The synthesis of matter

Many doors to many new and old rooms these days, some missing, some still phantoms, some still without keys, some which might close, and some changing every day. I feel like I have been in transit for the better part of a long time, and probably some temporal spaces transitioned through me, rather than I through them.

In the communal kitchen in the 1970s post office block in which my temporary office at the Center for Digital Cultures in Lüneburg is located, there are two peculiar appliances on one wall. One is a protruding metal box, sporting a clock and some switches the function of which is entirely unclear. Approximately one meter to the right, there is a small vault with a combination lock, embedded in the wall. I’ve asked around but nobody seems to know anything about them. What seems clear, however, is that there is a clandestine connection between the two of them, one that cannot be, however, disentangled. Open the vault and figure out the death clock, figure out the clock mechanism and get the combination for the vault. I watch it every day when I make coffee, or listen to Mercedes Bunz talk about the intricacies of locally smoked trout, or the nitrogen chambers used by local farmers to conserve their apple harvest from going bad. Every once in a while, an old apple farmer goes in there to die the supposedly most comfortable death, and come to rest on a mountain of apples.

The door to the new office in the medieval city center is still closed. The building, formerly Hotel Deutsches Haus, also served as the local Gestapo headquarters, and housed to office of the rather unbeloved media theorist Werner Faulstich, tempting some to ask for a ritual metaphysical cleansing of the space before we move in.

The old sanatorium in the mountains of Borjomi, Georgia, where sulfuric water cures your every ail, is now inhabited by refugees. Cows wander around, and in the old operating theater someone plays the piano. Since the 12th century, the cave monastery of Vardzia riddles the mountain with tunnels and doors on 13 levels, connecting 6000 apartments, a throne room, and a church inside the mountain. Some monks still live there.

These are all doors I miss finding and walking through. Especially the mouth of the glacier.