Page 46 - WTP Vol. IX #9

Twittering (continued from preceding page)
art, a hobbyist inventor and an automaton enthusiast.
He knows how to behave around automatons.
It is Wednesday, midafternoon, and Tobias Lütke is all alone in the Kunsthalle Bern on the Helviaplatz.
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Tobias Lütke steps over the braided blue velvet cord—this is easy for him since Tobias Lütke is a preternaturally tall, thin man. He approaches the twittering machine. He does this with anticipatory excitement, an almost childish glee, and with only a hint of trepidation.
It would be unfair to judge Tobias Lütke’s actions harshly. He has been an automaton enthusiast from a very early age.
With trembling hand, he grasps the crank’s handle and begins to turn, slowly at first—once, twice, thrice—
“F
sailing on the comic fantastic sea of life with only a thin plank of wood separating us from the watery grave forever beneath our feet?”
then faster. The mechanical birds come to life. They move awkwardly, performing a kind of fitful dance. This is to be expected given the irregular curvature of the bar on which they perch. As the machine speeds up, their movements become increasingly spasmodic, and then, all at once, the birds begin to—
To what? To sing?
No, not sing exactly but to emit a strange paroxysm of sound. How to describe it? Best not to try. Tact, after all, is the great art that makes for civility so, out of re- spect for Herr Klee who is not only a great artist but
a man of undoubted civility, let us say simply that the birds, the birds give forth an unearthly birdsong.
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Tobias Lütke finds all this very amusing, even exhila- rating, at first. He laughs and turns the crank and laughs and turns the crank some more. How much this heady feeling is to be attributed to the machine’s
eccentricity and how much to his own delinquent behavior, about which he is boyishly proud, is hard to say; but, at a certain point in the twittering ma- chine’s performance, Tobias Lütke’s amusement turns to annoyance.
It is as if the harsh dissonance of the birds’ song has reached his ears for the first time. Why is he still turning the crank? And why so fast? “Enough!” he says aloud, taking his hand from the crank and step- ping back. It is too late. Much too late. The machine has taken on a life of its own. The crank turns faster and faster, the birds’ herky-jerky dance becoming increasingly frantic in step with the contrivance’s fit- fully quickening music.
Tobias Lütke backs away some more and, covering his ears, screams: “Stop, dammit!” He turns to run and, tripping over the braided cord of blue velvet as he goes, Tobias Lütke brings the metal poles down on the parquet floor with a clatter.
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It is Wednesday, midafternoon, and Tobias Lütke is all alone in the Kunsthalle Bern on the Helviaplatz.
But not for long. Here come the gallery attendants now.
Der L-Platz im Bau
after Paul Klee
What a thrill to be riding the tram around the S- shaped streets of L-Platz and—as the tram rounds the track at dizzying speeds, its wheels screech- ing—to lean far out of the window, and to wave your hat in the air like a madman, and to wolf- whistle at the girls in the street and, then, to fall back into your seat and catch your breath amid the laughter of your friends and travelling companions while elderly ladies tut-tut and the greybeards be- hind their newspapers frown and shake their heads disapprovingly.
Ah, to be young again and riding the L-Platz tram!
Brägg is the author of Felicitations, a chapbook of literary minia- tures (Underwhich Editions) and the playwright/producer/director of numerous plays, including Gina Lollabrigida, Ah But It Sings But it Sings Luvena, and The Hotchpotch Suite trilogy. He is a co-founder of Toronto’s annual Rhubarb Festival. His work has been antholo- gized in Rhubarb-O-Rama and Globale Heimat.ch: Transnational Encounters in Contemporary Literature and has appeared in literary magazines in Canada, the United States, and Europe. His latest collection of short-short fiction, The Ovation & Other Conundrums, Convolutions, Circumambulations & Peregrinations, is forthcoming from Guernica Editions.
or are we not, all of us, sea-
farers in a sense, seafarers