I come across Uncle Wally examining the train timetable book at the Bratislava station for the next train back to Vienna, normally a short journey, perhaps thirty to forty minutes on a fast service. He has been joined by another man, who has been introduced to us as T B Nestbeschmerzer. Thankfully with a name like that we are told he is happy for us to call him ‘Bug’. The two men are deep in conversation, speaking together in German in what sounds like rap form, and we listen in to a snatch of it using the translation service that our Russian friends at the listening stations had provided us with earlier.
The evidence is,
as if
we had
a choice
but
considering
this dimension
in which
we find
ourselves,
entirely other.
And I am thinking of you just now simultaneously lying in a bed of nettles by the road staring up into a blue sky and bringing to mind the restricted codes of Basil Bernstein, and it also reminded me of Tony Judt, who, in one of his last blogs posted in the NYRB before he died, The Glory of the Rails (in two parts), wrote of our conquest of space and the normalization of time in this our “time-bound” modernity, being best represented through this emblematic book, the railway timetable.
Including
of course
the logistics
essential
to
the twentieth
century
history
of deportations.
Uncle Wally and Bug rap on. We continue listening in but what is called the Decline Effect, a phenomenon well known in scientific research, seems to be kicking in. What began with the excitement of a discovery, being able to clearly hear what they are saying, but then over time their voices appearing to be getting weaker and weaker. Some kind of interference perhaps…
The countless
singulars,
it is so hard to understand
it is so complex,
a question of too much,
information overload,
or the opposite
too little
or
no evidence at all
according to certain of the Colonels
(what goes in the jargon as Publication Bias),
impressing itself
on all these open systems
we somewhat ridiculously
like to call
ourselves.
No, I don’t believe in death either, says Bug scratching his nose and licking his fingers before flicking through the well thumbed pages of the railway timetable one more time.