The cowry snails chanting
One time I laid in the wet hand of an Indian woman giving birth.
One time I listened to Beyoncé’s music.
One time I tried to understand the essence of ancient bitcoins. Therefor I read Karl Marx from the
front to the back and from the back to the front and from the middle into both directions and so on.
One time I tried to imagine myself all alone and by myself: Difficult.
And one time it clicked. It was nice.
And then again, I asked myself: What do carrots and dark jam have in common? To be honest this
something that I had often asked myself.
One time I lived in ocean mud. Thus, I was a being — it was very quiet and fun and bad and beautiful.
In a Maldivian lagoon I then got stuck to a branch of a coconut palm. I was then pulled into the light
and got killed. This has to do with the luminousness and the luminousness has to do with the meaning.
However, the meaning only grows with the centuries.
One time I was an automatic subject and the centuries asked me: How did you do it, how were you
… remembered in that way? And I replied: How about differentiating your questions, gosh.
You see, I move across maps. My use stretches out in the bathtub, on the sushi mat, in the bed
between self-sewn cushions in fuchsia and brown, petrol, golden green, pink … it winds its way
through the eye of the needle and back again.
And the centuries once again said: Yes, but don‘t you remember? One time someone listened to
your mumbling, as if you had some kind of idea about the future.
And one time you laid in a clay pot and above you hung the continental nose of a monstrous storyteller.
She looks like a vulva, she said, so from her island she probably threw Aphrodite into the
water.
All right, I thought. That’s how it always is.
One time I realized that I am what is being said about me and what is being exchanged about me.
Beyond that, I am what is being suspected, what is being remembered, what is being buried and
dug up again, being washed out, being sieved out. But the essential part of it is that I am hard on
the outside and dead on the inside.
Furthermore, on the surface I am similar to something. The 13th century was very fine and white as
rain. At most, transparent little pigs smelled a little bit like seaweed and freshly washed ashtrays.
Juliane Zöllner, 2020
translation: Claire Deuticke & Libia Caballero
