“[Capital] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”

— Mark Fisher: Capitalist Realism

“We were a heap of living creatures, irritated, embarrassed at ourselves, we hadn’t the slightest reason to be there, none of us; each one, confused, vaguely alarmed, felt de trop in relation to the others. De trop: it was the only relationship I could establish between these trees, these gates, these stones. In vain I tried to count the chestnut trees, to locate them by their rela­tionship to the Velleda, to compare their height with the height of the plain trees: each of them escaped the relationship in which I tried to enclose it, isolated itself and overflowed.. –  And I-soft, weak, obscene, digesting, juggling with dismal thoughts-I, too, was de trop…. Even my death would have been de trop. De trop, my corpse, my blood on these stones, be­tween these plants, at the back of the smiling garden. And the decomposed flesh would have been de trop in the earth which would receive my bones, at last; cleaned, stripped, peeled, proper and clean as teeth, it would have been de trop: I was de trop for eternity.”

— Sartre, La Nausée. Paris: Gallimard. 1938

“Photography is a vulgar addiction that is gradually taking hold of the whole of humanity…”

– Thomas Bernhard, Extinction (1986)

“The traveler reflected: It is always questionable to intervene decisively in foreign circumstances. He was neither a citizen of the penal colony, nor a citizen of the state to which it belonged. If he condemned this execution, or even wanted to deceive it, one could say to him: You are a stranger, be quiet. To this he would have nothing to reply, but could only add that in this case he did not understand himself, for he was traveling only with the intention of seeing and by no means to change foreign judicial constitutions.”

— Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony

das Harte und das Weiche, das Saubere und das Schmutzige, und eben, als Hauptopposition, das titelgebende Trockene und Feuchte

–littell, das Trockene und das Feuchte

The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

— WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

Genesis 1:28

and the reason for the expulsion was the discovery of sexuality; or some kind of enlightenment, either way, he wanted them gone and here the program was set into motion. Fast forward sexuality turned into a commodity and the program threatened to come to a screeching halt, as this multiplication has exhausted that subdued earth. And, Mr. Senator, while you were reading out loud to us this passage from a book that you want to have banned, burned, and want to see bonfires to cleanse yourself in: Did you have an erection? And when you imagine drilling into the white-covered Alaskan soil to provoke a black ejaculation of oil – do you have an erection then? The obsession of evangelicals with other people’s sexuality; and their obsession to subdue the earth, intricately linked to this moment of expulsion from paradise…

Paradise, Berlin, October 2022

Das ist die Welt;
Sie steigt und fällt
Und rollt beständig;
Sie klingt wie Glas;
Wie bald bricht das!
Ist hohl inwendig.
Hier glänzt sie sehr,
Und hier noch mehr,
Ich bin lebendig!
Mein lieber Sohn,
Halt dich davon!
Du mußt sterben!
Sie ist von Ton,
Es gibt Scherben.

— faust, hexenküche

Qeqertarsuaq, Greenland, August 2023