Herzog trained that chicken, the one in Stroszek - did you know that?, says W. He trained it to dance longer than the 3-5 seconds it was used to. For months he would train it (as well as other chickens – a whole troupe – just in case this one died), withholding the food it would usually get after its dance, extending the dancing period, until he reached 15 seconds.
15 seconds! It's not much. Herzog likes to film in still shots, with no cuts. An image, just an image. But this time, he had to cut – he had to intercut the dancing chicken with other images. The car that was set to circle outside the arcade. Bruno on the chairlift. Luckily, these are very fine images … But the chicken is at the core. The chicken is the centre.
Herzog talks of finding images adequate to the world, to the new world. The chicken is cosmic, that's what we have to understand. The chicken, the dancing chicken, is everything.
W. dreams of a thought that would be the equivalent of that chicken. A thought, a single thought adequate to the disaster, equal to it … He dreams it will coalesce from a feeling, like a star. That a feeling could be reduced to a precise point …
Above the sense that it's all at an end, that it's all finished, which mustn't be simply an intellectual idea. It has to be felt. You have to take it to your heart. The flat, wide plain must be at your heart. The blasted plain. So that above it, like a star, a single idea might be born. A single thought, like a crown.
In some sense, W. says, we have to exhaust thought. We have to run it ragged, run it to its very end, like the car Bruno sets running in circles outside the arcade. It has to run until it burns, until it catches fire. Then and only then, something might happen.
We have to think like a chicken. We have to dance, says. W. Go on, fat boy, do your chicken dance. Go on, do the funky chicken … Perhaps I am the chicken, and W. is the thinker. Perhaps I am the chicken dancing, endlessly dancing, and he is the one who has to think what that means.
But sometimes W. thinks he is the chicken, that he is only a chicken-thinker and a dancing-thinker, which is to say, not a thinker at all. He supposes he is cursed to be able to accomplish only a simulacrum of thought, when what is essential is to think, really to think.
Perhaps I am a purer dancer than he is. Perhaps I am more ready to dance, and to the limit of my abilities. Perhaps that's the pinnacle of my life, W. says, my dancing, my continuous dancing which is there beneath everything I say and do.
It's glorious!, W. says of this dancing, though it just irritates most people. Why are you hanging out with Lars?, they ask him. They can't see it, W. says. It's been up to him, W., to see my significance. That's his gift, his only gift. He's like a man with a dancing bear, only no one can see that's it's dancing. Can't you see it, can't you see the bear?, W. says, although sometimes he says chicken instead of bear. And they can't, W. says. They can't see a thing.
It's like theology, W. says. The theology of an absent God. The theology of an absent chicken. No one can see the chicken. No one believes in the chicken. But still, the chicken is there. And the chicken won't stop, says W. The chicken won't stop!
Sometimes, though, W. supposes that the chicken, the dancing chicken is between us. We have to think of the chicken as a form of relation, W. says, with great seriousness. He and I might be the terms of this relation, but the relation itself precedes us, and we only make sense because of it.
Perhaps that's what our friendship is, W. says: a chicken dancing. Perhaps our friendship is itself a great duty to the world, a great sacrifice. Oh, it's not a sacrifice for me, W. knows that. I've been lucky! It was pure luck for me, becoming the term of a relation. How else would I have redeemed my life? How else the misery and squalor of my life?
The chicken is between us, W. says, almost mystically. That's what we have to understand: it's the mode of our relation. It's what happens between us. We depend upon it. Our very friendship. Our interaction. We belong to the chicken, to the dancing chicken. We are friends of the chicken. No: we are friends by way of the chicken.
Lars Iyer's Blog 