Towards the self, away from the self. A postscriptum. One had never expected anything like this - this intense self-questioning in the form of a comic goes to a limit: the limit of what a diary is capable of. Beyond that a marking that is inherent also in us is TOUCHED; what we can stand, what we can bear in life and reading. This play with images and language never indulges in superficial breakings of taboos, ingratiations or silly jokes. On the contrary, it is the earnest attempt to come as near as possible to the UNNAMEABLE. It is the extreme necessity of the lived-through experiences, a thoughtful building-up upon this chapter of life from which a complete detachment doesn't seem possible, though. The DISTANCE sometimes seems to be dangerously small: "What was so wrong with being frank." Frankness, openness is unusual, hard; it doesn't frighten us only for a short moment, but gives us a tremendous scare. One has to be extremely suspicious not least because of this fact of the connection between the self and its truth here presented. This is also mirrored in the necessity of the corrections made in order to take the changes into account. It is the continual and extensive "endeavor towards the truth" (Blanchot) that gives us here always IMPROVEMENTS. Slanting or rough lines, displacements of words across several lines: it is the intensity of life why we are working like this; which makes us the mercyless narrator of our own misery, again and again. Failure, the own and that of others, shortcomings and a considerable loss of confidence make distrust to a principle of life. The structures of the biography, standing in place of life ITSELF, begin to shake under this BURDEN, under this "immune deficiency of order". The depicted tortured body of the cat refers to the possibility (and maybe also to something like a: neccessity) to hold out life. SURVIVING is what counts; it doesn't seem possible to come closer than this to the misery of our days. In this context it's not surprising that love as a main theme shines through time and again; it is rather the temporary impossibility of life mirroring itself in the improbability of happy love. "Before": the original state of the still innocent self is only supplied in the last, isolated panel; not yet burdened by the necessity of guilt, CAREFREE. The writing around a constantly shifting center becomes an act of sounding that speaks for the strength and stamina of the author; her successful attempt to grasp and understand herself by going backwards: "Lots of chaos. That's what remains." Thomas Ballhausen, Vienna 2001