" Prüfe dein Gewicht " ( Bee's Journal )
Bee — Prüfe dein Gewicht ...
I would have stopped there because of the sentence.
Not the machine first.
The sentence.
Prüfe dein Gewicht.
It sounds as if someone has spoken to me in a corridor, not unkindly, but with too much certainty that I should obey.
I know this kind of sentence. It comes dressed as help. It does not shout. It does not expose itself as violence. It simply assumes there is something in me that should be checked.
I stand in front of it and feel the old embarrassment of having a body in public.
Not shame exactly. More the small adjustment one makes before being looked at. Coat closed. Bag held nearer. Feet placed correctly. A woman knows these adjustments before she knows she knows them.
The machine asks for twenty Pfennig and offers a card. This almost moves me. Not because it is tender, but because it is so poor in what it can give. It can only print a number. It cannot know whether the person standing there has eaten, has been ill, has been touched, has been left, has carried children, has lost sleep, has become older inside her own skin.
Still, the card comes out.
A little piece of cardboard saying: this was your weight, once.
I imagine keeping it. Not proudly. Not secretly either. Just not throwing it away. It would sit among receipts, tickets, old appointment slips, things that were once practical and later became small proofs that a day had happened.
Then the proofs stop proving.
A card lies on a red or green field. It should open a rule. It does not. A coin is available, but no side becomes more convincing than the other. A bed appears in a room and remains a bed. A figure stands beside it and remains a figure. Two people sit near each other and do not become a scene. Bodies lie in cloth and grass without producing dream. A man’s face repeats until repetition removes him from contact.
Nothing deepens.
That is the process.
The image offers association and then takes it back. It lets me begin to connect, then makes the connection feel unnecessary. Card, coin, bed, body, face, room. Each item arrives with the promise of use. Each loses its grip before it can become meaning.
This is where the caption enters for me.
Draw a card. Toss a coin. Someone told me a joke and owes me the punchline.
The weighing card is also like that. It arrives as if it has answered something, but it has not answered the part that was waiting. The coin has dropped. The card has been drawn. The body has stood still. The machine has done its work.
And still something is missing.
Not a deeper meaning. I do not feel that here.
Only the strange flatness after a promised turn does not arrive.
I think of standing in a station hall. People passing. Someone laughing elsewhere. The machine waiting with its sentence. I step on, not because I need the number, but because the command has already touched me. Then I take the card and feel briefly ridiculous.
There I am.
Seventy-two kilograms, perhaps.
Printed.
And yet I have not been recognized at all.
That is the quiet cruelty of the thing. It gives me myself in a form that cannot hold me.
I do not hate it.
I almost trust it for not pretending to hold more.