Go ego! Please frame me within a European context. Let me have the thoughts of all the great writers and thinkers of the European past. Let me comprehend what went Right and what went Wrong; just for one night. Give me one billion firecrackers to light up the sky so I can see the European continent with my three eyes in all its glory and bloody history. Give me the very last seconds of this millenium.

Freeze them.

Press pause.

Rewind.

EGU - the new style of thinking for the generation who experiences most of its reality through TV, that gets most of its language from advertising, and gets most of its pleasure from altering its consciousness.

I'm going to take you back to 1945 as EGU gets out of bed and opens the door. EGU enters a dynamic world dominated no longer by things but by the activities of men. Working class Havana cigar smokers. Men who think they are part of an intellectual elite as long as there are trees in the world willing to lie down and get raped by men at the paper factory. When the paper runs out no one will dare to speak or laugh. The big room framed by four walls will fall apart. All of them enter the great wide open. They get fired and return to their screens to nurse their personal Web page.

"Hi, I'm Inga, I like pets, sunsets and if you want to see a picture of me naked - click here! No? Then mail me for christ sakes, tell me what you think!!!" "Hello there, my name is Jean-Claude and I used to pose in front of a camera." "Yes, you are visitor number one million to Lars Hansen's Web page. Click here if you want to come over and have a cup of coffee at my place. We can talk about politics and eroticism and surrealism. Click on my banner and I'll get some money from my sponsors and I can pay half of your flight trip."

At night EGU has nightmares circulating the questions: What am I supposed to do with the masses? How can I keep on speaking and writing while the chainsaw massacre is something going on in my backyard? What happened to the rational and logic? - "Why aren't they only chopping up the bad guys?"

EGU is forced into a dome controlled by the good men. In here 25.000 computer screens with 256 colour bit map pictures of naked girls cover the walls. The sign blinks and reads: Free entrance to sex carnival. ¶ EGU closes its eyes but still it sees nothing but the nude and 25.000 different pairs of shoes. Someone out there is happy about the fact that porn-world wasn't build in old-school Russia. Then there would have been no difference between the shoes.

Play.

In EGU's world there is enough light for everybody. Everyone can pose naked in front of the electrified light. With or without wearing shoes. There is no need for a trendy pair of jeans or a red hot jumper. So the factory workers at the European fashion dome get fired. They return to their screens to nurse their personal Web page.

Fast forward.

EGU is the new master in control --of the instruments of fashion and advertising and programming. It can produce and consume its own trends. Without a momentary glimpse of Africa and the starving naked dark-haired babies. Shoeless. Nevertheless.

EGU stumbles and the torch falls down on a rock and the light goes out. It clings its arms around the dead cold piece of metal which it brought along into the tunnel. Though without light there is no reflection. The ultra monitor is black.

Myth : Out of the darkness enters the beast.

Question: Is that why EGU still is so afraid of the dark?

Stop.

It sighs: "In the early days of the steam train, you always used to be late. A bit later you were always on time. I started to believe that I could trust you. That you always would be there if and when I needed you. Now I sit in a dark cargo wagon and can't feel that we are moving. Why did the train stop? Who pulled the brakes? Did we run out of coal or imagination?"

Water is running down the tunnel walls. Above it a German soldier is reloading his fire arm while taking a piss. In a few minutes a Berlin man and his wife will try to escape and the soldier will shoot. We won't see them on the other side. Their names will be put on a page and filed in the archive of 'victims of history, progress and evolution.'

Still.

"It's a long tunnel and there is no turning back," EGU cries and lets his bra fall to the ground for an unknown number of curious eyes. His last drops of innocence are about to be queezed by a bunch of hard-working ladies in their mid 20s wearing different coloured strap-ons. "It's another day in the office," one girl laughs while she is loading the blue rubber thing with fresh batteries. It seems like not even a power cut inside or outside Europe can save our hero now.

Though it comes and she might grab and hold him tight while emotions of Angst rush through her veins. EGU holds his breath and hopes for the eternal embrace. A hand stretched out, feeble, into the void. The thing is shaking now. Her hand is vibrating, reaching out for him. Some seconds passes. The light comes back on for a couple of more seconds. Her shoes tap along the floor and she steps out of the glory light of electric sun shine powered by the European work force who apperantly all got fired and left the building with nothing to see and with no desire ever to return to their work stations.¶ So the dark age returns and behind the curtain of eyelids the ancient ego will once again question the core of the mystery of light. The mystery that once kept the olives and fruits coming back every year. They were popping up on a unknown numbers of trees in the fertile valley of naked tribes, possibly covered in mohair.

"Possibly covered in mohair," suggests EGU with dry mouth and lays his thick head down onto the pillow, sets the alarm clock and blows the candle out: Here comes another floating piece of reality that the prevailing ego cannot grasp or sleep next to.

Copyright © 1999 jacob ørsted nielsen

Jacob Ørsted Nielsen was nothing but a piece of meat on the 4th. of April 1972. Much later in the same country [Denmark] he edited a litterary magazine in Copenhagen [Zoe] and published comics with fellow country man Søren G. Mosdal. He is also a member of the music duo Chicken & Banana, which has brought 'poetic noise' to the capital residents for years. At the moment he is striving to maintain a focus on his last academic paper (upon 1960s 'new-wave' of Danish poets), but he is ever so often distracted by friends, his girl-friend, his modem and the daily chimes from his telephone.