I could sing of the ominous and threatening things, the dead and forgotten. But will I ever travel again through the fog of oblivion, tinted yellow by madness, to the shores of a strange reality? Will I ever find my way back, which seemed as coincidental to me back then as Rip van Winkle once wondered about the emergence of a Flemish society? No decades were stolen from me by a strange liquor, not even years, but I could also tell you about the strange festivities in the depths of the fateful Mons Vereneis. However, I would never be able to say what was mixed up with my hallucinatory dreams because one thing has become clear to me: There are different types of nocturnal spinning, and at least one of them opens up the infinite vastness of the afterlife to us. It is not at all impossible to me that, as soon as we leave our stable star system, we could also end up outside our diligent sleeping activities simply because we would not be allowed to keep our bodies and would die. In other words, everything we need in our world would die and, if we lost it, we would wander around unable to continue dreaming because, in such a state, we would simply consider all our memories to be dreams. We need the protective shield of matter so much that we fear losing it more than anything else. Perhaps this is why we fear ghosts. They show us that even in death, we cannot escape and must continue playing endlessly. Through their sinister appearances, they demonstrate the importance of repetition and how everything repeats itself until the concept of eternity is realised.
Sometimes you want to make up a story, only to realise that it’s true. The same applies the other way around. A memory that you swear is true turns out to be false. Then there are the mixed ratios in various gradations. We will never discover what reality truly is, and the secret of fiction has long been shrouded in mystery. I remember my life as if it were a story I had read. There was a time when I was dreaming alongside the surrealists in Paris, and perhaps they had heard of me decades before I was born. In 1990, I read their notes, pamphlets, and manifestos to see if I was listed anywhere. But then I remembered that I had been given a different name long before I was born. At least I didn’t hear anything about the person I knew myself to be. You wake up and stand in front of a shelf of the dead. All that remains of them is your interpretation of their thoughts.
