Ronald Gruner :: The world is full of spaces between
And at the edges of the world, they also exist. Real or as fiction. We have heard of them often: Orpheus, the thracian prince and the singer blessed by the gods, turns too early to Eutydice and loses her again during his long way back from the netherworid. Jean Cocteau let his Orphee know (on the way there) that he was in the zone which exists from memories, people and the ruins of their houses. And that the people (there) believed that they were alive because it takes a long time for all living things to become dead and that nothing is as lasting as the deformation caused by careers. Tarkovsky's Stalker lives in an economically ruined and at the same time extremely mysterious region, the "zone", abandoned by God and the sciences. The character of space between cannot be clearly decided upon.
At first, the space between is a space between somethng. A space between things, a space between elements, a gap, a margin, a distance. At the same time it can have to do with a space in time. In this, the concept of space between pulls the concepts of connection and division along with it. Space between divides and connects similar and unsimilar things at the same time. Elements of division include the wall, the border, the river and the almost ideal insulator. Elements of connection include the bridge, the ferry, the airplane and the train. Here, space between connects similar objects over another (dividing) thing. Land through the sea, cities through the land. Here differences are shut out. As an element of connection, it can be a go-between for different quantities or qualities. To overcome the space between a medium is needed. The fulfilled space between is the medium itself. The overcoming of space between through people creates the traveler and the passenger. In some ways also the tourist. The luxurious stay in the spaces between (of the city) creates the idler.
In his lecture "Transit Routes" Peter Bexte describes a special and ideal case of space - empty space. "Transit routes are... tunnels through emptied space... that cancel themselves and which are as bare trans always beyond every point of contact."3 Paul Virilio, a theorist of speed, reports about a woman named Sarah Krasnoff ,"who for five months in 1971 crossed the Atlantic over 160 times in the planes of K.L.M. without interruption while fleeing from psychiatrists before... she died totally exhausted in Amsterdam in room 103 of the Hotel Frommer." 4With the background of economy the space between creates speed with the goal of its elimination. However, this elimination is only seeming. The supposed democratization of high speed, writes Paul Virilio in his essay about the Vehicle, places " ridgid straightness far over everything curved... over the harmful image of the turning snake and the curve which slows down the tempo of the drive and makes it more dangerous through centrifugal force."5
The space between becomes displaced, forgotten, denied, left-out space. However, the left-out space strikes back. The apparently tamed, straightened river, the water street, devastates land and cities through flooding. And most of all - the space between still houses the demons - cynical dwarfs with crazy eyes, in expectation of a big comeback. All of this, Virilio writes, ,"lets a mythical and mythological climate be resurrected which is teeming with dragons, sea snakes and labyrinthian tunnels - figures from a crossed over and passed through world."6 Hans Henny Jahnn describes the process of such a demonization and the striking back of the demonic in modern civilization in his story Kebad Kenya with the background of a changing world in the first half of the last century. Kebad Kenya, who denied death many thousands of years ago, whose mare is long dead and whose grave is long destroyed, sees his land devastated through the greed of his neighbors and their many thousands of offspring. He sees the changed landscape. New streets have been dug on the slopes of the hills. (But the streams still have their run.) However, Kebad Kenya the demon, the undead and the inhabitant of spaces between is not (like it might first seem) outside of us. He is this only as a projection of the hostile (called up through the advancing process of alienation) in the symbolic space of the outside world. He is the demon in us, in our space between - he is hostility, suppression, desire, drive. He is our memory; "The sweat and breath of the horse penetrated his skin... the undestroyable animal smell that made him tumble. The darkness of the earth, the darkness of inwardly flesh... the sumptuous torment, to be there in the gloom."7
In the end, the demon becomes the destroyer of all the hopes of civilization; "In the night he stole their (the neighbors, commentary of the author) horses", "in order to ride them into the ground and to bloodily become one with them" - and "in order to again take his land into possession." "The neighbors ran to the police.. .but they did not catch him. The neighbors cried to the heavens that their mares would be corrupted."8
"The antennas on roofs, the antennas are a forest and in them live ghosts of different shapes," sang the songwriter Demmler in the 70s. They come through the radio, the television and these days through the Internet. Frank Kafka already - in his novel America - foresaw "that the lure of high speed would lower the importance of identity in favor of conformity." Everywhere where economy forces the straight and narrow, this theory is confirmed. Occassionally, the space between, as an empty space (as gap in realization, as terra incognita), contains the potential of shaping and fulfillment. And where it allows curves it can also be - extremely seldomly - a space of fledom, of slowness, of love and play.
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