C1I sit down in the upper small rather dark and cool room, which is not very congenial to me, but I really want to sit alone and not hear the talking of others. That seems to me to suit this mushroom. Nevertheless, I hear voices from downstairs - but they are none of my business.
It's a horrible blackish grey sticky slimy mass in the bowl, the mushroom is incredibly watery, it's impossible to rub, even though I didn't even take ¼ mushroom. Patty, sticky, like tar greasy.... like I'm mixing a disgusting grey paint.... almost odourless, maybe a bit of a watery smell.... I can hardly hold the substance in the bowl, it sticks to the pestle, to the scraper... so the mass forces me to add all the sugar right from the start - but still everything sticks and smears... like sticky grey clay... I have never had such a rubbing mass in the bowl before.

I'm sitting up here in the dark chill.... in the psychiatric ward, in a chamber... I have been given plasticine to play with, so that I have something to do - play, shape, whatever, they don't trust me to do anything sensible anyway.
I'm breaking all the rules now and getting more sugar - the fungus is forcing me to break the rules and I don't care at all.
I might have been creative once - now I'm splashed down, completely dull, I get pleasure from rubbing around or not.... I feel nothing... everything is completely indifferent and without any sensation.
I get sugar from downstairs again - downstairs the doctors and nurses sit and talk about their patients - from above and not lovingly. I don't care.
My rubbing around is a bit like playing in the sandbox and baking cakes, pointless, anything.... whatever.
What was earlier in my life? There is a veil (this word somehow comes up to me from below) over it, I don't know.
Forgotten, taken care of, deported... was I once uncomfortable? Did I have an uncomfortable political view? Not agreeable? What do I know, I don't know.
Sharp burning in my throat on the right like I was getting a sore throat.
Who was I anyway? Who am I? Who or what brought me here?... there are others here somewhere, but they don't interest me and I want nothing to do with them.... I have been segregated in this place - an un-place, a utopia.... I am trapped in an evil utopia and stirring in the grey.
Now (with a lot of sugar) the mass has become a grey ash. I stir in the ashes, in crumbling lava.
I hear people's voices, but I have nothing to do with them.
Sharp sensation in my nose and around my lips.
I look through the window and don't know what's out there.... green... what am I supposed to do with it? Why am I doing what I am doing - and for whom or what? The connection between me and my doing is broken, the connection from "me here" to "the one I am" is broken.
I rub. I do something - just to do something.
Sharp burning pointed feeling in the right nasopharynx < Inhale... I breathe in something corrosive.
Am I now taking part in an experiment?
I now see faces looking at me through the windows, watching me. What is the point of continuing? The faces are making fun of me... aren't they... like rascals looking through a keyhole somewhere...? I don't care.
Only the burning of my throat bothers me.
I briefly feel an uncertain fascination with the grey.... it vaguely reminds me that perhaps I once worked with colours - painted? created?....
Dullness... playing around in the dark. No one taught me how to deal with the dark and keep the light in me. it's like a bad fairy tale: If I could form anything out of this grey mass, I would be redeemed. But it's a completely hopeless job.
I have given up what I might once have been. I am a little here-and-now, lifeless...reduced to a lump of moist slimy matter.
I hear voices from afar, scraps of words - I don't understand them.
"hide"... is now sounding up... what is this?... I am all alone here... who knows about me? No one... I am all alone here.
"Veil"... "secret"... Words from "outside".
My world is this small bare room here. No outside except this green behind the window...timeless endlessness... only the unconditional needs of my body determine my life. Lightless space. No feelings, no desires, no dreams... endless grey.
Now the grey powder is light ash. What remains of the body after cremation.
Sharpness in the nose, as if inhaling something corrosive - a strong irritation of the mucous membranes. Eye burning, slight irritation in the throat, coughing irritation.
The powder does not adhere to the bowl, it is very light... the ash would fly away very easily.... as if nothing had happened.
It smells like damp masonry, like mortar.... Plaster.

The ashes left by the one who never left the psychiatric ward are put into the urn. There is no one to collect and bury the urn. Forgotten life... scattered into the earth... as if it had not been.
(yet the mushrooms looked so colourful before they went into the blackness.... what was before the grey? What was before the black?... Mystery?... this word kept coming up from below...)

Hospitalisation syndrome?