Agony of Flies, page 7
Flatterer-thieves: they tell you the most delightful things about whatever they’re in the process of filching from your pockets.
Wheen, librarian at the Victoria and Albert Museum, whom I like very much, today told me about the first humiliating experience he remembers from his childhood. He grew up in Australia, in Sydney, where he never had any contacts with the aboriginals. One day, when he was about eight years old, his whole class was taken by their teacher on an excursion to Botany Bay, where a reservation was located. The people there led a miserable existence in the worst of squalor and regularly drank themselves to death. The teacher brought them to an old man who had been appointed a kind of chieftain of the reservation. He was lying at the entrance to a cave, and upon seeing the group of children, simply turned his back to them. The teacher tried hard to persuade him to speak to the children, who had come especially to see him. The old man glanced at little Wheen with such revulsion in his eyes as the boy had never seen. Then the old man turned away once more and nothing could move him to change his position. But the disgust he had shown Wheen on that occasion was something Wheen was never able to forget. All during his later life he felt unwanted and despised.
When later, as a young man en route to Europe, he went ashore at Suez and, accompanied by a young girl, visited the old quarter, a Suez native with a proud and very hand-Gesicht some face came toward them and, without the slightest provocation, spat straight into Wheen’s face. — We then spoke of other things and it was only later that I asked Wheen how he had reacted. He had not hit the man in return and had felt very bad about that in retrospect, particularly since the young girl had expected such a reaction from him as normal. He explained his behavior as mere cowardice, and in a long discussion which then ensued, could not be dissuaded from using this word. When we parted an hour later, he suddenly asked me whether I had ever been ashamed of being a white man.
She smiles at his words as if they were balloons—unaware how readily and joyfully they burst.
What is one capable of? What is one incapable of? One man is capable of letting everyone starve to death, but he cannot kill anybody.
The alienator goes among the people, pushing them apart.
It amuses me when people who do not know me at all make fun of me in my presence. I am overjoyed to hear and understand what they are saying about me in a language they think I do not understand. I then have the feeling that I’m sitting there clad in a false skin and that it is that skin they are discussing and judging. But underneath I am myself, and how many true things could I tell them about themselves!
To be so well fed as a child that one never need eat again.
He is tormented by the idea that perhaps everyone died too late and that it is this delay alone that makes our dying a genuine death; anyone could go on living if he only were to die at the right moment, but no one knows when that is.
All lovers of death end up disavowing it.
The girl who only takes off her clothes under a comet.
She sits down in the lap of the first chair that comes her way.
Time has its maternal pride: it wants to be fulfilled and not sliced up.
God’s heartbeat in us: fear.
The interest in numbers as if one could hang on to them. Here best friends offer numbers in farewell as if these were hands: so much for me; so much for you; the more exact the exchange, the better friends they are.
He can help anyone as long as he doesn’t receive anything in return.
She travels the whole wide world in search of his lost jealousy.
The echo of his childhood is out of tune.
The dance of the cranes! Seeing it, how can humans still dare to take even a single step?
His misanthropy was rivaled only by his love of mankind.
You connect so quickly that you compare too little. Perhaps only those who collect can really compare.
The only people I find boring are relatives.
His dream: Only the names are alive—and all life is merely their dream.
You still have not learned to grasp the moment at the height of its power: you think it will continue shining, you don’t recognize it as a moment in time; you believe a new word cannot expire. But they all expire, and the only thing that continues to exist is what you write down at that moment. You shall have to recognize this limitation, otherwise you will miss out on your true life, that of your thoughts.
How numerous the hands flying out to all points at the same time! And yet you revere only one.
She has devoured his immortality.
I’m sick of all perception, of the connections to all that has been before, the interrelations, the follow-ups, the disguises, the revelations; I wish to experience something which has no relation to anything that was in me earlier, something which does not reproduce itself and is not doomed to stay; something with swift, abrupt motions, never predictable—in a word, I wish for a miracle.
The loneliness of pain: how strange that humans should not resent each other for it more than they do.
Weed out the emphatic words. Let the thought itself be powerful and not the emotion with which you express it.
This anxious fatigue caused by many new faces, whether they are sitting around you or coming toward you, and the unquenchable need for precisely that fatigue! Nothing epitomizes modern man as much as this special combination of fluidity and density into which he plunges several times each day, only to detach himself again from it every time.
I am fascinated by the notion in the Last Judgment of the resurrection of all bodies, their reassemblement.
Countries made for throwing things in, such as America, and for throwing things out: England.
Those families! All exactly alike, and each so proud of itself.
The happiest man: he knows everybody and no one knows him.
It is wonderful to be a fool if one is wise.
His life is a search for everything that can’t be sold.
Let all others speak; but you yourself refrain: your words rob people of their shape. Your enthusiasm blurs their outlines; when you speak, they no longer know themselves; they become you.
He feels so lonely that he begs for permission to give advice.
Whenever he has nothing to say he mentions God.
Everything came alive too soon, so that mankind became used to death long before knowing better.
Some words are so manifold in meaning that merely to have known them makes having lived worthwhile.
He has no one to implore for mercy. The proud unbeliever!
He cannot kneel to anyone: this is his cross.
Pride commands the highest price; happy the worm who has none.
You have spread yourself so thin that you no longer can oversee the whole herd of your thoughts; nevertheless, you still don’t want to tame them.
A smile that staves off death.
Unwitting propagators.
If only he had read more, then he really would know nothing at all. But this little bit of knowledge that draws confidence from its gaps is deceptive and pernicious.
You are so beautiful, he says at times—but he is speaking to no one.
I have become lost in a labyrinth of the strangest thoughts, perhaps because I was not afraid of confronting these times, perhaps out of boastfulness, a kind of youthful conviction that they, too, could be mastered spiritually—but whatever the reason, the labyrinth is there, I am caught in the middle of it, and I have to find some way out, for others as well as for myself.
Don’t forget that for some you are just as stupid as the most stupid is for you.
A park in London: many people, strangers, not too close and not too far off, all of them in the mild light of late summer, some lying down, some standing, some sitting or walking, all alive beneath a warm sky, no one is shouting, no one is fighting, everyone comes and goes freely, alone or with others, with whomever he pleases, and everyone can stay as long as he wants without making anyone feel oppressed or saddened. It is as if people were free to enter paradise with no obligation to remain there and no danger of being expelled for any sin whatsoever.
It seems to me that without a new attitude toward death nothing worthwhile can be said regarding life.
Life seeks to be everywhere, otherwise it is not life.
I do not acknowledge any kind of death. That gnats and fleas also die does not make death any more comprehensible to me than the horrifying story of the Original Sin.
It makes no difference whether or not any part of us continues to exist somewhere else. We don’t live enough here, on earth. We don’t have enough time to prove ourselves here. And since we acknowledge death, we use it.
Why shouldn’t there be any murderers when we consider it fitting for people to die, when we are not ashamed of it, when we have incorporated death into our institutions, as if it were their best, their most solid and meaningful foundation?
It is the apparent expediency of organisms which has led us most astray.
The Augustinian massa damnata is the Roman legacy inherited from battle.
Whoever despises his own misery excessively no longer feels that of others.
From the Stoics
The things I tell about myself that are true seem most like lies to me.
To implant other hearts: horses as donors instead of hyenas.
It would be better if all the gods had simply emigrated and we could meet them on another star.
I hate history; there is nothing I’d rather read; I owe everything to it.
A St. Peter’s Basilica full of popes.
N. wishes to cancel retroactively all contact with someone as soon as he knows that that someone has died. He fears a delayed contamination by death. He believes he can go on living for as long as he effectively denies—also within himself—those who have died. To avoid death, he kills his own dead even more thoroughly.
Some haggle because they are conciliatory, others because they are cantankerous.
Degrees of despair: to remember nothing at all; to remember some things; to remember everything.
To think by different lights. The unreadable philosophers do not submit to any changes in their light.
The Tower of Babel made of bones, and all languages forgotten.
Each conversation makes him terribly upset—a year later.
The happy man whose misgivings drink themselves into a stupor.
She receives him with tears and bids him farewell with tears: she gives him tears to eat. She clothes him in tears. And when she reads to him out loud, she reads tears.
The prayers with which they evade God.
The nation’s lucre is licked clean by its king.
Compulsory change of name every five years. The fate of celebrities. Their frauds.
The diabolic joy of the dead because we know nothing of them.
The Electra of Sophocles contains death in all its forms. The heroine stands in the shadow of one murder and leads to two others. These are murders in their most concentrated form, the first one that of a husband, Agamemnon, the second one that of a mother, Clytemnestra. Only the third and last murder is that of a lover, who is not a close blood relative. Electra is filled with thoughts of her father’s death at all times. Her brother, Orestes, whom she has appointed her avenger, lives in another town, but is in constant touch with her. Now that he is finally about to arrive, he spreads the news of his own death. We simultaneously experience Clytemnestra’s and Electra’s reaction to the news. The messenger describes with great eloquence the death of Orestes in a fall during a chariot race. For the mother, who fears him as avenger, it is the death most wished for; for the sister, who had set all her hopes on Orestes, it is the death most dreaded. After her mother has left Electra, Orestes appears disguised as the bearer of his own ashes. In this way he witnesses his sister’s grief over his own death, a spectacle rarely granted to mortals since they are never present when such tidings arrive. Electra’s suffering is so great that Orestes reveals himself to her: for her sake he returns to the living. Their reunion is all the more intense as a result of the earlier false news of his death.
In a preceding scene Electra herself had assumed the role of avenger since she thought her brother dead. Her sister, whom she had attempted to enlist in this endeavor, had refused her. As soon as Orestes returns to life, he once again becomes the avenger. As messenger and bearer of his own ashes he enters the palace and slays his mother. Outside, Electra, for her part, strikes at her mother with her terrible sentence, and so joins in the slaying.
The end, the murder of Aegisthus, provides a new variation on death: Aegisthus is shown a bier with a shrouded corpse he believes to be the dead Orestes; he lifts the cloth and is confronted instead with the bloodied body of Clytemnestra. This play thus contains all the elements of death and dying. The memory of the dead daughter which inspires Clytemnestra—she avenged Iphigenia’s death by murdering Agamemnon; the memory of the dead father which prompts the avenging urge in Electra and Orestes, and the submission to death in Electra’s sister Chrisotemis; the fear of death in the guilty ones, in Clytemnestra and, in a different manner, in Aegisthus, who experiences the moments before he is slain in full consciousness. Electra’s own fearlessness in the face of death and its spellbinding effect on others. The murderer who presents himself as a dead man and who arrives bearing his own ashes. The bier, the urn filled with ashes, the sacrifice for the dead. The news of a death and its extremely varied effect on all others. The inversion of a wished-for death into that of the wish-bearer (Clytemnestra); the same inversion, albeit a slower one, from a wished-for death into a feared death and, ultimately, into one’s own (Aegisthus: Orestes-Clytemnestra-himself). All these different forms, elements, and transformations of death are also experienced by the chorus. Its function is that of a huge crystal which polarizes the events for the larger audience. Orestes appears with a friend who never speaks and seems to be his double or his shadow. The messenger, a very old man, is a bit like an insidious angel of death: in delivering the news of a false death, he prepares the way for a real one.
(1951)
She can love only if mistaken for another.
Pleasure in price increases: He strolls through the streets of the city, looks into all the shop windows, and is happy because everything has become more expensive. Items he once treated with indifference now tempt him as potential purchases. He’s worried that everything might become cheaper before he has bought enough at high prices. He smiles at the salespeople, who are all somewhat ashamed and look at everyone either a bit guiltily or brazenly impertinent. He encourages them: Higher! Higher! But they misunderstand him, thinking that what he wants is higher quality. He would like to be present when prices go up; but it always occurs behind his back, at night, when the shops are closed.
V
Die Verantwortung des Stummen. Ein Roman.
Sie will sich umbringen, sagt sie, aber erst nachdem er sich bei ihr entschuldigt hat.
Es gibt eine leuchtende und eine bittere Angst. Die erste wächst und wächst und dehnt sich solange aus, bis sie birst. Die zweite schrumpft ein und vertrocknet. Diese bittere Angst ist es, die aus Menschen Mumien macht, die leuchtende macht sie zu Dichtern.
Es ist beinah unmöglich, in niemandes Macht zu sein – aber wer das doch zuwege brächte!
Der Schläfer gibt dem Wächter seinen Traum, und dieser hütet ihn, und beide sind zusammen erst ein Raum.
Er bat sie, aus seinen Augen hinauszusteigen.
Er bereitet jedem sein Ende zu und setzt es ihm »Mahlzeit, Mahlzeit!« vor.
Die Schöpfung. »Als es noch Nacht war, war das Licht von einem großen Etwas umschlossen, aus dem es hernach hervorkam. Dieses Etwas hub an, hell zu werden und das Licht, das es in sich barg, zum Vorschein kommen zu lassen. Dann begann es, im Schein des ersten Lichts die Dinge zu erschaffen. Zuerst schuf es große, schwarze Vögel und befahl ihnen in dem Augenblicke, da sie Gestalt angenommen hatten, durch die ganze Welt zu fliegen und aus ihren Schnäbeln einen Hauch ausströmen zu lassen, der reine, strahlende Helle war. Und als die Vögel getan, was ihnen befohlen war, wurde die ganze Welt so hell und licht, wie sie heute ist.«
Chibcha
Das Einzige, was ihn wirklich tröstet, sind Mythen. Sein Herz nährt sich nur von Mythen. Er hebt sich einen Vorrat von unbekannten Mythen auf, sein Lebenselixier. Wenn die Mythen erschöpft sind, muß er sterben.
Das Alter der Erde, meinte er, ändere sich je nach der Zahl ihrer Bewohner.
Am wenigsten verstehe ich mich selbst. Ich will mich gar nicht verstehen. Ich will mich bloß dazu verwenden, um alles zu verstehen, was abgesehen von mir da ist.
In den platonischen Dialogen, denen man selbst sozusagen schweigend zuhört, wird man gezwungen, möglichst langsam zu begreifen, worum es geht. Manchmal, beinahe widerstrebend, schlägt ein Mythos wie ein Blitz dazwischen ein, aber es wird dafür gesorgt, daß die Atmosphäre gleich danach sich klärt und man nicht mehr zu rasch weiterkommt. Die kraftvolle Entrückung, deren Plato mächtig ist, wird durch den Dialog in einen alltäglichen Gang zurückgeholt, und so erscheint das Großartigste und Unmöglichste plötzlich praktisch.
Alle Tiere ausgestorben. Werden die Menschen, wenn sie auf keine Tiere mehr sehen, einander immer ähnlicher werden?
Wenn sie ankommen, werfen sie ihre Schuhe zum Fenster hinaus. Dann erfolgt die Begrüßung.
Aus Besorgnis um ihren Charakter hielt sie sich einen Kernbeißer.
Es gibt, glaube ich, kein einziges altes Gebot, das mich nicht in meiner tiefsten Natur beunruhigt und beschäftigt.
Ein Mensch von ungeheuer langem Atem, der sich zu kürzesten Sätzen zwingt.
Geschäfts-Ehen seien die glücklichsten. Dann lieber kein Glück.
Von vielen langjährigen Beziehungen zwischen Menschen bleibt schließlich nichts übrig als ein gegenseitiges Überwachen. Alles, worauf man selber Lust hätte, darf der andere nicht tun. Weil man ihn nicht mehr erträgt und darum bestimmt nicht kommt, soll er zu Hause sitzen und auf einen warten. Weil man viel vor ihm verbirgt, soll er keine Geheimnisse haben. Weil man ihn nicht unterhalten mag, soll er unterhaltsam sein.
