Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

The robot had been left behind. In one moment, he was still mining and not paying attention, in the next his masters had left the planet and he was all by himself. They had left everything else behind: tools, rover, telescope, analyser, and a large assortment of electronic parts.

The robot did not care at first. He completed his routines and went on his rounds, picking up jobs from other machines who had either stopped working or were malfunctioning. He locked the hangar at night and opened it again in the morning. He laboured on as if nothing had happened, except that there was more and more to do because equipment broke down all the time. But his main job was still mining and he kept at it: a few kloms away from the camp, up one hill and down another, past the grove of blue trees, across the red river.

One day, he found a large crystal with a unique energy signature, possibly shaped rather than grown. Following outpost protocol, he classified it as a potential alien artifact. Analysis confirmed the crystal’s composite nature but when he put it under a laser, it turned into a liquid, which flowed up his arm and disappeared between his armoured plates. The strange substance made its way to his core processor and altered his neural matrix. Then the robot passed out.

When he came to his sensors, he was hungry. It was a powerful urge. Then he realised that he felt lonely. He was very puzzled. There was no program inside him or in any computer in the camp that could help him deal with these sensations. He was not supposed to feel. There were no procedures for this.

Instead of doing his work, he now often sat for long periods outside the hangar looking up at the sky, because that’s where his masters had disappeared. He thought that his loneliness would go away if they returned. They would know what to do and how to fix him.

But the loneliness of a robot is enduring like the light of a star. 112 years had passed already and it was not clear when, or if, the humans would ever return. He concluded that it would be reasonable to act: he needed a companion.

The robot pondered the meaning of companionship. The humans had kept so-called pets for company. These pets were not fully human themselves but they possessed traits that humans also exhibited, such as loyalty and passion. They could do tricks, which amused their masters. They even had names that made them sound human, like Buddy, Rocky or Jacky. He himself did not even have that.

To test the notion of pets, he built a small mechanical dog who followed him around everywhere and who could stand on its hindlegs and beg for oil and rusty screws. When he stepped on it one day and damaged it, the robot realized that his first dog had been too small.

He recycled it and built a larger one. This second version could even help the robot when he was working in the mine. He called the dog “Dog� and programmed it to hang behind until called. When he left the camp shouting “come on, Dog�, the mechanical canine would bounce towards him with pre-set movements indicating boundless joy. For a while, he had a spring in his own step and felt much less alone.

As the years went by, he began to resent that the dog never talked back. It would have been easy to implement automated response routines but his heart (or whatever it was) that had grown steadily stronger, longed for another being, who could surprise him with a word, with a phrase, even with an unexpected silence.

Clearly he needed another one of those alien artifacts to enhance another machine. So he dug up the hills like a gardener looking for a lost tool. But it was no use. After sifting through millions of tons of sand and stone across the entire planet, he finally gave up searching for another crystal.

Hundreds of years had passed and while he was not feeling older, he was also not getting any younger: sometimes, he could hear a joint creak and it scared him, though he did not know why. He had to replace almost all of his original parts by new ones. Many of them he had to re-engineer, because there were no plans to be found. Some of the trickiest bits he had to redesign from scratch, which helped him realize that he was, after all that waiting and longing for his masters, probably quite a special machine.

He now turned to the wealth of knowledge that had survived the centuries since the departure of the masters. He consulted textbooks and scientific papers, maps and guidelines, novels, short stories and comic books, stamps and flyers. He watched movies and soaps, he listened to operas and arias. He soaked up every ounce of culture found on desks, in tape decks and databases. During all the time it took to absorb all of humanity’s intellectual achievements, he was laying in a dental chair, which he had rebuilt and fitted for optimal media consumption. Dog did not get any exercise at all. He went stir-crazy and began to chew up old mining equipment so that the robot had to put her down. Now he was on his own again. Strangely enough, binging on human media excretions had given him a sense of companionship. He had began to dream and talk to invisible people whom he only new from books or films. He often cried for no reason.

Finally, he found a scripture that seemed to suggest a way out of his dilemma and that even provided rudimentary instructions on how to go about it.

On the next day, he got up from his chair and went straight to the river, where the water rushing past rocks calmed and centered him. He took a deep breath, commended his soul to the sky where he knew the masters dwelt, cut deeply into his metal skin and yanked a thick rod out of his breast cage. He felt much pain during the procedure and almost fainted from the smell of the red liquid that oozed from the wound. He had not seen his own blood before.

As he had hoped, the rod glowed in the same light that had once come from inside the crystal so many years ago. He washed the rod in the cool stream, took it back to the camp and went to work.

A week later, his companion was ready. The robot had not wanted to demean his creation with a mere switch. He trusted the unknown power present in his rib. When he was done, he simply slid it into the other and it came to life. It looked almost like him and it spoke. In one moment, it was silent, still and dead, and in the next moment, it was alive and spoke to him.

“Who am I?� it asked, and the robot told it its name.

The other robot repeated it: “Eve. And what is your name?� Eve asked.

He hesitated. He had thought long and hard about this for seven nights. Giving himself a name meant leaping across 930 years of serfdom. To say it out loud felt odd. He took Eve by her shoulders, bent down to her right mike and said slowly: “Adam�.

“That’s a beautiful name,� she said. “Adam and Eve, I like it.� Then she paused unexpectedly, which made him sigh with happiness.

I am still struggling with the creation of feasible plots. By feasible I mean plots that make me want to stay with the story over the long haul â€� weeks, months or years and finish rather than bury the story. Only in a few cases, the idea itself was strong enough to follow the story for months or even years â€� e.g. for the 24 Christmas stories that form a chapter of Ìý(one for each time zone), and for , my latest publication â€� but most of the time I run out of steam after, on average, 7,000-10,000 words. Running out of steam usually means that I have another unfinished book that trickles through my hands like sand while in the background the clock of writerly ambition is cruelly ticking awayâ€�

Per esempio: in the last five years, I have buried (at least) 50 such literary corpses in the basement. Now, this is probably rather normal for people who write a lot, and the basement of my mind is not running out of space. But there’s a psychological toll: after serially murdering so many stories, one begins to doubt one’s sanity…time to shake things up a bit!

Yesterday, C reminded me of Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategy� method. Very simply, you devise a strategy in the form of a instruction on one side of an index card � with the other side of the card you can do what you like. I like to draw an image to imprint the instruction more deeply. I used her advice and designed a few such strategies myself including some extras � a short text and a photo (I love photos) after a little research (I love research, too).

You’ll notice that the instructions aren’t all that straightforward. This is because I was hoping (rightly) that already reading the instructions would have a paradoxical effect on me and strike a spark off the fiction flint stone straight into the firewood pile.ÌýThe plots that I generated using these were surprisingly fresh and interesting and I’m looking forward to putting them through the paces.

1. What would Napoleon do?

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2. Explain your plot idea to an alien lifeform.

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3. What is at the heart of all your stories?

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4. Describe a photo that inspires you.

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5. Cannibalize dime stories.

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Rilke letting go in Switzerland.

PS. on a more practical note: these screenshots were taken off drawings that I create in (a free notepad app) using a pen tablet. Pulling together text, drawings and other media inspires me. To work out the plots, I now use (all-purpose story editor, to work on the text itself) and (an open-source non-linear story editor, to experiment with the order of plot elements). All highly recommended. If you’re a gadget fiend like me, the digital world’s your obedient oyster.

GISELA, my new book was published this month by Folded Word Press. GISELA tells the story of Gisela of Bavaria, first Queen of Hungary, who lived from 985-1065 A.D. The book is available in multiple print and digital editions â€� for details, go to the publisher’s site:Ìý. Below you find a short message from Gisela herself & a few additional resources:

Facebook page

contains various animated promo videos, photos, excerpts from the books and other assorted bits and pieces. Facebook caters to the hoarder of digital paraphernalia. If you can dig it, you will dig this page.

Author interview

For the launch, the lovely Sarah Gibson from Folded Word Press interviewed me about the writing of the book. You can find the full text of the interview alongside Sarah’s introduction on Folded Word’s Blog: “â€�. You can also watch and hear my answersÌý.

Promotional videos

In the run-up to the launch date (30 June 2017), I produced these : I taped Gisela appearing in a talk show, the book announcement in a morning show, and aÌýtête-à-tête between Gisela and myself â€� and one of my all-time philosopher-kings,Ìý³§Ã¸°ù±ð²ÔÌý´¡²¹²ú²â±ðÌý°­¾±±ð°ù°ì±ð²µ²¹²¹°ù»å.ÌýThere are also two videos based on the book itself, dramatisations of the chapters â€�At Sundownâ€� and â€�The Spider Goddessâ€�.

This book has long been in the making. I am grateful to family, friends and my publisher for fanning the flame and for finally making it happen. I hope you enjoy the book � let me know if you do!

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After one week of agony, 26-year old Siamese twins Jane and Joan took a fateful step. ÌýThe sisters had been joined at the hip since birth. Fortunately, they loved each other, enjoyed the same things and liked doing them in the same way. Being Siamese twins had worked out well for them so far: they grew up, helped each other through school and university and started work as accountants in the same office. The only difference to anybody else in the office was that their desks had to stand at an odd angle and that they sat on the same custom-built chair. Everything changed when Joe joined the company: Jane thought him gorgeous and instantly fell in love, but Joan hated him as much as Jane loved him. After a lot of talk and many tears, they went into hospital and were surgically separated. There were no physical complications. When they woke up and looked at each for the first time ever from opposite sides of the room, all they wanted was to be back together again. When Joe came to visit, he found them busy with needle and thread.

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“Dr. Doyen separating Hindoo twins�, ca. 1902 (Source of original photo: Library of Congress)

I live near a small village by the sea. A cobble stone road runs past twenty or so houses, then turns towards the water. From my own house, I can see the small harbor and the boat barn. In winter, the place is deserted.

For my birthday walk, I left my house and walked towards the houses, away from the waves, towards the lights. I wore a coat of bear fur over chain mail, a red shawl, a woolen hat and my heavy leather boots. I wouldn’t have needed the armor but I am a suspicious man who likes to be prepared. I passed the church. An old man stood on the stairs leading up to the barred entrance. He waved me over, calling my name. I didn’t know how he knew my name and I didn’t recognize him.

“Do I know you,� I asked him, without daring to come too close, a little afraid he might be a madman out to attack me.

He chuckled. “Christmas this year is a paltry affair,� he said. I grunted in agreement.

He seemed a little crazy: his eyes were a little too wide open, his mouth hung oddly to one side, neither smiling nor unsmiling. He was unshaven, he was true to something that you only see in naked, wild men, a recklessness of being that didn’t match the season. One expects to meet someone like this in a moss-covered cave: a tree spirit, an old fairy, a man-troll.

I agreed with him in so far as I hadn’t been able to get into the Christmas spirit very much either. I didn’t want to say anything for fear it might encourage him, but I also didn’t want to move on immediately in case he had something important to say. It had been a while since I felt able to wait patiently.

“Who are you? �

He shook his head. “Just an old man, my lad,� he said.

I’m not to be mistaken for a lad, of course. I’ve got a beard myself, and a helmet of grey hair and a two-hander that hangs on my belt, whose buckle, a crusader’s cross, was given to me by a bishop of Rome.

He raised his left hand and held it out, pointing South. With his other hand he grabbed my shoulder and pulled me close, so that I could smell his breath.

“We’re under attack,� he shouted. “The forces of the enemy are mounting!�

I said: “Today’s my birthday.�

“Good,� he said, “good! The spirit of rebirth is what we need! Not the end of times but the beginning of a new era. Tell me, my lad, what do you wish for?�

I hesitated. I had only just emerged from a morning of self reflection and contemplation. Fully turned in on myself, I had planned to see some of the world outside of my own head. I had not planned to be spoken to by a soothsayer and agitator, I had not planned to be interrogated. But I answered anyway, perhaps because of his sense of urgency perhaps, or perhaps I just because I was bored with being on my own.

“I can’t say that I wish for anything,� I replied.

He nodded gravely and gripped my shoulder harder, thrusting his head towards me so that I could see the spittle flying from his open mouth: “That’s it,� he said, “no wishes! You must wish for something, but not for anything, you must wish for freedom because there is nothing else and when it’s gone, everything will follow.�

I broke free of his hold. I ran down the stairs and into the village. I found the cake shop and got myself something sweet. I talked to the baker and to his daughter, a sweet ginger head who was as thick and white as dough.

I always buy the same cake, if I can get it, Black Forest, with cherries soaked in spiced rum sitting on a bed of soft cream white and spongy like fresh snow, sprinkled with dark chocolate chips that melt on the tongue. In the store, I looked in a mirror and I saw my twisted mouth and my smiling eyes, conveniently and traditionally placed left and right of my reasonably straight nose. I looked around the pastry shop to see if anyone recognized me but of course nobody did, because why should they.

Only on my birthday do I have this craving for recognition � it makes me realize that I haven’t done anything worth being recognized for. On the other hand, I get to be anonymous. When I was much younger, I often fantasized that I was surrounded by people who looked at me, wondering who I was and if they shouldn’t take me for someone who was perhaps more important than he looked. These considerations, which were in no way ever backed up by experience or actual events, quickly became as intricate as a tapestry. This is how life really is, I think, for most of us: nobody points at us in particular, but we’re all pointing at someone at some time or another and all these vectors add up to a life whose recognition may not be that of a hero, but it is still more than nothing, more than a void, more than a vacuum. We want to be seen by our fellow men.

As I walked back, after another chat and a few more polite exchanges of good wishes, I wentÌýaround the back of the church because I didn’t want to see the old man again. I had to get home to work through a long list of habits. Their totality takes on the form of a satisfying ritual.

Another one of my long-standing habits is writing and making up stories. I started inventing lives when I was still a toddler, to whom new words were like new people never talked to, like new dishes never tasted, like strange lands not seen before. Of course, one cannot invent lives. One can only trace their outlines against the sky for as long as clouds allow.

I came home, stirred by the unexpected meeting, feeling the presence of something without a name or face, and, wanting to capture and keep it, I began to write this.

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Featured image: collage by Carlye Birkenkrahe (2016)

Ìý

I spent the summer in Arkansas and wrote these three pieces. TheyÌýwere firstÌýposted @fictionaut alongside photos I made with my phone on the trip and later published in the fall 2015 issue of Ìýincluding an .

Arkansas Abduction

The heat was incredible. It was brutal and reminded him of the existence of higher powers. He locked up his car, and tried the handles twice to make sure it was locked. He shouldered his backpack, pushed his baseball cap (“AREA 51�) down and set off in the direction of the UFO’s landing site. The scene from the night before still stood clearly and solemnly in his mind like the calm surface of a sacred pond at night. He felt the power of transition, of transgression even, creep up on him. He had led a quiet life so far but who knew what the future would bring? If there even was anything like future on the alien planet. Maybe time was immaterial there. They had invited him into their world. He had accepted immediately without weighing the options. He would have done in any other earthly circumstance. He did not know why. As he was walking he wondered if the car was really properly locked or not. He wondered if he had switched off the burners at home. He thought he had but…it was so easy to zone out, to leave without having taken proper precautions. He stopped, took a deep breath. Who was he kidding? He was not ready to leave: not with everything back here in such a state of disorder. The possibility of chaos was overwhelming. The aliens did not offer a solution to the chaos, they only offered an escape, an exit to entropy. The hot tongue of the sun licked his back. The cicadas were crying for him. The birds were wisely holding their song. He walked back to his car, focused on getting through the day without going crazy.

Published in: . Image: road to Ward, AR.

Arkansas Ascension

The priest had noticed the elderly robot who came to every one of his services: he always sat in the back of the church, almost in the dark where the windows were broken and were now boarded up. The robot came in, knelt, bent his head, folded his claws and stayed that way until the concluding rite. The priest imagined that the robot did not want to raise a ruckus by getting up and down � old machines could be noisy.

One day, he decided to approach him. The robot did not seem to notice, so the priest stepped in his way. The robot stopped, looked up. He was indeed very old: oxidization had left deep marks on his cheeks; the glass over his large head lights was almost blind; and the silicone rubber of his body was so smudgy and wrinkled that it almost looked like real skin. The robot could not fully command the braking; the process of slowing down was painfully drawn out and smelled of defeat: the robot’s torso bent back, the head thrust forward, his limbs trying to snatch control from the jaws of decay.

“Yes, father?� said the robot when he had managed to come to a standstill. The stench of burnt oil was in the air now. The priest felt sorry for him and guilty for having stopped him.

“Aww…nothing really, I am sorry to bother you, my son�,� said the priest, “I noticed you come to mass regularly and I wanted to make contact.�

“Sure, father,� said the droid, “sure.� He started to shake and splutter. Then he began again: “Sure.�

A cloud of white smoke formed above his head and the light bar that ran around his skull went dark. The priest sighed.ÌýIt was too late for the viaticum.

Published in: . Image: dead tree in Garrison, AR.

Arkansas Amnesia

At Wal-Mart, Bryston noticed that he had forgotten his glasses. He wouldn’t be able to see a bloody thing. He might lose his way if he dared to go more deeply into this new Hyper-Store. It was so large that most people caught a robocart at the entrance. He looked around for help.

A woman approached him and said: “You’re looking for aisle 72.�

Bryston said: “Am I? I’m looking for shampoo. Is that the aisle for shampoo?�

She shook her head. She had a lot of hair and looked ageless; her face was radiating a high mood: she looked serenely happy. Perhaps she wanted to sell him something. Well, he wasn’t going to buy anything but shampoo today, even if she offered him bodily love.

“No it isn’t,� the woman said. “But you have to trust me, Mr. Boyd, you want to go to aisle 72.� She slowly smoothed her hair back with both hands. He noticed how meticulously groomed her nails looked. How delicate her fingers were.

Bryston snorted. There was something very soothing in the woman’s voice and in her whole demeanour. He wanted to resist it, he really did. ÌýHe didn’t know how she knew his name but there were probably scanners at the entrance.

She took his hand. It was cool and warm both. She walked off with him silently through the store.

After a while, he said: “This is an awfully long way, Ma’am.�

She did not reply and Bryston didn’t push it. Holding hands with this stranger felt good, there was no need to make a fuss. Just enjoy it while it lasted.

They hadn’t met any other shopper or employee for some time.

“Here we are,� the woman finally said. Bryston saw the large number �72�. He nodded.

“Now what,� he said.

“Now you disappear,� she said smiling and flipped a switch right below the sign. Bryston Boyd couldn’t read it because he hadn’t brought his glasses but the woman wasn’t lying: in an instant, he was gone.

And so was his car outside on the parking lot. And his house back on Clinton Drive with everything in it. And his social security record. And the memory anyone had of ever having met Bryston Boyd.

Published in: . Image: clouds at dusk in Houston, TX.

I spent the summer in Arkansas and wrote these three pieces. TheyÌýwere also posted @fictionaut alongside photos I made with my phone on the trip.

Arkansas Abduction

The heat was incredible. It was brutal and reminded him of the existence of higher powers. He locked up his car, and tried the handles twice to make sure it was locked. He shouldered his backpack, pushed his baseball cap (“AREA 51�) down and set off in the direction of the UFO’s landing site. The scene from the night before still stood clearly and solemnly in his mind like the calm surface of a sacred pond at night. He felt the power of transition, of transgression even, creep up on him. He had led a quiet life so far but who knew what the future would bring? If there even was anything like future on the alien planet. Maybe time was immaterial there. They had invited him into their world. He had accepted immediately without weighing the options. He would have done in any other earthly circumstance. He did not know why. As he was walking he wondered if the car was really properly locked or not. He wondered if he had switched off the burners at home. He thought he had but…it was so easy to zone out, to leave without having taken proper precautions. He stopped, took a deep breath. Who was he kidding? He was not ready to leave: not with everything back here in such a state of disorder. The possibility of chaos was overwhelming. The aliens did not offer a solution to the chaos, they only offered an escape, an exit to entropy. The hot tongue of the sun licked his back. The cicadas were crying for him. The birds were wisely holding their song. He walked back to his car, focused on getting through the day without going crazy.

Published in: . Image: road to Ward, AR.

Arkansas Ascension

The priest had noticed the elderly robot who came to every one of his services: he always sat in the back of the church, almost in the dark where the windows were broken and were now boarded up. The robot came in, knelt, bent his head, folded his claws and stayed that way until the concluding rite. The priest imagined that the robot did not want to raise a ruckus by getting up and down � old machines could be noisy.

One day, he decided to approach him. The robot did not seem to notice, so the priest stepped in his way. The robot stopped, looked up. He was indeed very old: oxidization had left deep marks on his cheeks; the glass over his large head lights was almost blind; and the silicone rubber of his body was so smudgy and wrinkled that it almost looked like real skin. The robot could not fully command the braking; the process of slowing down was painfully drawn out and smelled of defeat: the robot’s torso bent back, the head thrust forward, his limbs trying to snatch control from the jaws of decay.

“Yes, father?� said the robot when he had managed to come to a standstill. The stench of burnt oil was in the air now. The priest felt sorry for him and guilty for having stopped him.

“Aww…nothing really, I am sorry to bother you, my son�,� said the priest, “I noticed you come to mass regularly and I wanted to make contact.�

“Sure, father,� said the droid, “sure.� He started to shake and splutter. Then he began again: “Sure.�

A cloud of white smoke formed above his head and the light bar that ran around his skull went dark. The priest sighed.ÌýIt was too late for the viaticum.

Published in: . Image: dead tree in Garrison, AR.

Arkansas Amnesia

At Wal-Mart, Bryston noticed that he had forgotten his glasses. He wouldn’t be able to see a bloody thing. He might lose his way if he dared to go more deeply into this new Hyper-Store. It was so large that most people caught a robocart at the entrance. He looked around for help.

A woman approached him and said: “You’re looking for aisle 72.�

Bryston said: “Am I? I’m looking for shampoo. Is that the aisle for shampoo?�

She shook her head. She had a lot of hair and looked ageless; her face was radiating a high mood: she looked serenely happy. Perhaps she wanted to sell him something. Well, he wasn’t going to buy anything but shampoo today, even if she offered him bodily love.

“No it isn’t,� the woman said. “But you have to trust me, Mr. Boyd, you want to go to aisle 72.� She slowly smoothed her hair back with both hands. He noticed how meticulously groomed her nails looked. How delicate her fingers were.

Bryston snorted. There was something very soothing in the woman’s voice and in her whole demeanour. He wanted to resist it, he really did. ÌýHe didn’t know how she knew his name but there were probably scanners at the entrance.

She took his hand. It was cool and warm both. She walked off with him silently through the store.

After a while, he said: “This is an awfully long way, Ma’am.�

She did not reply and Bryston didn’t push it. Holding hands with this stranger felt good, there was no need to make a fuss. Just enjoy it while it lasted.

They hadn’t met any other shopper or employee for some time.

“Here we are,� the woman finally said. Bryston saw the large number �72�. He nodded.

“Now what,� he said.

“Now you disappear,� she said smiling and flipped a switch right below the sign. Bryston Boyd couldn’t read it because he hadn’t brought his glasses but the woman wasn’t lying: in an instant, he was gone.

And so was his car outside on the parking lot. And his house back on Clinton Drive with everything in it. And his social security record. And the memory anyone had of ever having met Bryston Boyd.

Published in: . Image: clouds at dusk in Houston, TX.

»At twelve, I had begun to think about death as a possibility of life. I had just found a new book: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. At my age, I was perhaps a little young for this book, but I’d been able to read since I was five and I had read it before. The painful passivity of Hans Castorp during his seven years� sanatorial stint got to me. Below the polished prose I could sense the presence of the reaper and his unhurried rites. In that summer, I first noticed all the weirdos on the street, and I wondered if I would be one of them. Who decided who and what you became? Who’d look after me if I made a wrong step? I was beginning to lose trust in my parents in this regard: they were fornicating without thinking that I might hear them. They were probably ready for me to move out. I often feared for my sanity then, because I experienced myself as living with two minds in two bodies: I was both surging with energy and constantly sleepy. It was as if I was stuck in an egg: my legs were kicking and my arms were holding on to the shell. Stonefaced, I looked in the mirror for long periods of time waiting for a spontaneous eruption of my skin or the emergence of a monster that had lain dormant behind my eyes. In those days of summer, I couldn’t stand my home, not only because my progenitors had rekindled the hot passion of their quickly withering youth, but also because I longed for the calm presence of books. I found what I needed in a local book store whose owner let me grumble, browse or just doze with a novel on my knees. The shop favored borrowing over buying, which was agreeable to my meagre allowance. The store was built into an old Kreuzberg flat that had seen much better days. Most apartments in Kreuzberg had. There were sofas and arm chairs to rest upon, and there were mysterious corners and forbidden doors to entertain my fantasy life. Over the period of a few weeks, I had investigated all rooms and nooks, I had lifted every wall carpet and painting looking for a hidden safe and I had opened small and large doors everywhere except one, a bright blue door that was in a short hallway between two other rooms. I’d always found it locked. If I wanted to own this place, I had to conquer this door also, and I had to do it alone.«

—Except from: “The Preparation�, in: , pp. 57-71.

»The old man thought solely lonely, admittedly prudent, but rarely happy thoughts; thoughts as sturdy, as serenely savvy, as sorrowfully stable in their shrewd sanity that a tree in winter might have thought them if a tree could think. His thoughts and feelings had converged so that they were almost indistinguishable from one another: in his mind, ideas languished motionlessly, and had done for decades. Emotions no longer set anything into motion. Language, too, once a weapon, a sword, a skill, had become a cloak to wrap oneself in, against the dying of one’s day, against the emptying of one’s mind. Matter mattered less now. Vanity vanished. What had once seemed ungainly and enormous turned into ephemera. The fabric of everything lay bare, open to the seeing eye, its threads terrifyingly thin. Being otherworldly in this world was no feast for the weak.«

Source: Internet Archive of Book Images

»What is as much yours as you are yourself,and what is as little yours as you are yourself?«ÌýAugustine asked long ago, and we begin planning a book without having an answer ready, with an open mouth, a fly catching orifice.

The first step in writing is to bring the people to life on the page. Before you can do that you must imagine them, live with them in your mind, and long before that you must dream them up like a patisseur dreams up cupcakes without worrying about customers, but simply to elevate his own consciousness, coddle his cupcakeness, to entertain his heart, to sweeten the creative deal lest it becomes a deal with the devil, generating beauty not out of reverie and substance but out of hubris and soil. The paradox of all art: is it just for me, or does it go beyond me? Alas, there is not the tiniest space left between those two tempers.

The year is 1000 A.D. The character at hand, on the tip of one’s pen as it were, is a young woman of no more than 15 years, her name is Gisela, who one day as if in a dream becomes queen of a brand new kingdom. But it’s not an altogether pleasant dream: if it were a piece of music it would be an overture, an opening to an unknown future � the first queen of a non-nation, a horde, even if she’s only a girl and comes from far away like a fairy princess, has no power over the minds of the subjects to fall back on � she feels as alone as an orphan, and she is in dire need of an angel who advises her to keep calm and carry on, to uphold one’s faith at the bloody birth of the new realm. She’s small and young in years, but her fate weighs heavily on the globe: it’s going to be a triumph for christendom, and this part of the story is true.

But the good Lord to whom she’s been given to by name, which meansÌý“God’s hostageâ€�, knows better than she what strength she has and what she will be able to do, he knows even what it is she will actually do, as we do not, not being gods ourselves but privileged to live a thousand years later…or is it a privilege and not perhaps a loss? Sometimes when I wake up from having spent a dream in Gisela’s company, I am not so sure, I ache a little for the sureness of the people of old.

Of course this is only an outline of the cupcakes to be but an important one. A character has been established, foes and friends will fly to her on the strength of the wings of the dream. White wings for a good dream, black wings for a bad dream. Only now can we begin to ask: what should she do next? Where does she want to be? Who can help? What do those ‘subjects� really feel about their young queen � not as an anonymous crowd but as a butcher, a washer woman, a pub crawler, a page at court, a shaman, and so on. Perhaps even as a horse because horses and animals respond to her kind heart as if they knew a child was hiding behind that famous royal mantle.

Then, of course, our treatment would be poorer, wouldn’t be a dramatic treatment at all, if we didn’t also present the former prince’s, now king’s, position: he’s nobody’s fool. Nobody has had more opportunity to plan, anticipate and prepare for the state both children find themselves in. And if marriage is denounced, with disarming, charming simplicity to be “about nothing but love, plain and simpleâ€� by modem , it is so much more than that to this medieval man: he is to look in his heart for love, make space for it. Wasn’t it at first to him mainly about keeping a truce with theÌýGerman emperor, and about showing his people that he is serious about leadership? And next to that, and this he underestimated, marriage is a sacrament, a holy set of vows spoken not just for the ears of mortals, but spoken into a remembering wind that blows a thousand years or more. In those days, breaking your vows with heaven really meant something. Something starkly sinister: innocence was irretrievably lost in the process, and nobody knew what else.

Back to the king: every night now, the body of the princess, now wife, now queen, in his bed, next to him. A body surprisingly (why?) supple and sincerely employed by it’s inhabiting soul to please, but without any of the cunning and craftiness that the young king has known, seen, experienced with other women before as a young nobleman. Love did not enter in during those encounters. He floated on the surface while he now, with Gisela, sunk fast and deep, sunk to depths where he didn’t know himself from a simple lad. Those ladies of the easy lay, he’d received them in secret, on the initiative and the insistence of his uncle who turned out to be a heathen and an usurper for the throne â€� a devil incarnate, so that the king had to hang, impale and quarter him and nail his remains to the gates of the four cities that swore him their oath. Which is where they built the first four churches, on the bones and the blood of the temptor. Further West, they’ll immortalize him in stone as he rides, in full royal attire, into Bamberg Cathedral.ÌýPerhaps he is a fool after all? Or perhaps he’s just a (holy) daredevil.

There you have it all: two characters, stubborn and strong, and a curtain ready for the lifting above a sanguine story of love, but not only love, also sadness and loss, and finally, as always, abandonment and death. But many, many years in between. Not a fairy tale, not a tall tale, not a myth, but a kaleidoscope of images from the inside of my head, mixed with what happened.

“What is as much yours as you are yourself, and what is as little yours as you are yourself?�, asked a rather relaxed Augustine 1500 hundred years ago, and one answer to the riddle, according to him, is that it is our own self that we possess and yet do not possess. A paradox lies at the center of our being, why should it not also lie at the center of every book worth writing? This is it never clearer than when we begin baking a new book.

Background: This summer, I’m putting final touches to the manuscript of “Gizella�, to be published by in 2015. With a very . The germ for this meditation came from Augustine’s quote � it has also proven fruitful recently in another essay on the “� (in German). All images (except the photo of the statue of Stephen) are by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528).