The night is black. Twenty four small black photos. Twenty four pictures of the night. Sometimes it is possible to discern the suggestion of a form if you look very closely: on this one twigs, or lines on the palm of someone’s hand? On another soap bubbles, or dewdrops, or blood cells? Just like ‘I am a hopeless romantic (2006)’ the boundaries are blurred between inside and outside, between the individual and nature. Whilst in ‘I am a hopeless Romantic’ the MRI of the brain served as a starting point for a macrocosm inside the microcosm (blood vessels turn into star charts, eye balls into romantically exaggerated double moons), in ‘Nachtspaziergang’ I remain the level-headed reporter who merely records what he sees – and this time that happens to be in the dark of night, where there is nothing to see. Or so it seems.

People expect to discover new things in a story, to be surprised. With the rows of numbers (1,2,3,4,5....) in ‘le conteur’ I want the opposite: to tell the very same story time and time again. It is not only a story with no storyline but also a story that everyone already knows: a story without any element of surprise. Numbers are abstract concepts that have no meaning until they are associated with an object. Whereas every story is written with the end in mind, the end of the sequence of numbers in ‘le conteur’ is random and not pre-determined. A meaningless story cannot possibly have a pre-determined end. Still, all the errors that are made when writing the story are carefully corrected: the only characteristic feature of the identical, continually repeated story is the carefully safeguarded continuity: as if the continuous, meaningless sequence of numbers were a genetic code. What was that story of the Parcae who weave a person’s destiny? All of a sudden these repetitive number sequences gain an individuality of their own through the errors that are made and corrected. These number sequences point involuntarily to constant recurrence, the cycle of day and night, of life and death.

The very opposite of poetry: calligraphy characters are replaced with numbers, the intuitive ink brush by a mechanical typewriter. The poem yields to the market prices of futures and options (as paid at the stock exchange on February 29th, 2008). In a similar way to calligraphy characters it is also only possible for the initiated to decipher the codes for options and futures. Here, however, we are faced with numbers whose only purpose is to rate and measure a virtual value – an option. Although this is, to all intents and purposes, diametrically opposed to the essence of the poem it almost turns into another poetic endeavour in the end.