my chair. The body is much more intense in the dark. As if it all turned into a detector that’s desperately trying to get its bearings in space. I’m trying to listen to the sound of my heart, but in the room next dooe trhere’s some kind of techno playing or something like that and the regularity of that sound  now, now I heard it. But when I want to hear it, I mustn’t move or write. When I close my eyes, I can’t cioncentrate on my own thoughts, the body wants to see. I can hear lots of footsteps around me and uneasiness rises in me, I don’t have the situation under controol – under supervision. I also have the feeling that I;m making a lot more typos than when I was calm and could look at the monitor, . My fingers are slower than my thoughts, but it seems as if the thoughts were adapting to them. I talk the same way as I write. Hana has laughed at me several times already for articulating while writing emaols. My connection to the device I’m writing on is alwas much more intense than I htought. If I was writing by hand, I wouldn’t have the lines under control, I would be rewriting the already written. This way I don’t have the words under control, maybe my fingers are misplaced on the keyboard and I’m just writing clusters of incomprehemsible characters. But there are these small protrusions on the keys f and j (it’s funny, I don’t even have to know what they’re called) by which I can clearly determine my position on the keys. The body is so intense that I can’t stop recording all of its percfeptions. Already as a kid I played around with this sound I can create only in my ears that nnobody else can hear. I have no idea what it is, but but it sounds as if I suddenly increased the blood flow in the ears exponentially and a lazily flowing stream suddenly became a river. Or it’s similar to someone lighting the stovetop he has it burning low, the flames softly whisper. Sudeenly lng. About 9 - % seconds. After that you can’t stand the tension any longer. If someone stood stock-still right next to me just no2w and observed me, I don’t know if I’d be able to discern his presence. I’ve finally found the words that closely fit reality. That previous philosophizing of mine wasn’t going anywhere, it just skidded from left to right and back again, I could feel how horribly trivial it was. Mz thinking is slow and when I want to say sinething interesting, I have to think it a good deal through, ideally consult it with other sources because I don’t have much confidence in my own judgment. There are smarter people than me. Maybe if I regarded the world with closed eyes, I’d find more greatly intense perceptions than I have with eyes wide open. I;ve also caught myself being able not to think of anything, not thinking of anything at all. No isn;t anything difficult, on the contrary, it’s the simplest thing. I’ll press enter then until I think of something.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Car – a car crossed my mind. I have reallu no idea why. I’ll try to hold out a big longer, as it seems that the words in which my thinking appears to be ensnared are disappearing and rather simple visu-images are appearing

 

 

 

 

Nothing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I gulped and had to endure the sound of it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I found out that the way I press enter with my pinky finger irritates me. This movement is too intense with eyes closeed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m not thinking, I’m listening, I just heard the murmur of my blood. When I write, the murmur of blood has remained as a perception. It mingles with the whistling silence. K

 

 

 

 

 

My finger involuntarily pressed the k key. I’ve begun to hear the beat of my heart.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 I’ve realized that I’ve lost count of time, at this point I have no idea whether my eyes have been closed for ten minutes or half an hour. It won’t be much longer than that though.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have a feeling as though the head were something removed from the body. When I went with David Böhm to visit Robert from the Biology Institute, he told us that the brain is actually this sort of sprout of the spinaal cord. The furrowing of the brain is determined by the same process as when you squeeze toothpaste from a tube. My body has gone rifgid in this strange position I once found myself in about ten fifteen years afo when I was travelling with my parents by night bus from Germnany. I was sitting in the seta without leaning on it. My body was in a perfectly balanced position in regards to my center of gravity, my backside, even though I can feel it a bit above the backside, and I slept. I balanced out the jerks of the moving bus by swaying slightly. Tomáš later told me that it looked as though I were some sort of apparition or sleepwalker. I listen, steps, someone is walking by.

 

 

 

 

I can’t even begin to assess how I look, how I feel, that all my facial muscles are relaxed, and yet somehow contorted comically into a grimace. I’ve just opened my eyes.

 

Hana was standing in front of me, smiling. She asked me if I wanted something to eat and I went to the restroom. Now that I’ve come back to the table and the device, I realize that it was more pleasant with my eyes closed. I knew right where I was, exactly. I didn’t care if someone was staring at me, I didn’t know about it. I didn’t have to think, just write because my body itself told me what to write. My eyes open, I think. I can’t get over it. I cling to meaning like shit to a shovel. I’m gonna have some nuts. I stacked them up in a pile on the table between my hands. The sound is even a bit more sensuous. When I asked the first girl if she could tell me 10 sentences about her life, she answered me and asked me to do the same. I wasn’t capable of doing it. I want to write ten sentences about my life:

I am. I’m munching on nuts. I’m eating them with my left hand. I don’t know what else to write. I’m with Hana. I’m trying to get over myself into reality and say something about it. I’ve also just bitten into an apple. The guide is currently standing in the same room and talking about what I’m doing. She’s talking about what I’m trying to find, analyze. About what the thesis is, but she doesn’t know what actually happened yet. If my eyes were closed now, I’d look like an idiot. Or an artist. I’m not sure whether a person can be an artist just because he closes his eyes. Closes, opens, closes opens. People are asking as if they want to translate it into their own language. The man speaking is gesticulating and the guide confirms that he’s understood correctly, then they move on. It hurts under my right shoulder blade. No, they haven’t left yet.

I’m gonna have some more nuts, just not the brazil nuts. Before I could think about it – my hand returned the brazil nut back into the bag. And now, as if to spite me, it took a brazil nut it had forgotten to sort out and stuck it in my mouth. I’m starting to have the feeling that my body thinks faster than my head. At least as far as nuts go. I’m sweating. I don’t know why, I don’t feel hot. I’m sweating and eating nuts and suddenly I really don’t have the need to say anything think about anything and claim anything. Almonds. Hazel. The body is fond of nuts. Most of all I’d like to get up and go out and just start to soak up images and words of other people, observe, listen. My body would have a smoke. Even though Topol claims – and Kotyk reiterates – that those who smoke think, but I myself have it exactly the other way around. When I smoke, I don’t think about anything at all. Only when I was fifteen and unhappily in love, I read a book on buddhism and astral projection, and later I tried to travel in my astral body to that girl, but I was sitting in a back room in our cottage, which in those days was still completely packed with grandpa’s trophies, it was Sunday afternoon (or at least that’s the impression that memory gives me today), I had a brown blanket with a tiger wrapped around me as I travelled astrally to that girl along with all those antlers around me, but it didn’t work. I can’t stand these nuts any longer. I feel as though I have them everywhere. I’m smoking an electronic cigarette. I bought it so I could smoke inside. I’m addicted, in an alert state I wouldn’t be able to handle 12 hours without a cigarette. I write poems because there are few words in them, a lot of words equals prostitution. I like to exaggerate. And I’m surprised at how my mood has changed over 4 hours and 58 minutes. I put my watch away. I have another nut. The artist is eating nuts, yes, and... they’re gone. Would beer taste good right now? I’d like to have salmon in lemon sauce with baked potatoes and French baguette, dill gravy, some kind of yellow or orange soup – for example carrot or pumpkin soup because I feel like curry, I like curcuma, nutmeg and chili, but I don’t know how to spell chili and word corrected it for me. I’m smoking my e-cigarette. I had my first ever cigarette to learn how to smoke so I wouldn’t be a sissy when it came down to smoking weed with my friends. Nobody ended up bringing the weed, but I did learn how to smoke. At home, I smoked in secret from a window and my mom walked in on me once and forbade me to do it. I felt sorry for her. A fruit fly buzzed by me now and disappeared somewhere. I stretched myself out in the chair, kept my eyes open and stopped looking at the screen, so I’m writing, but I can’t see it. I’m looking at the number four that’s suspended on the elastic band in the room. When I started to write this text, I started it off as a letter to Jan so I wouldn’t have to look, so I wouldn’t have to think how to start,that was the first sentence. I’m surprised I don’t have figurative associations, someone is regarding me as an exhibit but he’s not interested, now again and then he looks once more at the screening, I look at the number four and the person is turning around, I wanted to smile and almost did. I feel as though I’m doing a weird thing now and so I write a lot faster than I did before. It’s a completely different situation because I can make eye contact at any time and I feel more threatened. But I’m not sure if there’s any point in describing my feelings and physical state over and over again. I’ve noticed my Czech has changed and now I’m writing the way I talk. The text is swelling before my eyes like badder, better,

pitter patter bather blather banter I look back at the screen. I shift in my chair and don’t know what to write. I just thought of Michal Rehúš, the word concept crossed my mind somehow and the association was with Rehúš. I wanted him to be here as well. I like to collaborate. But it’s also due to a lack of self-confidence because when I don’t come up with something myself, someone else does. I’m an editor, it’s easier for me to build upon something that someone’s already come up with. Through the combination of being an editor and poet, author, artist, I don’t know, a person much rather discovers how hard it is to come up with something of your own, completely, new, it’s doable but not that much Kristeva I’ll try not to use punctuation and see where it takes me Joyce, damn it a comma my own textual habits and dabbling got me now sitten und bräuchen German in fourth grade, no that had to have been later, another comma and another and another I’m completely addicted to them my body does them or rather my fingers do without thinking my body thinks more than I’d expect is the body the editor or the poet question mark what about your body you’re gone already  and you speak German anyway and I wouldn’t have heard you anyway another useless attempt at communication it worked out before but at the same time it wasn’t worth shit because you can’t talk to someone when you’re writing a text when the text is writing you and it’s impossible to write a text when I’m talking to someone that maybe isn’t true you can pick up a girl on chat and you can put so many emotions into it that it isn’t complete bogus my hand is slowing down

Head as well

Silence

whistles

i don’t like capital letters at the beginning of sentences. Period. I’m hungry. I’ll eat the baguette no I’ll save it for hard times when Hana was here she promised she would drop by at 8 so she might bring me something even though I’m acting completely against my philosophy of non-communicative writing right now but I remembered Markéta who wanted to lie down for an hour and not think of anything and she could only spare fifteen minutes political art silence. I’m gonna have that baguette. No but I can at least have a bite. I’m gonna take a bite, I can’t take a bite because I’d stop writing and I don’t know how to do it so that at least with one hand I’ll press

tttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttnuttttttttttttttttthungerrrrrrrrtrrrrrtttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttgrttttttttttttgrttttttttttttgettttttttttttttttingttttttttttttttttttimmmmmmmmmmmmrrrreeeeeeeeeeeteiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeezttttatatatatatatataatatataatatatatatatatattattattattaatatatatatatatatatatttzttztngbcngfhiluhsfbsfwhncmjh,lkoipolfjbshshsaqaGSFSGBSBGNCMZSTWHQRGNHGJHHDGHHDFHDFHDFHHDFHFDHFHGFso I ate it. I’m still chewing and these words occurred to me

forge

morel

dolt

prong

gleam

thing

hold

have

fright

smack bang

wham

hey

puppy calf away car quick doctor incoming vaccine injection child

bawling

how easy it is

and others: fuck

shag

sprt

lech

fart

 

COLOPHON

 

Ondřej Buddeus — A me

 

Is part of Ondřej Buddeus‘s participation in the Adaptation.

 

“But the need to adapt, uncoordinatedly, individualistically, without any authority, leader and order, to changes we initiate ourselves. Adaptation signifies now (asynchronously) and here (various places) an affinity with Utopia, which remains a non-place. Adaptation to conditions of reality which the collective dialectic of individuals without leader and order themselves create.“

 

Babi Badalov, Hafiz, Lia Perjovschi, Loulou Chérinet, Ondřej Buddeus, Ruti Sela, Shady Elnoshokaty, Vít Havránek, Xu Tan, Zbyněk Baladrán.

 

 

Curatorial Consultant Visual Arts:

Anne Faucheret

 

Translation: © Tereza Novická, 2013.

Graphic design: www.mutanta.com

 

We would like to thank all participants of the festival who took part in the project.

 

We would also like to thank

the following individuals:

Hana Buddeus, Věra Krejčová,

Antonín Mareš

 

Published by Steirischer Herbst Festival

GMBH Graz 2012 in collaboration with

tranzit.cz

 

 

© Ondřej Buddeus, 2013

ISBN: 978-80-87259-18-4

 

steirischer herbst festival gmbh

Sackstraße 17 / 8010 Graz / Austria

 

Supporters:

Land Steiermark Kultur

Stadt Graz Kultur

Bundesministerium für Unterricht,

Kunst und Kultur

Programm Kultur 2007-2013 der

Europäischen Gemeinschaft

Graz Tourismus

 

Sponsors:

Legero / con-tempus.eu

Steiermärkische Sparkasse

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