UNHEIMLICH HOUSE
(Rain and Dream Streets)

Where is my house? And where my mind? (1)

There are different entrances to Unheimlich House --

-- RAIN STREET
Technology has simultaneously, though not paradoxically, exacerbated and collapsed the sublime at the same time, finding a more appropriate affect in the displacement accredited to the unheimlich. One translation of unheimlich is, literally, "un-homed", to have been so severely displaced that one finds oneself coming back at oneself in an eery, uncanny fashion, DOPPLEGANGERS everywhere. (2) In the basement of Unheimlich House I find a room full of books, left over from the people who used to live here but long since gone. The books have already started to rot, they are scattered over the ground. It stinks. Amongst them, within all this chaos, you can be sure to find a copy of The Sandman. Oh yes, you remember this bit which you never could read without feeling shivers icing down your spine. I WANNA TAKE MY CLOTHES OFF / TEAR MY MOUTH AND NOSE OFF AND TAKE OUT MY EYES / TAKE OUT MY EYES * That's a bad man who comes to children who won't go to bed when they're told, and he throws a handful of sand into their eyes, causing them to leap out of their sockets. And then he throws the eyes into his bag, and carries them to the half-moon as food for his children. There they sit in their nest, with beaks as curved as an owl's which they use to pick up the eyes of naughty human children. (3) If I look out of the window, I can see Voodoo Tower. Strange people use to go in there and never come out again. IN THIS INDUSTRY FULL OF VOMIT / MY VOODOO MAKE EM SICK / MY VOODOO MAKE EM SICK * Screams, by night and by day -- they come from The Open Wound Motel. I prefer to take a walk, to visit Former Lover Building (and from there I use to go to the Blank House, for a change, a rest). One could say that at Former Lovers and Open Wounds they deal with similar problems, and both places have their unheimlich bits. TRAMPLE ON MY SOUL / KILL ME WITH A QUICKNESS / TRAMPLE ON MY SOUL ... YOU LOVE IT WHEN I AM LEAVING. *

-- DREAM STREET
One morning, when you wake up in Unheimlich House you will find a dirty piece of paper under your pillow, ripped out of an old exercise book. You won't have any idea where it comes from. It says: -- When I was a child I was in flames. Everything I did I did for love, wild and soft, like the sea, silent and beautiful, like a flower, like moss, a rainbow over the old willow tree to which I told my secrets, hollow-cheeked, gentle and brittle with loneliness. -- (4) What The Fuck Is This? But it will remind you of something. But -- YOU CAN'T GET CLOSE * Kid A in Alphabet Land says, I could wish you dead, which would be surely be a means to an end, but not yours! It's d�j� vu all over again! Ha! You're just a disagreeable bit of reality I've dined on before! Choke on this, Unheimlich. (5) It's d�j� vu all over again.

-- POISON STREET
The houses, the unheimlich houses. Warsaw, for example. There are these huge concrete blocks, built where the ghetto used to be. Unwillingly they keep the horror buried in the ground. A first hint is their brutal uniformity, but this is of course nothing special, only the typical inhumanity of postwar communist architecture. These blocks are pillows of cold that drain, suffocate and kill. They neither speak nor give warmth, but the appalling past is conserved in the eeriness of their dark corners, in the tristesse of their neon-lit corridors with the wire-mesh gates secured by multiple locks and entry codes. Yet these safeguards are to no avail, offer no protection from the shadows. Sometimes, abruptly, you feel like you're dead there. You look out the window, see the interplay of lights in the buildings opposite. Buildings that look exactly the same as this one, and which are infinitely reflected in the other monolithic blocks. The incandescent dices stacked one on top of the other, the stairwells two long light sculptures. You concentrate, trying to turn into a TV programme the windows you are watching. The tragedies, the boredom, the love, the suicide, the family, the food, the children, the dreams, the nastiness, the tautology. Behind the lit windows and behind the dark. But your imagination is running away with you: too unreal are the ideas you project. THEY WON'T PROTECT ME FROM ME. Equally, the difficulty might be that Swiss man sitting there now, in an armchair, silent as the grave, in the same room as myself. I am trying to concentrate on the uncontrollable experiments with loneliness. Whereas he has everything under control. That leads to self-control. You're unable to let rip. Unable to suddenly dance through the room in a fit of lightness. Or tear off your clothes. Unable to weep. Unable to torture yourself, to think. One is being monitored: you are lonely. Are bored. The truth recedes further into the distance. No more imagination. The mirror is cloudy. An encounter does not take place. He is there. The silence adds to his presence. Nerves taut to breaking-point. Another night you won't be able to sleep. The telephone is under his control, too; it ought to ring. You should throw it against the wall. Yes, it's pleasant. No, it's unpleasant. You wouldn't want to be anyone else. You can no longer say I. No more encounters will be possible. You are dead. No, you've gone mad. Unable ever to speak again. To nobody. You're suddenly indignant. Think of mother. You are many. You should really talk to yourself, only that's impossible because the Swiss man is there. And has everything under control. The floor continues to be smooth parquet, maybe a bit dusty, the objects are tidily in their places. Maybe you even eat something. The music is striving to eliminate all other sounds. You don't even think of yesterday. You are satisfied with yourself. Frightening sometimes is the finality of this state. You won't leave the house. "Punishment is essential. For rebellion," the Kastrierte Philosophen sing -- mocking castrated philosophers who now sound monstrously insipid, stupid. Infuriating that the hours continue to go by relentlessly, and at their usual pace. The telephone is broken now. We dream too much. The problems with flying in a dream, old friends from another life (when Poison Street was still called Laurie Street), and masses of bread. By day the sculptures across the way have vanished, now there are only blocks of flats with rows of windows, devoid of secrets. Good. That's over. (DAMN YOU I HOPE YOU TO PAY *)

-- DRUNK STREET
Je pr�fere tont ce qui fait peur -- I love anything that makes me afraid. (6) Oh no, I can't say that really applies to me. But why did I move into this house then? THE MOMENT I FEARED * (Really? Really? You're afraid of yourself. You fear your own memories. Pure projection. Is it really death you fear?) Perhaps I should talk about the former bakery. Red bricks, iron stairs painted grey (one should think more about stairs **), everything very fine, very fine. The smell of flour has gone. (And a bakery, that's something innocent, innocuous, after all, I can be grateful it's not a butchery.) There's somebody else living there as well, in a different part of the building. One day, he says to me out of the blue: You do know what a ghastly thing the man who lived in your flat before you did there, don't you, in your flat? No, I haven't got a clue. Well, let me tell you sometime, another time. But the other time never came, he moved away at some point, I lost sight of him. But the eeriness remained. It is lodged in the corners, crawls out after dark, poisons your dreams, possesses you, owns you, changes you, finally drives you away. Given is a wall, what goes on behind it? (7) -- And what went on before that, and before that? The Unheimlich endeavours to make the housings uninhabitable, to expel us (even in a city inhabited by texts.) But, sensitive as we are, where are we supposed to go with all our madness?

THEY THINK THEY ARE SAFE *

** The uninhabitable: seas used as a dump, coastlines bristling with barbed wire, earth bare of vegetation, mass graves, piles of carcases, boggy rivers, towns that smell bad

The uninhabitable: the architecture of contempt or display, the vainglorious mediocrity of tower blocks, thousands of rabbit hutches piled one above the other, the cutprice ostentation of company headquarters

The uninhabitable: the skimped, the airless, the mean, the shrunken, the very precisely calculated

The uninhabitable: the confined, the out-of-bounds, the encaged, the bolted, walls jagged with broken glass, judas windows, reinforced doors

The uninhabitable: shanty towns, townships

The hostile, the grey, the anonymous, the ugly, the corridors of the Metro, public baths, hangars, car parks, marshalling yards, ticket windows, hotel bedrooms

factories, barracks, prisons, asylums, old peoples homes, lycees, law courts, school playgrounds

space-saving private properties, converted attics, superb bachelor pads, fashionable studio flats in leavy surroundings, elegant pieds-a-terre, triple reception rooms, vast homes in the sky, unbeatable view, double aspect, trees, beams, character, luxurious designer conversion, balcony, telephone, sunlight, hallway, real fireplace, loggia, double (stainless steel) sink, peace and quiet, exclusive small garden, exceptional value

You are asked to give your name after 10 p.m. **

Homely, so it is said, are places free from the ghostlike. (8) Without secrets.

Sources:
* TRICKY: ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES. Island Records, 1998.
(1) Anna Achmatowa: Gedichte, Frankfurt/M. 1988.
(2) Robert Cheatham: At the Bottom of the Kitchen Sink. Perforations 6: The Technological Uncanny. (http://noel.pd.org/topos/theory/perf-frame.html)
(3) E.T.A. Hoffmann: Der Sandmann (1817); quoted in: Sigmund Freud: Das Unheimliche (1919).
(4) Stolen as well, but I forgot from where.
(5) Carl Steadman: Kid A In Alphabet Land. (http://www.freedonia.com/~carl/kida/)
(6) Olivier Messiaen: La cit� celeste -- Das himmlische Jerusalem, 1998.
(7) Jean Tardieu, quoted in: Georges Perec: Esp�ces d�spaces, 1974 [Species of Spaces].
(8) Wilhelm Grimm: Deutsches Woerterbuch (1877); quoted in: Sigmund Freud: Das Unheimliche (1919).
** Georges Perec: Esp�ces d�spaces, 1974 [Species of Spaces].

Compilation: astrid sommer
Many thanks to tom morrison