My Residency at the Garzonka
On the normal course of a morning in my beautiful home city of Praha, I’d not be sitting in a kavárna named Zrno Zrnka munching banana bread embedded with walnuts and a few other unidentified nuts. I’d not have a white porcelain pot with a metal lid full of steeping zazvorový čaj and I’d not be listening to The Sky Moves Sideways on the best earbuds that a goat herder’s salary can buy.
On the normal course of a morning, I’d not be thinking of the advantages of being Test Tube Conceived and the psychological ramifications of having been borne in a womb for nine months.
Test Tube Conceived, you say? Shouldn’t I be working on my remake of that album? My cover of that album? It was a project of mine, or, rather, a tentative project of mine dating back to at least 2021. I actually laid down some lines for The Rah Rah Man at some point during my residency at the garzonka in Vackov. I’ve made no further progress on the project, even in the vast expanse of my imagination - at least not in my conscious imagination. My subconscious could have the whole album sussed out and ready for rendering as far as I know. It’s a bastard having a whole universe of other people inside one’s head just a parchment’s width out of reach at all times.
In the womb, a fetus learns the idea of time from the heartbeats of the creature bearing it. They are the booming clock that ever ticks out existence. The fetus’s malleable mind is constantly hammered by it to the point that without it, the pulse of its tiny cosmos is missing. Is that what happens at birth? Does the cessation of this universal clock become the trauma that molds the clay of the person (ex-fetus)’s life?
If so, then the beginning of the nurture stage of our existence is horrifying bewilderment. It’s the moment where all one has ever known becomes forever out of reach. Perhaps the subconscious, that seething morass of other people just a parchment’s width out of reach, has the job of coping with the transition and directing the “conscious” mind one way or another behind the scenes in relation to that moment of bewilderment until the day the organism fails and falls ever silent.
V tomto připadě, it’s good to be Test Tube Conceived. No impressions at all pass between any other being and the swelling fetus - not until the birthing. The creature that bursts the test-tube and lies squirming and squirting on the laboratory floor awakens from nothing, or at least from absolute silence. No concept of time exists beforehand, and therefore no trauma comes about. The hiccuping menagerie of other people just a parchment’s width out of reach don’t have to expend their energy guiding the “conscious” mind towards signpost after signpost that are each veiled coping mechanisms. The vociferous gaggle of other people just a parchment’s width out of reach instead perform a more useful task, such as helping complete the five Flavigula albums that are stranded in various stages of stasis.