Moving again. North, away from spring. Fragments of the world do not add up to anything that is expressible. Tractors in the fields. Greening. The greening of the world is not fragmentary, but is pure (I want new words and ways of moving them to the page). Tired of the same places, I guess, but the same friends bring a special closure to all movements, the small circles that can be memorized, closed, and stored away for next retrieval. Kiel is not so large, and it is easy to find the Muthesius Hochschule where I meet Hubertus in the late afternoon. The flat where I will stay for the duration of the workshop is in a special building of the Christian-Albrechts Universität zu Kiel. It overlooks the harbor. Here I am , another seafaring situation, on the main harbor, and not far away, the Nordsee-Ostsee Kanal. Here is another history of the War, the U-boat, untersee boot. A large cruise ship moves by the window, heading for Gotebourg. A few people are clustered on the top decks while Irish farmers protest cuts in beef production and silent pictures from a tornado in Minnesota play on the feed line into the room. Suspended dis-animation, curious. Palestinians chant and throw stones on the West Bank. Israeli soldiers shoot them. When does this end? Is this only ignorance to think that these things can be overcome? Teevee.
We go to dinner, all the while discussing the critical issues of being. Hubertus started here two years ago as Director of the FORUM, an interdisciplinary program of lectures and workshops that runs parallel to the regular study program in Design, Fine Arts and so on. Something of a unique program where he is given almost complete autonomy to bring people in — the students don’t realize the luxury and possibility, especially given Hubertus’ massive personal and professional network and his own significant professional output. Paying for dinner, his credit card is rejected apparently because of a problem with the dates on the local dial-up machine and the central computer — it seems the central computer had not yet had its clock adjusted for DayLight Savings which went into effect last Sunday at 0200. Is this a foreshadowing of the Millineum Bug? It is easy to be pessimistic about all this. Technophobia aside, human nature fore-fronted; it is fallible, grotesquely so, not much thought needed to figure that. Has the world ever been in mass chaos? Perhaps in the Plague times, although that was very much a process with a discrete temporal vector pre-determined by a combination of transport speeds of the time and the latency period of the Plague itself. Now, given the immediacy of computing, and despite the fact that computer networks are not everywhere on the globe, they do control aspects of life that touch almost every human being through an instantaneous Butterfly Effect. If, for example, anything in the chain of production of wealth is disrupted, the entire chain reels from the effect … What is the minimum percentage needed to affect the whole chain? How sensitive is modernity? (Can we look at Yugoslavia as an example, or Somalia, Japan, elsewhere?) Is it a card house?