Hannes found the void in time

As time flies by,
and as I meander between my own
past and a chimeric future ahead,

I travel forward to the next christmas
break thinking where I might spend it,
in my hometown maybe, and then I
suddenly shuttle backwards and it is
christmas 2001 and I sit in the dark,
both literally (it's dark wooden benches and tables
in a small pub) and pharmacologically (I am sure
it is hours after we actually got here),

and a face emerges from the haze my brain
is stuck in, or rather a voice. It is the voice
of the great shaman Hannes Woidich. And,
as we chat and rant about photography, both
his field of expertise and his pet hate at that time
("if every picture taken would leave a blank hole
instead of the original scenery..." he wondered,
years before the camera phones from hell
would prove him right) --
he suddenly says, 'you know, Jonas',

'Du musst die Zeit mir der Wahrheit
multiplizieren, dann fällt die ganze
Scheiße raus.'

It takes me several shots of schnaps
to recover from that outburst of truth,

and I think that, to this day, I have
not fully recovered from it. His truth
is with me every day, and it offers great
consolation if the pain and the absurdity
and the sheer ugliness of life (German
transl. Scheiße) seem to take over.
I then use to remind myself that a little
simple third-grade algebra operation
with time will do the job.

Hannes is a great artist in residency in Dortmund.