Svetovi drugih - priče iz Sarajeva

Zadnja delavnica skupinskega pisanja feministično-queerovske znanstvene fantastike Svetovi drugih je potekala 9. septembra 2011 na festivalu ženske angažirane umetnosti PitchWise, ki se je letos šestič odvijal v Sarajevu. Podobno kot na prejšnjih delavnicah smo se tudi v Kulturnem centru Sarajevo ravnale po nadrealističnih receptih za skupinske besedne igre in se poželjivo ozirale k feministično-queerovskim svetovom, ki zaenkrat spadajo še v znanstveno fantastiko.

Pravila iger 'definicije (vprašanja in odgovori)', 'pogojniki' in 'izvrstno trupelce' lahko v angleščini preberete na tej povezavi. Spodaj lahko preberete prvi izbor povedi in zgodb s sarajevske delavnice, napisanih v slovensko-hrvaško-srbsko-bosanskem jeziku. Seznam bo popoln šele, ko bo vsem udeleženkam uspelo dešifrirati vse pisave in prepisati zgodbe.


Na delavnici so sodelovale: Kristina Andrić, Džejla Bektić, Berina Džemailović, Vesna Đorđević, Dragana Đukić, Ivana Gordanić, Maja Halilović, Amina Herak, Nedžiba Idrizović, Ilona Jerič, Lidija Kajtazi, Tamara Karanović, Selma Kešetović, Anja Tedeško, Ana Vilenica in Safija Zairović.

Udeleženkam se zahvaljujem za sodelovanje, Fundaciji CURE pa za vabilo na festival in izjemno gostoljubje.



Definicije (Pitanja i odgovori)

Šta misliš o današnjem danu?
U svemiru ima svega.

Koliko je sati?
Mnogo.

Šta želiš?
Puno malih slatkih zečeva.

Znaš li šta je ljubav?
Ponekad kad se ne nađe drugih izgovora.

Šta je megalomanija?
Svemirska pita iz antigravitacijskog brašna.

Jesi li ikad se digla u pola noći i zavijala sa vukovima?
Zato što je neko bacio ciglu.

Voliš li banane?
Sve je super, treba se udubiti u sve i zavijati s vukovima!

Ili znaš gde je otišla banana?
Tamo gde helikopteri šume u komšiluku.

Zašto žirafe ne jedu grožđe?
Izbledeće, plašim se.

Koliko ti je dobar vid?
Deset podeljeno sa dva.

Koliko si queer danas?
U slavini ima vode.

Šta je smisao života?
Diktafon, fotoaparat i hljeb.

Kako nastaju mobilni telefoni?
Pa ljepo bona, kako neznaš!

Koliko je visoko?
Pa zavisi koliko pingvina bude gladnih.

Zašto nisi kupila ružnati šešir?
Zato što su brojevi nestalna kategorija.

Kada ćeš obojiti obrve?
Kad se popiškim u travu.

Koliko si kolačića pojela?
Trudim se, da ne razmišljam o tortici.

Šta misliš kad šetaš ulicom u zadnje vreme?
Da ima ljubavi i vatre.

Kondicionali

Ako se budemo zadržale duže u pustinji, sačekaću sljedeću komercijalu.

Ako bi se ti zaustavila nasred ceste, onda bih ja otišla na pitu ispod sača.

Ako bi jahala konja, onda bi jela šampite.

Ako se nasmiš, organizirat ću uništavanje njihove štampe.

Ako krenemo odmah, možemo uhvatit leteću metlu.

Ako sutra mačka zaspi, popeću se na traktor.

Kad bi pala kroz staklo, meditirala bih kraj reke i sjedinila se s prirodom.

Kada bi imala uber awesome superpowers, onda bi pobjegla u kanalizaciju.

Kad bi se našla u liftu sa Madonnom, onda bi se smijala do kraja života.

Kad bi se sunce ugasilo, onda bi letjela.

Kada bih imala svu moč u državi, onda bi svi vodili ljubav i sadili drveće.

Kad bi Sarajevo bilo u Africi, nekako bi pronašla izlaz.

Kad bih se našla u drugom tjelu, onda bi ljudi imali više strpljenja drug z drugim.

Kada padne lopta, ja ću plesti goblene.

Kada bi uzela nož i gulila krumpir, ostavila bih sve i preselila se na Veneru!

Kada bi krenula prema mjesecu, otišla bi na prstima, da te ne probudim.

(Kratki) odlični leš

Zeleno oko skida se u šumarku u ormaru.

Tristohiljada livada spava kod plave rjeke.

Lepa zebra ide u ljuti indigo.

Nadjačani grah voli dlakavu ružu u lošem stanju.

Svilena zubdana trči prema šarenom kišobranu.

Ljubičasta banana je pojela čupavu pećinu.

Ljubičasta banana trči u ljepoj ljubičasto-crni kugli.

Lijepa olovka ide prema pospanom suncu.







(Dugi) odlični leš 

Kada bih imala svu moč u državi …
Kada bih imala svu moč u državi, onda bi svi vodili ljubav i sadili drveće. Zašto ne sadimo drveće od novca? Zašto još to nisu izmislili. Zašto nisu izmislili food drvo? Onda bi sve lakše bilo. Ipak zadovoljni smo i ovim našim nemutantskim drvećima. Ljeti su monotoni, dosada. U jesen mijenjaju boje ko osječaji šarenilo. Svaki list pada različito, nema monotonije. Sve šuška, listovi plešu. Kao da vode ljubav.

Zašto se ne probudiš jedan dan sa uber awesome superpowersima i možeš da vladaš državom? Diktature treba. Pohapsiti i zatvoriti sve mrzitelje prirode. Zašto svi ne odemo u šumarak na potočić spojit se sa unutrašnjim mirom, da vodimo ljubav? Budimo hipijevi. Ljubav nije za pičkice, pička si ako mrziš ljubav. Zašto svi ne zaboravimo na se, udružimo se, napravimo ogroman kolač i usput sadimo drveće; vračamo staro. Legalizujmo gay brakove.

PIČKA. PIČKA. PIČKA. Volimo pičke. Ja znam, da je volim. I sada, lijepo da se izrazim, nabijem vas sve na svoj fantomski kurac. Mene vaše norme ponašanja uopće ne zanimaju. To je valjda neka ironija. Zato što slavim nježnost, moram da se borim, da iznalazim nove načine da spasim sopstvenu kožu od vaših stigmi, vaših značenja. Prošla su vremena kada je John Lennon zajedno sa Yoko Ono upozoravao, da ne posežemo za nasiljem, jer kada vas isprovociraju za nasilje, znaju šta će s vama. Ne znam, nalazim se na ivici svijeta, sa slušalicama na ušima iz kojih trešti ljuti glas Marylna Mansona: FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!

Jebeš ti to sve. Sve je to ludo i bolesno. Boriti se za ljubav – bolest uma, koja vlada svjetom i to svjetom koji je izmislio jedan kuronja u svom officu. Zato i samo zato volite se, poštujte jedni druge, vodite ljubav i sadite drveće. Zar to nije poanta života? Što ti više treba? Haj sad reci. Nema veze sve će doć na svoje kad se digne revolucija na planeti zemlji i potamani svakog kuronju u officu i spali ga na lomači. Strpljen spašen.
 

Već pet godina živi u tišini 
Već pet godina živi u tišini i bulji u svoje sove, pčele, vrane, jabuke, kruške. Nikad neće nać ono svoje pismo al nema to veze jer je nabavio novu antiknu uniformu i prodat će je na dražbi kao i ono prošlo, da može nastavit živjet u tišini. Prostor tišine. Da se barem nalaziš. Tu. Da ne ovisiš o drugima, o osjećajima. Da ne budeš stvar. Da promijeniš sebe. Vjetar vijori tvoju kosu. Opusti se, kažeš si, sve se treba proći. Nemoj da ta tišina preovlada s tobom. Nije ni toliko dobra. Uniforma će se poderati, novac od uniforme će biti potrošen. Ne možeš kupiti sreće sa njim. Preovladava s tobom. Daj si reci: Današnji dan nema granica, ne nosi pasoš sa sobom. Nemoj postati pjesnik tame i tišine …

Pjesnikinja udahnula dim cigarete i pogledala kroz prozor. Ostao joj je jedino sredstvo bijega u drugi svjet. Razmišlja: Hvala na ovoj cigareti. Razmišlja opet: Kako ljepo život prolazi … kao i ova prokleta cigareta. Ne može napolje. Zatvorena je u ovoj ludnici duži niz godina. Dali je pitate tačno za broj, ne bi vam znala reći. I da li je to zaista važno? Zatvorena zajedno sa ostalim pacijenticama i tišinom dočekuje zoru. Tretiraju je kao dijete iako je odrasla žena. Zna ona i zašto. Dijete ne sanja slobodu, nego dobrog gospodara, nekoga tko će u njegovo ime, u ime njegovog dobra, osloboditi ga odgovornosti.

Nakrivila je šešir i zagledala se u svoj odraz u ogledalu. Čuvaj se slike, rekao je Lacan. Iskrivljena stvarnost. Uvijek iskrivljena stvarnost, ali i ta razarajuća spoznaja, da nova ne postoji. Nalazi se u sobi punoj odraza, refleksija i ne zna koja je ona. Da li je njezino tijelo uopće materijalno? Dali postoji u vremenu i prostoru? Postoji li vrijeme i prostor? Kako da ona sada kaže svojoj majci da je zove bog, a ona pere suđe? Odaziva li se uopće netko tom pozivu? Problem je sav u tome: ona to ne želi raditi, ali mora, jer nema nikoga drugog da preuzme tu paklenu ulogu. Lakše je izbrati komfor svakodnevnog ponavljanja. Obuci opeglane košulje, obuj lakirane cipele. Pričaj nešto lijepo kao „Ništa nije završeno dok je čovjek živ“ ili „Sve se može kad se hoće“. Hoće li netko jednog dana znati, da je postajala u vremenu i prostoru? Čemu taj strah od nestajanja? Da li zbog toga piše?

Jako zajebano vrijeme, naglas razmišlja pjesnikinja, vrijeme je da lik koji želi predati svoje pismo okonča misiju i shvati, da je izmišljen lik.


Zeleno oko skida se u šumarku u ormaru 
Zeleno oko skida se u šumarku u ormaru. Zeleno oko zagleda crveno oko. Zeleno oko je ljuto. Reži! Neko joj je uletio na teritoriju. Zeleno oko i crveno oko počinju borbu na život i smrt. Ovako ta borba izgleda: dva oka zure jedna u drugu. Povremeno škilje, namiguju. Tešku artiljeriju čuvaju za kasnije.

Moglo bi se reči da su te oči u određenom raskoraku, neuhvatljive na istoj razini sporazumijevanja. Jer zeleno oko služi kao refleksija crvenom oku, a i crveno oko shvata da mu je zeleno ogledalo.

Kažu da so oči prozor duše ali zelenooka Azra nije vjerovala u dušu, samo u precizne anatomske činjenice kakve je prižekljivala od sada određenog i savladanog Fuada. Izgledao je tako krhko među tim žutim lišćem, ne znajući da li da moli za milost ili da traži još. Ipak, ta drskost ... Koliko god mislila, da ga je pritisla i uništila mu svaku priliku da ponovo sakupi rasuti identitet, bilo je nečeg ponosnog, nesalomljivog u tom preljepom dječaku.

Sunce je sišlo u šumu. Objasnio je crvenom i zelenom oku da su dijelovi cjeline i da oba oka pripadaju sunčevom spektru boja. Crveno, zeleno, žuto, plavo oko. Sve te boje je posjedovao taj dječak, smatrala je Azra. Čak ga se malo i bojala zbog tih boja, jer je čudno izgledala zelena irokeza na glavi, ljubičasto i crno oko, jaka čeljust, poderana odjeća, lanci, čizme i duša na jakni. Tačno je znala kada on prolazi pod njenim prozorom. Svaki dan u 17.00 je dolazio da se rukuje s nekim tipom koji bi mu dao paketić a on njemu novac. Redovno ga je promatrala i uvijek se pitala šta li je u tom paketiću i zašto svaki dan. Ali nije previše razmišljala o tome sve dok ga je ona mogla vidjet.

Jednog dana se nije pojavio. Umjesto njega je drugi dječak kasnio. Svaki dan, različito vrijeme. Zeleno oko je počelo suziti. Duša je slomljena. Nema ga. U paketiću je smrt. Zašto nije uzeo njen paketić ljubavi i života? Oči su ogledala duše, ljubičasto i crno oko. Ne mogu prežaliti. Otišla je do tipa po paketić. Krenula je za svojim očima sudbine. Umrla je. Na rajskom kolodvoru izlazi iz voza, čekao ju je s ružom, rozom.

The World SF Blog: Reflection on In Other Wor(l)ds workshops

The "ideologically suspect" World SF Blog, dedicated to new science fiction, fantasy, horror and comics from around the world is edited by Lavie Tidhar. On March 14th, the blog featured my article on In Other Wor(l)ds workshop series where I explain how and why it all started four or five years ago ... The article can be read here or below.

In Other Wor(l)ds: Workshops in Collective Writing of Feminist-Queer Science Fiction 
As a feminist activist, passionate reader of utopian fiction and hesitant writer, I often wondered why nobody in Slovenia seemed to be interested in literary games, for example in collective explorations of unthinkable ideas and unheard-of styles. My question and a possible answer might have something to do with the fact that I am relatively young yet older than my country.

Let me explain. I come from a twenty-year old country whose official language, Slovene, is spoken by two million people. In 1991, Slovene literature was appropriated for nation-building goals as it neatly legitimized the claim for Slovene independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia – even though this political demand had little to do with art and a lot to do with the rise of ethnocentrism in the region. This (and the war that soon spread to Croatia and most fatally wounded Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina) has profoundly influenced the “serious” status of literature in Slovenia.

As an art form of national importance, literature has been serving the interests of established authors and theorists who continue to prescribe aesthetic norms that discourage innovation and guarantee that marginal authors and genres are going to stay in that position. Of course, an alternative writing scene does exists but genres such as science fiction, fantasy or horror are barely present. And since the literary market is so small (the usual print run for works released by small publishers is 800-1000 copies for fiction and 500 copies for poetry), genre authors can forget about either commercial or critical success. I was never sure whether this was a blessing or a curse.

With the help of my friends, many of whom are musicians, comics artists and zine writers, I was able to think of it as a blessing. They often organised music and comics jam sessions where strange, sometimes humorous, sometimes poetic, sometimes scary conjunctions arose from, so it seemed, pure chance. I enjoyed these encounters very much and in 2007, I decided to invite other amateur writers to jam with me and make writing a less solitary experience. So we sat around a table and started playing the Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse. Since we were less interested in automatic writing than in the points of interaction, we adjusted the technique to our needs. We decided upon a character, a setting or a plot twist and began to write. When our aching fingers forced us to stop, we assembled the pieces into a messy monster-piece, read it out loud and almost died laughing. The synchronicities were fantastic and frightening, as if our unconscious cared little for our elimination of the game’s automatic aspect. It seemed that our “emphatic repudiation of individualistic artistic value”, as Mel Gooding puts it in The Book of Surrealist Games (1993), really resulted in a “collective revelation” – one that taught us to trust our imagination and our abilities as writers.

The first public workshop took place in Amsterdam (The Netherlands) at the feminist-queer festival Ladyfest in 2008. The title In Other Wor(l)ds seemed most fitting for the occasion. It paid homage to Gayatri C. Spivak’s book In Other Worlds (1987) in which she tried to develop a methodology that would allow for non-patronising representations of “Third World women” in (Western) theory and fiction. It referred to another author whose view on the distance between – or rather, proximity of – fiction and fact is exciting for feminists and other intuitive visionaries. In the context of science fiction, Wittgenstein’s famous statement that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” seemed to suggest that it is possible to write about Others, those metaphorical aliens, in ways that change my own (position in the) world in the process. In short, science fiction seemed to be the perfect genre for people who think about otherness in practical details, rather than abstract concepts.

At the workshop, I invited the participants to write stories that relate or transform gender variant human characters to aliens, fremdsprachenmonstermavens, kiggies, dodots, levitating broomsticks and other queer creatures. We discussed examples of feminist Sci-Fi to see what has been done, what hasn’t been done and why it might be still hard to do it. For example, we asked why does the critique of Cartesian dualism in Ursula K. Le Guin’s ground-breaking novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) not automatically extend to the critique of homophobia. And why does the Other, the radically different, the hardly imaginable, often seem so monstrous? We also talked about the ways to queer the rigid conventions of gender and genre. Since ideas in Sci-Fi are often disguised as characters, we figured they are inevitably gendered, thus it must be possible to genderfuck with them in all sorts of ways. So we tried out the recipe.

In Amsterdam, we defined the characters and a plot feature. We wrote about Bo, the human, and Vlar (or Vlarrr), the non-human character. We said we’ll let them choose the setting as long as they accept to meet and run away from – or towards – something together. The stories were written by Brigitte, Anne, Sara, Diny, Caroline, Nina, Anouk and yours sincerely. The second workshop happened in Salzburg (Austria) at a conference about innovations in open-access media. Since we wrote with pens on paper, we focused on the social innovation of a very old medium indeed: language. We decided to split in a German-speaking and an English-speaking group because these were our only common languages: the group consisted of eleven people whose mother tongues were Portugese, English, Slovak, French, German and Slovene. We managed to hold hostage individual authorship for three hours and wrote about three characters – Kim, V, and 0/1 – whose gender and character were subject to rapid change. The stories took place in Salzburg in the year 2050 and were written by Cristiane, Debi, Red, Dušan, Paul, Sarah, Christian, Nikoletta, Jenny and Imre. Later, I self-published the English stories from both workshops in a zine called – you guessed it – In Other Wor(l)ds.

Since then, the concept has been used for brainstorming purposes at other independent feminist-queer events in Belgium and Great Britain to promote zine-making and self-publishing. A participant from Amsterdam, an architect, told me she and her colleagues found it useful in their profession. As for me, I finally held some workshops in my home-town, Ljubljana, in 2010. We were hosted by a radical library, an arts association and twice by a feminist-lesbian collective. The characters varied from Rx Vulgaris (a symbiotic mechanoplant), Vanja (a transgender cyborg), The Decoratives (gay activists) and female anthropomorphic cats fighting gentrification to local politicians and self-appointed intellectuals – suggesting we disguised political satire as Sci-Fi. The combination certainly worked! In addition, the hosts liked us enough to help us scrape together funds for the release of a book entitled Svetovi drugih (KUD Anarhiv, 2010).

The most recent workshop happened on February 19^th 2011 at the winter edition of Lad.i.y.fest in Berlin. We played several Surrealist writing games in Sci-Fi settings with feminist-queer aspirations. For example, we collectively (de)constructed sentences like “The sexy robot slapped a strong community.” Later, we wrote several short stories, based on our favourite Exquisite Corpse sentences.

I no longer have to wonder where are all the people interested in literary games. I found them and learned that, locally speaking, “serious” literature and its inevitable identity crisis, is none of my concern. The fact that I am older than my country is an absolute advantage: I don’t even have to take myself seriously!

In Other Wor(l)ds stories from Berlin

The In Other Wor(l)ds workshop took place at the f.a.q. Laden in Neukölln on February 19th on the occasion of Lad.i.y.fest Berlin. We played several Surrealist writing games in Sci-Fi settings with feminist-queer aspirations: Definitions (Question and Answer), Conditionals and two versions of Exquisite Corpse. In the first version, we collectively (de)constructed sentences like “The sexy robot slapped a strong community”, in the second we wrote short stories, based on our favourite Exquisite Corpse sentences.

The following mistress-pieces were written by Nina, Laura, Tanja, Dare, Sybille, Katha, Raoul, Cy, Tina, Audrey, Sabine, Skyler, Tea and another (for now) anonymous participant. The list of stories will expand as soon as we manage to decode our exquisite handwritings. Until then – enjoy the ones below …

Many thanks to Lad.i.y.fest organisers for hosting the workshop and the Slovenian Embassy in Berlin for donating the wine! (The Surrealists were right: “The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine!”)

Definitions (Question and Answer)

What is your idea of queer science fiction?
Biting the dog again and again.

What does a star look like?
Like the cow that went up the mountain.

Why is it cold?
Because the night belongs to the creatures.

Is there such a thing as luminous wonder?
Depends on the light.

Must there be light at the end of the tunnel?
Look, the teddy bear is acting like a cat!

What is the best place for a secret?
That would be just too complicated to answer.

Which pizza do you like? Peperoni?
No, the one with the book from last year.

When is it the time to fall in love?
I don’t care. Let’s just do it now.

Why are sad people so complicated?
Because blue robot ponies don’t have a sex.

Why did the Snowqueer slip on the pavement?
Because the stars are pink and there is a huge teddy bear jumping on the top of the mountain.

What’s your favourite way of making sure you’re really awake for class in the morning?
I look for a fly that flew millions of years ago in a tropic forest and got trapped in amber.

Where did you find this book?
That’s misleading the truth written in the book.

Why did you sell that pink car?
Because the nuns told me so.

How can you travel from London to Siberia?
Look for a white rabbit with your answer in her mouth.

What would you do if you noticed you peed in your pants after laughing too hard?
It’s quite simple: you would want to try to cover it with a large carpet.


Conditional

If you walk into a queer party and you can’t find anyone who looks like you, then you can fit two green jellies inside your trifle spacesuit.


Exquisite Corpse
Follow the links to reach the stories based on the first three sentences.

An ambitious thought is swimming with the multiple cyborg.

A beautiful facility manager is insisting on a heart-breaking glass window.

A wild teddy bear cried over a deconstructed baby.

The yelling princess hurt an apple-shaped glitz business.

A stupid bicycle basket fell onto a terrible caterpillar.

The beautiful bowling ball is spitting a slow cigarette.

A blue ant sculpted the queeriest crocodiles!

An amazing power is playing with spicy gloves.

A rather curious box will devour an exhausted mirror.

The wonderful Amazons danced with a very used box.

The phenomenal train met a furious birthday cake.

The sexy robot slapped a strong community.

A precious cupboard secretly fell on Cinderella.

Part 1: An Ambitious Thought ...

In Other Wor(l)ds stories from Berlin - Part 1: 
An Ambitious Thought Is Swimming With the Multiple Cyborg


I. No Escape
The ambitious thought is swimming with the multiple cyborg. The flowers are falling from the trees, the birds are singing out loud and there's a terrible noise that seems like thunder: it is the nostalgic voice of another cyborg coming from the distance and it sounds like the saddest song on Earth ... Our multiple cyborg decides there and then ...

… to go to Earth and look for the other cyborg and maybe save it from its sadness. But the 1st cyborg had forgotten how people live on Earth. It was seen by the anti-terrorist forces and put in jail. There, it heard so many sad songs that it couldn't recognize the one it heard on its planet. As the 1st cyborg had no gender, the guardians put it in a cell in the women's quarter, alone, because in their world, if you are not a man you are not something else but assimilated to women. So the 1st cyborg descended deeper and deeper into sadness and soon its mission was forgotten. It thought only of the sad songs and its inability to fit into one gender box or the other. Teardrop after teardrop fell onto the concrete floor until one day one of those salty teardrops tore a hole in the floor, opening a trapdoor and sending the 1st cyborg down down down until it landed at the feet of the cyborg it had intended to save from sadness when it came to Earth.

“Hi, there you are! I was waiting here for you, really sad and terribly alone,” the other cyborg said.

“Yes, I heard your sad voice and so I decided to look for you and free you from your sadness,” the 1st cyborg explained, “but now I see this idea was too romantic. Since I've been caught and trapped here, I've become just as sad as you are.”

“Yes, but at least we're not alone now, and maybe we can escape from here.”

The other cyborg already looked a bit happier.

“But we are in a prison, there is no way to escape!”


II. The Supersonic Message
An ambitious nostalgic thought is swimming with the multiple cyborg. The cyborg carried this thought for a really long time. Thoughts were falling from its head like a fish bowl kicked so strong that all the fish fly far away ... Anyway, a head full of thoughts and some strange memories: memories from the wild sex party they threw last night.

What was that? Nostalgic thoughts? They represented what the cyborg has been longing for: cyborgs from all kinds of places, dancing to slow motion songs in ballerina suits. Oh, for sure it felt like swimming. Swimming in a sea of metallic kisses and passionate oil. That was when the multiple cyborg remembered that special robot that looked like a piece of machine from the future in 1920. All kinds of thoughts started to return to its head: “I’m gonna organize a play party this evening!”

The cyborg thought of sending a supersonic message to the whole galaxy, one that can be translated as: “Welcome to the strangest place in the universe! Everything is possible here: fucking cyborgs, aliens, robots and maybe lost humans … for one night in our timespace but in your timespace, it could represent more or less, it depends!”

The cyborg sat back, satisfied with its message. Smiling to itself, it pressed its scrawny grey thumb on the ‘send’ button.


III. Revenge of the Lonely Cyborg
The ambitious nostalgic thought is swimming with the multiple cyborg. The thought swims backwards, against the current, passing through channels and bouncing off rocks and fallen tree stumps, further and further into the past. The cyborgs swims alongside the thought, guiding it around islands and through marshy areas. While floating under a bridge, one lazy summer afternoon, the thought questioned itself.

“Why am I going backwards?” it said loudly to itself. One of the older cyborgs raised his wide head out of the water and answered: “Because you must revisit the past before you can move into the future.”

Slowly floating, the thought wondered what he would find in his past. At this point he couldn’t remember where he was coming from nor which way he had gone so far. Only when he bounced against a rock or a tree stump, he had a short flashlight of memories, astonished and confused about the way he had made so far. Where was the beginning, his origin? Or was there no origin at all? Would he just lose himself on the journey, fragmented and untraceable? And then, even if he could follow the way back to one origin, what would it tell him about the future?

Probably that he should take care of the dog more often, or write some letters to his family – the kind of precious advice that life is teaching you all through. Or: don’t step on the line, try to walk the sidewalks without stepping on the lines because that brings bad luck.

Anyway, the cyborg was lonely. A forty year old cyborg with no hopes for a future (technology doesn't last that much), thinking and meditating all day long: why nobody told me that technology doesn’t last forever, that we must be trashed too, necessarily, at a certain point? Why nobody teaches us this in school and we have to learn it the hard way ... when our metal is only good for ironing?

Even the complaining and meditating took too long, so our cyborg took a life-changing decision: “I am going to crash to the Earth, in a techno-pole, to show them where technology leads: to death ... Ah, ah, ah, I am becoming diabolic because no hope is left, no future for me, no future for others! I am going to destroy all 'scientific centers' and put bombs everywhere! Maybe the survivors will find parts of my body, maybe they'll wonder how a cyborg could be so lonely?! They might understand that all planets are perfect and loneliness exists everywhere …”


IV. In the Here and Now
The ambitious nostalgic thought is swimming with a multiple cyborg called Az. It lives in another world, far from us. Whoever built it had in mind an ideal world. Az should be clever, free-minded, not straight, but it met another cyborg called By, lost in this ideal world.

By: It’s boring, we don't have to fight anyone!

Az: I don’t agree! This world is so wonderful, no more discrimination! Everyone can live freely!

By shook its head sadly: “What good is freedom if it wasn't fought for? Furthermore, what do we learn by relaxing in this peaceful paradise? Is there no challenge here, can't we use our minds for a single moment?”

Az didn’t know what to say. It arrived to this ideal world just a few days ago: “How long have you been here?” it asked.

“3 years, 99 days, 4 hours and 36 minutes,” By replied.

Az: “And what did you do all this time? You just seem to be bored with this perfect place and you’ve forgotten what it means to fight. Now the fighting for freedom looks like a great heroic adventure to you but don’t forget about the all pain and suffering it causes!” Az looked a bit furious because his beautiful thought was questioned that way.

Oh, stop telling me what to think,” By replied angrily, “you came here with your fantastic thoughts about perfect life, telling me your wisdom – but you didn’t live this life! What do you know about it?”

“The point is that when you arrive to the ideal world, nothing is like you imagine it would be. When you live 'this' life, the ideal world is far away, unreachable. And it seems to be perfect because our reality is 'here'. Our reality doesn’t taste good, the ideal world does. But the ideal world is not here.”

When By stepped into the ideal world he couldn’t believe it because it had became part of the 'here' and the 'here' is where we experiment, what we live. And if we live something we don’t like, then we have to fight to change it. This desire for change, even in the paradise of the ideal, was too shocking for By, who realized that he was never living in such an ideal place, that this static picture was an illusion of reality. When By met Az, he realized there were many things that needed to be done. And that’s when he joined Az in the fight. He also realized that Az was not a 'he' but a 'she' and that by calling 'him' 'he' was trying to see the world as a place made only for him.

When he saw that there were others, different ones, and saw a part of the fight as well, he started to call Az for what she was, a complete cyborg, independent of pronouns. And both kept on fighting together. Ideal world or reality, call it as you want. The fact is that they are fighting HERE.


Part 2: A Beautiful Facility Manager ...

Part 2: A Beautiful Facility Manager ...

In Other Wor(l)ds stories from Berlin - Part 2: 
A Beautiful Facility Manager Is Insisting on a Heart-Breaking Glass Window
 

I. Clashing Histories
A beautiful facility manager insisted on a heart-breaking glass window.

“Give in, give in to my beauty!” shouted the manager. By now she was in despair. Normally, her charms always worked, no matter how pressing the window’s heart-ache was. This window didn’t make a screech. One if its panes moved slightly, from left to right, as if to say: “No.”

“What do I have to do to heal your shattered window-heart? I tried duct tape, chewing gums, even the new subparticle glue … Please, talk to me!”

Was this a dream? A bad one, it seemed. A kind of nightmare. Since when did he notice that this special window was talking to him? And why did he think it was female? Nobody knew he liked women. It was forbidden, the machines didn’t want it. Why was he so sad about the broken glass? He couldn’t remember. This shouldn’t be happening. The machines. Was evolution really this bad?

He was male. That was the only thing he knew.

“Go to hell,” he shouted, “go to hell, all of you!”

Stretching Robin woke up. He looked over to the corner where he kept the window. She was still there. Shattered. And his dream slipped away from him.

“Time for another appointment with the high Wita. Stay there,” he said, “and don’t move.”

Talking to a mirror again, oh dear. He crawled up the ladder and into the air vent that protruded insignificantly into the room. He had to make his way to the bowels of the ship. It was magik time. He had to witness the Ritual.

“Psst.”

He heard a sound as he tried to wriggle him ample hips through the small hole. He paused, sweating. No other life forms apart from the Facility workers were allowed in the ship. That’s unless you count the witches. And of course, no one knew about them.

“Psst.”

He heard it again. He lowered his feet down onto his screen shelf where all the Universe’s oracles were kept. He pushed his shoulders through, and bruising the right one, he landed with a bump on the second layer of his cabin.

The only thing with even a vague Life-Energy was the mirror. But that was impossible. Surely the forces had died long ago with the genocide that had rid the planets of all humans. Womyn. Was that how it was spelled? He wasn’t sure. The histories seemed to clash.

Moving over to the mirror, he observed his long lashes repeated in her eyes.

“Why the fuck mirrors? Are mirrors glasses? Window-glasses? What a stroke of genius of fate. Of course, at this point people did not believe in faith, a somewhat anachronistic concoction, anymore. But then, in spite of technology, how do you know – to have picked mirrors as the last remnant of life-energy?

The thought of recovering a mirror, that symbol of vanity and coherence of the self, tickled Robin’s sense of glory. He pictured himself as the hero, just like in the texts he had at one point read in brain training.

Robin the hero would save those he loved most – women, womyn – and himself, rescue them from the planet where it was possible to survive only with the help of mirrors. Robin didn’t know exactly where to but knew how it should look like. He gave the idea a second thought and suddenly he wasn’t sure anymore if he knows where to go. Sure about the need to leave and sensing that the journey away from the planet will be long and exhausting but nonetheless necessary, Robin started preparing for the journey of his life.


II. Potatoes Don't Have a Gender
A beautiful facility manager was insisting on a heart-breaking glass window. She was sitting in a large oval room, surrounded by kaleidoscopes of windows. Rainbow-light was reflecting everywhere, bouncing off her hair, giving it the colour of the old flags she had seen in the history Portals, carried on poles by strange women with short hair. Her salopettes were slightly wet with sweat and she was sitting surrounded by fragments of broken glass.

A short, curvy figure walked up to her: “What are you doing, Ariadne?”

“Shh!,” the other said. Her stained fringe shook irritably: “'I'm concentrating.”

It had taken her so long to get to this point, she felt. And yet only a few hours ago she had been sitting in the mess-cafeteria, sipping her tomato juice with Vox. And now they were here, at last. And she had to concentrate. Hard. Or everything might be lost.

Vox ate her mashed potato hungrily. Ariadne was acting strangely. Quiet, frowning. Holding her tomato juice in her hand, barely drinking it and eating nothing, even though they had a busy day of Lyte Krystal mining ahead. What the hell was going on with her?

Annoyed, she finished and slurped down her cold, luminous energy T. In a way she felt manipulated, as if she was in some kind of sarcastic system of cow-willing-sipping luminous energy T in the morning, replenishing, just to pour all the energy into the Lyte Krystal. On the other hand, their plan was projecting an arduous night ahead.

While sipping on the mashed potatoes (yes, they could be sipped as well if X-rayed with the sharp light of the awakening morning), they were sorting out the last details of the night that was lying ahead. They didn't let themselves be bothered by the annoying phone ringing, or by people who were passing by, iodizing in wonder at the two persons sitting on the floor, surrounded by glass-spirals, eating breakfast and talking just as casually as if they were shopping at the market. No, they didn't let themselves be disturbed by the BIG ONE, who was flying into town and who was way more important than any of their human concerns.

Ariadne's concentration period was finished. She opened her eyes again and instantly the rainbow-light disappeared from her voluminous hair. As she looked around herself, nervous about the BIG JUICY ONE's arrival, she noticed that her hair looked even longer and darker in the shattered glass reflection. She wished she could cut it right there, at once, just like Vox did after seeing the holographic representation of her strong predecessors' history of struggle against the BIG ONE. What worries! Now, only a hundred years later, she and Vox were on a diplomatic mission to introduce the BIG ONE to the new mashed potatoes recipe which healed the heart-break off all species, BIG and small.

Everything became great as Vox accepted the new wisdom. And everybody really loved the BIG POTATO ONE. Potatoes don't have a gender. Who knew it would be that easy? And it all started with a facility manager ...


III. Metamorph Now!
A beautiful facility manager insisted on a heart-breaking glass window. So he looked at it. Why do these cyborgs always destroy windows? That was his life: queering ponies, broken crocodiles.

“Mr. Suffer?”

Oh, no. He hated to be called by his real name.

“Yes, divine queen of perverts?”

Cyborgs are so logically engaged. You can’t win.

“Why is there a teddy lying on the second floor?”

“I don’t know. Do you wish that I metamorph it?”

“No, thanks.”

And then he saw it. The face in the window. Again. This planet was a mess.

He looked down and returned to his work. They called him Mr. Suffer but nobody knew his real name. He forgot it a long ago, in the Third-Iron-Age. And no one bothered to give cyborgs a name these days. There were too many of them … us … no, them. So hard to think of the trillions of slick figures of his kind. And of course, that is what the humans always wanted. To de-figure them. To take cyborg culture and hide it from all second-class citizens of the Eleventh Galaxy. No wonder, he thought cynically. With the combined life-force of these eternal lifeforms, a revolution could be staged.

“Screech.”

Again he heard it, that sound that his Professoress once described as the sound of fingers scraping a blackboard.

“Screech.”

Quickly, he looked up. Nothing.

“Queenie, oh queenie,” he mumbled.

His Supervisoress reappeared.

“About that teddy: can you metamorph it after all? Its fuzzy little legs are bringing out my maternal instincts.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

Typical, he thought. She was scared.

Scribbling little letters which don’t deserve their name onto the surface of the table, the divine queen of perverts was pondering: “Is there a difference between Teddies and Cyborgs, and if yes, who gets to name them? In a way, Teddies had been just very lucky but maybe also strategic in selling their fuzzy legs as completely inoffensive; so trivial and cute that revolutionary metamorphosis could not be thought of.”

Queenie started thinking aloud but just couldn't get it why the Cyborgs were always said to be biologically engaged. After all, she never saw any Cyborg sharing its desire with another Cyborg. At least not with her own eyes. Or was she simply ignorant? Maybe she imagined desire in a certain way, thought it had to assume a certain shape ...

In this moment, Mr. Suffer realised he was in his own world. There were still teddies around him but no cyborgs in sight although he could swear he smelled the overwhelming saliva from their mouths ... not in sight but surely present. Instead, only a sales-person was looking at him like he was insane. He was sure that this sales-person thought so, but he didn’t care about it. Cyborgs were around him and they might have desires, too (he just didn’t see them) ... and he himself ... yes, he himself ... a small flash of insight grew … became huge ... yes, he desired them! He desired THEM!

“Oooh! Cyborgs,” he screeched like a nail scraping against rusty metal, “why wasn’t I constructed as an autoerotic cyborg, why can’t I just please myself?!”

“Don’t despair,” shouted the divine queen of perverts, “metamorph! Metamorph now!”

“Yes, I am ... am ... mmh ...”

His electronic consciousness faded out for a second, perhaps a century. When he opened his eyes again, he realized he was tied to the iron frame of a velvet-red bed. A dozen fluffy and warm teddies were sitting on his chest, salivating with desire and gazing transfixed into his many compound eyes.

“Who am I,” he thought, “what have I become?”

Perhaps it no longer mattered ...


IV. One grows, one grows up to the task of growing
A beautiful facility manager was insisting on a heart-breaking glass window. The window belonged to a fancy shop with antique teddy bears. They were not in the best shape, some of them were missing legs, some of them had no head, but looking at them, the facility manager could cry tears – so beautiful they were in their uniqueness! They were to be exhibited, the facility manager decided, and so s_he went against the conviction of her_his colleagues and clients who thought s_he's gone crazy. S_he was standing in front of the shop, looking at it from a distance, aware of the treasure that was lying behind the wooden bulk windows. S_he was thinking of teddy bears and their heads and legs and bellies and filling that was partly pushing to the surface of their beings. S_he could almost smell their fur, it had the sweet odour of years of humidity.

“Aaa-khm!”

The facility manager moved her/his beautiful head towards the sudden sound. What was that?

“Aaa-khm,” repeated the sound and by now (s)he knew that this was not some random noise from the street, not the cracking of the boards that covered the window – no, the sound was coming from behind the boards. (S)he brought her perfectly violet nose closer to the window and looked at the damp teddy bears from real close. One of them seemed to move slightly, as if to stretch its muscles. Suddenly, it pulled out a sign that said: “WE ARE NOT EXHIBITS. FLUCK YOU!”

“What?”

“Which part of the sentence you didn't understand?”

“Maybe the 'Fluck you' part.”

“C'mon, I'm a bear. Do you expect a perfect pronunciation or what?”

“I didn't even know that a toy is able to talk.”

“I'm lonely. And my name is Zoo, by the way.”

“What kind of a name is 'Zoo'?”

The bear seemed to grow: “What kind of a job is a 'facility manager'?”

“You're a naughty little bear.” Am I really talking to a bear, she thought in the mean time, I should visit the doctor. While it wondered, the bear apparently returned to its inanimate stasis. And then: “Naughty little bear, am I? Are you trying to dominate me or what?”

Aa-khm laughed: “Well, I guess they don't call you 'Bears' for nothing. Who would think that toys are into BDSM?!”

To her/his surprise, the teddy laughed heartily with her. Did it understand? No one, not even the Sybil-IV's got his/her jokes. They were too old-fashioned, filled with references to a time long gone. So s/he kept laughing, hysterically now, the sound coming deep from hir belly.

“Look, shut-up,” the teddy bear hissed, “you've got to get me out of here. I'm old and trapped. Look, my shagging is starting to get mouldy.” Zoo held up a leg impatiently, showing Aa-khm the newly-formed star crystals. Zoo was here for too long and too frustrated to bandy about PleasSex with a facility manager. However, s_he was pleasantly appealing. Zoo quickly thought about how simple it was for it to label people as appealing or not. Where did it learn that? Behind the glass window, checking out passers-by.

Like a balloon with its sides stretching, Zoo became larger. A kind of an unpleasant feeling, but one grows, one grows up to the task of growing, stretching, filling up space. Like a yeast dough with a slightly fractured surface. Fractured? It started with some cracks, cracks turning into fractals, like sprinkled sugar all over the place. A kind of slow-motion but steady, then a point of fullness, a point where glass resistance is overwhelmed by Zoo's mighty belly, crashing and cracking, shattering all over the floor. The glass window is broken, and so is Zoo's mightily enlarged heart. Literally.



V. Embizzle's Home

A beautiful facility manager was insisting on a heart-breaking glass window. Glass had proven instrumental to Embizzle's daily routine at least once or twice before. Its power to break people's hearts, literally, helped her once to dodge a ticket checker, another time to stop a night train from departing on time.

Looking at the window frame, Embizzle could not help giving in to the – what was by now thought to be obsolete – way of insulating living units. So Embizzle was choosing the occasions, the moments when it used its power very carefully and sparsely. It always focused on something that was incredibly important to it or to those it loved. And it loved people very much. Throughout the years it would observe how its use of power made people do things they wouldn't do otherwise but were just more right – they brought more equilibrium and justice (however vague this concept might be). However, when people would act in a more just way, their hearts would turn bigger and bigger until they would explode.

Embizzle itself was hurt by it and now, at this point was wondering whether the glass windows were the key to get rid of all this pain. After all, the glass was supposedly emotionless – and motionless. But wasn't there always something, someone behind the window glass?

Embizzle tried to look through the dusty window but only saw its own reflection. Its beauty was typical of its species: vertical eyes, horizontal nose, vertical mouth et cetera. But Embizzle was used to her face. So used, xe no longer noticed it. Right now she knew only one thing: her reflection in the dark dusty window was on her way, preventing her from seeing what was behind it. So s/he smashed the window with her fist.

She was surprised to see how easily the glass broke. How soft. It melted away and she was surprised again. The window was hiding a different room. There stood a scientist and mumbled: “Oh no, oh no, oh no.”

Embarrassing. Her beloved H was a small scientist? An ant? An insect with a writing pad in its hands? Ridiculous?

Embizzle wished she hadn't broken the window. This story was going to end really bad and she knew who would suffer in the end – herself. Looking at the scientist she noticed something strange about the creature. Although it definitely had insecticide characteristics it also had the same slightly slanting eyes as H, Embizzle's own long mouth. But, as well as this, the scientist had long white fingers, which were writing feverishly in a book. Looking at H, her own heart was breaking.

“Hello Embizzle.” The creature smiled: “Recognise me? I am your syster.”

And Embizzle knew then, where her ana…est dreams and skills had led her. Here. Home. To this beautiful, tri-specied creature, truly a child of the anti-speciesist Order's own philosophy. Looking at her, Embizzle knew that her hardest work had only just begun. Instead of breaking hearts, she would now have to learn to mend her own.


Part 3: A Wild Teddy Bear ...

Part 3: A Wild Teddy Bear ...

In Other Wor(l)ds stories from Berlin - Part 3: 
A Wild Teddy Bear Cried Over a Deconstructed Baby


I. One-Way Baby Route to Neukölnoid 
A wild teddy bear cried over a deconstructed baby when Elija awakened on its new planet. The sun had just risen and the tidy hills were covered in a kind of pinkish light. Even Elija's skin looked a bit pinkish. Except for the teddy bear and the baby everything seemed to be empty. Just these hills (Elija remembered them from some kids show), everywhere. When Elija looked closer, she saw that the teddy bear's tears were small little wool balls that started rolling down the hills and when they got stuck somewhere, they sprouted little trees with wool-ball leaves.

The baby didn't know it was deconstructed, it didn't care. It started playing with the wool balls and wool-ball trees. Elija didn't know what to think about all this, but then she thought that she also didn't have to, and started playing with the baby, throwing wool balls and piling the up. The teddy bear was still crying, so more and more wool rolled down the hills. But when Elija and the baby stopped touching the balls, the teddy stopped crying immediately. It started singing and the baby began to reconstruct itself.

When the baby was in one piece again, Elija noticed that somebody was shouting. A lot of creatures here, she thought. She saw the shouting one crawling on the sand towards them very quickly. It was a giant blue slug, now heading for the baby. It hugged the baby while softly talking to it and seemed very happy.

The happy times were over and done! The community did not approve those happy F-E-E-L-I-N-G-S, as they called them, in the stratosphere of deconstruction. The teddy bear unveiled his mask – it never cried, that was just woollen leakage coming from the old grandpa disguised in a fluffy bear. This was a strategy employed by the people of the planet of Media Deconstruction to deconstruct semi-innocent babies! Then they would use the babies as prototypes to live on planet Earth.

The way to stop this circus was to save the babies by transporting them to another dimension called Neukölnoid where no teddy bear could find them. As we speak, the new babies are coming to their new habitat. And yes, it's a one-way baby route to Neukölnoid! The robots of Neukölnoid will be happy to adopt these new imported life forms.



II. “Bahbahbuaha ...”

A wild Teddy Bear cried over a deconstructed baby.

“Not again!” said the baby, this time completely deconstructed. Teddy Bear had done this before. The last time it was when the omnipresent Robot had a massive jet-lag and started deconstructing the baby furiously.

“Look,” said the baby, “I think someone is manipulating with our time and space coordinates. That's why you leak tears, my dearest Teddy bear.” As soon as the baby said that, the Teddy Bear started vomiting uranium jelly candies.

In that moment, Ara the Third of the 3 Homeless Companions, randomly travelling through the space, entered the enormous bathroom of their ship. She spotted the candy and started to collect it from Teddy and stuffed it into her mouth.

“We have to do something,” Teddy Bear gasped.

“I like the candy,” Ara the huge parrot said. After she took a look at the baby she changed her mind: “OK, I do have an aunt on Planet B3, she is a witch and maybe she can help us. But we probably need the candy to pay her, so you need to stop eating it.”

They found a hygiene products bag in the bathroom and held it under Teddy's mouth to collect the candy. When it was full they left the bathroom and hitch-hiked to Planet B3.

During their travel the baby deconstructed more and more. Its body became only texts and discourses, its gender was gone long ago. But its shit was still real and they had forgotten to take enough diapers along. They used whatever they could find in the various spaceships and spaceship stops but they were still very happy when they finally met the witch. But something was wrong with her.

“Oh, my babyyy,” the witch screamed with tears in her eyes, “I've been searching for you forever.” She took the baby under her hairy armpits, watching it closely.

The baby made babbling sounds: “Bahbahbuaha ...”

What happened to it during the journey? Where did all its words go? Did it lose them? And what did it receive instead of words? The witch smiled happily and looked a bit scary with her black yellow sharp teeth.

“Finally you are ready, baby. The only purpose of your journey was to bring me the total power of deconstruction. I will see, finally see! I'll be the last and final judge.” And so she kissed our little deconstructed baby and sucked. She sucked until nothing was left except for the little crying Teddy Bear.

Back to Introduction
Back to the workshop invitation where the writing technique is explained (in case you were wondering what on Earth this is).

In Other Wor(l)ds workshop at Lad.i.y.fest Berlin

My next writing workshop is going to take place at the 2011 winter edition of Lad.i.y.fest on Saturday, February 19th from 12.00 to 15.00 at the f.a.q. Laden in Jonasstrasse 40 in Neukölln, Berlin. 

In Other Wor(l)ds: Collective Writing of Feminist-Queer Science Fiction

At the workshop, we are going to hold hostage individual authorship. We won’t wait for inspiration and we won’t worry about controlling the narrative either. Instead, we are going to play with the rigid conventions of genre and gender by disguising feminist-queer ideas as utopian characters of our choice.

The roboladies of Hermannstrasse.

The workshop will start with a short discussion about feminist-queer science fiction and the ideas or characters we would like to explore in an utopian setting. We will continue by playing several Surrealist games in “automatic writing” in order to relax and prepare for the climax: the collective writing of gender-fucking and mind-bending speculative stories. To amuse ourselves, we are going to conclude the workshop with a reading of our mistress-pieces.

We are going to play the following games: Definitions (or Question and Answer), Conditionals and two versions of Exquisite Corpse. The game descriptions below are taken from Mel Gooding's A Book of Surrealist Games (Shambhala Redstone Editions, Boston, 1993). In Gooding's words, these games can be played by anyone. The strange conjunctions, humorous or poetic, that they generate give them their point since the exploration of chance with automatic techniques is central to these and many other Surrealist games. 

The two faces of Ardra (from the Star Trek series).

 

Definitions (or Question and Answer): the game is played in pairs. A question is written down, the paper folded to conceal it from the next player, who writes an answer. Remarkable facts emerge. 

Conditionals: for two or more players. The same procedure as before, but in this case the first player must write a hypotetical sentence beginning with ‘If’ or ‘When’, then conceal it. The second player writes a sentence in the conditional or future tense. 

Exquisite Corpse: for a minimum of three players. Each writes on a sheet of paper a definite (‘The’) or indefinite (‘A’) article and an adjective. The sheet is folded so as to conceal the words, and passed round to the next player. Each player than writes a noun, conceals it, and the process is repeated with a verb, another definite or indefinite article and adjective, and finally another noun. The paper is unfolded and the sentences read out. Players may agree on small changes to ensure grammatical consistency. The game acquired its name from the first sentence obtained in that way: “The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.”

 

Konrad Potthoff's Wilhelmine meets Rosie (from The Jetsons).

I modified the game Exquisite Corpse in order to use it for collective writing of stories at In Other Wor(l)ds workshops in the following way: for four or five players (or several groups of four or five). Each participant begins by writing her own story. Ten minutes later, he passes the piece to the next person. After reading it (or not), xe continues where the other person stopped. The workshop is finished when everyone has written a part of every story and they are read aloud to ourselves or to the audience that can endure it;) 

The workshop will be in English. Please, bring a pen and some paper! 

Open to all genders, no application necessary. 

Stories from previous workshops can be read here and here.

Dogodek je podprlo Ministrstvo za kulturo Republike Slovenije. / Supported by the Slovene Ministry of Culture.

In Other Wor(l)ds - Three stories from London

Three stories from the collaborative writing workshop in London! As we agreed before we started writing, all stories include a character called Michelle/Michel/Michael who has a retractable, turtle-like head. Written by Red, Will, Jen Claptrap, Miriam, Katie, Golden Beetroot, another girl who had to leave early and me on May 29th 2010 at the London Zine Symposium. 


Michelle languished in bed

Michelle languished in bed. As she awoke her aching head suddenly emerged from her body, turning she looked out of the window. A glittering queer sheet of golden cloud had settled over the city. She was dreading going to work that mourning as she pulled herself up out from under the covers, which still smelt of that man who had stayed two nights ago. Just three more months of this work and she’ll have enough money to pay off Taylor.

She’ll be free. You would think it would be soothing, this thought of freedom. The places she would go, the opportunities she would grasp. But instead it filled her with a sick restless impatience, one that could only be cured by ingesting Zarkuous, purchased cheaply from the Somalian street sellers.

The bitter taste of the pills had often brought about a strange sense of nostalgia in her. Something from her childhood, those innocent days before the overseers decided which of the three genders she should become. The memories washed over her and the dullness settled as the drugs metabolised inside her bloodstream. Her head sank slightly into her body as the pills took effect.

At work she would look out of the window with an envious eye on the carefree children as men, women and woms passed by with the weight of their responsibilities clearly etched upon their faces.

Greg the Somalian street vendor stood outside ringing Michelle’s doorbell. “Surly she’s in” he deliberated. Greg had no ambition to carry the under-the-counter drugs he was attempting to supply all the way home again. He tried her mobile number. There was still no answer. “Where the hell was she?” Looking up at her window Greg could see it was open; he decided to go up the fire escape and to force his entrance. Pulling the curtain to one side Greg was shocked to discover a large pile of vomit, sitting in place of Michelle.

The pile of vomit eyed Greg from across the room. It mumbled, oozed, spluttered, and sucked. “Give me my pills,” it commanded. Greg moved from foot to foot to foot. He scratched at the back of his neck then dug his hands into his pockets. After all, a deal was a deal, he thought.


Willpower Pills

In a world far away and most definitely in the future, retractable heads were feeling slightly out of date compared to the new, fully removable & flat packed versions. Michel didn’t care, an escape was planned and if you were the latest model you’d be far too easy to track anyway. If the plan was to go well and not to end in the permanent removal of a head, retractable or not, Michel was going to have to use technologies that were mainly forgotten, data and programmes that had been left to gather dust in the foundations of the current system. Michel was planning, it was nearly time.

“Time for what?” From the back of the room, a cautious, worn out voice asked.

“Who is this?” replied Michel.

“It’s Who, Dr. Who, perhaps you’ve seen me on the telly?”

“What is a telly?” asked Michel who obviously had never seen a Dr. Who nor a so-called telly.

“Ah, never mind,” sighed Dr. Who. He scratched his ear and asked Michel if he needed help. He certainly looked like it. His outdated head was rusty and it screeched at Michel’s slightest attempt of moving towards the unwanted visitor.

It wasn’t exactly what you would call a nice way of meeting anyone. All it could hear was noises coming from a sort of background and nothing had much sense.

“How many pills have you taken today?” asked Dr. Who. Michel, surprised, answered, “What pills?”.

“Obviously the pills are wearing their effect off you.”

“What pills? Who are you? Who’s Dr. Who?”, Michel asks with a horrid high-pitched voice…

“Oooops! It seems that you definitely ran out of them…”

What Michel didn’t know was that in order to survive in this world, its willpower was determined this 3 little pills given to it every morning in the breakfast. All this was leading Michel away from the plan.

“Look mate, I’ve got a plan, yeah? I don’t need you messing it up with your mumbo-jumbo. Michel retorted. “I’ve got some serious digging to do in the foundations of the current system, yeah?”

“Well, if that’s how you greet your visitors then I really can understand why you’re so lonely,” said the doctor.

“Lonely? LONELY?!”

“Look, we do really need to talk about the withdrawal from the willpower pills and how it’s affecting you. You might start to slip in & out of consciousness, of reality.”

“Can you just leave me alone? You’re giving me a headache,” complained Michel.

“That’ll be it, are you ready to fight, Michel. If you want to stay in reality, you have to fight.” Feeling woozy Michel sat down on the floor. “Like I said, I’m busy making a plan, I don’t need you…”

“But are you ready to fight, Michel?”

With that, Michel’s eyelids lolled shut.


The Great Effulgence

Some months after the Great Effulgence, Michael the turtle headed proconsul for the Intergalactic Space Federation was happy making lunch, when all of a sudden she came to the understanding that every other turtle headed person in the solar system had disappeared, leaving her world and that of many others in complete chaos.

Who now would clean the streets? How would normal turtle head life now resume? She had no answer to these vital questions. But something else was bothering her, growing deep into her sinews and nerves. What was the Great Effulgence? Why had it happened? Why was the retractable turtle headed clan so disposable, or indeed, why had they been targeted? Was it a direct attempt to wipe a whole species out?

Lunch no longer seemed so appetizing. Questions, doubts and accusations were flooding her mind and she felt uneasy. Where and how had the retractable turtle headed people disappeared to? Her mind ran over the details of the previous few days. Have there been any clues as to what might happen? She began to recall all the events of the past 48 hours. Seemingly normal interactions were analyzed until they became distorted and sinister. At the corner shop Maki from whom she bought milk every day had offered her some fresh dates. Although she had taken them, they were left unopened in the cupboards. What if they were contaminated?

Everything was now not as it seemed.

Maki had mentioned a few times how frustrating it was that the turtle people never bought food from the Angolan shops. But despite this she never felt he resented her. That he would be part of the silent group that sought to annihilate turtle people.

But in the end it wasn’t the dates she should have been worried about. Opening the cap from the milk and taking a big slur she noticed a slight off colouring. Instead of the usual deep green there was a tint of blue in it, and what was that strange taste? …but too late. Whatever it was it took control of her and pulled her to the floor. Beautiful dreams ensued, swirling feelings of great freedom and liberation and then a “click” and a bright light.

Waking up – woozy she realised she was surrounded by turtle headed people again. But something was wrong. As the haze cleared, she saw row upon row of turtle headed people. Their heads clamped at full extension. Unable to move like this they would soon become permanently stuck and lose this beautiful ability altogether. People with fixed necks walked amongst the rows checking for signs of life in the turtle heads but otherwise dismissed their cries for help.

Michelle’s neck was also fixed and she knew that her destiny was fixed. Whilst she would still be able to reproduce, she and the rest of her people would forever lose that beautiful and unique way to make love amongst themselves that the fixed people had always been so jealous of.

In Other Wor(l)ds workshop at The London Zine Symposium 2010

The London Zine Symposium is an annual event that was set up in 2005 in the Institute for Autonomy - a squatted social centre in central London - to bring together zinesters, radicals and comic creators to celebrate DIY culture. The idea is to build a stronger DIY network and community by having people meet up, chat, maybe participate in a workshop or two but definitely have a good time.

The 6th annual symposium is, among other workshops, hosting In Other Worl(d)s!

In Other Wor(l)ds
An exercise in collaborative writing of feminist-queer Sci-Fi
At the workshop, we are going to hold individual authorship hostage for two hours. We won’t wait for inspiration. We won’t worry about controlling the narrative either. Instead, we are going to try to queer the rigid conventions of genre and gender together. We are going to disguise ideas as characters and genderfuck with them by relating or transforming gender variant human characters to aliens, cyborgs, monsters, mechano-plants and other queer creatures.

In Other Wor(l)ds workshop is a variant of the Surrealist game Exquisite corpse. Each participant begins by writing her own story. Fifteen minutes later, he passes the piece to the next person. After reading it, xe continues where the other person stopped. The workshop is finished when everyone has written a part of every story and when they are read aloud to the amazed amusement of all.

Everyone is welcome! Please, bring a pen and some paper.

Stories from previous workshops: Civilmedia Salzburg (2009) and Ladyfest Amsterdam (2008).

Saturday, May 29th at 17.00
The Rag Factory, Heneage Street, London E1 5LJ (just off Brick Lane on Heneage Street, about 400m north of Rough Trade and the Truman Brewery.)

station: Liverpool Street Station
tube: Aldgate East
bus: 205, 25, 254, 67, 15

Pet zgodb z delavnice Svetovi drugih

Zgodbe, objavljene spodaj, so nastale v manj kot treh urah na literarni delavnici Svetovi drugih, ki je potekala 1. februarja 2010 v ŠKUC-u. Na roko smo jih napisali in za spet prepisali Vesna Lemaić, Tibor Bolha, Dare Pejić, Danijela Zajc in Tea Hvala.

Pred pisanjem smo se dogovorili, da v zgodbah, posvečenih biotehnologiji, nastopata dva glavna lika: dvospolni kiborg Vanja in mehanorastlina RX Vulgaris. V zaključku zgodb naj bi se znašla v Trnovem leta 2010 in v večini primerov jima je to tudi uspelo...

Uživajte v branju!



V tri kiborške rastline, kam greva?!
»O, gob, mislim, da koordinate tudi tokrat ne štimajo,« je reklo Vanja v. 7. Stalo je pred podobo sveta, ki je smrdel po trohnenju, zakrit je bil z gostimi drobnimi lističi neznanega drevesa, in čeprav si niti malo ni želelo stopiti v ta vonj, je moralo – in to hitro. Rx Vulgaris, Vanjina biomehanična
sopotnica, je namreč že strastno sesala enega od lističev pred izhodom. Vanja je zavzdihnilo in izklopilo svoj vohalni čut. Uprlo je svoje gumijaste okončine v optična vlakna na stebelcu vulgarno
požrešne Rx. Rx se sploh ni odzvala na ta opomin, ampak je še naprej mulila listje nad teletransportno kabino.

»Ko bi jo vsaj lahko spravilo nazaj v kabino,« je zagodrnjalo Vanja in v istem trenutku dobilo idejo: gumijasto roko je izprožilo v škarjasto dlan, z njo odrezalo vejico, katere se je oklepala Rx, in obe sta padli na tla kabine.

Medtem je v Trnovem samo od sebe, tako se je vsaj zdelo ekipi, ki je pohala pod eno od sosednjih vrb, visoko listnato drevo padlo okrog. Rx se je spet začela pritoževati zaradi Vanjinih nespametnih dejanj, vsaj kar zadeva spreminjanje stvari med potovanjem v času: »Kaj pa če bo célo Trnovo drugačno, spremenjeno?«

Vanja je imelo že zadosti Rxinega godrnjanja.

»Ali pa če Trnovo sploh ne bo več …« ni Vanji dala miru klepetava Vulgaris. Namesto da bi Vanja preprosto izklopilo svoja ušesa in se skoncentriralo na vnašanje novih koordinat, je njegova človeška stran opravila svoje in Rx ga je razpizdila. Med njunim strastnim prepirom so se Vanjine nosnice široko razprle in začele vleči vase. Ko je iz nenadnega gnusa res glasno kihnilo, je njegovo čelo priletelo v velik zelen gumb.

Mlada Vulgaris se je začela zlobno hihitati.

»Tokrat bodo koordinate prave, ti rečem! Ti se kar smej, boš videla, ko bo tebi zmanjkalo listov za sesanje, ti bo trda predla!« Vanja si je raztreseno prilepilo čelo nazaj in se poskusilo skoncentrirati na prave koordinate. Ampak hočeš nočeš Vulgaris ni in ni dala miru, neprestano je tarnala: »Kdaj bomo že tam? Koliko svetlobnih let bo še trajalo? Bo tam veliko slastnega listja?«

»Pa daj, utihni že!« je zarjovelo Vanja, vse okončine so se mu prilepile na razne gumbe, nazadnje se je z ustnicami zaletelo v gumb OK in že sta se podala na pot proti neznani destinaciji.

»Vidiš, kaj si sedaj naredila!!!! V tri kiborške rastline, kam greva???«

Vanja ji je nalahno obložilo listke s težo svoje sape.

»Tukaj sva.«

Trnovo 2010. Ob Trnovskem pristanu je Rx bruhnila v reko, katere imena ni bilo v njenem hard disku. Pozelenela je še bolj kot trava, na kateri je razkrečila svoje listke. Vanjo je zaščemelo v prsih. Ni bilo vajeno trnovske atmosfere. Krenilo je proti prvemu objektu in skeniralo fasado in ženico na stopnišču.

»Vanja,« je zaklicala ženica in mu pomahala v pozdrav. Vanja je to spomnilo na njegovo zadnje bivanje v Trnovem. Od takrat je Trnovo dobilo žvepleno barvo s sivimi odtenki. Ženici s peroksidnimi lasmi je dalo znak, da bosta z Rx vstopili v objekt, obložen z aluminijem. Rx je zopet popadel smeh. Tokrat ni bruhala, šlo je namreč zares. Ženica je govorila vso pot po stopnicah v prvo nadstropje. O velikem povpraševanju in slabi ponudbi, o sprijeni cannabis, ki več ne zadeva, o nizki vsebnosti THC-ja. Izpod klubske mizice, ki je bila pogrnjena z idrijsko čipko, je privlekla aluminijasti kovček in ponudila Vanji bankovce, spete v poravnane svitke. Vanja je začudeno pogledalo v ženico. Ženica je pokazala na Rx Vulgaris in predlagala, da skleneta biznis: ona njemu bankovce različnih držav iz različnih časov (ki jih bo Vanja lahko dobro unovčilo na svojem planetu),
Vanja pa naj bi ji predalo Rx Vulgaris, ki naj bi bila visoko nasičena s THC-jem. Rx Vulgaris je najprej ozmerjala Vanjo, kam jo je pripeljalo, kako podrepno od njega, da trguje z njenim mesom. Nazadnje pa je ženico in njene idrijske čipke zalila z bljuvanjem, v katerem je ženica doživela
svojo najbolj nepozabno omamo.

Vanja se je opravičilo Rx: »Rx, res ne vem, zakaj sva pristala tukaj. Mislim, da z nama manipulira nekdo od zunaj!«


Trnovo, obljubljena deželačas

Potovala sva v obljubljeno deželočas Trnovo-2010. Takole je bilo treba. Takole je bilo izračunano. Tako so velevale koordinate, ki so določile obstoj moje idealne partnerke za Razplod. Moralo sem se Razploditi, saj sem ravno vstopilo v fazo zrelosti, ko so moja maternica in testisi zasijali kot tri lune X-fondovega planeta. Mojo življenjsko sopotnico Rx Vulgaris, ki so mi jo ob zadnji regeneraciji zasadili v lasišče, sem še zadnjič popršilo z vlažilcem po listih. Pravkar sva prišla v čuden čas, v čas, ko se dekleta niso družila s fanti, ne, morala so biti doma. To je bilo sto let pred trenutkom, ki ga tako nestrpno pričakujeva.
»Vidiš, kam sva prišla? Ne boj se, skrilo te bom pod klobuk, nihče te ne bo videl!«

Rx je zatrepetala, ko je okoli sebe videla zaraščene moške poglede, polne nejevolje in utrujenosti. Bil je namreč jutranji čas, čas mrzle, neusmiljene zime, ki ni prizanesla nikomur, vsi so se morali odpraviti na delo. Jaz prav tako, skupaj z mojo sopotnico imava pomembno opravilo.

V tem prostorčasu morava najti vlažilec za ljubo Rx – začuda se pri potovanju skozi časprostor niso prenesli vsi predmeti. Pravzaprav je bilo potovanje varno samo za žive predmete, takšne, kot so bili tile mrkeži, ki so hiteli skozi ledeni piš. Najin razpršilec se je razblinil ali morda ujel v katero od časovnih pasti, črnih lukenj, ki so še najraje prežale na plodne pare, kot sva bila midva. Kot bi jih podvojena življenjska sla – in svetloba, svetloba! – za razplod zrelega Vanjoida sapiensa nezadržno vlekla k sebi, ne pa obratno. Vanja se je na dolgem popotovanju k združitvi z Rx Vulgaris eni takšnih lukenj izognil samo zato, ker je vanjo zalučal sprej.

»Ihh,« ga je iz premišljanj prebudila Rx.

Vanja se je popraskalo po glavi in potem svoj s plišem oblečeni kovinski prst »rožici« podstavilo pod brado. Čohalo jo je in žgečkalo, mala pa je spuščala rezke visokofrekvenčne vriske, ki so Vanjo takoj vzburili … Tudi prej, ko še ni sijalo kot X-fondov planet. Zdaj pa je bil učinek Rxinih vriskov potrojen, in čeprav sta bila na ulici, na sedežih mrzle avtobusne postaje sredi trušča kočij in mrkih pešcev, se Vanja ni moglo upreti dražestnemu vabilu. Iztegnilo je vseh dvanajst prstov, razprlo živčne končiče, na tisoče njih, da so završali v zraku, in preden je dalo dlani k glavi, lasem, so se končiči že prisesali na kratke lase, ki so obkrožali Rx. Začela se je ... predigra! In to brez razpršilca. Rx je pljunila v goščo las in končičev in razprla lističe.

Rx se je preveč vzburila, Vanjin prstič je zaobjela tako tesno, da je na vrhu počila kožna prevleka in ven je pogledal metalni parkelj. Kadar se Rx vzburi tako na polno, jo je skoraj nemogoče ustaviti. Vanja je ne bi mogel, tudi če bi hotel, saj so bile koreninice čisto prepletene z delčki njegovih možganov, in na tistih delih, ki sporočajo telesu občutek užitka, je Rx zmeraj rada okrepila prijem, in takrat se je Vanji kar mešalo.

Rx je začela krvaveti iz desnega ušesa. To se ji je vedno zgodilo ob takih trenutkih. Vanje to ni ustavilo. Vedelo je, da mora za razplod žrtvovati nekaj Rxinega ušesnega masla. Orgazmatronični val je vibriral po telesu Vanjoida sapiensa. Postkoitalni kontakt je pri Vanji upogibal metalno povrhnjico. Metalne pore so pričele puščati tekočino, ki je kapljala po Rxinih režah. Razplod je terjal svojo žrtev – Rx je ostala brez enega biomehaničnega listka. Njeni končiči niso čutili ničesar več, le njen omrtvičeni štrcelj je nabrekal od razplodne tekočine.

Vanja je bilo oplojeno bitje. Prvič, morda ne poslednjič, so se mu oči zakotalile v notranjost optičnih loput. Maternica se je ugnezdila med njegovimi testisi. Toplina je prvič nadomestila metalni hlad njegove korpulentne vsebine. Brhetanje, prijetno in ščemeče, je zmotil le avto pred objektom. Trlo se je ljudi – vsi so čakali na rojstvo predsednika krajevne skupnosti Trnovo.


Večna klorofilija
Nekega običajnega popoldneva, ko je bilo sonce še visoko na nebu, se je Vanja skrival v rastlinjaku. Ta kiborg, včasih fant, včasih dekle, nikoli ni hodil ven, ko so sončni žarki božali rastlinje, neskončne trakte letečih avtomobilov in lebdečih hiš. Ta čas je raje preživel z Rx Vulgaris, saj je bil takrat najboljši čas za izmenjevanje energij; takrat je bil Vanja moški, ki ga je Rx Vulgaris ljubila. A kaj, ko so sončni žarki le redko pokukali iz gostih temnih oblakov, ki so se desetletja nabirali na nebu.

Vanja je obril svoja poraščena ramena z eno samo žiletko. Ko se je njegovih prsi oklepala Rx Vulgaris, so bile dlake Vanjev edini razpoznavni znak, in vedel je, da jo bo gladka koža zmedla in odvrnila od izmenjave sokov. Vanja je še zadnjič napudral svoje bujne prsi in si mednje zataknil čip. Nedrček je komaj poveznil čez prsi, toliko mlečnih žlez se je že nabralo v njih. Vsega tega Rx Vulgaris ni mogla niti slutiti. Ko je bila v fazi produciranja klorofila, se je le nemo oklepala steklenih sten rastlinjaka. Mimo so brzela ogromna kolesa cestnih vlakov. Kolesa so se nemo sukala v nedefinirano smer, kot bi jih vodil le perpetuum mobile, brez šoferja za volanom. Čas je polzel skozi neutrudno kolesje, dokler klorofil ni nabreknil in napel mesnatih listov. To je bil znak za konec hibernacije. Vanja se je tega dobro zavedal, preden se je odločil Rx zaliti z nutricidi.

Dnevi z Vulgaris so hitro minevali, Vanja je bil zadovoljen. Dokler nekega dne ne prejme sporočila. Čisto iz sebe pridivja v rastlinjak in meni nič tebi nič grobo zgrabi svojo biomehanično ljubezen in panično izjavi: »Skozi čas bova morala!« Mudilo se je. Kar naenkrat to mirno okolje, v katerem sta simbiozneža preživela večino svojih življenj, ni bilo več varno. Vanja je panično začel poskakovati naokrog in grabiti za bližnje predmete. Mudilo se je. Rx je delovala zmedeno.

»Čez minutko ti bom vse razložil,« pravi Vanja, trepljajoč svojo Vulgaris. »Vse, kar vem, je, da bodo naš planet uničili v naslednje pol ure in da imava manj kakor dvajset minut, da prispeva do gozda.«

Ne kateregakoli gozda, ampak do drevoreda ob Gradaščici na robu Trnovega. Leta 2010 so tam osnovali podzemno skladišče devterionskih konic, orožje, s katerim bodo leta 2180 obstreljevali vse neposlušne planete kolonije, kamor so poslali kiborge kot delovno silo. Toda marsikateri kiborg se je, tako kot Vanja, rajši udejstvoval v rastlinjaku ali pa poležaval v kakšnem drugem prijetnem, klimatsko urejenem prostoru s svojo družico ali drugom rastlinske ali živalske vrste.

Nič ni razlagala svoji Rx Vulgaris, čeprav ji je pojasnilo o hitrem premiku obljubila. Vanja in presenečena Vulgaris sta se znašli ob Gradaščici. To je bilo to. Treba je bilo ukrepati hitro in rešiti svoje ljubo domovanje. Znašli sta se na ravni strehi skladišča devterionskih konic. Vanja je Rx vzela iz žepa in jo dvignila visoko v zrak, da so jo obžarili žarki zahajajočega sonca.

»Napoji se, napoji se, klorofilček moj,« je Vanja zapelo otroški napev, medtem ko je Rx vračalo v mračni, a varni žep. Vanja ni moglo drugače, kot da se je spet prepustilo klorofiliji – fantaziji o tem, kako leži na gozdni jasi sredi varnega gozda, leži tako dolgo, da njegovo telo začnejo obraščati pomendrane vitice mehanorastlin, medtem ko se Rx, posajena na njegov prst, s svojimi končiči in mehanolistki začne počasi ovijati okrog njegovih bujnih prsi. Čas se meri v stoletjih ...

Vanja se spotakne, a se nič ne obira, steče po temnem hodniku in odpira vsa vrata, s komolcem v jeklene pregrade dela velike luknje, da bo kasneje, ob povratku, iz njih v hipu izvleklo po eno konico, ravno prav, da jih po eno na glavo usmeri v inženirje, ki so svoje znanstveno delo z devteroni prepustili pohlepu politike ... A ko je hitelo in vlamljalo v skladišča, je Vanja vedelo, da zna biti ta herojska gesta njun konec. Nežno je pritisnilo dlan ob nabrekli žep, Rx Vulgaris je zvedavo pokukala iz svojega rastlinskomehanskega zavetja in Vanja jo je počohalo po temnozelenih cvetnih listih.

»Bo?« je vprašalo in potem v odgovor na svoje obupano vprašanje stegnilo roko v prvo sobo s konicami. Z orožjem pod pazduho se je vračalo na streho. Ko je vzelo zadnjo, se je spotaknilo na istem mestu kot pri vstopu. Zaklelo je, hotelo pobrati izpuščeno konico in opazilo, da se je devteron razlil po tleh, po tleh, ki jih ni bilo več, tako kot ni bilo več stavbe ne zelene vrbe ob njej – kot vsak čas ne bo več niti delavcev niti kolonij niti prihodnosti, ampak samo še lebdenje v večni klorofiliji ...

V jasnem pasjem očesu
Skoraj so naju že dohiteli. Če ne bi mojih pljuč poganjala Vulgaris, bi bila zdajle popolnoma zadihana. Spet potipam obloženi levi žep temnega plašča, ki uspešno prikriva moje iznakaženo telo. Še si tu, pomislim. Zašepeta mi, naj pohitim. Njihovi psi so naju že skoraj dohiteli. Še nikoli niso bili tako vztrajni. Na vrhu se začne prikazovati streha neke koče. Med tekom odskočim od nekega nagrmadenega drevja in ga potisnem v globino, psom naproti. Vsaj nekaj časa nama prihrani. Hitro vdrem v kočo in se sesedem za zaloputnjenimi vrati. Za zidovi kmalu zaslišiva renčanje. Sežem v žep in jo potegnem ven. Pobožam njen mehanski listek.

Seveda ne gre za navadno leseno kočo, v kleti je nameščen eden od neštetih vstopno-izstopnih potovalnikov (njihovi predniki so bile arhaične telefonske govorilnice). Ampak pustimo zdaj zgodovino potovalnikov. Hitro vnesem koordinate. Trnovo 2010. Psi se zaženejo v prosojno steno potovalnika, a že v naslednjem trenutku zbledijo. Vulgarine liste si prislonim k dihalnemu organu. Od živčnosti kar ne neham sopsti, res so me skoraj raztrgali tile psi. A vseeno. Rajši psi kot njihovi lastniki, ki so me samo zaradi mojih dvojnih spolovil obtožili čarovništva. Moja spolovila bodo v Trnovem 2010 prednost. Tja se zatečejo taki, kot sem jaz. Rx Vulgaris mi vrača sapo. Barve se zlivajo in med potovanjem pritisne neznosen hlad. Z Rx Vulgaris trepetava.

»Diham,« pomislim pri sebi in odprem oči, napolnjene z močefitom. Potovanje je preseglo časovne koordinate. Prebledela Rx Vulgaris prisloni list na moje prsi. Tu sva. Končno! Odkar so v koordinate vgradili mehansko budilko, je nemogoče zamuditi na tradicionalno podelitev Bevkovega prstana.

Jaz, Vanja, sem se privadila na ženski spol, število in sklon. Zato tudi v Trnovem ne bom »ono«, kljub priznanju. Spol so mi vgradili v jezik. Tega ne bo pozabila omeniti na podelitvi priznanj za presežke v biomehanični reprodukciji spolov. Mehanski listek ji je spolzel po reži, ki ji pravijo usta. Rx Vulgaris je še vedno trepetala od strahu pred podivjanimi psi.

»Konec je,« ji je prišepnila Vanja, »ni nama več treba bežati.«

Zadovoljno je potežkala njen mehanski listek. V njem se je pretakalo vedno več mehanske energije. V zaodrju nista bili opaženi. Ostali nagrajenci so ju pustili sami med štirimi stenami. A tedaj pod vrati opazita sence štirinožnih psov, ki renčijo, da v sobico sili njihov žvepleni zadah. Tega tu, v zaodrju Cankarjevega doma, nista pričakovali. Psi so jima bili še vedno na sledi. Ali pač ne? Sem si vse skupaj izmislila, je pomislila Vanja.

»Blodim?«

Povezovalec slovesne prireditve je pokukal skozi žametne zavese in ji pomignil: »Ste pripravljeni?« Tudi ta nesrečnež je mislil, da ju je zaradi »zmešnjave spolov«, kot so njuno mnogoterost vljudno opisovali tukajšnji gospodarji psov, najvarneje nagovarjati v množini. A čakaj, se je opomnila Vanja, kakšni gospodarji psov neki, tu stojiva zato, ker so v Trnovem gospodarji pod rušo, psi prevzgojeni v neškodljive cucke in vodnike slepih vseh spolov, zato je ves strah odveč. Globoko je zajela zrak in Rx Vulgaris namenila spodbuden nasmešek, saj je žveplena razjeda, tisti vonj, očitno res prišla v zaodrje iz spomina.

Vanja pokima, zavese se razprejo, žarometi jo za hip zaslepijo in potem se zave, da jo povezovalec programa, znani ultrapokvirjeni aktivist, kot je slišala praviti za odrom, vodi k mikrofonu, kjer mora povedati vse, vse, kar jim gre, tudi tukajšnjim, in potem, če se prej ne zgrudi od treme, mora zavrniti priznanje. Reči mora, da bi ga sprejela z veseljem, vendar ga ne more, ker bodo sicer v Trnovem pozabili, da je ono, drugo, in počasi bo še sama pozabila, kdo in od kod je. Doma so ji v jezik vgradili ženski spol, od zmeraj ga je uporabljala in tako počasi izbrisala svojo dvospolnost. A zdaj in tukaj je imela občutek, da bo lahko iz globin spomina sestavila neko novo osebo, na katero se bo ono, drugo, lahko naslonilo. V Trnovem so imeli hudo underground sceno, in računala je na te čudovite ljudi, o ja. Ko je zajela sapo, da bi končno izdavila vse to iz sebe, jo je prehitela Rx Vulgaris. S svojim zakvirjenim glasom je trepetaje in čudno počasi zaklicala v slepečo svetlobo: »Oooo neeee!«

Zadnja stvar, ki jo je Vanja videla, preden so jo raztrgali stekli psi, je bila njena lastna migetajoča podoba v jasnem pasjem očesu. Zadnja stvar, ki jo je slišala, preden sta skupaj z Rx Vulgaris izdihnili, je bil Vulgarin klic: »Ljubiiiicaaaa, nasviiiidenje v naslednjiiii vojniiii!«