Category Archives: Life, the universe & everything

general category

Eternally Unfinished

Men speaks many different languages, the king said
Children speak only one: the mother language
Mothers don’t speak; they hear
For men don’t know what to say, but this is okay
For older people don’t hear nor do they speak
For having come before, they learned how to see
How to decay, while they observe” [1]

Sometimes we are above, sometimes below, but we are Eternally Unfinished, even if we knew ALL the languages, as I sometimes wish.
The second guided tour I had the pleasure to experience with Juan wasn’t any bit less intriguing than the first, which was this one:


I am therefor very happy that a centrepiece of that exhibit has found its way into my realm, where it can remind us of the most universal und powerful language of all: silence.
As Juan emphasized back then, the skull is a symbol of life, not of death. As we unearth it, layer by layer, we uncover and discover his-story, auf Deutsch: die Ge-schichte(n). Just as we ourselves are many-layered stacks of stories, some of them lost, some hidden, some fragile and fading, but some strong enough to provide us with a skeleton that supports us for some time.
Which stories will remain?


The skull (category: Brains) is a multi-layered symbol of life.

And those you fear neither Death nor Hell nor the Florence Foster Jenkins of Finnish Tango go back to www.petersch.at and make sure their browser doesn’t block audio autoplay. Qui vit sans folie … (category: Ears) 🙂

[1] from Juan Arata: “What makes us human? – A model of Migra Tion”, Booklet for Ruberoid Festival 25-26 Sep 2015, ACUD Kunsthaus, Berlin

Draw your own zodiac

Lets face it: star constellations – and hence zodiacs – are an entirely arbitrary human choice. There are neither 12, nor 13 zodiacs, there is an almost infinite number of visible stars in the sky, from which a literally infinite number of “constellations” can be generated by connecting stars with lines. Not the sky, your phantasy is the limit. You can also divide the year in arbitrarily small intervals (say: picoseconds) and define your own zodiac depending on where planet Earth happens to be on its orbit with respect to the stars at that picosecond.
Lets take a look at Taurus (which they tell me I “am”):

Taurus as depicted in Urania’s Mirror, a set of constellation cards published in London c.1825 (image source: Wikipedia).

Or in a more sober representation:

(Image source: Wikimedia)

And here is what the night sky around there actually looks like:

Section of sky around “Taurus” (image source). The brightest star is called Aldebaran. Not Alderaan. 🙂

Oooooh WOW! I can totally see a bull here! If I consume a lot of fungus. So now lets forget about all the zodiastic taurusshit and reveal my REAL zodiac (25th of April 1977, 6am, 320e+12 picoseconds):

My Zodiac: Unicorn.

Surprise: my zodiac is Unicorn! As can be clearly seen, Elnath defines the tip of the horn, while Aldebaran makes for the shiny ass. The anomalistic year (time between perihelion passages of the Earth) has an average duration of 365.259636 days, which amounts to 3.15584325504e+19 picoseconds (=number of distinct zodiacs in our system). We therefor randomly assign number 2.504197706e+12 to this zodiac. I think it’s a good zodiac. Character traits associated with “Unicorn” are: sexy, a bit vain but kind, icecream. The picosecond division of the year also means: not many people have it!

What is your zodiac?

Das Hörrohr

“Reading The Hearing Trumpet liberates us from the miserable reality of our days”, said Luis Buñuel. And not just during a pandemic I would like to add to that. In the end, “people under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats”, and those are the majority. And: Leonora reveals the true origin of the Holy Grail, which after all we’re also searching for here, and which reminds me that the front tyre of my bike is in desperate need of pneuma. 🙂 Whoever does not acquire a copy of this book at their local book merchant of trust after this immediately, cannot be helped.

First published 1974 (though written in the early 60s) in French translation as “Le cornet acoustique”

Here she is:

A book for all senses, but clearly: category “ears”.