Steps (16): Universes   [nederlands]

You regularly come across them on social media: memes with partially overlapping circles, stating certain opposite values, and in the overlap their shared value, and then it's funny. Or not, if it offends you perhaps? Last night i dreamt something vague, involving different universes, and i thought: i should write about that but now i've long forgotten the storyline of it, partly because i went looking for whether 'universes' is really the plural of universe, and i disappeared into a universe of conflicting language advice for a while.
I have since returned safely, but little remains of the dream. All i remember is a landscape made up of stairs, which were not real stairs, more like patchwork quilts of slats and carpets and i don't know what else, dangerously sagging and tilting, rising dozens of metres above everything else. Arriving at a certain point, i decided it was far too dangerous to go any higher, but when i turned around there were several bullies ridiculing me, and they blocked the way back. But i overcame them and came down safely. There i suddenly found myself in possession of a huge bunch of keys, and realised i didn't have to go through those stairs, but could just enter the building here now. I expected to have to try all the keys on the one door i saw, but immediately the first key gave me access, to what was the backstage of a club annex café annex restaurant. Since i didn't want to cross the stage behind the performing artist (pretty logical), i had to go through the café to ? (no idea where i was heading), but all the seats were poofy and weird and no one moved aside so i had to crawl and slalom over people and there was someone in a foetal position behind the bar laughing like a sad lunatic and i recognised people as people from the past and X who had died long ago from complications after an appendectomy and what was i doing there and what were they doing there?

Today's steps are in an artwork i saw years ago at Art Rotterdam, but whose creator i have forgotten - my filing system is not a system, it is disorder with the appearance of a system, a universe of nothing because you only have to do a few things wrong or it is gone. This is probably a bit more complicated with the universe in which we exist, hopefully, although that -as it turns out- is no guarantee of our survival for us as humans. Our universe's terms of service are pretty shitty, you might say, the helpdesk staff don't give a damn and the warranty period has expired before you are even born.

One of the language advice was that universe would not have a plural form, because there is only one universe. Fortunately, there were responses there about multiple universes, a difference between the universe consisting of mass, energy, space and time, and the individual universes of humans (and other flora and fauna, i would add). Perhaps there are many more kinds of universes. These must meander and wriggle and squeeze past each other and get stuck, and sometimes maybe even merge into each other, or be encapsulated, swallowed, and eventually end up in a foetal position behind a bar somewhere.

Now i suddenly realise that the drawing i'm working on might also have something to do with that, and i want to refer to it, but how to do that when it's not yet finished and only exists on the drawing board, and not here, not on the Internet. I wanted to put the drawing workshop online, but because of all the fuss i forgot about it and now my drawing universe suddenly opens up again.