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Purpose Machines

“If this was the land of dreams, then nothing was real, but everything was eternally true. These were not the footsteps of the gods, for they should have known that a machine in no man’s land should not have existed. This was not paradise, but the realm between the long shores of meaning and nonsense. It was up to us to let our absurdities flourish or to uproot them.”

 

COMING OUT SOON

Beschreibung

In five short stories, human experiences collide with profound emotions. A father and his son find themselves ensnared in a perplexing role reversal. Two brothers are suffocated by silence until the death of their grandmother breaks the spell. An estranged couple, entangled in trench warfare, discovers a fresh start in the pursuit of meaning. In a modern myth of the Minotaur, the ‘Reader’ and the ‘Daughter’ encounter each other in an epic struggle for survival. And finally, Taras, a student of Pythagoras, shatters under the weight of a divine revelation.

The motifs of meaning and meaninglessness resonate with the grand themes of humanity: the absurd, the beautiful, and the void. Through each page, humanity steams and stomps as a Purpose Machine in its quest for meaning and ever more meaning.

 

 

 

The Machine in the Garden

...I rubbed my eyes and stared at the colossus in the grass, leaning against flowers, lying beneath trees. Tons of weight amidst the garden. My father, the boy, laughed and puffed with his lips like the engine steam rising gray-black into the blue sky. Absurd! I thought, as he already scrambled up the behemoth and felt the levers and buttons. His shrill laughter echoed across the meadows into the forests, and I marveled at the stench, the foul breath of the thing...

Purpose Machines

...The waitress had frozen into the stone column. She balanced two cups of coffee on her tray, waiting for the next moment that was about to explode. Apollinaire behind the counter held his breath at this sight of love and passion. But the Frenchman was mistaken and would never grasp what was happening for the first and last time in his café...

The Great Silence

...To my parents, Jörg was a hero. The quiet one. The silent one with recurring outbursts of anger. The guardian of the unsaid. Father detested my questioning, and I detested his silence, the beast. My brother was his pride, more soldier than son. No secret burned so fiercely that it ever passed his lips, in no world and no war. He didn't talk, not even when he had been beaten up by three boys. He hadn't said anything, not even to himself...

Taras

...The papyrus scroll stretched across the writing desk, large and deep, timid of ink. His writing was a blotch, a flicker of light, a torch beneath the stars, nothing more. He strung syllable after syllable, yet the papyrus rejected him. He read, listened to the wording, struck out whole sentences, paused, breathed heavily under a weight, stared into the oil lamp until circles of light filled the nightly chamber, felt despair crawl up his spine and choke around his neck, he shook himself, gathered new courage, and continued searching...

Taras wanted to breathe in the harmony of the stars and fall asleep, forgetting the world. He concentrated, but he was bumped by the waves against the planks. The world had shrunk to the length of a ship, and the cosmos had plunged into infinity.

Taras

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