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What is a trolley? We don't know.

Q.U.I.C.H.E.

Pulled by magic on rails
a vehicle and four wagons glide down into the mines.
Deeper and deeper into a night of coal
Into a valley without end, a valley without bottom


But it's not a magical hand that drives the trolley. Rather, it is the muscles of the worker who has left his home under the dry leaves of old trees to drive himself and the tunnel further into the mountain.
The draisine was once invented as a kind of running wheel for the well-heeled. Only in its second incarnation did it change its environment from the well-kept, private parks of the bourgeoisie to the rails that would take it stuttering underground.
Good luck, shouts someone who is sitting on this vehicle, which squeaks and groans like the driver's joints, and sets itself in motion with rattling carriages full of dust. The sweat from the pores of the human engine mixes with soot to form a paste that sticks everything together.
Because we don't want to see this work, it has to be done underground. Because we don't want to feel the beating of the pickaxes, this dismantling of frozen memories takes place inside the earth. Because we don't want to listen anxiously to see if the canary is still chirping, the wheels of the trolley have to be pumped deep into the tunnel, safely concealing all the work without which our world would come to a standstill in the light of the sun.

All the necessary things that have to be done, all the necessary things that have to be snatched from the earth's bosom so that the wheels turn and turn and turn and turn, that should appear to us as if provided by a ghostly hand. The work is unrecognizably embedded in the things that we see lying on silver pedestals and want to buy. The more horribly the work has to be done so that these things that we think we want exist, the better the work that rests in the things has to be hidden.
That is why it is no longer enough for the mines to be hidden underground. They must also be geographically removed so that the work is better hidden.
To Bolivia for lithium, to Peru for copper, to the Congo for all the miracle substances that make our little supercomputers beep and vibrate. But thanks to which civil wars can also be financed. Thanks to which children drink lead-poisoned water. But thanks to which the endless beauty of the salt lakes reflecting the sky is transformed into gray deserts.
The trolley knows nothing of all this. It allows itself to be propelled by everyone who sits on it. The trolley doesn't want to know about any of this either. It simply glides on through a night whose darkness protects it from questions.


TL

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)