Stories of nothing

Abstract

The stories compiled in the attachment are called stories of nothing, as they are built from coincidences and are based on real events: as they happened, they were slippery and difficult to remember. With the work of time—and practice—they became stories: picked up, linked to events and occasionally come with some advice. Like in Walter Benjamin’s essay on Nikolai Leskov—the Storyteller—the stories eschew the premises of journalism and of authoring. In his words, the crafts constitute the home of a higher level of storytelling. Since they deal with coincidence the stories of Nothing are connected to Surrealism, as explained by André Breton and Paul Eluard (Minotaure). In some sense they oppose the Hidden Hand of Liberalism, with the Hidden Hand of History: as necessity finds its way through desire and dream to display in coincidence. A number of the attached stories the events utfolder as though there was a hidden film director at work, and the story teller became unwittingly involved and tangled in a movie take. Of course, there was no such thing, which is why they are called stories of nothing. At the bottom of the coloumn of files to the left, the reader will also find some writing exercises, that will help to prepare her for stories like these. It takes som effort and toil to get there, but in the end they will yield to writing. The stories were compiled in the early days of the Covid 19 pandemic, on a FB group support page called Mora til Herman. It closed, as the pandemic progressed, the 23rd april 2020. The definition of DESIGN used here, determines a two-tiered process of 1) pathfinding and 2) goalseeking, through sustain trail and search of mark-making (writing or drawing) that hatches when the two tiers start to converge/coincide.

As a roundup of the stories a TRIPTYCH of 3 different arrangements of the essay (nothing & Spinoza) is proposed. It proposed as a score for a dancer to read as a choreographic performance. The elements of the TRIPTYCH are (see left column): 1) nothing & Spinoza—EDITION 2) nothing & Spinoza—PRINT 3) nothing & Spinoza—SITE