Long Grass

Alcoholics in the long grass, stretching their limbs and laughing, half-drunk bottles of cider by their ankles. Anyone can walk on the Town Moor, he likes that, W. says. Where the alcoholic can walk, he walks, W. says. And where the alcoholics cannot walk — where his way is barred by security guards or policemen — W. will not walk either.

Shouldn't we lie down in the long grass and drink ourselves to death?, we wonder. Shouldn't we just give up — give up everything — and let death come and find us on the Town Moor? But we consider ourselves to have work to do — that's our idiocy, and our salvation. We actually take ourselves to be busy — that's our imposture and our chance of survival.

A Rilke of Newcastle

The Town Moor: escape. We wander through the knee-high grass. What are those birds?, we wonder. What are those flowers? But we have no idea.

The Moor is like the world on the fifth day of creation, we agree — before Adam, before anyone, when everything went unnamed and unredeemed. It needs words, we agree. It needs a poet! Where is the Rilke of Newcastle to sing of the Moor?

Above us, a shore of clouds and then blue sky. — 'That's a weather front', W. says. Which way is it travelling? Where is it heading? And where are we heading, we who walk beneath it, the shore of clouds?

Is the future open to us, or closed? W. can never decide. Are we making progress, or falling behind? W. can never decide about that, either.

Stand Well Clear

‘God, what a racket! How do you do any work?’, W. says.

The sound of drilling, high pitched, then lower pitched as they cut through something. The fizz of a lorry's brakes. The clattering of metal poles being thrown onto metal poles. A heavy chugging in the distance. The distant throbbing of engines …

They're rebuilding the campus, I tell him. They're putting up new office blocks for the private partners of the university.

He requires silence to work, W. says. Silence and calm, in his study in the pre-dawn morning, just the pigeons flapping their wings and cooing to annoy him, and Sal asleep in the other room.

Stand well clear, vehicle reversing: a warning from a tannoyed male voice. And now warnings overlapping with warnings, as many vehicles reverse: Stand well clear … Stand well clear … Stand well clear … And now a high pitched throb, very loud, like a helicopter landing. — 'Surely a helicopter isn't landing?', W. says. 'A helicopter couldn't be landing …'

We walk out through the campus through the narrow pedestrian routes left to us alongside the building works. W. feels so channelled, he says. We're being route-marched, he says, staff and student alike, heads down and in lockstep. Where are they leading us?, he says. Where are we going?

A thick smell — is it tar? They must be pouring tar. They must be making some kind of route for the lorries. A hiss as of gas escaping. The high beeping of a reversing vehicle. — 'They're going to crush us', W. says. 'They're going to drive right through us …'

They’re going to drive right through philosophy, W. says. What use is our subject to them? What use philosophy to the new breed of the university, which is busy hatching from the old one?

'How long do you think we'll last?', W. says. 'How long before we're closed down?' Because there's no room for us in this world. No room for Kierkegaard and for scholars of Kierkegaard …

'Are they shredding trees?', W. says. Yes, they really are: we can see them cutting off their boughs with chainsaw, and feeding them into shredding machines. Leaves fly up over the fence. And the smell: sap. Life, destroyed. The stuff of life, being destroyed.

It'll be our turn next, W. thinks. They'll cut off our arms and legs and feed us into the machines …

Oh God, the building, the eternal rebuilding. The noise! We want to put our hands over our ears. We want to stop up our ears …

Stand well clear … Stand well clear …

At the End

What do I think is going to happen to me at the end?, W. asks me. I’ll die with froth on my lips, he’s sure of it. I’ll die like some rabid animal with wild eyes and dirt under my nails. I’ll have tried to dig my way out. I’ll have gone mad from confinement, and they’ll shoot me out of disgust like a dog.

And what about him (W.)? He’ll have starved to death, W. says, having given up all hope, all desire. There he'll sit, a skeleton by the window, who'd hoped that things could be otherwise, but learnt things could never be otherwise.

FLEISCHMANN: Are you denigrating art and literary history as a matter of principle, or simply because you have extremely high expectations of art?
 
BERNHARD: Well, I’m not denigrating anything; it obviously denigrates itself as it pursues its inevitable course, which, whether we’re talking about culture or politics, always runs downhill; it’s like a pebble or a snowball, the snowball of stupidity.  No matter how small it is when it starts out up there, it arrives down here giant-sized and destroys the entire city of Vienna.  Perhaps it’s bigger than Vienna.
 
Bernhard, interviewed

Suicide Clinic

What is it that keeps me from cutting my own throat?, W. asks. Why don't I book myself into one of those Swiss suicide climics?

Can’t You See I’m Burning

In the end, perhaps I'm only a figment of his imagination, a kind of nightmare, he says. Can't you see I'm burning?, I ask him in his dream. But in the end, he's burning, W. says. He's the one who set himself on fire.

Posterity

Am I concerned about posterity?, W. wonders. Am I concerned about what people will think? Obviously not, W. says.

A Typo

So many typos! I complain about the errors in my typescript. – 'You are a typo', W. says.

My Own Corner

My own corner, that's where I should stay, W. says, and I am staying there. My own corrner, with my own interests, which are contracting by the day, W. says.

A Jeweller of Thought

Pathos is not enough, W. says. He wants precision, too: jewelled writing.

This is no time for sloppiness of thought, W. says. Lines have to be drawn, demarcations made!

W. is becoming a jeweller of philosophy, he says, whereas I will only ever be one of those elephants who splashes with a paintbrush.

Ignorance

Ignorance falling into ignorance, W. says. Ignorance redoubled, and lost in ignorance: that's what happens when we converse.

Administration

Administration is our good fortune, W. says. Our endless bureaucracy. Because we can still believe that if we had time, we could produce a masterwork.

An Apprenticeship in Stupidity

My apprenticeship in stupidity. – 'You served your time'. I ran up against my limits, not once, but a thousand times. And I wore my limits away, as a river, over millennia, can wear away rock. – 'You made them irrelevant'.

In the end, they opened, they became a kind of landscape, a wide, flat plain over which there rolled great storms of idiocy. – 'They were fierce', says W., 'but you endured'. And then, when the storms had passed? A calm sky, a limpid sky, the stars flashing … I'd come to the highest, widest place. I'd been tested and survived. – 'Your stupidity was very pure'.

My Troubles

My troubles, W. says. I'd like to think I am a troubled man. My romantic troubles. My troubles at work. My life troubles. He's heard them all, W. says, but he's convinced by none of it.

An Idiot Drools

An idiot drools: that's my life, that drooling, W. says. An idiot scratches his head: that's my life, that scratching, W. says.

The Humiliation Artist

The circle of your obsessions has become narrower, says W. That's the change in me. That's the essential change he's seen over the years. 

Once they passed through the whole world, my obsessions. You confused them for ambition, genuine ambition. You wanted to learn things, master whole areas of knowledge. My God, you could confuse yourself with someone with ability! You studied, didn't you? You read. You even wrote. You – wrote! It's amazing. You wrote and published.

What temerity! What lack of understanding! Yes, you'd deluded yourself completely, it was quite magnificent. You confused yourself for a scholar, a man of letters. You wrote learned articles. You spoke with learned people on learned topics …

You thought you were part of something, didn't you? You walked in cloisters, in Oxford colleges. Ambition – that's what you had, wasn't it? The horizon couldn't limit you. Ah, what aspirations you had! You would write one book, and then another. And you did it: you wrote one book and then another.

Everyone laughed. We were all laughing up our sleeves, but you didn't notice, did you? The circle of your obsessions had not closed tight around you. You weren't yet being strangled. It wasn't yet a garrotte.

Your obsessions reigned as far as the horizon – further! You thought, you really thought you were entitled to write … And then what? What happened? Doubt crept in. Doubt snuck in the door. Were you really permitted to write? Were you elected to read? To publish? To share your thoughts with the world?

What a disgrace!: that's what you said to yourself in your loneliest hour, wasn't it? I'm a disgrace: that's what your heart whispered. For the most part, you could choose not to hear it. The world was too loud. You were too loud. But then, in the quiet of the night … Then, just after you turned off the light … A new obsession began to form: your disgrace. What was its origin? Where had it gone wrong? At what stage did it all go wrong, as it so clearly had?

Doubt crept in. Obsession. Your ambition was eaten out from within. It rotted from inside. It had dawned on you, hadn't it? What had you done? For what had you been responsible? Guilt: that was the word, wasn't it? Humiliation. Because you'd humiliated yourself, hadn't you? You were a dunce turned to the wall in your corner … 

What had you done? What hadn't you done? What hadn't you spared the world? Your thoughts. Your books. My God, your books!

One day you understood that there were no excuses. That you were inexcusable. That you couldn't apologise enough for yourself. That your life was already that: an apology, an excuse. A scorpion stinging itself to death. A tarantula seething in its own poison.

Your obsessions didn't range as freely. Your horizon shrank. Once the sea – the far blue distance, and now? A room. Less than a room. A cone of light. A modem and a computer. Type, fat boy. So you typed. You typed, and what did you type? Your confession, your autocritique …

Tighter still it drew, the circle of your obsessions. Tighter until it was taut around your own neck, and strangling. Tighter until your face turned blue. And that's what it is now, isn't it: blue. You're gasping for breath, aren't you? But you can't allow yourself to breathe. Your obsessions are strangling you.

My God, how do you spend your time? What do you actually do? Write endlessly of your own failure. Write your autoconfession, your apology. You're sick of yourself, aren't you? But you can't be rid of yourself. And that's it, your life – the whole drama of your life. The circle of your obsessions. The circle become garrotte, become noose. The circle pulling tighter …

Type, fat boy, make us laugh! Because we're all laughing at you. We're watching you humiliate yourself. We're watching how far you can take it, your humiliation. You're not a hunger artist – you're an humiliation artist. And we're here to watch your disgrace. We're here to watch your ongoing disgrace.

'The Prince is shouting […] He says, he is always free in himself. his position is between things. And in between things he sees that he is himself the sum of things. And what things add up to is ruin, nothing but ruin. To his followers he is "The Prince" but in his own view, he is the prince of princes. Only he can see the whole, he says, because he can see there is no whole. And for The Prince this is how things must be … as they must always be … he must see with his own eyes. His followers will wreak havoc because they understand his vision perfectly. His followers understand that all thiongs are false pride, but don't know why. The Prince knows: it is because the whole does not exist'.

from Krasznahorkai's, The Melancholy of Resistance

… 'the enormous Strindberg', whom Kafka read 'not to read him but rather to lie upon his breast' …

Robert Calasso, K.

Many are the glosses are commentaries on [Before the Law], which the priest tells Josef K. in the dark cathedral, about the doorkeeper of the Law. The longest, most persuasive gloss is by Kafka himself – it's The Castle. To understand it, one must read all of The Castle, after having replaced each occurrence of the word Castle with the word Law.

from Calasso's K.

He replied to Brod with a closely argued letter in which he explained that the only sensible conclusion he had ever reached in his life was 'not suicide, but the thought of suicide'. If he didn't go beyond the thought, it was due to a further reflection: 'You who can't manage to do anything, you want to do this?'

From Calasso's K.

Nearly everything is totally indifferent to me. Time is passing, boredom is everlasting.

You know, I find myself in this town by pure chance, it has never meant anything to me. It's also by pure chance that I'm the treasurer here. But if I hadn't been here, I would've been somewhere else and have led the same kind of life. However, I cannot reconcile myself to that. I get really upset when I think about it.

Existence has never answered my questions. Just imagine, to live an entire life, my own life at that, without having found the path to where my deepest needs can be seen and heard! I'll die in silence, which frightens me, without a word on my lips, because there's nothing to say.

Bjoern Hansen, in Dag Solstad's Novel 11, Book 18

Our cosmic terror springs from the memory of the endless night against which God fought his first battle. He partly won, for he made night and day alternate. Man tried to establish the reign of day by conquering the night altogether; he was successful only in his imagination. We sleep not to rest but to forget the night we should have defeated.

E.M. Cioran, Tears and Saints

We watch things pass by in order to forget that they are watching us die.

Joe Bousquet.

I've always been writing, even before I ever tried to write anything. The career of a writer doesn't begin at the moment he begins to write. The career and the writing may coincide earlier or later.

Genet, quoted.