THE DRAWER /by Tomas Ivan Träskman

There are seven, or at most eight signs by which you recognise a drawer. Those who draw seem to be obsessed, enchanted, more or less hysteric, erratic, perhaps more than anything spiritually mislead. They predict, for sure, but they predict things that don’t come true. They translate, for sure, but without understanding the meaning. They jump around and perform tricks, at least the simplest of them, and they fall over their own pencils whilst doing it. In short, what they do is terrible and against nature; they say dirty things, things that decent men would never say. The strange thing is that this coincides with the signs by which exorcists, penitents, and Capuchin friars and priests, from times past, found characteristic for those with supernatural powers. Strange? But, true!

The surgeon, who places the drawer in his own category, did a great service to humanity. In our society of lonely individuals, the drawer often has to act as a magician. Through a tiny movement of the pencil the drawer makes everything that has come to a rest: humans, social relations, society etc liven up for a moment, the lights of our mundane lives will glow like light beams. Everything is to be transformed; it’s not in the beginning or the end that important things occurs, it’s somewhere in between. But the distinction between reality and representation does not collapse, which is what normally happens with mislead and obsessed persons, instead it starts floating around, becoming variable and productive. And then the drawer says something dirty again. Perception, consciousness of time and memory, our thought process is subjected to horrible things, something exterior, which these processes have a hard time understanding.

The drawer seldom makes a fuss, but is remarkable.

Tomas Ivan Träskman
translated by Helena Scragg