Agony of Flies, page 5
An jedem langen die Götter vorbei, aber manche fühlen sich doch ergriffen.
Er liest über uralte Kriege, als wären Kriege längst abgeschafft.
Taubheit, das größte Glück des Vielredners: er hört sich dann selber nicht mehr.
Kann man denn nie, keinen einzigen Augenblick leben, ohne jemand verabscheuen zu müssen?
Diese sonderbare späte Liebe zu allem Bösen, das einem die nächsten Menschen getan haben, als hätte man es gewollt; als hätte man es darauf und nicht auf das Gute abgesehen gehabt; als wäre das Gute nur ein flüchtiger Nebenzweck der Nähe, und das eigentlich Beständige, die eigentliche Leistung das Böse.
Es strömt soviel Abneigung zwischen ihnen, vom einen zum andern und wieder zurück. Manchmal, um es noch besser zu spüren, sitzen sie Hand in Hand verschränkt. Sie warten auf den gesegneten Augenblick, da ein Schlag, stärker als sie und durch nichts zu beherrschen, sie wie ein Schwert Gottes auseinandertreibt.
Erlösung durch Unbekannte, doch muß es verschiedene Grade der Unbekanntschaft geben: Leute, die einem völlig fremd sind, unheimlich und ganz anders als alles, was man je gesehen hat, andere, die dem Typus, mit dem man umzugehen gewöhnt ist, nicht allzufern sind, andere, die einen in etwas an Menschen erinnern, die man gekannt hat, obwohl man doch sicher weiß, daß sie einem fremd sind, wieder andere, die man vielleicht einmal gesehen hat, und solche, die man bei bestimmten Gelegenheiten trifft, ohne je ein Wort mit ihnen zu wechseln. Solange man ihren Namen nicht kennt, sind sie Unbekannte. Der Name ist die Abwehr der Menschen und mit ihm beginnen sie gegeneinander Schrecken um sich zu verbreiten.
Jeder Grad von Unbekanntheit hat seine eigene Erlösung, und man braucht sie alle. Eine große Kraft der Befreiung kann sich dort gelagert und gesammelt haben, wo man nie nach ihr gesucht hätte, und man vermag nur weiterzuleben, solange man sie überall erwartet.
III
Forget about the real enemies, they’re so boring; invent some of your own instead.
A religion which forbids prayers.
A country of fanatics in which suddenly every opinion is permitted and respected.
There is something sad about unclothed words, but I’m no tailor and I’d rather stay sad than try to fit them out.
Clarity and concision hamper the storyteller, for he makes his living from unpredictable leaps of transformation and an inexhaustible supply of breath.
A person often falls very ill in order to become someone else and then returns to health much disappointed.
The shapes of our organs often express themselves in our dreams, so that when we dream, we wander inside ourselves, entirely unaware.
He would like to tear his heart out of the future.
It is difficult to see through others and still remain intact.
A vision of gluttons: Everyone’s plate is full. No one is hungry; all have eaten their fill. Each person digs into his neighbor’s plate and eats and eats.
I would like to get to the heart of the many severe and extreme aspects of our time, just like Quevedo and Goya did, unafraid of myself and unafraid of these aspects. I would like to compel people to go on living, however small their chances for survival may be. I would like to arrive at a reverse apocalypse that carries all threats away. I would like to be tough, and full of hope.
As long as some domains of science remain untouched by experimentation, all hope is not lost.
The only friends worthy of that name are those who find out how many years they still have to live, and then distribute these years equally among one another.
His judgments are merely measures of length.
There is solitude and solitude. One person chooses to be alone so he finally can feel all those who are not. Someone else chooses to be alone just because he so much would like to be the only one.
He doesn’t waste his time, he chokes it: that’s how tightly filled his time would be if he actually made use of it.
Very large pockets, as big as ladies’ handbags, designed for carrying sins.
A scar on the face of a woman—and already she has the attraction of the beast which might have torn her flesh.
To live, what you need set out before you—more so than any number of goals—is another human face.
A man fluent in so many languages that he always answers in the wrong one.
A head above water restored his storytelling powers.
Never do we hate ourselves more intensely than when we realize we have given our best, yet all in vain. It is then and only then that we truly wish to die.
A person needs an untold number of desires to which he does not yield: otherwise—how terrifying!—he’s nothing but a wretched dog.
The greatest humiliation of the rich: that they can buy everything. They then believe that that is all there is.
To come upon an entirely alien and beautiful new world as a result of forgetfulness.
He hopes to go on living in all the exciting images he has ever beheld.
Ants on strike.
And what if the words of different languages had some secret connection to one another?
I have no respect for reality as soon as it is acknowledged as such. I am interested in what I can do with unacknowledged reality.
The country where I am ashamed to sit among people, pencil in hand, and write down entire sentences: England. If instead I were to write merely numbers, I would not arouse the slightest suspicion.
And what if, after all, there were secrets kept from God?
All human beings would have a single communal heart, no larger than the hearts we know. But that heart has to make the rounds visiting everybody, for everyone alive has a claim on it. To accommodate this heart, all humans are provided with a cavity into which the communal heart is simply placed, whereupon it immediately makes itself felt. All holy rites and important customs are connected to that heart. The receiving of the heart marks the greatest moment in anyone’s life. Each person is prepared for it for a long time in advance; he is told how rare and old the heart is; how wonderfully strange it is that it has preserved itself all that time and how it derives its indestructibility precisely from the rite of implantation. If the heart were left by itself for any length of time, instead of inside one of the innumerable cavities which await it, it would age and shrivel and lose its power. No one is allowed to possess it more than once. One carrier travels with it to the next: the heart never appears in the same town twice in a row. Whoever is carrying the heart is said to be invulnerable—who could be so blind as to mistake the carrier? He is radiant for as long as he is the chosen one. He well knows how little he deserves such good fortune, but that is of no significance. He has as much right as anyone else to this distinction, and only when he has been awarded it does he become a full-fledged human being.
Is it possible for someone to locate and position all the personae he contains in such a way as to lose all fear? He turns himself into a game of chess and plays himself to a draw.
The word “solitude” has a false ring, as if it came straight from God.
The only way he can bear all the evil legends and stories is by inventing even more evil ones.
He is desperately seeking people about whom he knows nothing.
A dream:
One of M.’s dreams, which she recorded for me years ago, I believe in 1942 or 1943:
“I threw something away by mistake, it might have been a cigarette butt. At the same time I realized—a dead girl was lying there—I looked over—everything was as if under a table or the tabletop formed a roof—up in the front some boards had been propped up across. They were almost half a yard high, so that one could still see over them and under the table—and there she was! Entirely exposed! If I had known that, I would not have been so careless as to throw a cigarette butt over there—I hope it didn’t fall right on top of her! I liked her very much. I was greatly upset that she was lying there, really exposed and visible. When I bent down, she started to move! Her mouth grew large and twisted—a black hole—there was no way to tell whether it was laughing or screaming (there were no teeth to be seen). Apart from that, she was a pale yellowish color like dried-up dough. I was very agitated. ‘So she’s coming to life. Maybe she really will come alive!’ I liked her very, very much. I thought of C. If I could really bring her back to life!
“I sat with her. I sat right next to her. Her arms were stretched down fairly straight. One slanted off to the left, the other to the right. One of my own arms was placed over both her arms. I liked her so terribly much. And I was so afraid. I thought it can’t be true that she’ll return to life—she’s bound to fall back into death. I noticed her arm. It was made of clay. But fresh, soft clay, one could still see the traces of the putty knife, a few coarse downward strokes—and now the most wonderful thing occurred! I was right next to her—my eyes came to rest on her cheek and … it was pink—a pale pink—as if tinged with the breath of life! And then I knew: she’ll stay alive.”
“Vishnu took on the form of a boar and fetched the sunken earth back from beneath the flood. It had sunk because once Jama had governed it and under his reign many creatures were born but none died. Thus the burden for the earth became too great and it sank beneath the waters.”
In each language there is one word that kills and which, therefore, is never spoken. But it is known to all and in some mysterious way propagates itself in the minds of humans.
A country in which each woman serves some time as a waitress and each man as a dog.
You are highly ramified and only the most dire threats can keep you together.
A gentle person, with a gentle body, and inside a heart like the maw of a shark.
God has lost His way. And now they are calling Him back from all sides at once.
It is bad enough that I sometimes catch myself—more frequently now than in the past—having calculating thoughts; I don’t want any more of this, for then it won’t matter at all that I am alive. To behave like everyone else, sniffing out a slight advantage here, a larger one over there, counting, pursuing, grabbing—what for? I wish to live on the margin and not use anything.
A man produces so many words and creates so few.
Thieves who steal things for a definite time only and then return them. The danger of their profession lies less in the theft than in the unnoticed return of the stolen objects. They feel their pride and honor hinges on this successful return, and any object they keep longer than they intended burns in their hands like hellfire.
A life of wasted moments, moments which suddenly light up all at once.
Changing one’s location to better bear the permanence of thought.
God was lame and created Man as His crutch.
Wherever he goes, the first thing he does is sit down and unpack his superiority.
To turn into time—out of sadness.
He ties nothingness around his neck like a scarf and yet it absolutely refuses to throttle him.
Dismantling knowledge without damaging its component perceptions.
One day all to himself, surrounded by many new faces—his vision of heaven.
To say no with open arms.
Our best, our most essential thoughts are those we forget with the same passion with which they revealed themselves in the first place. They then come back as entirely new thoughts, in different situations; we no longer recognize them, or if we do, then only as if they had come from another life. The more this happens, the more of these denied lives such thoughts possess, the more significant they are.
The danger of growing mistrust: the satisfaction of being in the right. Everyone is glad to have been right and being right becomes what is most essential. Instead of living in despair—the only truly selfless way to live—we content ourselves with some ridiculous, irrelevant, and insignificant “insights”; we acquire X-ray vision, we are able to spot every evil deed before the evildoer has committed it, before he’s even thought about it. But there will always be evil deeds beyond our scope, nor can we become adept at all of them. Mistrust, however, becomes a complete and well-organized system of evil deeds.
Instead of wedding rings they wear tiny wedding gauntlets extending the whole length of their fingers, and use them to strike each other in the face.
Pain makes the poet, pain fully felt, in no way evaded, pain perceived, grasped, and sustained.
Nietzsche can never become a danger to me: for beyond all moral considerations I feel inside me an enormously powerful, an almighty feeling for the sanctity of every—and I mean literally every—life. And that repels all attacks, from the most simplistic to the most sophisticated. I’d sooner give up my own life than that of anything else alive, even as a matter of principle. No other feeling in me can compare with this one in intensity and imperturbability. I do not acknowledge death in any form. Thus all who have died are for me still alive, not because they have any claims on me, or because I fear them, or because I might think that some part of them has gone on living, but simply because they never should have died. All the dying up to the present was nothing but judicial murder, carried out thousands and thousands of times and for which I cannot find any legalization. What do I care about the multitude of precedents, what do I care that not one single being has stayed alive since the very beginning! Nietzsche’s attacks are like a gust of poisonous air, but one which cannot harm me: I inhale it with pride and exhale it with disdain, and I pity him for the immortality which awaits him.
All of a sudden he felt the days become precious. He started to count them. His jealousy focused on them; and it turned out that they were more fitting objects than people.
The gods reach past each and every one of us, and yet some nevertheless feel touched.
He reads about age-old wars, as if wars had been abolished long ago.
Deafness, the greatest fortune that may befall a chatterbox—for then he no longer can hear himself.
Isn’t it ever possible to live—be it for just a single instant—without having to despise someone?
This strangely belated love for all the evil inflicted by one’s nearest and dearest, as if one had willed it to happen, as if one had aimed for that and not for any goodness; as if what was good were merely an ephemeral by-product of proximity, whereas the truly lasting, the essential accomplishment was the evil.
There is such a strong flow of antipathy between them, from one to the other and back again. Sometimes, to feel this with even greater intensity, they sit side by side, hand in hand. They are waiting for the blessed moment when a single blow, more powerful than they and beyond any and all control, will, like the sword of God, split them asunder.
Salvation through unfamiliar people—though there are various degrees of unfamiliarity. Some of these unfamiliar people are completely alien, strange, and totally different from anyone we have ever seen before. Others are not too remote from people we are acquainted with, and there are some who may even vaguely remind us of people we have known quite well, although there is no question that they are strangers. Some of these unfamiliar people we may have seen once before and some of them we run into on occasion, without exchanging a single word. As long as we do not know their names, they remain strangers. For names are the armaments of people and it is through names that we spread fear against each other and among ourselves.
Each degree of unfamiliarity has its own salvation, and we need them all. A great power of liberation may have accumulated where we would have expected it least, and it is only the hope of finding it somewhere that enables us to go on living.
IV
Den schweren Himmel, der über ihr lastet, muß man ihr entreißen. Aber wie atmet sie auf, wenn es einem gelingt!
Ein Land, in dem die Leute splitternackt gehen und nur ihre Ohren bedecken. Alle Scham liegt dort in den Ohren.
In einem Traum bringt er Fünflinge zur Welt, und alle sind lesbar.
Noch nie, seit ich denken kann, habe ich zu jemand Herr! gesagt, und wie leicht ist es Herr! zu sagen und wie groß die Versuchung. Hundert Göttern bin ich genaht, und jedem sah ich klar und mit Haß für den Tod der Menschen ins Gesicht.
Man muß sich für Liebe oder für Gerechtigkeit entscheiden. Ich kann es nicht, ich will beides.
Die Diebin, die immer daran denken muß, daß sie ihr Gesicht gestohlen hat.
Wie soll man sie ertragen, diese Mit-Paranoiker, die genau so funktionieren wie man selbst, deren winzigste Regung man zum voraus begreift, in denen man vorausahnt, was noch kommen könnte, die einen in jeder Kleinigkeit, erschreckend präzis, spiegeln, und während alles formal so stimmt, ist der ganze Inhalt verschieden!
Von Nebel zu Nebel größere Klarheit, bis er im Nebel der höchsten Klarheit ganz aufgeht und verschwindet.
Diese Fahrzeuge im Nebel, große, kleine, von Menschen bis zu Lastwagen, gleiten alle an ihm vorüber, ohne sich zu stoßen. Sie berühren nicht, sie streicheln einander, es streitet nichts, für alles ist Platz. Die Vorsicht, mit der man einander begegnet, die liebevolle Behutsamkeit, und wer dann doch aufeinander stößt, empfindet es als eine Offenbarung. Der Nebel in dieser Stadt ist das Bild paradiesischen Friedens, des einzigen, der hier möglich ist, und erfüllt den Beschauer mit unendlichem Glücksgefühl.
Der Menschenhasser: er hungert acht Tage und ißt dann allein.
Verwirrende Vorstellung: daß die Unsterblichkeit erst an einem Haustier gelingt, an einem Hund z.B.: der unsterbliche Hund.
Es ist nicht das Alleinsein, das ich zu erlernen habe, denn es fällt mir nicht schwer, ich bin gern allein; es ist das Schweigen unter Menschen. Diese plötzlichen Ausbrüche von raschen, heftigen Reden sind wertlos und verwirrend. Es ist gar nicht so wichtig, an wen sie gerichtet sind, ob man mich versteht oder nicht; die Worte selbst, meine eigenen Worte haben eine furchtbare und verheerende Wirkung auf mich. Sie sind zu stark, ich muß sie dämpfen, indem ich sie niederschreibe. Was ich rede, ist so heftig, daß jeder, der es hört, ausweichen muß, schon um sich selbst vor mir zu bewahren. Ich aber kann meinen Worten nicht ausweichen; ich bin ihnen ausgeliefert; ich nehme sie ganz auf, ich verstehe sie ganz, ich gerate durch sie in Erregung wie ein Meer im Sturm.
