The Pillars of Uncertainty

Ramses Kiesele is a fictional author of non-fiction, an academic who self-identifies as a modernist. Following a student’s remark in class, Kiesele’s assumed knowledge is in crisis. Can he be a poet, or is he condemned to a life of theory? The decline of his intellectual confidence is recorded in a sequence of fragments, each testing a literary genre, which show a growing acceptance of uncertainty. Unfinished, Kiesele’s notes come into the possession of M.H. Obrasnič, an architect and opportunistic peer-reviewer, where they go on to inspire a monument to post-ironic culture: the Repeated Museum in Berlin.

Has the jeu d’ésprit lost its innocence in this translation? The Pillars of Uncertainty presents Kiesele’s fragments as annotations to the proposed monument. The reader is invited to exercise judgment on how each contribution advances Kiesele’s original question: What role do dead monuments have in describing lived experiences?