Radical Despair

Trial 0000

To start a story of horror and despair, it is almost always appropriate to talk about the weather. A clear blue sky or a cool gentle breeze on a summer day, and a barrage of normalcy that draws the final line between an undisturbed natural condition and the inevitable disaster it precedes. As a tower falls, a camera seizes its initial descent, tears it apart from time, like a dream..... As we walk erroneously in the street, just before the world as we know it falls apart, crumbles into small particles and disappears, the catastrophe seems to have just eluded us. We retain no memory of it, no document or testimony. All we can recall is that only a moment earlier it was late fall and now it is spring, and the fields below are green and moist. We rise from a bunker or a bank, a private loan or a rifle in hand, the air still saturated with the usual suffocating odor of bones, urine, blood, and cow guts coming from the city's public slaughterhouse. The surrounding nightclubs sunken into the ground like communal graves and bomb shelters, their light-heartedly featured tables shaped like coffins and war memorabilia, their loud beats fail to disguise the deep groovy hums of tower cranes and the buzzes of surveillance aircrafts.

To foresee and to forecast; with an oracle or a satellite and an all-embracing gaze, the weather allows us to allocate the disaster on a set of defined coordinates, a sudden fall, or a loud burst. But then again, there is no punctual moment of disaster ....

Talking about the weather is to define the disaster in terms of per-determined parameters, stacked and categorized into complex models and processes. With a log, a chart, or a trembling needle, a young intern’s face is overjoyed as her war machine detects a movement or a long anticipated disturbance on an infinite plane of stillness..... Both as catalyst and a warning, the sky turns yellow and a city drowns in its own flooded sewage. All at once we are in motion, and then we are still again.

At a distance, a woman walks with an unusual gait....