; vi = vie; vitz [or witz, as it would be in German] = Mexican church [!]3)This street is named ASJA LACIS STREET1
after the person who as engineer
drove it through in the author
The construction of life currently lies far more in the hand of facts than of convictions. Facts, moreover, of a kind that have almost never, up to now, and almost nowhere come to form the basis of convictions. Given such circumstances, true literary activity cannot expect to take place in a literary context – in fact, that is the usual expression of its failure to bear fruit. Significant literary effectiveness can come about only within a strict interchange of doing and writing; it needs to cultivate the unspectacular forms better suited to its influence in active communities than the ambitious, universal gesture of the book in pamphlets, brochures, newspaper articles, and publicity bills. Only such prompt language will prove an effective match for the moment. Opinions, when what we are talking about is the gigantic apparatus of social life, are as oil to machines; no one goes up to a turbine and douses it in machine oil. One squirts a little of it in hidden nipples and joints, and these one must know.
A popular tradition urges that dreams should be told in the morning on an empty stomach. The fact is, one who has just woken up remains, in this state, under the dream’s spell. Washing, you see, brings only the surface of the body and its visible motor functions back to light; deeper down, even during the morning wash, the drab twilight of dream still lurks – indeed, in the loneliness of those first waking hours it becomes established. Anyone who shrinks from making contact with the new day, whether from shyness or in search of inner composure, will have no wish to eat and will spurn breakfast. It is his way of avoiding the rupture between the worlds of night and day. By contrast a cautious approach, justified only by burning up the dream with a morning’s concentrated work, if not through prayer, leads to a different kind of mingling of the rhythms of life. In this state of mind, telling dreams is disastrous because the person who does so, still half in thrall to the world of dream, betrays that world in his words and must expect it to seek vengeance. In modern terms: he will be giving himself away. Having outgrown the protection of dream’s naivety, by talking about his dream story without superiority he exposes himself. For only from the other shore, from bright day, may dream be addressed from the superior position of recall. This otherworldliness of dream is attainable only through a process of purification that, while not unlike washing, is of a quite different nature. It proceeds through the stomach. Before a person has eaten, he will talk about dream as if talking in his sleep.
The hours containing shape and form
Were spent in the house of dream.
We have long since forgotten the ritual according to which the house of our life used to be played out. Yet now that it is to be subjected to siege and enemy bombs are already falling, what gaunt, quaint antiquities those bombs expose among the foundations. All that stuff sunken and sacrificed to the accompaniment of magic spells, that ghastly cabinet of rare specimens down there, where the deepest shafts are reserved for the most day-to-day. In one night of despair I saw myself, in dream, reunited with the earliest mate of my schooldays, whom I have not been in touch with for decades and about whom, in that time, I have barely thought once. Yet there I was, in the dream, enthusiastically renewing friendship and comradeship with him. On waking, though, I saw quite clearly: what despair had uncovered like an explosion was the dead body of that person, which had been walled in there as if to convey: whoever comes to live here, may he be nothing like this man.
A trip to Goethe’s house. I cannot recall seeing rooms in dream. There was a line of whitewashed corridors, like in a school. Two elderly English lady visitors and a curator are the dream extras. The curator asks us to register in a visitors’ book that lay open on a window ledge at the far end of a passage. Stepping up to it and leafing through the pages, I find my name already entered in a large, ungainly childish hand.
In a dream I saw myself in Goethe’s study. It bore no resemblance to the one in Weimar. Above all it was tiny and had only one window. Opposite the window stood the desk, narrow end to the wall. Seated at the desk, pen in hand, was the writer, well on in years. I was standing to one side when he stopped writing and presented me with a small vessel, an antique vase. I turned it over in my hands. It was dreadfully hot in the room. Goethe stood up and together we went next door, where a long table had been laid for my kin. However, preparations had apparently been made for many more folk than this comprised. No doubt the ancestors had been included. I sat down beside Goethe at the right-hand end. When the meal was over he rose to his feet laboriously and with a gesture I begged leave to assist him. As I touched his elbow I was moved to tears.
Persuasion will bear no fruit.
To the great, their completed works weigh less than the fragments they work on throughout their lives. For only the feebler person, the more distracted person, will take a matchless delight in finishing things, feeling himself restored to life thereby. To the genius, each caesura, each blow of fate falls like sweet sleep in the effort and application of his workplace itself. And he attracts their influence in the fragment. ‘Genius is hard work.’
Like a gymnast tackling the giant wave on the high bar, one takes one’s own swipe, as a young man, at the wheel of fortune, from which sooner or later the big prize then falls. For only what we already knew or did at fifteen will one day constitute our attrativa. That, moreover, is why one thing can never be made good: having neglected to run away from one’s parents. From forty-eight hours’ self-exposure in those years there leaps into being, as in an alkaline solution, the crystal of existential bliss.
The only adequate description and at the same time analysis of the furnishing style of the second half of the nineteenth century is provided by a certain type of crime fiction that sets the horror of the habitation at its dynamic core. The arrangement of the furniture is at the same time the sketch plan of murder cases, and the perspective of the suite of rooms dictates the victim’s escape route. That this type of crime novel in particular starts with Poe (that is to say, at a time when such dwellings scarcely as yet existed) does not gainsay this. For without exception the great writers make their deductions in a world that comes after them, as the streets of Paris in Baudelaire’s poems were there only after 1900 and Dostoevsky’s characters, too, did not pre-date him. The middle-class interior of the 1860s to 1890s with its giant sideboards heavy with woodcarving, the sunless corners where the palm stands, the bay window with its shielding balustrade, and those long corridors with the singing gas flame proves fit only to house the corpse. ‘On this sofa the aunt can only be murdered.’ The soulless luxuriance of the furniture will offer true comfort only with a dead body in front of it. Of far greater interest than the rural Orient of crime fiction is the voluptuous Orient of its interiors: the Persian carpet and the ottomans, the hanging flowerpot and the noble Caucasian dagger. Behind the heavy, gathered kilims the head of the household celebrates his orgies with stocks and shares, has a sense of himself as an Oriental merchant, an idle pasha in the khanate of rotten spells, until one fine afternoon that dagger in the silvered belt and scabbard hanging above the divan cuts short his siesta and his very life. This character of the middle-class dwelling, which tremulously awaits the nameless murderer like a crone her toyboy, has been thoroughly explored by a number of authors who, being ‘crime writers’ (partly, perhaps, because in their writings something of this bourgeois pandemonium finds expression), failed to receive their just deserts. Conan Doyle, in some of his texts, brought out what I am trying to get at here, the writer A. K. Green highlighted it in a huge output, and in Le Fantôme de l’Opéra, one of the great novels about the nineteenth century, Gaston Leroux helped promote the form to its apotheosis.
No one, nowadays, should stick rigidly to what he or she ‘can’ do. Strength lies in improvisation. The blows that count are all landed with the left.
There is a gate at the beginning of a long drive leading downhill to the house of…, whom I used to visit every evening. From the time she moved away, the opening of the gate arch lay before me like an ear that has lost its hearing.
A child dressed for bed cannot be persuaded to say ‘hello’ to a chance visitor. The latter, seizing the moral high ground, adjures the child in vain to conquer its prudishness. The child, moments later, does come down, this time stark naked, to greet the visitor. It had spent the time washing.
The force exerted by the country lane varies according to whether one walks along it or flies over it in an aeroplane. Similarly, the force exerted by a text varies according to whether one is reading it or copying it out. The person in the aeroplane sees only how the lane moves through the landscape, unwinding in conformity with the laws of the surrounding terrain. Only someone walking along the lane will experience its dominion and see how, from the selfsame countryside as for the flyer is simply the unfolding plain, at every turn it summons up distances, views, clearings, and outlooks as the commanding officer calls back soldiers from a front. Likewise, only the copied-out text commands the mind of the person reproducing it, whereas the person simply reading it never gets to know the new prospects of his inner being that the text, that lane through the ever-denser internal jungle, opens up: the fact is, the reader yields to the movement of his ‘I’ in the open air of daydream while the copyist enables that movement to be directed. The Chinese copyist of books was therefore the supreme guarantor of literary culture, and the book he had copied became a key to China’s riddles.
In a disgusted reaction to animals the dominant feeling is fear of being recognized as a result of touching them. What is horrified, deep down inside one, is a dim awareness that something is alive down there so familiar to the animal provoking disgust as to be, perhaps, recognized by it.
All disgust is in origin disgust at touch. Even self-control can tame that feeling only by means of abrupt, excessive gestures: it seeks violently to embrace the agent of disgust and consume it, while the zone of the most delicate epidermal contact remains taboo. That is the only way of meeting the paradoxical moral demand that calls for the simultaneous surmounting and meticulous cultivation of a person’s sense of disgust. A person may not deny his bestial connection with the creature to whose appeal he responds with disgust: he is required to master it.
I never pass a wooden fetish, gilded Buddha,
or Mexican idol without telling myself: that
may be the true god.
Charles Baudelaire
I dreamed I was a member of a research expedition in Mexico. After traversing a high-altitude jungle, we came upon a cave system up in the mountains where a monastic order dating from the time of the first missionaries had survived into the present day, with the brothers still engaged in their work of conversion among the indigenous population. In a vast central grotto enclosed within pointed Gothic arches, services were held in accordance with the most ancient rite. As we approached we came in sight of the main event, as it were: towards a wooden bust of God the Father, displayed somewhere on one of the walls of the cave, attached at a great height, a priest was holding up a Mexican fetish. Three times, in a gesture of negation, the divine head moved from right to left.
What is ‘redeemed’? Do not all the questions of lived life remain behind like the foliage that once blocked our view? Clearing it, even just thinning it out, are undertakings that scarcely cross our minds. We stride on, leaving it behind us, and from a distance it can indeed be seen as a whole, but entwined in a way that is unclear, shadowy, hence even more mysterious.
Commentary and translation are to text as style and mimesis to nature: the same phenomenon viewed in different ways. On the tree of the sacred text they are both mere ever-rustling leaves; on the tree of the profane text, fruit falling at the right time.
A lover will cling not only to ‘defects’ in the loved one, not only to a woman’s quirks and failings; facial lines and liver spots, worn clothes and a wonky gait will bind him far more durably, far more inexorably than any beauty. One learned that long ago. And why? If the theory is true that feeling does not lodge in the head, that we feel a window, a cloud, a tree not in our brain but in the place where we see them, when we look at the loved one we are likewise outside ourselves. But in this case painfully stretched and tugged. Our feelings churn and swerve like a flock of birds blinded in the woman’s bright presence. And as birds seek shelter in the tree’s leafy hiding places, feelings too take refuge in dark wrinkles, graceless movements, and the secret blemish on the loved body, where they duck down, safe and sound. And no passer-by will guess that it is here, precisely here, in the shortcoming, in the less-than-perfect, that the admirer’s burst of love, swift as an arrow, hits home.
Brooding pedantically over the manufacture of objects (visual aids, toys, books) destined for children is silly. Ever since the Enlightenment, this has been one of the stuffiest speculations of educational theorists. So obsessed are they with psychology, they cannot see that the world is full of the most incomparable objects that capture children’s attention and dictate what they do. What is more, some of those objects are very specific. The fact is, children have a special tendency to seek out any kind of workplace where the work being done quite clearly concerns things. They feel irresistibly drawn to the detritus created by building, gardening, housework, tailoring, or carpentry. In waste products they recognize the face that the material world turns to them and them alone. In putting such products to use they do not so much replicate the works of grown-ups as take materials of very different kinds and, through what they make with them in play, place them in new and very surprising relations to one another. In this way children form their own material world, a small one within the large one, and they do it themselves. It is the standards of this small material world that need to be borne in mind in any attempt to create deliberately for children, unless one would rather have one’s own efforts alone, aided only by the concomitant props and instruments, show one the way to reach them.
The more hostile a person is to what has been handed down, the more determinedly he will subordinate his private life to the standards he wishes to elevate as legislators for a future condition of society. It is as if those standards obliged him, though they are nowhere accepted as yet, at least within his own circle to uphold them as exemplary. However, the man who knows himself to be in accord with the most ancient traditions of his class or people will occasionally order his private life in flagrant contrast to the maxims he relentlessly champions in public, and without the least qualm of conscience praise his own conduct as secretly providing cogent proof of the unassailable authority of the principles he espouses. It is what differentiates two types of politician: the anarcho-socialist and the conservative.
How the leave-taker is the more easily loved! The reason being that for the person departing the flame burns more cleanly, fed by the fluttering scrap of fabric waving back from the deck or train window. Widening distance is like a dye steeping the vanishing figure, imbuing it with a soft warm glow.
When someone very close to us passes away, in the developments of the following months there is something of a sense that, gladly though we should have shared it with them, only their being gone allowed it to unfold. Ultimately, we greet them in a language they already no longer understand.
I. In the treasury of those turns of speech by which the lifestyle of the German citizen (a permanent blend of stupidity and cowardice) betrays itself daily, that of the imminence of disaster – things ‘cannot go on like this’, people say – is particularly memorable. A helpless fixation on concepts of security and property inherited from past decades prevents the average person from taking in the very remarkable stabilities of a wholly new kind that underpin our present situation. The relative stabilization of the pre-war years worked in his favour, so he thinks he must regard every state of affairs that dispossesses him as unstable. Yet the fact is, stable conditions are not necessarily, now or ever, pleasant conditions, and even pre-war there were sections of the population for whom stabilization meant stabilized poverty. A crash is no less stable nor any less a marvel than a boom. Only a system of calculation that admits to finding decline the only rational explanation for the current situation could recover from a draining astonishment at things repeating themselves daily to accept symptoms of collapse as the quintessence of stability and see salvation alone as something so extraordinary as to pass understanding and verge on the miraculous. The national communities of central Europe are living like the inhabitants of an encircled city whose food and powder are both running out and where by any human reckoning rescue can scarcely be expected. A case in which surrender, possibly on any terms, should be very seriously considered. Yet the silent, invisible power by which central Europe feels itself confronted does not offer terms. There is nothing to be done, consequently, but to keep on looking, in constant expectation of the final onslaught, for nothing but the extraordinary, which alone can bring salvation. However, this strained situation of the most tense, uncomplaining watchfulness, really might, since we are in secret touch with the forces laying siege to us, make the miracle happen. On the other hand the expectation that things cannot go on like this may one day have to face up to the fact that so far as the sufferings of the individual and of communities are concerned there is only one limit beyond which things cannot go on: destruction.
II. A curious paradox: people have only the pettiest private interest in mind when they act; yet at the same time their conduct is now more than ever determined by the instincts of the mass. And now more than ever the instincts of the mass have gone crazy and become alien to life. Where the deep, dark drive of the animal (as countless stories tell) finds a way to avoid the approaching danger, seemingly before it can be seen, this society, with each member thinking only of his own miserable well-being, acting with animal torpor, but without the animal’s torpid knowledge, stumbles as a blind mass into every danger, even the one lying just around the corner, and the variety of individual goals counts for nothing against the identity of forces dictating developments. Over and over again it has been shown that the way society clings to normal (but already long-lost) life is so fierce as to frustrate the truly human use of intellect and foresight, even in the face of drastic danger. The upshot is that society today presents a perfect picture of stupidity: uncertainty, indeed perversion of the instincts so essential to life and importance, not to say decay of intellect. This is the mood of Germany’s middle class as a whole.
III. All human relationships having any degree of intimacy are under assault from an almost unbearably piercing clarity such as they can scarcely withstand. This is because on the one hand money, devastatingly, forms the focal point of all life’s interests, while on the other hand that same thing (money) is the barrier that brings nearly every human relationship up short; in consequence, things that are disappearing more and more from both the natural and moral worlds are unthinking trust, peace, and good health.
IV. Not for nothing do we speak of ‘naked’ poverty. The worst, the most dreadful aspect of such exposure, which gained currency under the law of necessity but which nevertheless reveals only a thousandth part of what remains hidden, is not the pity or the equally grim sense of his own impassivity that it evokes in the observer but the sheer shame of it. One cannot live in a German city where hunger obliges the poorest to exist on the pretence with which passers-by seek to cover a nakedness they find wounding.
V. ‘Poverty is nothing to be ashamed of.’ Quite so. Yet they do feel shame, the poor. They feel it, and they cover it up with the saying. It is one of those that could once be used validly but whose validity is now long gone. Like the brutal ‘If he won’t work, he shan’t eat.’ When there was work to feed the doer of it there was also poverty of which he need feel no shame should crop failure or some other misfortune inflict it on him. But this is cause for shame, this want into which millions are born and in which hundreds of thousands get caught up and grow poor. Filth and wretchedness shoot up like walls around them, the product of invisible forces. And just as the individual is able to bear much on his own account but rightly feels shame when his woman sees him doing so and suffers it herself, the individual is at liberty to suffer much as long as he is alone – everything, provided he hides it. Yet he must never make his peace with poverty when like a giant shadow it falls over his people and his dwelling. If that happens, may he be constantly on the lookout for every humiliation handed out to him, nursing it in his heart until such time as his sufferings, ceasing to pave the downhill road of penury, have cleared the rising path of revolt. Here, however, there is nothing to be hoped for so long as that most dreadful, that darkest of fates is daily, even hourly, discussed in the press, set out in terms of all its pseudo-causes and pseudo-effects, helping no one to understand the dark forces to which his livelihood is now in thrall.
VI. To the foreigner superficially observing the evolution of life in Germany (he may even have visited the country briefly), its inhabitants will appear no less strange than some exotic tribe. A witty Frenchman once remarked: ‘On only the rarest of occasions will a German see himself clearly. If he does happen to do so, he will decline to say what he sees. If he does say what he sees, he will make sure he is not understood.’ This desperate remoteness has increased with the war – and not simply as a result of the terrible deeds, both real and imagined, that have been attributed to Germans. No, what makes Germany’s grotesque isolation in the eyes of the rest of Europe truly complete, what basically, for other Europeans, prompts the attitude that in Germans they are dealing with Hottentots (as Germans have quite rightly been called), is the violence, wholly incomprehensible to outsiders and quite beyond the inmates’ awareness, with which on this stage circumstances, destitution, and stupidity have forced people under the yoke of communal forces in a way that can be compared only with how the life of any savage is dictated by clan law. That most European of all commodities, the more or less pointed irony with which the life of the individual seeks to evolve separately from the existence of whatever community that person has been set down in, is something the Germans have lost completely.
VII. Conversation is becoming increasingly unfree. Whereas previously, when two people conversed, it was quite natural for one person to question the other in some depth, nowadays the questions concern what his shoes cost or his umbrella. Unavoidably, all social intercourse becomes permeated by the topic of circumstances, i.e., money. No longer is it a matter of the trials and tribulations of the individual, in which people might possibly help one other, but about viewing the whole picture. It is like being held prisoner in a theatre and having to follow the play on the stage whether one wants to or not, having over and over again, willy-nilly, to make it the object of one’s thinking and speaking.
VIII. Anyone not ducking the perception of decline will without hesitation enlist a special justification for staying on, doing what he does, and participating in this chaos. So many insights into the general breakdown, so many exceptions for one’s own sphere of activity, place of residence, and moment in time. That kind of blind determination to salvage the prestige of one’s personal existence rather than, by boldly sizing up the impotence of that existence and the extent of its implication, at least detaching it from the background of the general blindness – that comes through everywhere. It is why the air is so full of philosophical theories and ideologies, and it is why, here at home [i.e., in Germany], they seem so presumptuous: because ultimately, with few exceptions, they are sanctioned by somebody’s private situation, which proves absolutely nothing. For that very reason, the air also teems with delusions, mirages of a radiant cultural future that, despite everything, will dawn tomorrow: because everyone is committed to the optical illusions of his own isolated standpoint.
IX. The people penned in within the environs of this country have lost the power to recognize the lineaments of the human being. Each freeborn citizen is in their eyes a misfit. Imagine the mountain chains of the High Alps – but not set against the sky, set against the folds of a dark backcloth. Only vaguely would the mighty shapes loom. Just so has a heavy curtain been drawn across Germany’s sky, and we no longer see how even the greatest of men stand out.
X. The warmth is going out of things. Objects of daily use are quietly yet insistently repulsing man. Altogether, he faces a huge task every day, overcoming the secret resistances (not just the obvious ones, either) that they put up. He must cancel out their coldness with his own warmth if he does not wish to stiffen at their touch, and he must grasp their prickles with meticulous care if he wants to avoid bleeding to death. He expects no help from his fellows. Tram conductors, civil servants, craftsmen, and shop assistants – they all of them feel they represent a recalcitrant matter, the dangerous nature of which they are concerned to highlight by their own uncouthness. And the degeneration of things with which they, in line with human decline, castigate him is something that even the country is sworn to. Men and things are both having their strength sapped, and the German spring, always late arriving, is only one of countless like signs that German nature is breaking up. In it one lives as if the pressure of that column of air whose weight everyone carries had hereabouts, in defiance of all law, suddenly become palpable.
XI. The unfolding of any human movement, be it triggered by mental or even by natural impulses, encounters massive resistance from its environment. The housing shortage and traffic controls are both in the process of destroying that basic symbol of European freedom, which in certain forms existed even in the Middle Ages, namely freedom of migration – destroying it utterly. And if medieval coercion bound men together in natural groups, nowadays they are shackled in unnatural commonality. Few things will enhance the ominous power of a restless nomadism to the same extent as curtailing its liberty to settle anywhere, and never has freedom of migration existed in greater disproportion to the wealth of means thereto.
XII. As all things caught up in an unstoppable process of mixing and contamination lose the power to express their essence and substitute ambiguity for authenticity, so too does the city. Big cities, whose incomparably reassuring and confirming might encloses the creative worker as in a castle keep and by cutting off his view of the horizon also manages to deprive him of the elemental forces forever awake inside him, are now everywhere breached by the invading countryside. Not by the landscape but by the harshest features of untamed nature: ploughed fields, highways, the night sky no longer shrouded in a coat of shimmering red. The insecurity even of busy districts makes things very different for the city dweller, placing him in the kind of inscrutable, thoroughly grim situation in which amid the evil forms dotting deserted wastelands he must contemplate the monstrous spawn of once-grand urban architecture.
XIII. A noble indifference to the spheres of wealth and poverty is something that manufactured items have lost completely. Each brands its possessor, who can choose only between appearing as sucker or spiv. The fact is, while even true luxury is of such a kind that intellect and conviviality can so permeate it as to consign it to oblivion, the luxury goods on offer today display such shameless crudity as to shatter any illusion of spiritual radiance.
XIV. From the earliest customs of nations it seems to come to us as a warning that in accepting what nature so bountifully provides we should eschew the gesture of greed. For there is nothing of our own that we are able to give back. It is fitting, therefore, that we should show reverence in the taking by restoring to nature a portion of every single thing we receive before taking possession of it as our own. Such reverence finds expression in the ancient custom of libatio. In fact, it may be this same age-old moral experience that survives in altered form in the ban on gathering forgotten ears of corn or picking up fallen grapes: these things benefit the earth or the all-giving ancestors. In Athens, custom forbade the picking up of crumbs at mealtime, for they belong to the heroes. Has society, through hardship and greed, degenerated to an extent where it can now only plunder the gifts of nature, wrenching fruit from the trees still unripe in order to be able to sell at a good price, having to empty every dish, simply in order to feel full up? If it has, then the earth will grow poor and the land bear poor harvests.
In dream I saw a desolate expanse. It was Market Square in Weimar. Excavations were in progress. I did a little scratching
in the sand myself. As I did so, the tip of a church spire appeared. Delighted, I thought: a Mexican shrine from pre-animist
times, Anaquivitzli. I woke up laughing. (Ana = ; vi = vie; vitz [or witz, as it would be in German] = Mexican church [!]3)
Three thousand men and women from the Kurfurstendamm4 are to be hauled out of bed and arrested one morning and held for twenty-four hours. At midnight a questionnaire about capital punishment is distributed in the cells, asking signatories to indicate among other things what method of execution they personally thought of choosing should the case arise. This document had to be completed in private ‘to the best of [your] knowledge’ by people who had hitherto been used only to expressing themselves spontaneously ‘to the best of [their] belief ’. Even before first light, always a sacred time but in these parts dedicated to the executioner, the question of the death penalty would be cleared up.
Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven.
The times, which contrast with the Enlightenment generally, stand in particular contrast to the situation in which book-printing was invented. The fact is, whether by chance or not, the emergence of printing in Germany coincided with the time when the book in the highest sense of the word, namely the book of books, became common intellectual property as a result of Luther’s translation of the Bible. Now, however, there is every indication that the book in this traditional form is nearing its end. Mallarmé, who amid the crystalline construction of his indubitably traditionalist writing saw the truth of what was to come, was the first to take the graphic tensions of advertising and work them up into type in his ‘Un coup de dès’ [‘A Throw of the Dice’]. The graphic experiments subsequently undertaken by the Dadaists did not, admittedly, proceed from any Constructivist intention but from the precisely reacting nerves of literary figures and were therefore very much less solid and hence likely to survive than Mallarmé’s attempt, which was firmly rooted in his earlier style. But it does, as a result, show the relevance of what Mallarmé found, working in monadic seclusion, behind closed doors, and in pre-stabilized harmony with all the important events of these days in the worlds of business, technology, and public life. Writing, having found shelter in the printed book, where it was leading an independent existence, is ruthlessly dragged out into the street by advertisements and subjected to the brutal heteronomies of economic chaos. Such are the harsh schooldays of its new form. Centuries ago it began gradually to record itself, passing from erect inscription to the slanting script of hands resting on desks and eventually bedding down in book-printing; now, with equal slowness, it is beginning once again to rise from the floor. Even today newspapers are already scanned more from top to bottom than horizontally; films and posters are completing the process, pushing script into the dictatorial vertical. Before contemporary man gets to open a book, so dense a flurry of changeable, brightly coloured, clashing characters has settled on his eyes that the chances of his penetrating the ancient silence of the book have become slim. Locust swarms of lettering, already darkening the sun of the supposed mind of the city dweller, become thicker with each successive year. Other requirements of business life lead farther. The card file ushers in the triumph of three-dimensional writing – in startling counterpoint to the three-dimensionality of writing in its earliest days as rune or quipu. (And these days, as the current scientific mode of production tells us, the book is already an obsolete link between two different card-file systems. The reason being that all essentials may be found in the paper-slip index of the researcher who compiled it, the scholar studying it assimilating those essentials into his own card file.) Yet there is no doubt whatever that the development of writing will not indefinitely be bound up with the claims to power of a chaotic way of running science and the economy; no, the moment is approaching when quantity abruptly becomes quality and script, thrusting ever deeper into the graphic sphere of its new eccentric figurativeness, all of a sudden grasps its proper content. It will be a hieroglyphics in which poets, who will then as in primitive times be first and foremost scribes, can take part only if they open themselves up to those areas in which (without fuss) construction of that hieroglyphics is taking place: those covered by the statistical and technical diagram. By establishing an internationally convertible kind of script they will refashion their authority in the life of nations and find themselves a role in comparison with which all aspirations to a renewal of rhetoric will turn out to be daydreams belonging to a bygone age.
I. The whole thing must be marbled through with a continuous, wordy presentation of the plan.
II. Terms should be introduced for concepts that except in connection with this definition occur nowhere else in the book.
III. Conceptual distinctions laboriously drawn in the text should be blurred again in the notes to the relevant passages.
IV. Where concepts are discussed only for their general significance, examples should be given: where machines are at issue, say, all types of machine should be listed.
V. Everything that holds true of an object a priori should be substantiated with a wealth of examples.
VI. Connections capable of being represented graphically must be set out in words. Instead of drawing a family tree, for instance, all kinship relations should be elaborately portrayed and described.
VII. Where a number of opponents share the same line of argument, each should be refuted individually.
The average work of scholarship today wants to be read like a catalogue. But when will we be ready to write books like catalogues? If the poor inside permeates the outside in this way, the product is a fine piece of writing in which a figure is put on the value of each opinion without this meaning that the opinions are up for sale.
The typewriter will not make the pen feel out of place in the writer’s hand until such time as the precision of typographical forms becomes part of how the writer’s books are conceived. Probably this will require new systems with more variable type design. These will substitute the innervation of the commanding finger for the fluency of the whole hand.
A period that, having been drafted metrically, subsequently has its rhythm disturbed at a single point, makes the loveliest prose sentence imaginable. Similarly, a tiny gap in the wall of the alchemist’s parlour will admit a ray of light that strikes sparks from crystals, spheres, and triangles.
The rabble is in the grip of a frenetic hatred of intellectual life that has seen the guarantee of that life’s destruction in the body count. Given the least chance, bodies will form up in rank and file and march into the barrage of fire and onward to the market boom. None sees farther than the back of the man in front, and each one is proud to be so exemplary in the sight of the man behind. In the field, men have had the knack of this for centuries, but the goose-step of poverty, the forming of queues – those are female inventions.
I. Whoever is thinking of committing a major work to paper, let him give himself that pleasure and, his daily stint done, grant himself whatever will not impair the next day’s.
II. Talk about what you have accomplished, if you wish, but do not, during the course of the work, read aloud from it. Any satisfaction you obtain in this way will slow you down. Stick to this regime, and the growing desire to tell someone will eventually become an engine of completion.
III. In the conditions in which you work, try to avoid the average, the everyday. Semi-quiet, accompanied by empty sounds, will be degrading. However, the accompaniment of an étude or of the murmur of voices may be as meaningful, as regards work, as the audible silence of night. Where the latter will sharpen the inner ear, the former will be a touchstone for a diction whose abundance absorbs even these excentric sounds.
IV. Avoid just any old tools of the trade. Pedantic insistence on certain papers, pens, inks will be useful. Not luxury, but abundance of such utensils is essential.
V. Let no thought pass you by incognito but keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities do the Register of Aliens.
VI. Make your pen resistant to inspiration; it will then attract it with the force of a magnet. The longer you delay over writing an idea down, the more fully developed it will yield itself to you. Speech takes hold of thought by force, but writing tames it.
VII. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that you break off only when there is an appointment to be met (a meal, an engagement or the work is finished.
VIII. When inspiration fails, fill in by making a fair copy of what you have done already. Intuition will awake as a result.
IX. Nulla dies sine linea – but weeks, certainly.
X. Never deem a work perfect over which you have not, at some time, sat from evening to daybreak.
XI. Do not write the conclusion of the work in your usual study. There you would not find the courage.
XII. Stages of composition: thought – style – the act of penning. The point of the fair copy is that, in fixing this, all attention is now on calligraphy. Thought kills inspiration, style shackles thought, penning pays the wages of style.
XIII. The work is the death mask of the draft.
Snob in the private office of art criticism. Left, a child’s drawing; right, a fetish. (Snob: ‘Picasso and that crowd can get lost.’)
I. The critic is the strategist in the literary battle.
II. Anyone incapable of taking sides should say nothing.
III. The critic is quite unrelated to the person who interprets past epochs of art.
IV. Criticism must speak in the language of artists. For the terms of the cénacle5 are watchwords. And only in watchwords does the battle-cry resound.
V. ‘Objectivity’ must always be sacrificed to partisanship when the cause being fought over merits it.
VI. Criticism is a moral issue. If Goethe failed to recognize Hölderlin and Kleist, Beethoven and Jean-Paul, that is not about his understanding of art but his moral sense.
VII. For the critic, it is colleagues that constitute the higher authority. Not the audience. Certainly not posterity.
VIII. Posterity forgets or celebrates. Only the critic takes the author’s view.
IX. Polemics means destroying a book in a few of one’s sentences. The less one has studied it, the better. Only someone who can destroy can criticize.
X. Proper polemics picks up a book as lovingly as a cannibal prepares a baby for eating.
XI. Enthusiasm about art is alien to the critic. In the critic’s hands the work of art is no more than the weapon in the battle of minds.
XII. The art of criticism in a nutshell: coining slogans without giving away ideas. Slogans of an inadequate criticism will flog ideas off cheap to fashion.
XIII. The audience must always be wrong yet always feel the critic is their champion.
Thirteen – I took a cruel pleasure in stopping
at this number.
Marcel Proust
The uncut6 folding of the book still invites
the kind of sacrifice that made the red edges
of ancient tomes bleed; the introduction
of
a weapon or paper-knife, confirming
appropriation.
Mallarmé
I. Books and whores can be taken to bed.
II. Books and whores cut joggles in time. They dominate night as they do day and day as they do night.
III. Neither books nor whores give any sign that the minutes are precious to them. Become more involved with them and you will note for the first time what a hurry they are in. What makes them count along is our burying ourselves in them.
IV. Books and whores have always had this unrequited love for each other.
V. Books and whores – they each have their own kind of men who live off and torment them. Books have critics.
VI. Books and whores on public premises – for students.
VII. Books and whores – one seldom sees their end, having once possessed them. They tend to disappear before they die.
VIII. Books and whores love to tell and tell such lies about how they became such. Truth is, they often do not notice themselves. For years one pursues everything ‘for love’ before suddenly, very much the fuller figure, finding oneself walking streets that previously, ‘for study purposes’, one had simply hovered above.
IX. Books and whores love to turn their backs when showing themselves off.
X. Books and whores make many young.
XI. Books and whores – ‘sanctimonious old cow – young slut’. How many books were once non grata from which young people today are supposed to learn!
XII. Books and whores will squabble in front of people.
XIII. Books and whores – footnotes in the one are what banknotes in stocking-tops are to the other.
I had arrived in Riga to visit a friend. Her house, the city, the language – all were unknown to me. No one was expecting me, nobody knew me. I spent two hours wandering the streets on my own. I have never seen them like that again since. Each doorway shot out a tongue of flame, from each cornerstone sparks flew, every tram came hurtling towards me like the fire brigade. She might of course emerge from that doorway, come round that corner, be riding in that tram. However, of the two of us I must at all costs be the first to see the other. The fact is, had she laid the fuse of her glance all the way to me – I, without fail, would have gone up like an ammo dump.
A very confusing part of town, a warren of streets I had avoided for years, all of a sudden became clear to me when one day somebody I loved went to live there. It was as if a searchlight installed in her window now carved the district up with its beams.
The tractate is an Arabic form. Its exterior is non-articulated and unobtrusive, like the façade of an Arab building, articulation of which begins only in the courtyard. In the same way the articulated structure of the tractate cannot be seen from outside but reveals itself only within. Where chapters make it up, these are not given verbal titles but are headed numerically. The surface of its deliberations is not enlivened in the manner of a painting; instead it is covered with webs of ornamentation, woven without a break. In the sheer ornamental density of this portrayal the distinction between thematic and excursive observations falls away.
Pharus-Plan7 – I know a woman who is absent-minded. Where I will be familiar with the names of my suppliers, where certain papers are kept, the addresses of friends and acquaintances, the time of a particular appointment, in her mind it is political concepts, party slogans, professions of faith, and commands that have taken root. She inhabits a city of catchphrases and lives in a district of watchwords that are her sworn brothers, where every alley has pledged allegiance and every utterance is echoed by a war cry.
Wish-list – ‘May a reed indeed prove adept / At making worlds easier to bear, / And may sweet delights flow freely / From my own reed pen.’8 The lines come after ‘Ecstatic Longing’ like a pearl that has rolled from the open mussel shell.
Pocket calendar – For the Nordic person, few things are more typical than that, if he falls in love, he must above all, cost what it may, first have some time alone to think about and enjoy his emotion before going to the woman and declaring it.
Paperweight – Place de la Concorde: Obelisk. Whatever was entombed inside it four thousand years ago, today stands in the middle of the greatest of all city squares. Had he received foreknowledge of this – what a triumph for the pharaoh! The foremost cultural empire in the West will one day have at its centre the stone commemorating his rule! What, in truth, does such fame look like? Not one in ten thousand passing here pauses for a moment. Not one in ten thousand pausing for a moment is able to read the inscription. This, then, is how all fame redeems its promises, and no oracle can match it for slyness. For there the Immortal One stands like this obelisk: the spiritual traffic surging below is controlled, yet no one benefits from the inscription buried inside.
Incomparable language of the skull: total inexpressiveness (the black of its eye sockets) combined with the wildest of expressions (the grinning rows of teeth).
One who feels forsaken, while reading, is pained that the page he wishes to turn has already been cut, that not even this needs him any more.
Gifts should affect the recipient so deeply as to startle him.
When a valued, cultured, and elegant friend sent me his new book I caught myself, as I opened it, straightening my tie.
A person who observes good manners but condemns lies is like someone who, while dressing stylishly, wears no shirt.
If the cigarette smoke was drawing well in the holder and the ink flowing well in the fountain pen, then I would be in my writer’s seventh heaven.
Being happy means being able to look inside oneself without alarm.
Child reading – From the school library, each child receives one book. Books are simply issued in the lower classes. Only occasionally does one dare make a request. Often one sees much-coveted books going to others. One’s own book came at last. For a week one was completely caught up in the text, which gently, secretly, densely, and incessantly surrounded one like snowflakes. One entered into it with infinite trust. The silence of the book, luring one on and on! What it was about mattered scarcely at all. Because reading still coincided with the time when one made up one’s own stories in bed. The footsteps of stories, half covered, children trace. While reading, the child shuts its ears; the book rests on the table (always far too high) and one hand will rest on the page. For the child, the hero’s adventures can be read even in the whirl of letters, character and message in the driving flakes. The child’s breath hangs in the air of events, and all the figures in the book breathe back. Children will be far more involved in the characters than are adults. The child is unutterably affected by what happens and by the words exchanged, and when it gets up it will be covered in snow, the snow of what it has read.
Child arriving late – The clock in the playground has a damaged look, and the child is to blame. The hands point to ‘Late’. And in the corridor, from classroom doors, as the listener slips past, come murmurs of secret discussions. Behind those doors, teacher and pupils are friends. Or they are all silent and still as if expecting someone. Inaudibly, the child puts a hand on the door handle. The sun floods the spot where it stands. Then, defiling the green day, it pushes the door open. The teacher’s voice clattering away like a mill-wheel; before the child, the stones. The clattering voice sustains its beat, but the workers now leave everything to the new arrival; ten, twenty heavy sacks come flying towards it that it must then haul over to the bench. Every thread of its coat is dusted with white. Like a wretched soul at midnight it makes a din at every step, and yet is unseen. Once in its seat, it works quietly along with the rest until the bell goes. Not that any good comes of this.
Snacking child – Through the crack of the food-cupboard door, which is scarcely ajar, his hand advances like a lover in the night. Once the hand is at home in the dark, it feels around for sugar or almonds, sultanas or preserved fruit. And as the lover, before kissing his girl, will embrace her, the sense of touch meets up with these things before the mouth samples their sweetness. How seductively honey, heaps of currants, even rice will receive the hand. How ardent the encounter for both, now that at last they have eluded the spoon. Gratefully, unrestrainedly, like one snatched from the bosom of the family, strawberry jam with no bread will, as under God’s blue sky, surrender to the taste buds; butter, even, responds with tenderness to the bold suitor thrusting his way into its maids’ garret. The hand, that youthful Don Juan, will soon have penetrated every cell and chamber, leaving a trail of trickling layers and streaming measures: virginity, uncomplainingly renewing itself.
Child riding a merry-go-round – The board with the willing animals circles snugly above the ground. It is of the height best suited to dreams of flying. Music begins, and jerkily the child rolls away from its mother. It is afraid, at first, of leaving its mother. But then it realizes it is being true to itself. It sits enthroned, loyal ruler of a world that belongs to it. Off along tangents, trees and natives form guards of honour. There, in an Orient, comes mother again. Then a treetop emerges from the jungle, such as the child saw thousands of years before, such as it has seen only now in the merry-go-round. Its animal is its loving subject: like some mute Arion the child rides along on its mute fish, it seduces a wooden Zeus-bull as flawless Europa. The eternal recurrence of all things has long had all children nodding sagely, life has long been an age-old pipe dream of dominance with the orchestrion roaring away in the centre as the jewel in the crown. If the music slows the surroundings start to stutter and the trees begin remembering their place. The merry-go-round becomes an unsafe place to be. And mother comes into plain view, the many-times rammed stake round which the child coming in to land winds the rope of its staring.
Untidy child – Each stone it finds, each flower it picks, and each butterfly it catches is already the start of a collection; in fact, every single thing it owns constitutes, for the child, one big collection. In the child, this passion shows its true face, that stern Red Indian face that in antiquarians, explorers, book fiends shines on only in a blurred, manic fashion. Hardly has the child entered life before it is a hunter. It hunts the spirits it senses haunt things. Between spirits and things, years pass in which its field of view is empty of people. For the child, things happen as in dreams: it knows nothing permanent. Everything, it thinks, is done to it, affects it, happens to it. Its nomad years are hours spent in the dream forest. There it drags its booty home, cleans that booty, ties it up, takes its spell away. The child’s chest of drawers must serve as armoury and zoo, crime museum and crypt. ‘Tidying up’ would mean destroying an edifice full of prickly chestnuts that are spiked maces, bits of tinfoil that are a hoard of silver, building bricks that are coffins, cacti that are totem poles, and copper coins that are shields. In mother’s linen cupboard, in father’s library, the child has long helped, but on its own patch it is still the restless, valiant guest.
Hidden child – It already knows all the hiding places in the flat and revisits them as one might return home, sure of finding everything as it used to be. The child’s heart pounds, it holds its breath. Here the material, tangible world enfolds it. That world becomes terribly clear to the child, wordlessly close. It is how a man being hanged really takes in what rope and wood are. The child standing behind the curtain itself becomes something swaying, something white, a ghost. Crouching under the dining-room table turns the child into the wooden temple idol, with the carved legs forming the four columns. And behind a door it is a door itself; wearing the door as a heavy mask it will cast, as a wizard, a spell on anyone entering unawares. At all costs it must never be found. If it pulls faces, it will be told that the wind need only change and it will have to stay like that. There is something in this, and the child in its hiding place knows there is. Anyone discovering the child has the power to freeze it as the idol under the table, weave it for ever into the curtain as ghost, spellbind it into the heavy door for life. That is why, to avoid being found, it causes the demon that has thus transformed it to leave its body with a loud cry if the searcher grasps it – in fact, rather than wait for that moment, the child will anticipate discovery with a yell of self-liberation. That is why it never tires of battling the demon. The flat is then the arsenal of such masks. Once a year, however, in secret hiding places, in its empty eye sockets, its unyielding mouth, there are presents. Magical experience becomes science. The child, now an engineer, demystifies the dark parental home, hunting for Easter eggs.
Medallion – With everything that is justly termed beautiful, its appearing seems paradoxical.
Prayer wheel – Only the imagined picture feeds the will, bringing it to life. Mere words, on the other hand, may at most set will alight, then leave it smouldering. No perfect will without detailed pictorial imagination. No imagination without innervation. Now, the most sensitive regulation of innervation is breath. The sound of formulae is a canon of that breathing. Hence the practice of meditative yoga of breathing across the sacred syllables. Hence its omnipotence.
The antique spoon – One thing is the preserve of the greatest epic poets: being able to feed their heroes.
Old map – In a love, most people seek an eternal home. Others – very few, though – eternal voyaging. The latter are melancholics, who as such must shun contact with their native soil. The person who kept the melancholy of home away from them is the one they seek. That is the one they will stay loyal to. Medieval complexions books know about how this type yearns for distant travel.
Fan – One will have had the following experience: loving a person – indeed, simply being intensely preoccupied with a person – one finds them portrayed in virtually every book. In fact, that person will figure both as player and as opponent. In stories, novels, and novellas he or she will crop up in ever-fresh guises. It follows that the faculty of imagination lies in its gift of interpolating in the infinitely small, of inventing for each intensity, as extension thereof, its new, compressed fullness – in short, taking each picture as if it were that of a folded fan, which only when outspread draws breath and, using its new wideness as a screen, projects the loved one’s features held within.
Relief – One is together with the woman one loves, in conversation with her. Then, weeks or months later, separated from her, one is reminded of what the conversation had been about. And now, exposed, the subject lies there banal, glaring, lacking in depth, and one realizes: only she, by lovingly bending deep over it, shaded and shielded it from us, so that like a relief the thought lived on in all its folds and wrinkles. Alone, as now, we find it lying flat, offering no consolation, no light and shade in the glare of that realization.
Torso – Only someone who could look on his past as the ghastly spawn of duress and difficulty would be capable of giving it, in his own eyes, supreme value in every present moment. Because what a person has lived can at best be likened to the fine figure that as a result of being shipped, has had all its limbs knocked off and now presents nothing but the precious block from which he must carve the image of his future.
Anyone seeing the sun come up in front of him while awake, dressed – out walking, say – will retain throughout the day above all else a sense of the sovereignty of an invisibly crowned king, and anyone having the day break over him at work will feel, around noon, as if he had crowned himself.
As a life-clock ticking away the seconds like mad, the characters in a novel have, hanging over them, the page number. What reader has never once fleetingly, anxiously, glanced up at it?
In one of my dreams I, a fresh-faced junior lecturer, am walking with [Gustav] Roethe, talking shop, through the spacious rooms of a museum of which he is the director. While he is off in a side room, discussing something with an employee, I step up to a glass case. In it, among other no doubt minor items scattered about, stands a metallic or enamelled, dully reflective, almost life-sized bust of a woman, not unlike what they call the Leonardo Flora in the Berlin Museum. The mouth of this gold head is open, and spread over the teeth of the lower jaw at well-judged intervals, partly hanging out of the mouth, are various pieces of jewellery. There is no doubt in my mind that this is a clock.
(Dream subjects: blush of shame [Röte, which sounds like Roethe]; ‘Morgenstunde hat Gold in Munde’;9 ‘La tête, avec l’amas de sa crinière sombre / Et de ses bijoux précieux, / Sur la table de nuit, comme une renoncle, / Repose’.10 Baudelaire.)
Only someone who hopelessly loves a person knows that person.
Geranium – Two people who love each other cling above all to their names.
Carthusian pink – To the lover, the person loved always seems lonely.
Asphodel – When someone is loved, the abyss of sex closes up behind them as does that of family.
Cactus flower – One who truly loves is delighted when, in a quarrel, the loved person is in the wrong.
Forget-me-not – Memory always sees the loved one in miniature.
Foliage plant – If there is an obstacle to coming together, the fantasy of a perfectly contented togetherness in old age is instantly on the spot.
Lost items – The thing that makes the very first sight of a village or town in the landscape so incomparable and so irretrievable is that in it remoteness reverberates in its closest association with proximity. Habit has not yet done its work. As we start to find our bearings, all of a sudden the landscape vanishes like the façade of a house as we cross the threshold. The façade has yet to achieve dominance as a result of repeated, ultimately habitual exploration. Once we have begun to feel right in a place, the original image can never be reconstituted.
Found items – The blue distance that cedes to no nearness and does not, on the other hand, dissolve as one draws closer, that rather than lying there pompously and verbosely as one approaches only builds itself up the more impenetrably, the more threateningly before one, is the painted distance of the backcloth. It is what gives stage sets their incomparable character.
I stood at a stop for ten minutes, waiting for an omnibus. ‘L’Intran11… Paris-Soir… La Liberté,’ called a newspaper vendor incessantly behind me, her tone never varying. ‘L’Intran… Paris-Soir… La Liberté’ – a prison cell with a triangular ground plan. I could see before me how empty it looked in the corners.
In a dream I saw ‘a house of ill-repute’. ‘A hotel in which an animal leads a spoiled existence. Nearly everyone drinks nothing but spoiled animal water.’ These were the words I dreamed in,12 and I instantly woke with a start. Overtired, I had flung myself, fully dressed, on to the bed in the brightly lit room and promptly fallen asleep for a few seconds.
In cheap apartment blocks there is a type of music of such desperately sad exuberance that one is loath to believe it is for the person playing it: it is music for the furnished rooms in which people sit with their thoughts of a Sunday, thoughts that soon become garnished with those notes like a bowl of overripe fruit with limp leaves.
Karl Kraus – Nothing more dismal than his disciples, nothing more godforsaken than his opponents. No name that would more fittingly be honoured by silence. In an antiquated suit of armour, grinning with fury, a Chinese idol brandishing drawn swords in both hands, he dances the war dance in front of the burial vault of the German language. He – ‘just one of the epigones inhabiting the ancient house of the language’ – has become the sealer of its crypt. On watch day and night, he stands firm. No post was ever more loyally guarded, nor was there ever one more lost. Here stands a man who like some Danaid scoops from the sea of tears of the world around him, a man for whom the boulder intended to bury his enemies slips through his hands as it did for Sisyphus. What was the use of his conversion? What has his humanity ever achieved? What could have been vainer than his battle with the press? What has he ever known of the forces forming his real allies? Yet what visionary gifts in the new magicians can compare with the aural perceptions of this wizard whom a defunct language even instructs which words to use? Whoever conjured up a spirit the way Kraus does in ‘Die Verlassenen’, quite as if ‘Selige Sehnsucht’ had not been written earlier?14 As helplessly as only spirit voices let themselves be heard, the whisper from a chthonic depth of language sets his compass. Each and every sound is incomparably authentic, but they all of them baffle like spirit speech. Blind like the Manes, the language calls him to avenge it, bigoted like spirits that know only the voice of the blood, not caring what mischief they instigate in the realm of the living. He, however, cannot go wrong. Their decrees are unerring. Anyone caught by him is already doomed: his very name, in this mouth, becomes a sentence. When he opens wide those lips, the colourless flame of wit strikes forth. And let no traveller on the paths of life run into him. On an archaic field of honour, a giant battlefield of bloody work, he rages before an abandoned tomb. His burial honours will be immense, the last ever celebrated.
The idea of the class struggle can be misleading. This is not about a trial of strength to decide the question: who wins, who loses? Nor is it a wrestling match as a result of which things will go well for the victor but badly for the vanquished. Thinking like that means romanticizing and therefore hushing up the facts. For whether the bourgeoisie wins the struggle or loses, it will still be doomed to decline in consequence of the inner contradictions that will prove fatal as it evolves. The question is only whether it collapses spontaneously or is brought down by the proletariat. The survival or end of three thousand years of cultural development will be decided by the answer. History knows nothing of an evil never-endingness in the image of the two fighters slugging it out for ever. The true politician reckons only in terms. And if the abolition of the bourgeoisie is not achieved by the time an almost predictable moment of economic and technological development has been reached (inflation and gas-warfare point to it), then all is lost. Before the spark hits the dynamite the burning fuse must be cut through. For the politician, intervention, risk, and tempo are technical matters – not matters of chivalry.
Atrani – The gently ascending, curved baroque stairway leading to the church. The railings behind the church. The old women’s Ave Maria litanies: starting school again in the reception class of death. One turns round to find the church, like God Himself, fronting the sea. Regularly each morning the Christian era cracks the cliff open, but between the walls beneath night keeps on falling in the four ancient Roman quarters. Streets like ventilation shafts. In the market place, a fountain. As evening falls, women gather. Then no one: age-old splashing.
Fleet – The beauty of big sailing ships is unique. Because it is not only in outline that they have remained unchanged for hundreds of years; they figure in the least changeable of settings: on the sea, set off against the horizon.
Versailles façade – It is as if this chateau had been forgotten where such and such a number of centuries ago it had been erected, Par Ordre du Roi, for a couple of hours as the setting for an extravaganza. It retains none of its brilliance for itself, giving it undivided to the royal site it helps to bound. Against this background it becomes the stage on which absolute monarchy received a tragic interpretation as an allegorical ballet. Today, however, it is simply the wall people stand under for shade in order to enjoy the vista created by Le Nôtre.
Heidelberg Castle – Ruins with crumbling masonry pointing skyward sometimes look twice as lovely on clear days when one’s gaze, directed through windows or up at pinnacles, meets clouds scudding by. Destruction reinforces, as a product of the ephemeral spectacle it reveals in the sky, the eternal quality of such ruins.
Seville Alcazar – An edifice that reflects the architect’s first imagined strokes. Practical considerations have not diminished it. Only dreams and feast days, their coming true and being kept, are planned in these soaring interiors. In them dancing and silence are the dominant theme, for all human movement is absorbed by the soundless tumult of the decor.
Marseille Cathedral – In the emptiest, sunniest square stands the cathedral. Here all is deserted, despite the fact that to the south, at its feet, lies the harbour, La Joliette, while on the north side a working-class district crams close. A trans-shipment centre for intangible, unfathomable commodities, the grim building stands between mole and warehouse. For forty years they worked on it. Yet by 1893, when all was finished, place and time had successfully conspired against architects and builders to turn this monument, financed by the wealth of the clergy, into one giant railway station such as could never be opened to traffic. The façade reveals the waiting rooms inside, where first-to fourth-class travellers (except that they are all equal before God), squeezed as among suitcases in their spiritual possessions, sit and read in hymn books that with their concordances and connections look very like international timetables. Excerpts from the rail-traffic regulations hang on the walls as pastoral letters, fares for indulgences on special excursions in Satan’s luxury train are consulted, and little cubicles where the long-distance traveller can have a discreet wash are available in the form of confessionals. This is the Marseille religious station. Sleeping-car trains to eternity are made up here at mass time.
Freiburg Minster – A town’s most specific feeling of homeliness is associated, so far as its inhabitants are concerned – even, it may be, for travellers too, as they recall staying there – with the sound and the gaps between strokes of its tower clocks.
Moscow St Basil’s Cathedral – What the Byzantine Madonna has on her arm is simply a life-size wooden doll. Her expression of grief before a Christ whose infant being is merely hinted at, merely represented, is more intense than she could ever display with a true-to-life image of a boy.
Boscotrecase – The elegance of pine woods: their roof shows no joins.
Naples Museo Nationale – Classical statues, in smiling, endow the spectator with their awareness of their own bodies, as a child will offer us fresh-picked flowers not arranged in a bunch but loose, while a later art purses expressions more sternly, as the adult will bind a permanent bouquet with tightly constricting grasses.
Florence Baptistry – On the portal, Hope by Andrea Pisano. She sits there, helplessly stretching out her arms for a piece of fruit beyond her reach. Yet she has wings. Nothing is more true.
Sky – I dreamed I stepped outside a house and saw the night sky. It radiated a wild gleam. The reason: the air was clear, and the images we make by linking stars together stood out, perceptibly present. A lion, a virgin, a balance, and many others formed dense clumps of stars, staring down at planet earth. There was no moon in sight.
In summer the fat people stand out, in winter the thin ones.
In spring, when the weather is sunny and bright, one takes in the fresh foliage, in cold rain the as yet foliage-free branches.
How an evening with guests has gone, whoever’s left can see at a glance from the positions of plates, cups, glasses, and dishes.
Rule one of courtship: increase yourself sevenfold; have seven of you surround the one you want.
In the eyes are the lees of the person.
Modelling picture sheets – Stalls like big, rocking barges have put in down both sides of the stone-built harbour mole along which people shove their way. There are yachts with towering masts from which pennants dangle, steamships with smoke rising from their funnels, freight barges that keep their cargoes stowed for ever. Among them are ships into whose bellies people disappear; only men are allowed below, although visible through portholes are women’s arms, veils, and peacock feathers. Elsewhere strangers stand on hatch covers and seem to be trying to frighten folk off with eccentric music. But how indifferently this is received. People climb hesitantly with a broad, swaying gait as if ascending companionways and, once at the top, stand there, expecting the whole thing to peel away from the shore. Then, in a silent daze, they reappear, on red scales where coloured ethanol rises and falls they have seen their own marriage bloom and fade; the yellow man, who at the bottom was starting to flirt, when he came to the top of this scale left the blue woman. They glimpsed in the mirror how the floor beneath their feet became watery and floated away, and via moving staircases they stumbled into the open. The fleet sets the district on edge: its women and girls are got up boldly, and everything edible has been brought aboard in the Land of Cockaigne itself. One is so completely cut off by the ocean that everything is met with here for both the first and last time. Sea lions, dwarves, and dogs are preserved here as if in an ark. Even the railway has once and for all been brought in here and circulates over and over again through a tunnel. For a few days the district has become the port of a South Sea island and the inhabitants savages expiring in desire and astonishment before what Europe casts at their feet.
Rifle range – Landscapes of shooting booths need describing as a body. Confronting one was a whole winter wilderness with white clay pipe heads, the targets, gathered in fans, sticking up all over the place. At the back, against a plain strip of forest, two hunters had been painted; right up front, like stage flats, two sirens with saucy breasts, done in oils. Elsewhere pipes bristle in the hair of women, few of whom are shown in skirts, most are wearing tights. Or they emerge from behind fans that they hold outspread. Moving pipes revolve slowly in the background of these ‘Tirs aux Pigeons’. Other booths show theatre in which the viewer directs the action with his gun. If he hits the black, the performance begins. One had thirty-six little boxes, and written [in French] above the proscenium arch of each was what could be seen inside: ‘Jeanne d’Arc en prison’, ‘L’hospitalité’, ‘Les rues de Paris’. Another said: ‘Exécution capitale’. In front of the closed door are a guillotine, a black-robed judge, and a priest holding a cross. If the shot is good the door opens, a wooden board slides out with the criminal standing between two ruffians. Automatically, he lies down beneath the blade, and his head is chopped off. Ditto: ‘Les délices du mariage’. A miserable interior is revealed. There is the father in the middle of the room, holding one child on his knee and using his free hand to rock a cradle with another child in it. ‘L’enfer’ [‘Hell’] – its doors part to disclose a devil tormenting a wretched soul. Beside him another thrusts a cleric over to the cauldron in which damned souls must stew. ‘Le bagne’ [‘Hard labour’] – a door with a gaoler standing guard. A bull’s-eye causes him to tug on a bell. It rings and the door opens to show two lags doing something to a large wheel; they are meant to be turning it. Another tableau: a fiddler with his dancing bear. Here a good shot makes the bow move. The bear bangs the drum with one front paw and lifts one leg. One is reminded of the fairy tale of the Brave Little Tailor. Sleeping Beauty, too, could be roused by a shot, Snow White rescued from the apple through a shot, Red Riding Hood think herself saved as a result of a shot. A hit, like a magic wand, brings a healing force into the lives of these dolls that, by beheading the monsters, reveals them as princesses. It is the same with that big door with no writing above it: a hit here makes the door open on a Moor standing in front of a red velvet curtain. The Moor seems to be leaning forward slightly. He proffers a golden salver, on which lie three apples. The first opens, it contains a tiny person, bowing low. In the second, two equally tiny dolls pirouette. (The third did not open.) Underneath, in front of the table supporting the other pieces of scenery, is a little wooden horseman bearing the label ‘Route minée’ [‘Subsidence’]. Hit the black, and there will be a bang, and rider and horse will go head over heels – although he, of course, will still be mounted.
Stereoscope – Riga. The daily market, the crowded city of low wooden huts stretches along the mole, a broad, dirty stone harbour wall without warehouses running beside the waters of the Daugava. Little steamboats, whose chimneys often scarcely overtop the quayside, have put in at this blackish dwarf city. (The bigger ships lie downriver.) Filthy planks form the mudcoloured ground against which, glowing in the cold air, a few colours fade away. On some street corners, all year round, alongside stalls selling fish, meat, boots, and clothing, stand petit-bourgeois women selling the brightly coloured paper rods that, as one goes west, appear only at Christmas. They are like being scolded by the voices one loves best, those rods. For a few coins, multicoloured canes to castigate wrongdoers. At the end of the mole, a mere thirty paces from the water’s edge, is the apple market: wooden chests, heaps of red-white fruit. Apples for sale lie wrapped in straw; apples already sold lie strawless in housewives’ baskets. A dark red church rises behind, barely distinguishable in the keen November air against the cheeks of the apples.
Several ship’s chandlers in tiny premises near by. Ropes painted on them. Everywhere the eye sees commodities painted on signs or daubed on shopfronts. One business in the city has larger-than-life-sized suitcases and leather straps on an unrendered brick wall. A squat corner building containing a shop for corsets and ladies’ hats has made-up women’s faces and tight-laced bodices painted on a yellow-ochre ground. Away from the building, on the corner itself, stands a street lamp with similar representations on its panes of glass. The whole thing resembles the façade of some fantasy brothel. Another building, also quite near the harbour, has sacks of sugar and lumps of coal in grey and black relief on a grey wall. Elsewhere, shoes rain down from cornucopias. Ironmongery is depicted in great detail (hammers, cogwheels, pincers, tiny screws) on a shop sign in what looks like a pattern from an old-fashioned children’s paintbook. The city has many such pictures: on display as if taken from drawers. Among them, however, many tall, fortress-like, unutterably sad buildings stand out to remind one of all the horrors of Tsarism.
Not for sale – The mechanical cabinet at Lucca’s annual fair. The exhibition is held in an extended tent, symmetrically divided. Several steps lead up to it. The sign shows a table with a number of motionless dolls. Visitors enter the tent through the right-hand opening, leave it by the left. In the bright interior, two tables stretch into the distance. Their inside edges abut, leaving only a narrow space for circulating. Both tables are low and glass-covered. On them stand the dolls (twenty to twenty-five centimetres high, on average), while under them, out of sight, the clockwork mechanism driving each doll ticks audibly. A little step for children runs along the edges of the tables. Around the walls are distorting mirrors.
Nearest the entrance are royalty. Each one is making some kind of movement: one with its left or right arm outspread in a sweeping gesture of invitation, others with a swivelling of their glass eyes; some move eyes and arm simultaneously. Franz Joseph, Pius X, enthroned and flanked by two cardinals, Queen Elena of Italy, the Sultana, Wilhelm I on horseback, little Napoleon III and the even smaller Victor Emmanuel as crown prince are all to be seen there. Biblical figures follow, then the Passion. Herod, making a great variety of head movements, orders the Massacre of the Innocents. He opens his mouth wide, nods in confirmation, extends an arm and lets it fall. Two guards stand before him; one slashing at empty air with his sword, a headless child under his arm, while the other, about to stab, stands motionless – except that his eyes are rolling. And here are two mothers, one shaking her head incessantly, like a melancholic, the other slowly, beseechingly, raising her arms.
The Crucifixion. The cross laid on the ground. Executioners driving the nails in. Christ nods.
Christ hanging from the cross, wetted with the vinegar-soaked sponge that a soldier slowly, jerkily, raises to the dying man’s lips and promptly snatches away. Meanwhile the Saviour, almost imperceptibly, lifts his chin. From behind, an angel leans over the cross with a chalice to receive the blood, presents it, then, as if it were now full, withdraws it.
The other table shows genre-type scenes. Gargantua eating dumplings; from a dish set before him he shovels them into his mouth with both hands, raising his left and right arms alternately. Both hands hold forks with dumplings speared on them.
An Alpine lass at her spinning wheel.
A brace of chimps playing violins.
A magician, facing two barrel-like containers. The one on the right opens and out pops the upper body of a woman. She sinks back. The one on the left opens and a male torso rises up. The right-hand container opens again, and now what comes up is a goat’s head with the woman’s face between the horns. On the left another figure emerges, but this time a monkey instead of a man. Then the show begins all over again.
Another magician standing behind a table, each hand on an upside-down tumbler. Under the tumblers, as he raises them one by one, are by turns a bun, an apple, a flower, or a single die.
The magic well. A peasant lad stands beside a well, shaking his head. A girl is drawing water, and the continuous thick stream of glass comes pouring from the well-head.
The spellbound lovers. A golden thicket or golden flame splits into two wings that open. Visible inside are two dolls, turning their heads towards each other, then away, as if such mutual admiration threw them into a state of fazed astonishment.
All the figures have, below them, a small piece of paper with the inscription. The whole collection dates from 1862.
The author lays the thought on the marble-topped café table. Prolonged inspection: he uses this time, you see, because the glass (the lens through which he eyes the patient) has yet to be placed in front of him. Then he slowly unpacks his instruments: fountain pen, pencil, and pipe. The crowd of patrons, disposed in curved rows, are his clinical audience. Coffee, carefully poured and as carefully drunk, puts the thought under chloroform. Now what it ponders has no more to do with the matter in hand than the anaesthetized subject’s dream concerns the operation. An incision is made in the scrupulous lineaments of the handwriting, the surgeon, moving inside, shifts points of emphasis, burns off growths of verbiage, and inserts, as a silver rib, a word borrowed from a foreign language. Finally, punctuation sews the whole thing up for him with fine stitches and he pays the waiter, his assistant, in cash.
Fools, who bewail the decline of criticism. The fact is, its time expired long ago. Criticism is a question of correct distance. Criticism is at home in a world where perspectives and prospects matter, where it was still possible to adopt a stance. Things have now begun to chivvy human society much too urgently. ‘Impartiality’ and the ‘open outlook’ have become lies if not the wholly naive expression of straight non-competence. The name of the most intrinsic quality today, the mercantile look penetrating to the heart of things, is advertising. Advertising eliminates the free leeway of consideration, bringing things dangerously close, right in our face, the way a car, in the cinema, hugely increasing in size on the screen, comes quivering towards us. And as the cinema presents us with pieces of furniture and façades not in the fully formed, rounded figures of a critical consideration, only in their stolid, abrupt, sensational proximity, so will proper advertising speed things up to a tempo corresponding to that of a good film. With that, ‘objective reality’ is eventually left behind, and faced with huge illustrations on the sides of houses, where ‘Chlorodont’ and ‘Sleipnir’15 lie within easy reach of giants, recovered sentimentality is set free, American-style, much as people whom nothing moves any more, nothing touches, learn in the cinema how to cry again. For the man in the street, however, it is money that brings things closer in this way, establishing convincing contact with them. And the paid reviewer, handling pictures in the dealer’s art salon, knows if not something better at least something more important about them than the art lover seeing them in the window. The warmth of the subject comes across to him and renders him sensitive.
What is it, ultimately, that makes advertising so superior to criticism? Not what the red electric text up on the moving screen says – the pool of fire that mirrors it on the asphalt.
The boss’s office bristles with weaponry. What captivates the visitor as comfort is in reality an arms cache. A phone on the desk is always going off. It interrupts at the crucial moment, giving one’s opposite number time to compose a reply. Meanwhile scraps of the conversation show how many matters are dealt with here that are more important than the one currently under discussion. One tells oneself that, and one slowly begins to retreat from one’s own standpoint. One starts wondering who is being talked about here, realizes with alarm that one’s interlocutor leaves for Brazil in the morning, and immediately feels such solidarity with the firm that the migraine complained of over the phone is deemed a regrettable business malfunction (rather than an opportunity). Summoned or not, the secretary comes in. She is very pretty. And if her employer is either immune to her charms or, as an admirer, reached an accommodation with her some time back, the newcomer will more than once follow her with his eyes, and she knows, thanks to her boss, how to behave. His staff move about, placing on the table card files in which the guest knows himself to be entered in a wide variety of connections. He begins to feel weary. The other man, however, with the light behind him, registers this with satisfaction from the features of the blindingly lit face. The chair, too, has its effect; the person sitting in it leans as far back as at the dentist, and ultimately, when all’s said and done, accepts the painful procedure as if it were the ordinary course of affairs. This treatment, too, is followed sooner or later by a liquidation.
Early one morning I drove through Marseille to the station, and as on the way I was struck by familiar places, or by new, unfamiliar places or by others I could not recall in any detail, the city became a book in my hands in which I was casting a couple of quick glances before it went into the box in the attic, disappearing from my sight for who knows how long.
I dreamed I took my life with a gun. When the shot rang out I did not wake up but for a while saw myself lying there as a corpse. Only then did I waken.
This is the most powerful objection to the way the confirmed bachelor lives: he takes his meals alone. Eating alone soon makes a man tough and rough. Anyone used to it has to lead a Spartan existence if he wants to avoid going to pieces. Hermits, if only for that reason, had frugal eating habits. The fact is, only when done communally does eating come into its own; it needs to share and be shared if it is to work. No matter with whom: in the past, each mealtime was enriched by inviting a beggar in. It is all about sharing and giving, not at all about sociable table talk. Astonishingly, though, good company will turn critical when not fed. Food and drink are great levellers, they bind people together. Count Saint-Germain, faced with a full table, never over-indulged, and if only for that reason controlled the conversation. But if everyone goes away hungry, rivalries arise, breeding contention.
To anyone looking through piles of old letters, often a long-out-of-date stamp on a crumpled envelope will say more than dozens of perused pages. Sometimes one finds them on picture postcards and does not know what to do – soak the stamp off or keep the card as it is, like a page by an Old Master with two different drawings, both valuable, on recto and verso. One also, in glass cases in cafés, comes across letters that have a past and now find themselves pilloried in the sight of all eyes. Or have they been deported and must spend years languishing in this case, a glass-topped Salas y Gómez?16 Letters that stayed unopened for a long time have a brutal look about them; robbed of their inheritance, they silently, maliciously, plot revenge for long, long days of suffering. Many of them end up as the entires that one sees, covered in postmarks, in stamp-dealers’ windows.
Everyone knows there are collectors who specialize only in franked stamps, and it is almost as if people wanted to believe that they are the only ones to have penetrated the secret. They keep to the occult area of philately: postmarks. For the postmark is the stamp’s nocturnal side. There are solemn ones that place a halo around Queen Victoria’s head, and prophetic ones that set a martyr’s crown on Humbert. But no sadistic fantasy comes close to the sinister procedure that covers faces with weals and rips through the soil of whole continents like an earthquake. And the perverse delight in the way this violated body of the stamp contrasts with its white, lace-trimmed chiffon dress: the perforation. Anyone studying postmarks will need, as detective, to possess codes for the remotest of post offices, as archaeologist the art of identifying the torsos of the most foreign place-names, as cabbalist the inventory of dates covering a whole century.
Postage stamps are a mass of little digits, tiny letters, marks, and spots. They constitute graphic scraps of cell tissue. Everything seethes and teems and, like the lower animals, lives on even when shredded in pieces. That is why fragments of postage stamps, glued together, make such effective pictures. On them, however, life always carries a whiff of corruption as a sign that it is made up of dead matter. Their portraits and obscene groupings are littered with remains and heaps of wormcasts.
Is there perhaps a glimpse, breaking through in the colour sequences of long sets, of the light of some strange sun? Do the offices of the Postmasters General of the Papal States or Ecuador receive rays we know nothing of ? And why are we not shown the stamps of the better planets? The thousand shades of flaming red in circulation on Venus, the four large Martian greys, the priceless stamps traded on Saturn?
Countries and oceans are merely, on stamps, the provinces, kings merely the mercenaries of the numerals that, at their pleasure, imbue them with colour. Stamp albums are magical reference books recording the numbers of monarchs and palaces, animals, allegories, and states. The postal service rests on their harmony, as the movements of the planets depend on the harmonies of heavenly numbers.
Old low-denomination stamps with nothing but one or two large numerals in the oval.17 They look like those early photos in black-painted frames from which relatives we never knew gaze down at us: elderly great-aunts or other ancestors. Even Thurn and Taxis18 have large numerals on their stamps, staring out at one like bewitched taximeter numbers. It would come as no surprise if one evening the light of a candle shone through behind them. But then there are small stamps with no perforation and nothing to indicate currency or country. All they have, at the centre of a dense spider’s web, is a number. They may be fate’s real lottery tickets.
Printed characters on Turkish one-piastre stamps resemble crooked, overly stylish, overly flashy tiepins – say, on the tie of a crafty-looking, only semi-Europeanized Constantinople merchant. They call to mind those postal parvenus, those large, poorly perforated, garish formats from Nicaragua or Colombia, all dolled up like banknotes.
Excess-charge stamps are the spirits among postage stamps. They are always the same. Changes of monarch and form of government pass them by like ghosts, leaving no trace.
The child espies distant Liberia through the wrong end of an opera glass: there it lies, beyond its strip of sea, with its palms, just as stamps show it. With Vasco da Gama the child sails round a triangle whose three sides are equal, like hope, and whose colours change with the weather. Travel brochure of the Cape of Good Hope. If it sees the swan on Australian stamps, then on the blue, green, and brown denominations too it is the black swan, which occurs only in Australia and which here goes gliding over the surface of a pond as over the calmest ocean.
Stamps are the visiting cards that the major countries leave in the nursery.
Gulliver-like, the child visits the land and people of each stamp. The geography and history of the Lilliputians, the whole store of knowledge of the little people with all its numbers and names is fed to the child in sleep. The child takes part in their transactions, attends their crimson-robed national assemblies, watches the launching of their tiny ships, and in the company of their crowned heads, who sit enthroned behind gates, celebrates jubilees.
Notoriously, there is a postage-stamp language that is to the language of flowers as Morse code to the written alphabet. But how long will this floral abundance survive between telegraph poles? The big art stamps of the post-war years, with their wealth of colour – are they not already the autumnal asters and dahlias of this flora? Stephan, a German, and not by chance a contemporary of Jean Paul, sowed this seed in the summery mid-nineteenth century. It will not survive the twentieth.19
One night, in some pain, I was sitting on a bench. Two girls sat down on a second bench opposite. Apparently wishing to talk privately, they started whispering. No one else was in the vicinity – apart from myself, and I should not have understood their Italian, however loudly spoken. The fact remains, given this unmotivated whispering in a language inaccessible to me, I could not help feeling that a cool bandage had been laid on the place that hurt.
There is nothing more wretched than a truth expressed as it had been thought. In such a case, its being written down is not even a poor photograph. In fact, truth (like a child, like a woman who does not love us) refuses, when confronted with the lens of writing, once we have crouched down under the black cloth, to keep still and smile. Abruptly, as if struck, truth likes to be roused from self-absorption, startled, whether by a loud noise, whether by music, whether by cries for help. They are countless, surely, the alarm bells with which the true writer’s inner self is fitted? And ‘writing’ simply means priming them to go off. Then the sweet odalisque starts up, grabs the first thing that comes to hand in the muddle of her boudoir (= our skull), throws it around her shoulders, and flees like that, almost unrecognizable, from us to our public. Yet how fit she must be, how robustly constituted, to be able, like that, jolted, harried, yet victorious and with kindly charm, to move among them.
Quotations in my work are like bandits on the road that leap out, brandishing weapons, and rob the idler of his certainty.
Killing the criminal may be moral – its justification, never.
The nourisher of all is God and their undernourisher the state.
The expression on the faces of people circulating in picture galleries shows an ill-concealed disappointment that only images hang there.
No doubt of it: there is a secret connection between the measure of commodities and the measure of life – that is to say, between money and time. The less richly fulfilled is the time of a life, the more fragmented, multiform, and disparate its moments, while the great era typifies the existence of the superior person. Lichtenberg quite rightly suggests that we should talk of making time smaller rather than shorter, and he notes: ‘A couple of dozen million minutes make up a life of forty-five years and a little over.’ Where a currency is in use of which a dozen million units mean nothing, life there will need to be counted in seconds rather than years if it is to present a respectable total. In which case it will be frittered away like a sheaf of banknotes: Austria cannot kick the habit of counting in crowns.
Money belongs together with rain. The weather itself is an indicator of the condition of this world. Happiness is cloudless; it knows no weather. Furthermore, the future holds a cloudless realm of perfect commodities where no money falls.
A descriptive analysis of banknotes needs to be made. A book whose boundless satirical power would be equalled only by the power of its objectivity. The fact is, nowhere more than on such vouchers does capitalism naively come across in all its deadly earnest. The young innocents at play among numbers here, the goddess figures holding tablets of the law, the elderly heroes sheathing their swords in the face of currency units – the whole thing is a world apart: the façade architecture of hell.
Had Lichtenberg found paper money prevalent, the plan of this system would not have escaped him.
Publisher: – My expectations have been most deeply disappointed. Your stuff leaves the public totally unmoved; it’s not in the least attractive. Nor have I stinted on presentation; I’ve spent liberally on advertising.
You know how highly I still think of you. But you can scarcely blame me if my conscience as a businessman also baulks at this. If anyone does, I go out of my way for authors. But I do after all have to look after wife and kids as well. I am not of course saying I hold you responsible for the losses of recent years. However, this bitter sense of disappointment will not go away. At the moment, unfortunately, I positively cannot continue to support you.
Author: – But sir! Why did you become a publisher? We’d better have this out immediately. First, though, grant me one thing: I appear in your records as no. 27. You have published five of my books; in other words, you’ve bet on no. 27 five times. I’m sorry no. 27 never came up. Actually, you only ever did place a ‘cheval’ bet on me. And that was only because I come just before your lucky number, 28.
You know yourself why you became a publisher. You could equally well have taken up a good clean profession like your father. Typical youth, though – always living from day to day. Go on indulging your habits. But stop posing as an honest businessman. And wipe that innocent look off your face if you’ve blown it all; let’s hear no more of your eight-hour day and the nights, too, when you scarcely sleep. ‘This above all, my child: Be loyal and true!’21 And don’t throw a scene over your numbers. Otherwise you’ll be out on your ear!
Sexual fulfilment releases a man from his mystery, which does not consist in sexuality but is, in its fulfilment (and possibly there alone), not solved but at least severed. Think of it as the chain binding him to life. Woman severs it, freeing man for death since his life has lost its mystery. By this route he attains rebirth, and as the lover frees him from the mother’s spell, woman more literally releases him from Mother Earth, the midwife who cuts through the umbilical cord woven from nature’s mystery.
A person consulting wise women about the future unwittingly reveals an inner knowledge of what is to come that is a thousand times more accurate than all the things he will be told there. Such a person is guided more by lethargy than by curiosity, and nothing less resembles the resigned apathy with which he attends the disclosure of his fate than the swift, risky movement with which the bold man casts the future. For presence of mind constitutes its essence; noting precisely what happens in the blink of an eye is more crucial than knowing the most remote eventualities in advance. The fact is, omens, signs, and portents pass through our organisms day and night like wave impulses. Do they indicate, or do they serve – that is the question. The two things are incompatible. Cowardice and apathy say one thing, sobriety and freedom the other. Because before such a prophecy or warning becomes something communicable, in word or in image, the best of its strength is already gone, the strength with which it hits us dead centre and compels us, almost before we know it, to act accordingly. If we miss it, then (and only then) it appears in plain text. We read it. But too late. Hence, when fire unexpectedly breaks out or news of a death arrives out of the blue, that guilty feeling in the first moment of dumb alarm, that formless reproach: did you not, deep down, know that already? When you last spoke of the dead person, hadn’t the name rung differently in your mouth? Isn’t the memory of last night’s flames sending you a message you only now understand? And if an object you were fond of went missing, had there not (hours, even days beforehand) been a whiff about it, whether of scorn or mourning, that gave the game away? Like ultraviolet radiation memory shows all of us, in the Book of Life, writing that invisibly, prophetically, accompanies the text as a gloss. But not with impunity do we switch intentions, hand over unlived life to cards, spirits, stars – that then, on the instant, mis-live it, mis-use it, handing it back to us soiled; not with impunity do we cheat the body of its power to compete on its own terms with fate and emerge victorious. The present moment is the Caudian yoke beneath which destiny bows to it.22 Transforming the threat of the Future into the fulfilment of the Now (the only desirable telepathic miracle) is the work of actual, physical presence of mind. Primitive times, when such behaviour formed part of man’s daily routine, gave man in the naked body his most reliable instrument of divination. The Ancient World still knew the proper procedure, and Scipio, when he trips and falls as he treads Carthaginian soil, throws his arms wide and claims victory with the words: ‘Teneo te, Terra Africana!’ [‘I have you, Land of Africa!’]. What might have been a fearful omen, an image of bad luck, he links in his person to the instant, making himself the factotum of his body. Which is precisely how the ancient ascetic exercises of fasting, chastity, and vigil have always celebrated their greatest triumphs. Each morning, day lies like a clean shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably close-woven fabric of pure prophecy fits us like a second skin. How the next twenty-four hours will turn out for us depends on our deciding, as we wake, to grasp it.
Someone bringing news of a death sees himself as very important. The way he feels makes him (even in the face of all reason) a messenger from the realm of the dead. The fact is, the community of all the dead is so vast that even a person simply reporting a death is aware of it. Ad plures ire [‘Going to the many’] means, to Latin speakers, dying.
At Bellinzona I noticed three priests in the station waiting room. They sat on a bench opposite, but at an angle from where I was seated myself. Absorbed, I watched the movements of the one sitting in the middle, whom a red skullcap marked out from his brethren. As he spoke to them, he held his hands folded in his lap, only occasionally (and very slightly) lifting and gesturing with one or other of them. I thought: the right hand must always know what the left hand is doing.
Who has not had the experience of emerging from the Underground into the open air and being struck, back up top, by stepping into full sunlight. Yet only minutes ago, as he descended, the sun was shining just as brightly. How quickly he has forgotten the weather in the world above! That is how quickly the world above will itself forget him. For who can say more of his existence than that for two, maybe three others he moved through their lives with the same tenderness and immediacy as the weather?
Over and over again, in Shakespeare, in Calderón, battles fill the last act and kings, princes, lords, and attendants ‘enter in flight’. The moment when they become visible to the audience stops them in their tracks. The stage calls a halt to the flight of the dramatis personae. Entering the sight of non-combatants and true superiors allows the victims to draw breath as fresh air takes them in its embrace. That is what gives the stage appearance of these ‘fleeing’ entrances their hidden significance. Implicit in the reading of this form of words is the expectation of a place, a light (daylight or footlights) in which our own flight through life might be safe in the presence of watching strangers.
Bourgeois life is the government of private matters. The more important a mode of behaviour and the richer in consequences, the more that life relieves such matters of control. Political affiliation, financial circumstances, religion – all try to run away and hide, and the family is the crumbling, gloomy house in whose lean-tos and tucked-away corners the meanest instincts have taken hold. Philistines proclaim the complete privatization of love life. For them, courtship has become a grimly silent process conducted in total privacy, and such wholly private courtship, stripped of all responsibility, is what is truly new about ‘flirtation’.23 Whereas prole and peasant have this in common: that, when they are courting, it is not so much the woman as their rivals that they vanquish. However, this means having far more respect for a woman than in her ‘free state’; it means doing her bidding without consulting her. Feudal and proletarian equate to shifting the erotic accents into the public sphere. Being seen with a woman on such and such an occasion may signify more than sleeping with her. In marriage, too, value lies not in any barren ‘harmony’ between the spouses: what comes out as eccentric consequence of their fights and rivalries is not just offspring but also the spiritual force of marriage.
Sailors seldom come ashore; what they do at sea is a Sunday off compared with work in port, where often loading and unloading need to proceed around the clock. If then shore leave for a gang amounts to a couple of hours, night will already have fallen. At best, the cathedral is a huge looming shape on the way to the pub. The beer hall is the key to a city; knowing where German beer can be had is all the geography and ethnology a man needs. The German seamen’s pub unfurls the nightly city street map: finding the way from there to the brothel and on to the other pubs is not a problem. Its name has been cropping up in mealtime banter for days. The fact is, when sailors leave a port behind, one by one the nicknames of pubs and dance halls, beautiful women and national dishes in the next are hoist like tiny pennants. But whether they will get ashore this time is anyone’s guess. So as soon as the ship has declared and put in, touts come aboard peddling souvenirs: chains and postcards, oil paintings, knives, and little marble figures. The city is not visited so much as purchased. In the seaman’s trunk the leather belt from Hong Kong lies alongside the panorama of Palermo and the photo of a girl from Stettin. That is their true home, right there. The seaman knows nothing of a misty remoteness in which, for the bourgeois, strange worlds lie. The first thing each city means for him is a spell of work on board followed by German beer, English shaving-soap, and Dutch tobacco. The international norm of the industry sits in his very bones, palm trees and icebergs do not fool the seaman. He is ‘fed up’ with proximity, only the most precise nuances speak to him. He can tell countries apart better by the way they prepare their fish than by their architecture and scenery. So much at home is he in detail that out on the open sea the routes where his ship passes others (and with a siren blast greets those of his own company) become noisy thoroughfares where there are rules about giving way. At sea, he inhabits a city where on Marseille’s Cannebière a Port Said pub can be found across the road from a Hamburg house of pleasure and the Castel del Ovo in Naples sits on Barcelona’s Plaza Cataluña. With officers, their home town still comes first. But for the ordinary seaman, or the stoker – the people whose transported labour, down in the hull of the ship, maintains contact with the commodity – ports called at are not even home any longer but birthplace. And listening to them you realize what mendacity lies in travel.
All religions have held the beggar in high esteem. For the beggar is proof that, in the matter of alms-giving (as down-to-earth and ordinary as it has always been sacred and life-giving), intelligence and fundamentals, consequences and principle are all miserably inadequate.
We complain about beggars in southern countries while forgetting that their insistence beneath our noses has as much justification as the scholar’s persistent poring over difficult texts. There is no shadow of hesitation, no hint of intention or second thoughts that they fail to detect on our faces. The telepathy of the coachman, whose cry first alerts us to the fact that we are not averse to taking a drive, of the skinflint trader who extracts from his heap of junk the only chain or cameo that might conceivably catch our fancy – these are of the same ilk.
If, as Hillel once did for Jewish doctrine, one had to articulate the teachings of classical antiquity in a nutshell (standing on one leg, so to speak), the sentence would need to run: ‘They alone will inherit the earth who live from the forces of the cosmos.’ Nothing so distinguishes ancient from modern man as the former’s submission to a cosmic experience of which the latter is scarcely aware. The decline of that experience begins with the flowering of astronomy at the start of the modern period. Kepler, Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe were certainly not driven by scholarly impulses alone. Nevertheless, in the exclusive stress on an optical link with space to which astronomy very soon led there lies an indication of what must inevitably come. Classical dealings with the cosmos took a different form: intoxication. Intoxication, of course, is the sole experience in which we grasp the utterly immediate and the utterly remote, and never the one without the other. That means, however, that communicating ecstatically with the cosmos is something man can only do communally. Modern man is in danger of mistakenly dismissing such an experience as trivial, dispensable, and leaving it to the individual – a rush of enthusiasm on fine, starry nights. No, it needs to be renewed over and over again, then nations and generations will escape it as little as became most dreadfully manifest in the last [1914–18] war, which was an attempt at a new and unprecedented marriage with the cosmic powers. Human hordes, gases, electrical forces were unleashed in a free-for-all, high-frequency shocks ripped through the landscape, new stars appeared in the sky, the airy heights and the ocean depths thrummed with propellers, and everywhere sacrificial shafts were sunk in the earth. This mighty struggle for the cosmos was for the first time fought out on a planetary scale, very much in the spirit of technology. However, since the ruling class’s greed for profit meant to atone for its intention thus, technology betrayed mankind and turned the marriage bed into a sea of blood. Control of nature, the imperialists teach us, is the purpose of all technology. But who would ever trust a thrasher who stated that control of children by grown-ups was the purpose of education? Education, surely, is the essential ordering of the relationship between the generations – in other words, if one wishes to speak of control, control of generational relations, not of children? So technology, too, is not about controlling nature: controlling the relationship between nature and humanity. Man as species reached the end of his development tens of millennia ago; but humanity as a species is at the start. For humanity, in technology, a physis is being organized in which its contact with the cosmos takes a new and different form than in nations and families. One need only recall the discovery of speeds by virtue of which humanity is now preparing to make unpredictable journeys into the interior of time to encounter, in that place, rhythms from which, as in the old days, the sick will draw strength high up in the mountains or beside southern seas. Lunaparks are an early form of sanatoria. The shiver of true cosmic experience is not bound to that tiny fragment of the natural world we are in the habit of calling ‘nature’. In the nights of annihilation of the last war the limb structure of humanity was shaken by a feeling that resembled the epileptic fit.24 And the uprisings that followed the war were humanity’s first attempt to make the new body obedient to its commands. The power of the proletariat is the measure of its recovery. If this discipline does not enter its very marrow, no pacifist argument will save it. The frenzy of destruction will be stilled by the living only in the intoxication of procreation.
[1928]