Happy Sunday, Ariadne, you who must lose the thread to find it again!
Yes, the bunch of keys beside the toothpaste. It would still be lying there had I not found it after all, and rushed off to the train in the greatest of hurries.
We had got as far as the brutal self-diagnosis of self-boycott, with which I flogged myself once again on the way to the station (no pretzel from the Brezelkönig today!), and as far as the many shouts from my esteemed readers: untidy (Ursula), concentrate! (Giovanni), chaotic! (Brigitte), sloppy! (Mutti).
Fine, fine.
Then, sitting in the Intercity, having come round again after an eternity of gasping and savouring the quiet triumph of having leapt back onto the express train of life despite (or because of) the brief loss of my keys, and with them my bearings, it began to dawn on me that other forces must have been at work than the self-destructive ones of the English national team in the World Cup semi-final.
The business with the key was something like a game with myself, or against me. In other words: the key is laid in an unsuitable place while I know, half consciously, that I am setting myself a challenge. A kind of trap one lays for oneself: will the future Markus find it here?
Naturally the first question goes to Herr Freud, and his answer is astonishing. The well-behaved child he describes had a single troublesome habit: flinging all the small objects he could lay his hands on into the corners of rooms and under the bed, with a long-drawn-out sound that those around him soon learned to read:
The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string wound round it. It never occurred to him, for example, to drag this after him on the floor and so play horse and cart with it, but he kept throwing it with considerable skill, held by the string, over the side of his little draped cot, so that the reel disappeared into it, then said his significant ‘o-o-o-oh’ and drew the reel by the string out of the cot again, greeting its reappearance with a joyful ‘Da’ (there). This was therefore the complete game, disappearance and return, the first act being the only one generally observed by the onlookers, and the one untiringly repeated by the child as a game for its own sake, although the greater pleasure unquestionably attached to the second act.1
Interesting.
The reel is thrown so that finding it again remains possible: on a string, over the rim of a cot whose inside only the thrower controls. My key beside the toothpaste has no string, but it stays within my own flat: a loss staged where the ‘Da!’, the ‘there it is!’, is guaranteed, and the person to whom the finding is given as a present is my future self.
But Freud goes further, and tells in a footnote how the child himself found the supreme form of this game: making himself the thing that disappears.2
At some point I surface again from the dark of the Gotthard tunnel, and Lake Lucerne is enjoying the evening sun as it brushes over the surrounding peaks.
The key is the reel, clearly. O-o-o-o, the hiding in the bathroom, and there it is, beside the toothpaste! But with whom am I playing this endless game, my whole life long, and are there reasons more interesting still than the pleasure principle?
My playmate is not myself: masturbation, I suspect, is not the point. My future self is a good creature, a friend I enjoy leading astray and watching patter through the flat in a hurry.
But there is more here than pleasure principle and play instinct: there is also a kind of protest, and some diffuse presentiment of greatness. Dostoevsky!
In his Notes from Underground he tells of a retired civil servant who rants against reason from his Petersburg cellar-hole: man, he says, will again and again do precisely what harms him, solely to prove that he is free.
«... a formula, as positive as twice two makes four, and such positiveness is not life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of death.»3
To be free. Free, and not a piano-key on which the laws of nature play their études.
And finding the key on the key rack is the gate to limbo.
Warmly,
have a wonderful week!
Markus
Sources
- Sigmund Freud: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, translated by C. J. M. Hubback, The International Psycho-Analytical Press, London 1922, ch. II (German original: Jenseits des Lustprinzips, 1920). Quoted verbatim from the 1922 translation.
- Ibid., footnote to ch. II: «One day when the mother had been out for some hours she was greeted on her return by the information ‘Baby o-o-o-o’ which at first remained unintelligible. It soon proved that during his long lonely hours he had found a method of bringing about his own disappearance. He had discovered his reflection in the long mirror which nearly reached to the ground and had then crouched down in front of it, so that the reflection was ‘fort’.»
- Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground (1864), Part I, ch. IX, translated by Constance Garnett; the piano-key in chs. VII and VIII.
From the association
We are pleased to have renewed the funding convention between our Associazione artistica PETRUSKA and the City of Lugano for 2026 and 2027. With it, the City guarantees the non-profit association continued support.Travel Mates
The complete dog-days guide
How to make it safely through to September without kicking the bucket in August
Here is an appendix to our complete dog-days guide, supplemented from personal experience:
- Travel north! While Ticino roasts in the frying pan of the southern Alps, we took to our heels and crossed a few degrees of latitude northward by train and ship. We have genuinely escaped Lugano's infernal heat (today: 36°) and are concentrating on the present in the south of England, at a cool 25°. But the climate is collapsing here too: in July, southern England received just 1% of its usual rainfall.4 It has not rained for eight weeks; the leaves hang limp on the trees, the grass is parched and the water reserves are running out. Heathland is burning. The government has declared an emergency. Diagnosis: drought.
4 · Environment Agency: Drought declared in half of England, press release, 29 July 2026: England received just 7% of its usual July rainfall, southern England 1%.
Thank you for your letters!
Thank you so much for your letters, which we are glad to pass on here!
Wind-Blown Time
TIME.... One of my innermost themes. Yes, you are right: sometimes it blows; then it trickles away, then it races, then it stands still and condenses into eternity. Is it life itself? At least it is one of its parameters. And space is always immanent in it! Once I stood in the sand desert: a blue sky touches, at the horizon, the perfectly level surface of the earth, covered in white sand, glaring in the afternoon sun. Nothing else. I stand and look. After a while the horizon begins to pulse. It contracts towards my ‘standpoint’, it expands into the infinite. Again and again. That changes my perception, then my consciousness. Space becomes temporal. SPACETIME-TIMESPACE. I suddenly understood Hegel and his sentence on the infinity of punctuality.
Christine Bott
