Alexander Hahn
On the Nature of Things

The guests were gone. It was quiet again in my living room. Every now and then a bus roared down Smocza Street. At one point a TV test sound swelled in from next door and went silent again. I felt extremely unwell and looked it. From every mirror and monitor stared the same distressed face. I turned around. In the middle of the space towered the massive Pompeiian wall - still a bit chilly to touch. At the far end of it, past the dirty dishes on the floor, about twenty seemingly endless feet away, waited the convertible sofa with the promise of sleep.

Sparse light trickled in from a few broken windows. Junk was rampant, parts of machinery, appliances, office furniture from before the War, piling up to the ceiling in some of the rooms. Sprouting out of a heap of moist ledgers and envelopes was a spiral metal staircase which lead up to a corridor. The room at the end of the hallway was spacious and bare. Paint peeled off in large flakes from the walls and the ceiling. 
The front wall featured two doorless door frames opening abruptly on to a rubble yard and Bielunska Street one flight below. On the trodden and plain carpet which covered the entire floor were two book covers, bloated by humidity, a guide to living without sex and "Your Right to Riches," or some such title. I rented the place and set up my studio.

Heavy rain fell for four days straight. I didn't bother about the dripping noise. By late afternoon, water discharged from the Smocza Street ceiling onto the table near the balcony door.
"Like the court is attracted to guilt, water is drawn by your emotions and thoughts. You should try to contain them," said the woman sitting next to me at the Viking Bar. She handed me her card: Anna's Cabinet of Astrological Magic, Grzybowska and Zelazna Street.
"See me sometime..., and oh: meditate on your heart!"
When I returned home, part of the ceiling had collapsed.

In the presence of a few friends, I had workmen construct my first wall, a simple brick wall, about twelve feet long and ten feet high, set on the carpet in the middle of my Bielunska studio. 

One against each side of it and centered, I placed two threefold screens, just big enough to conceal me, leaving the greater part of the wall fully exposed to view. I walked behind one of the screens and raised my hands above it, then drew them within. I shouted, "I am going," and, after a pause, "here I am now," at that moment emerging from behind the screen on the other side. The audience was amazed. It was apparently impossible for me to go through, over, around, or what seemed most logical, beneath the wall - the rug preventing the use of a trap door. Yet it was an illusion.

I improved my agility and soon delivered the trick within seconds, feigning a smooth passage from one side to the other. When I came down with a debilitating allergy, I was forced to suspend training. The common scratch tests established the cause of my sneezing and wheezing: "prolonged exposure to unusually large numbers of fungal spores, most likely Aspergillus or Trichoderma, probably fruiting on the carpet - result of occupational circumstances." I was administered allergy shots which brought only minor relief.
 

The moon's shadow touched the Middle East, brushed across India, Southeast Asia, the waters of the Indonesian Archipelago before easing out over the Pacific. My eyes went all teary. Earlier, I had witnessed Shoemaker Levy plunge into Jupiter, volcanoes erupt on Io, and a new cycle of sunspots begin - without any allergic reaction. "Avoid the imminent total eclipse of the sun," said Anna.
The sun extinguished. Anna flicked on the ceiling light. The celestial bodies, which, defying gravity, had just seconds ago so realistically simulated the most prom-inent astronomical events of 1995, lay strewn over the wooden floor.

I spent October 24, the day of the eclipse, in Annaís sealed off Laboratory, listening to "Jovial and Venereal" music under a favorably tuned sky. The session did not cure me. Quite the contrary: I was suffering from particularly severe spells. Anna was rather delighted. She looked at my condition and the worsening of symptoms - which I attributed to the incense nebula - as temporary and indicative of the healing process. But I didnít come here mainly for therapeutic benefits. I was irrefutably lured by the dazzle of the galactic spectacle, and the beauty of Anna.
Anna never spoke much about herself. We shared the professional affinity of illusionists and there was strong mutual attraction, maybe love. She liked us simply to be, making love beneath her planets, body pressed against body, breathing together. Everything seemed to happen as clockwork, yet suddenly turned into a mess. Like a satellite tethered to a ravaged ship by an emotional umbilical cord, I got sucked into the nightmare of her broken marriage. From a dream at that time, I wrote down "Anna and I fought the impossible fight to be together. Why we separated, I donít remember. I find shelter in a log house in the forest, waiting for her. But she never comes. Friends or my family come. They tell me, Anna has been committed to mental care or some institution by her family. I have broken down, too. I will not see Anna again. Helpless, wrapped up in a blanket, Iím taken to the waiting car. Defeat. There will be a statement made to the press to belittle the severeness of our defeat. Nemesis."

I arrived in New York, mood and health peaking low. Still, I set up two installations, one at the International Center of Photography, the other at the Swiss Center - and then twisted my ankle.
"Very weak kidneys," said Dr. Chi Wah, the Chinese herbalist on Division Street, after taking my pulse and looking at my tongue and eyes. He composed a lengthy prescription in cryptic Chinese characters, occasionally pausing, and scanning me, and then handed the paper to his assistant. Out of cardboard boxes, she scooped leaves, barks, lichen, and toadstools, apportioning my mixture with her right hand without ever using the scale which she held up in her left hand all the time. Twice a day for several weeks, I boiled the concoction, "forest soil, I thought," into a tea.
Bit by bit, I was healing.

Archeologists, clearing shat-tered remains from the floor of a structure beneath the Bielunska yard happened upon the crushed, contorted skeleton of a woman. A bomb during the War apparently sent a six-foot stone wall tumbling down on her and a large aquarium nearby. A block of concrete crushed her skull, and a jagged glass fragment pierced her head as she fell. Her spinal column was pushed up into her brain case. With further digs scheduled for spring, the lot was now protected from pilferage by a corrugated metal fence.
The Vistula was frozen up. Beneath the Danzig Bridge, a man in yellow anorak was fishing through ice. Two silvery fry lay discarded next to the hole, tiny droplets of blood in the snow. Between snow-bent reeds near the abandoned camp site on the far side of the river stood another woman - Nina. I felt great with her and looked it - yet whom was I deluding then?
I woke up early one morning. Nina was lying next to me, breathing excessively, her stomach rapidly pumping air. "My heart is breaking," she said and turned away from me. Within minutes, she fell cold and catatonic, her whole body embellished with tiny pearls of frozen sweat. Her grasp was sudden and unex-pected. Tightly locked together, we canted and broke through a thin crust of ice. She let go of me and sank away. Half of my chest still above the surface, I instantly froze to the ice, caught with the contorted grimace of gasping for air. Only my eyes could still move. To my right gaped the posterior half of a cross sectioned human head. My eyes skewed away in disgust, past the Warsaw skyline in the first light of dawn, and struck upon the face, an old man with an unusually broad nose, breaching cryonic mouth, black filling in his teeth: the fisherman. 
His eyes looked at me. "Ood or ish," he uttered.
Snap went my jaws and I woke up.
Nina had gone.
"... one, two, three, hands up in the air..." The voice of a female instructor of an aerobics TV program rang through the apartment wall.

Bielunska Street. Icicles barricaded the staircase. Over the treads cascaded dull, yellowish ice. I clambered up to the hallway, which was crusted with crystal-lized excrescence. The toilet and the water pipes were smashed. Against a window leaned a piece of cardboard, roughly legal size with a photo collage of female genitalia, bizarre votive offering of an illicit visitor.
Shrieks issued from the studio. Three men were slaughtering a sow. Two tugged her down against the wall, as the third one kept bashing her head with a hammer. With every hit her skull cracked and blood gushed out. She squealed and winced, but would not die. The butcher clinched her head, wrenching it one and a half times around her neck, and still she lived, silent now, her eyes bulging.
"Fucking dilettantes," I shouted. My furious entry impressed them to abort their bloody business, and in an instant, they disappeared. 
The sow whimpered on the carpet. I fumbled for a silver case with a glass syringe inside. I drew some spit from my mouth and injected it into the pig. She shut her eyes, which all the time had stared at me with utter resignation, opened them once more, no fear, just immense tiredness, and closed them again. In a second, her head sagged over the trap door edge, lolling above the obscure debris downstairs.

I cope poorly with stress. Fluttering heart near explosion, hyperventilating, rancid body odor, I slumped against the wall, shaky hands groped along the bricks for a recess - and withdrew imme-diately: my fingers had half sunk into the wall.

New Yearís Eve 1985 in New York. Tripping high on LSD, I found myself at the closing of a party. Two couples were still dancing, some people lingered around small tables, scavenging glasses of left-over booze. Not much remained from the buffet, except for a melting slice of chocolate cake. With a gesture of grandeur, I swept a knife across the frosting which, for a startling split second appeared rock solid and resisted, before snapping into its likely state of sectile softness. I took a very suspicious lick from the schmear on the blade.
"By the last week of June 1952 all the existing six hundred fragments of the papyrus, with the exception of fifty small floaters, had been joined together; and we had before us a document over two meters in length which, though riddled with lacunae, extended more or less continuously from one of its original ends to the other. On a glass-topped table strongly lighted from below, every pair of fragments was examined for exact coincidence of their fibers, valid joins being confirmed and misguided attempts (of which I contributed an impressive number) being circumvented..."
I knew exactly what W.C. Hayes meant by "his misguided attempts," just having spent the better part of a week on Lipari in the cold and humid office of the local soccer club, struggling with the idiosyncrasies of an ancient Olivetti PC and a luckless article about the future of multimedia which began with just that quote. The paper concluded with the conjecture that ideas, rather than being sacred individual property, are like microbes, often promiscuously afflicting different peopleís minds and using them as hosts for their parasitic ambitions to get out into the real world. The editor was baffled. She could not understand what had happened. The text was completely useless.
"It is not satiric, and not prospective." At best, she would pay me with what she called a "Ausfallshonorar" - honorarium of failure.

"Are you two traveling together?"
The plain-clothes Austrian border guard palmed his badge. The bushed young man, sitting opposite me, woke from sleep.
"No, we arenít."
I stated the purpose of my trip as "business" - "mycology," sounded fine, resisting a tempting "walking through walls." I felt too tired to be bothered, and with the huge German shepherd sniffing at my untied shoe lace...
My neighbor cleared himself with a laminated ID: CERN, European Laboratory for Particle Research, Geneva. The officer ended the inspection, curbed his dog and went away, leaving everybody else in the car unchecked.

Begun 10 years ago, completion still a decade away, the Large Hadron Collider will one day be a physicists' game for studying fundamental particles and forces at highest achievable energies. For the moment, involved in the accelerator's simulating and prototyping phase, my fellow passenger's quest for elementary particles had settled into a wearing routine of steadily accumulating large quantities of valuable but unsurprising data. "So far, he said, they agree boringly well with expectations - no spectacular discoveries - but then again, break-throughs most often come in a completely unexpected place."

ÑI see now only the sun, without sunrise and sunset.  But in my heart is Northern Light in green colors. Anna, for Alexander.
PS.: Maybe this article could interest you?ì

"Soil fungi of the genus Trichoderma have numerous commercial applications. The cellulose-degrading enzymes produced by the fungi give jeans their stone-washed look; in some household detergents they help remove fabric nubs; as biocontrol agents they dissolve fungal wall cells of plant pathogens.
Manufacturers use a strain of T. reesei collected from a cotton tent on a South Pacific Island during World War II. Like most commercially valuable fungi, it reproduces only asexually, which makes potentiation through selective breeding impossible. Selective breeding will be possible only between sexually compatible strains."
(Science News, Feb. 24, 1996)

When I last saw Anna, she had just opened her "New and Expanded Laboratory of Astrological Magic," featuring the star Pegasi 51 and its recently discovered planet. The novelty and the prospect of happiness by heavens reprogrammed attracted clients from all over, "friends," she called them - everybody in urgent need for a change of luck. Her time spent with me dwindled to a velleity.

The laboratory windows which used to be bricked up had been opened. Bright light fell inside. Anna and her two teenage sons were sitting at the edge of the Milky Way. They did not notice me at first, and when I joined them, she smiled, weary, and whispered, "I have departed from you," her hand slipping out of my touch. I saw that her eyes belied what she had just said, but she avoided my look and quickly directed her head towards her new planet which was just about to dive into the corona of its sun.

I didn't know what to make of her note. But I got the piece of carpet which the intruders had cut out to access the trap door and took it to the Institute of Genetic Research at Warsaw University. I really hit lucky. DNA and enzyme analyses classified the fungus: a hitherto unknown strain of Trichoderma reesei. It reproduced sexually.
On May 08, 1996, the Polish Patent Office secured my rights on the cultivation and the use of my strain of Trichoderma hahnei. With the signing, one week later of a licensing agreement to the Posen pharmaceutical company Lechia and EcoScience Corp., based in Worcester, MA., began a period of prosperity in my life.

A horoscope described the year as particularly strange, a time where almost all the values would collapse and one tried to look for ways to bring some order into the general chaos. I took up breathing exercises. Initially, the chill effect always hit me by surprise and killed my concentration. I fell out of rhythm and had to start all over again. Respiring to the beat of a metronome, in the beginning set to 160 clicks per minute, produced an extended but rather deplorable shiver. And I wasnít even sure, if the cooling didnít come from the tension of trying to keep up with the pace of the instrument, or worse, the worry somewhere in the back of my head that it might skip a beat. I broke through my single-device-fixation by surrounding myself with a population of 100 metronomes, each one ticking at its own frequency. The rattling, at first, was overwhelming. My ears monkeyed from one oscillator to the next, and I was constantly rectifying my inhaling and exhaling. By and by, a small group of metronomes would usually begin locking up to each other, fast ones slowed down and slow ones sped up, nudging into a compromise rate, which stood out against the background noise, drawing more oscillators and myself under its inescapable spell until we all performed in synchrony.

I was very happy to see Anna among my friends who had all accepted my invitation to come to my home tonight for the premiere of my new performance; this time with a more imposing wall, the replica of a Pompeiian parapet. Shortly before the presentation, the scaffold of diode lasers which cooled the stones to subzero temperature was removed, and six video cameras were positioned to record the event from different angles. The guests could walk about freely; mirrors allowed observing all sides of the wall simultaneously from every aspect, and there were no screens.

I stood naked in front of the wall. Breathing gearing up to 17 racing met-ronomes, my temperature dropped. Quivering, I inched towards the wall. The moment I synced up with the metronomes, I was thrust forward, right through the wall and emerged at the other side. For about 10 seconds, jolting back and forth, appearing concurrently at each edge of the wall, well over two feet apart, I existed as two separate persons.
The stop of the metronomes was precisely timed, crucial for the coalescence of my dual existence to occur outside the wall. Trapped inside, I might instantly freeze to death. Still, the collapse always took a toll and I never looked my best after the feat. Tonight was no different. I came out of it triumphant, bruised and chil-blained, in pain, as though a barbed wire, strung between anus and mouth was twisting inside of me.

Dirty plates were left on the sofa, white rice spilling onto the bed spread. I wiped off the grains. They were hot, hissing as they melted through the Styrofoam packaging chips on the floor. Some animal peeped from pain and rustled in the flakes, making to the upper half of the picture. A dark and furry head, maybe a rat, emerged - my vision now slightly blurred - and transformed into what looked like a hairy babyís face - crying. The face slowly vanished leaving only the cry which remained some time before it was annulled by a rotating small black hole. As the hole gathered momentum, the surrounding objects, foam, glasses and metronomes began to twirl and drain into a turquoise belt which expanded around the center nothingness. Suddenly, the disk tilted and broke loose, leaving a gap in the space, about three feet in diameter. The void was instantly filled and the place looked normal again, except for the blue sun which hung between me and the Pompeiian wall.
A faint chirping emanated from the luminary which now spiraled around the wall, slightly distorting it. Faster and faster it whirled, stretching, as it drew closer, a frenzy of pure energy tug-ging the wall to wobble like flabby flesh, droning in the final seconds before merging... and plummeted into the wall. 
Abrupt silence.
I could see clearly again.
The impact had left no trace on the wall at all.
I burst out laughing - a grand Pompeiian wall, right in my living room!
"What the fuck, I heard myself say, here I go," and entered the wall.
 

©Alexander Hahn
Image: Niki's Moon
from the book On The Nature of Things

 

The guests ...