When, consciously, thirteen years old, I consciously claimed the desire to write – I wrote as a child, but I had not claimed a destiny -, when I claimed the desire to write, I suddenly found myself in a void. And in that void there was nobody who could help me. I had to lift up myself from a nothingness, I myself had to understand myself, I myself had to invent, in a manner of speaking, my own truth. I started, and it wasn't even from the beginning. The papers piled up – the meanings contradicted one another, the despair of not being able was one more obstacle for really not being able to. The never-ending story which I then began to write […], what a pity that I didn't keep it: I tore it up, despising an entire attempt at apprenticeship, at self-knowledge. And doing everything in such secrecy. I didn't tell anyone; I lived that pain alone. One thing I had already guessed: I would hgave to try to write always, not waiting for a better moment because that would simply never come. Writing was always difficult for me, even though I had begun with what is known as vocation. Vocation is different from talent. One can vocation and not talent; one can be called and not know how to go.

Clarice Lispector, cited in Benjamin Moser's biography

For too long now we have been estranged from the essential, which is the nomadic life: travelling on foot[….]

My voyages on foot have always been essential experiences for me. For many hours during my walk around Germany, sometimes even a day or two at a time, there was no well or creek to drink from. I would knock on the door of a farmhouse and ask for something to drink. 'Where are you from?', the farmer would ask. I would say Sachrang. 'How far aways is this?' 'About 1500 kilometers', I would reply. 'How did you get here' And the moment I would explain that I walked, there is no more small talk. [….]

When you travel on foot, you come with a different intensity. Travelling on foot has nothing to do with exercise[….]

When I am walking I fall deep into dreams, I float through fantasies and find myself inside unbelievable stories. I literally walk through whole novels and films and football matches. I do not even look at where I am stepping, but I never lose my direction. When I come out of a big story I find myself 25 or 30 kilometers further on. How I got there I don't know[….]

In 1974 we German filmmakers were still fragile, and when a friend told me Lotte [Eisner, film critic] had suffered a massive stroke and I should get on the next plane to Paris, I made the decision not to fly. It was not the right thing to do, and because I just could not accept that she might die, I walked from Munich to her apartment in Paris. I put on a shirt, grabbed a bundle of clothes, a map and a compass, and set off in a straight line, sleeping under bridges, in farms and abandoned houses. I made only one detour to the town of Troyes because I wanted to walk into the cathedral there.

I walked against her death, knowing that if I walked on foot she would be alive where I got there. And that is just what happened. Lotte lived until the age of ninety or thereabouts, and years after the walk, when she was nearly blind, could not walk or read or go out to see films, she said to me, 'Werner, there is still this spell cast over me that I am not allowed to die. I am tired of life. It would be a good time for me now'. Jokingly I said, 'OK, Lotte, I hereby take the spell away'. Three weeks later she died.

When you travel on foot with this intensity, it is not a matter of covering actual ground, rather it is a question of moving through your own inner landscapes.

from Herzog on Herzog

We are all ill, with one malaise or another, a deep-rooted malaise that is inseparable from what we are and that somehow makes us what we are, you might even say that each one of us is his own illness, we are so little because of it, and yet we succeed in being so much because of it.

from Jose Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

Q. You're obsessed with chickens, aren't you?

A. You may be right. Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity. It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in this world.

from Herzog on Herzog

I have never set out to imbue my films with literary or philosophical references. Film should be looked at straight on, it is not the art of scholars, but illiterates.

from Herzog on Herzog

I have never been one of those who cares about happiness. Happiness is a strange notion. I am just not made for it. It has never been a goal of mine; I do not think in those terms.

from Herzog on Herzog

The Island of Flores

These last few years, thought, the capacity to think is retreating from W. He's losing them one by one, his faculties, the organs of thought …

Species trapped on islands see changes in scale. They can become large – grotesquely large, says W., with giant tortoises and the like and Komodo dragons. Or they can become small – minaturising over the generations, W. says, like that species of human who lived until recently on that remote island. What were they called?

Homo Floresiensis, I tell him, after the name of the island, Flores. They shared their island with pygmy elephants and giant rats, I tell him. They hunted the rats on the back of pygmy elephants, or the pygmy elephants on the back of the rats, one of the two, I tell him.

Homo Floresiensis! They had great flat feet like yours, W. says, reading Wikipedia, and an improbably small brain, no doubt like yours. And they murmured rather than spoke. They whistled and hooted, just as I am a whistler and hooter.

I've become a Homo Floresiensis of thought, W. says. It's terrible. Didn't I used to appear intelligent? Even W. is forgetting. That's how it seemed, he says, improbable as it sounds. And now?

It's your flat, W. says. The squalor of your flat. It's the squalor of your life, your isolation, which is the equivalent of the island of Flores. But haven't I become larger rather than smaller? I'm like one of those giant rats, W. says. He's going to climb on a pigmy elephant and hunt me.

W. too is becoming a Homo Floresiensis of thought, that's what he fears. Isn't he becoming shorter by the day? Aren't his feet getting bigger and flatter? Isn't his brainpan shrinking and his chin looking a little more sloped?

He's following my example, W. says. He's declining, W. says. He's beginning to forget the higher ideas. Good God, he can barely count! He can barely add two numbers together! Is this what happened on the island of Flores? Is this where our collaboration has led him?

Jane Goodall

Sometimes in my company, W. feels like Jane Goodall, the one who did all that work with chimps, do I remember her? Jane Goodall, the chimp specialist, who not only studied chimps, but went to live with chimps, among them, slowly gaining their confidence and learning their ways.

What has he learned about me through his studies?, W. wonders. What's become clear to him? Admittedly, he first approached me as a collaborator. He first thought: here is a man I can think with. Here is a companion in thought.

Wasn't I the one he'd be waiting for? Wasn't I a thinker like he was, of the same cast, with the same inclinations, the same distastes? I seemed clever, too, back then. I spoke well. My voice resounded. – 'Your voice', W. says, 'what happened to it?'

Some seemed to have hopes for me. I was going somewhere, they thought. And W., too, concluded the same. Our collaboration – when did it begin? Several years ago now. Several years …

W. sought a thought-partner, for a companion in thought, but what happened? He became a witness to my decay. He saw me falling off into space like a lost satellite. I squandered it all, didn't I? Or perhaps it was never there, W. wonders that, too. Perhaps it was never there, my talent, my ability. Perhaps it was entirely an illusion, being what W. wanted to see.

A thought-companion, isn't that what W. wants? And instead what does he have? What has he become? A kind of zoo-keeper, he says. A chimp specialist.

Hadn't he become fascinated by my decline? Wasn't he watching, fascinated, for every twist in its story? He'd become an anthropologist, W. decided. No, a chimp-specialist. I'd brought him closer to chimp-observation than to thinking.

Touching the Void

Astray, that's what I've always been. Missing, in some sense. AWOL. – 'You're a deserter by inclination. You know nothing of loyalty, nothing of the cadre'.

What, for example, have I been doing all summer? Did I remember the task he set me? Did I remember to set aside at least two hours a day, for my study of Rosenstock-Heussy? Did I remember my Rosenstock-Heussy hours?

He, W., has been studying Cohen as we agreed. He's been reading the most obtuse and difficult of books, in German, and about mathematics, and says he'll send me his notes. 'But what about your notes?' Do I have them ready for him?

What happened to the pincer movement we agreed to undertake on German-Jewish philosophy? I was to approach it from one side (the easy side, W. notes), and he from the other side (the difficult side, W. says). I was to approach the mountain of German-Jewish philosophy from the east face, as it were (the easy slope), and he from the notoriously difficult west face (the difficult slope). He was to be a mountaineer of thought, and I – though no mountaineer – was to be something of a hill walker (of the low hills, the minor ones).

Heaven forefend that we would climb together! W. would never ask that. Never one reader-climber attached to the other by rope. Never two reader-climbers looking for handholds and footholds on the cliff face of Cohen's work.

German and mathematics, W. says. He knows it lies beyond me. I'm not his climbing-partner. He knows it would end up like Touching the Void, anyway. I'd have lost him down some cavern. He would have fell, doubtless trying to save me from some great reading-error, and I would have let him fall, disregarding both my error and his attempt to correct me, and even severed the rope that bound us together.

Yes, he would have fallen, and I, cutting the rope, would attempt to find the easy way round, the simplest of routes. I'd be reading my Idiot's Guide to Cohen instead. My Cohen in Sixty Minutes. And I'd come down the mountain whistling. I've read Cohen, I'd say. And meanwhile, W. be lying there groaning.

The Labyrinth

Lost in a labyrinth, you should take the same turn every time if you want to escape. The same turn, that's what I've always taken, W. says. The wrong turn. Every time! How have I managed to get it so wrong? Is it an instinct? Is it the opposite of an instinct? 

And now I'm taking him with me. Why does he follow me?, W. wonders. It's not as if he has no choice. He chooses to follow me, that's the thing. It's his choice – or is it? Is it an instinct? Is it the opposite of an instinct?

Either way, we'll remain in the labyrinth, the pair of us. We'll stay there, getting more and more lost, lost until we've forgotten we're in a labyrinth. It's becoming our world, says W. Our whole world, and isn't that his horror?

He's like an actor who's forgotten he's acting. A secret agent in the deepest of cover. He doesn't know who he is anymore. A denizen of Larsworld, that's it, isn't it? Another of my nutters and weirdoes …

Radical Idiocy

W. wants to know more about my typewriter. What kind of typewriter was it? An electronic one, I tell him. It had a little screen where you could see the words you typed. it had a 70 character memory, I remember that. – 'So it wasn't a mechanical typewriter at least', W. says.

It was light, I tell him. You could take it anywhere. – 'And you did take it anywhere, didn't you?, says W. You took it to the Greek islands, didn't you? You slept with it near you in your rucksack, didn't you? There it was, in your rucksack: your electronic typewriter, how marvellous.

'What's the opposite of talent?', W. says. 'What's the opposite of ability? That was your curse', he says, 'to be possessed by the opposite of talent, the opposite of ability. It never stopped you, did it? Something in you didn't want to be stopped. And it led you to Greece, didn't it? It led you all the way to the Greek islands.

'Were you cursed, do you think?, W. says. Did you commit some terrible deed in a previous life? What accounts for it?' It interests him, he says, the question of my compulsion. He wonders where it comes from. There I was, with my typewriter. There it was, in my rucksack, ready for me to get it out, charge it up …

Did I have an adaptor? Yes, I had an adaptor. W. imagines me plugging it in, my typewriter, first into an adaptor, and then into the wall. There it was, humming away, W. says. He imagines it humming. Humming and ready, its LCD screen blank and waiting, with its 70 character memory.

'What were you going to write?', W. says. 'What were you about to write? Were you waiting for inspiration? Yes, that's it, isn't it: I was waiting for inspiration, for the divine afflatus. I was waiting like the author of the Book of Revelations to be touched by the divine. The apocalypse: that was always my favourite word, wasn't it? Images of angels and devils fighting in heaven …

'What's the opposite of talent?', W. says. 'What's the opposite of inspiration?' My typewriter! Did I ever get it out in Greece, during my trip to Greece? Did I ever once peer at its grey LCD screen, waiting for black characters (you could enter 70 at a time …), waiting for inspiration to type my black characters, my fingers too fat for the keys (W. always imagines that: my too fat fingers, my pudgy little fingers …)? Did I get it out to type in a cafe as I blinked in the sun? Did I open it in the building site where I slept rough?

I didn't open it all, I tell him. I didn't type a thing. And what did that teach you?, W. asks. What did you learn from the whole fiasco? 'Anyone else, W. says, would have been shamed in stopping writing and any attempt to write. They would have abandoned it there and then, without fuss. But the opposite of talent led you astray, didn't it?, W. says. The opposite of ability, which isn't simply inability'.

Radical stupidity, W. says, thinking of radical evil. Radical idiocy, which isn't simply idiocy, which is to say, the absence of intelligence. No, radical idiocy has its own force, its own momentum. In truth, nothing was going to make me stop, not then, despite everything. Nothing was going to make me stop, just as nothing prevented me from actually travelling out to Greece, with my typewriter.

With my typewriter!, W. cries. With my electronic typewriter!

The Wrong Island

A Book of Revelations: was that what I was going to write? A new Book of Revelations, a new Apocalypse: is that why I journeyed out to that Greek island? It's the funniest thing of all, W. says, the thought of me heading out on the ferry from Piraeus with my divine mission in mind. How hilarious! What did I intend to do? What did I think would happen?

Of course Piraeus is disgusting now, everyone knows that. Was it really where I was going to begin my mystical journey? I must have been disappointed, W. says. I was, wasn't I? Athens was bad enough, that's what I told him, but Piraeus! Piraeus was an abomination. But I was borne along in a dream. I had my dream. I drifted along, a young idiot.

'And what did you have in your rucksack?', W. asks. 'What was in there?' He knows, he says. He knows full well. It's a detail I shouldn't omit. Your typewriter!, exclaims W. Your typewriter … It was some time ago, W. says. Before laptops, at any rate. Well, before they became cheap. And a pen and paper wouldn't do, would it? Not for taking dictation with regard to the apocalypse. A typewriter! A typewriter was essential!

'There you were', says W., 'on the ferry with your rucksack and your typewriter. What books did you bring? Did you take anything to read? Oh I forgot, didn't I?', W. says. 'You were going to give up reading. You were going to let it go. Books were going to drop out of your hand. What were you going to do instead? Act? Step into the world? Hilarious', W. says. 'The temerity!', he says. 'Write? Yes, that was it, wasn't it?', he says. 'You were going to write. To write as a man acts. And write a new Book of Revelations.

'Of course, you never got to your island, did you?' It'd gone wrong at Piraeus. I'd asked for the wrong island, or they misheard me, or they wanted to misdirect me. But I was heading for Paros, not Patmos. Paros, and by mistake – the party island, what an idiot! That was my mystical journey, W. says, to a party island.

'What did you think as the ferry docked? Patmos has become very commercial – is that what you thought? It's very noisy here – is that what you thought? People don't wear much on Patmos – was that it?

'Still, you made good. You slept on a rock and woke in the sun. It was Sunday. Old ladies gave you collaver. And then, rucksack on your back, up you went to the monastery, the deserted monastery. You had one of your pantheistic little ecstasies, didn't you?

'Imagine it: a Hindu in a Greek Orthodox monastery, completely deserted. A Hindu ready to write a new Book of Revelations. Paros, not Patmos'. W. still finds it funny. 'An idiot with a typewriter, on the wrong island. An idiot on his mystical journey, and no books to read, on the wrong island …'

The Book of Revelations

Your trip overseas. Your period as a world traveller. It's W.'s favourite story. You'd flown off to the Mediterranean, hadn't you?, W. says. You'd flown there as a world traveller, never to return! Did you speak the language? Had you made preparations for your visit? Did you know anything about the culture and mores of the country you were going to? The answer is no in each case, says W. You just went, didn't you? Off you went as a world traveller.

What did you expect? What did you think awaited your there? No sooner than your plane had touched down, no sooner than you were through the airport, but someone would recognise you for the wit and bon vivant you were, someone would invite you for lunch, someone for cocktails – you would be already on your way to becoming a local sensation, a favoured visitor from overseas, a man to be welcomed and passed around, introduced here, introduced there.

Soon, you'd be the centre of a whole circle. Soon, right at the heart of things, the social world orbiting around you, you'd caused a kind of frisson, women were throwing themselves at you, men were vying for your company. Your conversation was legendary, your learning magnificent, you could talk on every topic, from the petty to the world-historical.

Yes, you'd be recognised for what you were, at last. The world knew you, lauded you, carried you on its shoulders. All it took was a trip to another country. All it took was some resolve, a plane ticket, and there you would be, in a country that would celebrate your talents.

Was that what you dreamed of, W. asks, with your plans for world travel? Is that what you thought awaited you on the other side? And instead, what happened? You lurched from disaster to disaster, didn't you? No sooner were you off the plane than you were beaten down by the sun – beaten by it. You'd never experienced Mediterranean heat before, had you? You'd never seen a cloudless sky. And that blue – the fierce blue of a sky without clouds. It was too much for you, wasn't it?  

You became curiously mute. You'd been stunned into silence. You didn't say a thing. What could you say? What could you have said? Nothing was going to happen to you. You'd be picked up and carried along by no crowd. There was no one to whom you could prove yourself.

Who was interested in you? Who knew your name? If you were a little younger, a paedophile might have followed you around. A little younger, a little cuter, and some pervert with a camera might have taken pictures. But then, there, in the Mediterranean heat, no one wanted to know you. No one spoke to you, even out of pity.

Because you had the wrong personality, didn't you? The entirely wrong personality. You were not a world traveller. You were not a go-getter. You weren't a hail-fellow-well-met kind of person. You were surly, as you are now. You were churlish. You kept to yourself – who else would have you? You spoke to no one – who would want to listen?

What had the Mediterranean have to do with you? – that was your thought, wasn't it? What had it to do with you, the remorseless sky, the heat, the beaches, the sunbathers? And what were you to it in turn - the towns of white houses, the cafe bars, the tavernas? Where did the Venn diagrams intersect: the Venn diagram of the Mediterranean and the Venn diagram of Lars?

You slept rough, didn't you? You slept in a building site and then out in the open, on the rocks, the loop of your rucksack strap around your arm, for security. You slept on a beach, didn't you, and the sea came up? You thought: I'll sleep on this beach, how romantic, and then the sea came up and soaked your rucksack. The waves came in and you had to flee, didn't you, world traveller? Up they came, the waves, and off you went into town, towards God-knows-where in the darkness, because there you were lost, hopelessly lost on a Mediterranean island.

Why had you travelled to that island to the first place, anyway? Why did you book a ticket there, to island, among all the others? It was something about the Book of Revelations, wasn't it? It had been written there, hadn't it? Did you think some great vision was going to befall you? Did you think you'd see the end of the world? What did you see on the beach, as the waves came up? What, as you were driven into town, looking for somewhere sensible to stay?

How long did you last out there in the Mediterranean? How long, in your new life as a world traveller? A few days, that was it, wasn't it? A few days – a handful – instead of a lifetime. And there it was, green England, that you could see from your plane window. Green England – lush, verdant – and not the rocky Mediterranean. Had you had any visions?, W. says, rocking back and forth in laughter. Had you finished a new Book of Revelations? Had something of the apocalypse been revealed to you? Ah … it's his favourite story, W. says.

The Scorpion

We were laughing, but at you. You were laughing, but you were alone in your laughter, on the other side of our laughter. We were on one side, laughing, and you were on the other, similarly laughing. But everything depends upon where you are when you laugh.

We were watching you as we'd always watched you. And you – you'd seen yourself for the first time. And what had you seen? What we had always seen. What we had been watching for some time. And now you'd seen it. Now you wanted to join the club – the laughing club.

But do you really think you could laugh at yourself the way we laughed at you? Did you think you could join our side? You're alone, that's the truth, and how long can you laugh? Alone – laughing in your cage, your box. Laughing in the cell of your stupidity. And listening to your laughter echo. And listening to your laughter die away.

In the end, we don't envy you. In the end, you should never have found out. You should have believed your own lies, your alibis. And now you know? And now it's become clear? But nothing is clear. A scorpion can't sting itself. A tarantula is immune to its own poison. And the actor cannot be his own audience – not right there, not immediately.

Then who are you? Who are you now? Caught between yourself and yourself. Lost between two facing mirrors, and that's the curse, isn't? You have to live on, don't you? You've survived your collapse, when you were only collapse. So what are you now?

The Dresser Crab

A dresser crab builds its shell from whatever's to hand. It takes what it can, what it must, in order to have a shell. Its defence is borrowed. And you? You've built your life, which is to say, the failure of your life, from whatever you could find. And what you've found! What you've stumbled across!

You chanced yourself into a library, didn't you? You read. You thought you were entitled to read. You snuck in when no one as watching, and there you were with all the others, reading. Reading like a reader. But unlike them, you had no idea how to read. Unlike them, fluent readers, turning page after page, you were only a would-be reader, a reader-pretend. You turned pages as they did; your eyes scanned the lines as theirs did. But what could you take in? What could you read, really read?

And one day - and what a day! - you thought you'd begin to write, too, didn't you? That was the next step, the most hilarious one. You thought you could write, that you were entitled to write. And couldn't you fill a page like the others? Couldn't you type, or at least perform a simulacrum of typing, your fat little fingers hitting the keys? It's a wonder you could type, with your fingers. What a joke! If you began laughing, you could never stop. You began writing, and you couldn't stop that, either. Logorrhea. Literary diarrhoea streaming down your legs.

You read, you thought, so you could write. But in fact, you could do neither, and were entitled to neither. You could not read – reading is alien to you – but writing is yet more alien. The ability to write is the most distant thing from you of all. You – write? But you did write, didn't you? Or you called it writing. You thought it was writing. No one else thought so, but you thought so, didn't you? For a while at least. For too long, but not forever …

A dresser crab, scuttling along the sea-floor. A crab, clothing itself in whatever was to hand. And what was to hand was the scholar's mantle, wasn't it? What was to hand was the library-ruse and the writing-ruse – my God, what a joke! But if you began laughing, what then? If you even started to laugh?

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 Concrete

W. has grown increasingly convinced that intellectual conversation itself is an affectation. At first, he had supposed it was bad manners to talk of abstract things at dinner. When you eat, eat, that's what he had thought, and save the abstract matters for later.

But now? Intellectual conversation – so-called intellectual conversation – is itself a ruse, an excuse, he says. We have to plunge into concrete matters, W. says. Our conversation must be as concrete as our eating.

Friends of the Chicken

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.

WH: Whether Philippe's walk between the Twin Towers was witnessed by anyone down in the street really didn't matter. Philippe once secretly put a cable across a 2,400-foot ravine and walked across it and danced on the rope. Only a farmer who was driving his cattle at sunrise realized that someone was there. He rushed into the village to wake a policeman. And when they came back on a motorcycle, there was no Philippe, there was no wire left.

PP: But the cows remember.

Philippe Petit and Werner Herzog in conversation

… the crew couldn't take [the scene with the dancing chicken], they hated it, they were a loyal group and in case of Stroszek they hated it so badly that I had to operate the camera myself because the cinematographer who was very good and dedicated, hated it so much that he didn't want to shoot it. He said, "I've never seen anything as dumb as that.” And I tried to say, "You know there's something so big about it." But they couldn't see it.

[….] the dancing chicken was shot in Cherokee, North Carolina. When you are speaking about these images, there's something bigger about them, and I keep saying that we do have to develop an adequate language for our state of civilization, and we do have to create adequate pictures – images for our civilization. If we do not do that, we die out like dinosaurs, so it's of a different magnitude, trying to do something against the wasteland of images that surround us, on television, magazines, post cards, posters in travel agencies…

Herzog, interviewed

– And it is mysterious how cinema works in that respect. It is the placement of a shot that makes it so important, and makes it highly significant. It’s like the end of “Stroszek”, for example, with the dancing chicken. But then, the technical crew or almost everyone on location hated the film so much that ultimately the cinematographer refused to shoot it (the shot) and said: “We are going for lunch now if you want to film that shit. “ And I said: “I’m gonna film that shit, sure.” And I tried to tell them. “Don’t you see there’s something very very big here?” And nobody saw it. It was really big. And it’s still one of the best things I ever filmed in my life.

– That’s one of the most beautiful endings of a film…

– Even the crew that I paid and who were loyal to me went on strike.

[…]

– And one thing about that scene, it is a rare occurrence of inter-cutting different things happening simultaneously, from Bruno on the mountain to the animals (chickens, ducks, rabbits) dancing and playing music and to the truck on fire making circles outside. Usually your scenes are rather large segments, set in one space, one situation, often shot in long takes….

– Yes but the animals dance for quite a while so you hang on to that. The problem was that the chickens wouldn’t dance for more than 15 seconds and then they would retreat. We had them in special training for dancing as long as they could. When you fed a quarter into the machine, the music would play and the chicken would dance. And as a reward it would get some corn. They were accustomed to dancing for 3 to 5 seconds. Now I held them in training for a couple of months to dance as long as they could. But they would only dance for 15 seconds. The problem is, I couldn’t get away with an ending that was a 15 second shot. I had quite a few of those shots and I had to add them together. There was always a jump cut. So there were technical reasons behind it as well. Very often it’s not an ideology or so that’s behind something.

Herzog, interviewed

In myths people live forever. In fairy-tales they live happily ever after. In novels there is, at the end of the 'ever after', the beginning of unhappiness, and usually even before.

from Cees Nooteboom's In the Dutch Mountains

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.

Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks

Hikikomori, lit. 'pulling away, being confined', i.e., 'acute social withdrawal', is a Japanese term to refer to the phenomenon of reclusive individuals who have chosen to withdraw from social life, often seeking extreme degrees of isolation and confinement because of various personal and social factors in their lives[….]

Although there are occasions when the hikikomori may venture outdoors, usually at night to buy food, the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare defines hikikomori as individuals who refuse to leave their parents' house and isolate themselves from society for a period exceeding six months. While the degree of the phenomenon varies on an individual basis, in the most extreme cases, some youths remain in isolation for years or even decades. Often hikikomori start out as school refusals or futoko in Japanese.

From Hikikomori, Wikipedia entry

The Third Person

Bruno, Bruno Stroszek. Everything is concentrated in his figure. All the secrets of the world, of the end of the world. Everything that is to happen, that will happen. Fate, the secret of fate.

He speaks of himself in the third person, which is already a sign. In the third person as if he were also someone else, another person, away from him. As though he were already away from himself, displaced. As though he somehow happened to himself, as all events happen to him. As though he suffered himself, befell himself, lived – and died – as his own fate; no – as fate, not his own fate. As fate.

Bruno suffers … he suffers in advance of whatever will happen to him. He's a kind of prophet, but what sees is doom, not salvation. He knows in advance that it's all going to fail. We're going down: he knows that. The descent has begun: that he knows.

He's not even resigned – that's not the word for it. It's not as if he knows his fate and then resigns himself to it. He's not a man dead in advance. All hope has not been hollowed from him. It's rather that hope, his hope takes place amidst fate.

He knows it will end, that it's all coming to an end, but he hopes nonetheless. He hopes nevertheless, against himself and against fate. He can still enter into life, or at least part of him can. But there's another part, which is what he speaks of in the third person. It's why he speaks of himself in the third person, he must do. Because what he is is divided, there where he should be one. Divided, right there, as hope and despair are divided …

Cycles

Berlin, winter. Bruno S., Bruno Stroszek is released from prison. He's warned not to drink – it's drink that gets him in trouble. But Bruno knows that it's got nothing to do with drink. There are cycles in which he gets caught up. Cycles of life which catch him out. What can he do, Bruno, to change things? He is only Bruno …

Bruno speaks of himself in the third person. He's a spectator of himself. He stands to one side; he barely occupies his own place. He suffers; he undergoes life. It happens to him from without and he even happens to himself from the same place, from the same non-place: without.

Who is Bruno S. but one to whom things happen? Cycles, always cycles. And isn't it these cycles that lead him straight to a bar for a drink? Aren't these same cycles what lead him to bring her back to his apartment (Bruno S.'s real life apartment), which is being looked after by his elderly neighbour, Mr Scheitz (played by a Mr Scheitz)), who has a strong belief in animal magnetism (as Mr Scheitz in real life had a similar belief in animal magnetism)?

But Bruno loves to play music. There is something he loves, something which makes him feel less lonely. He plays the piano (which Bruno S. bought with his royalties from a previous film) and the accordion. He plays handbells. A moving sequence: watching Bruno perform a Berlin street song with his accordian in a back alley. (That was how the real Bruno S. performed on the weekend – in gardens, playing nineteenth century ballads in back garden. During the week, he would drive forklift trucks to make a living). 

He sings, he plays, and appears to disappear into his singing, his playing. (Later, in real life, he would claim to transmit songs, rather than perform them. To transmit them: this too would be part of fate, happening to Bruno from without). Is music part of a cycle? Or is it what allows him to escape the cycle – a kind of reprieve? When he's beaten up by Eva's pimps, he is so on the piano, on the handbells. A strange crucifixion. What does it mean? Has he lost his music? Has fate interposed itself between him and his music (but it's barely his music)?

Mr Scheitz tells him his nephew in Wisconsin has invited him to live with him. A decision: Bruno has made a decision: they should all go to Wisconsin, says Bruno: he, Mr Scheitz and Eva. Yes, it's time for them to start new lives, Bruno says. They should go! They must go! A decision: perhaps Eva has given him hope. Eva who will share his bed, even as she prostitutes herself to earn enough money for them all to go. A decision: is Bruno really standing up to fate? Is he really raising himself against it?

And there they are in Railroad Flats, Winconsin (it was really Plainfield, Ed Gein's home town, which Herzog had explored on a previous visit) … Of course, things go awry, as Bruno knows they must. Everything is fate to him. Everything comes from without. He happens to himself. He occurs in his place, in the place he cannot take. There's only music – fate? Something like counter-fate, or another part or face of fate. But here he is in America, far from his apartment, his piano, his music.

And now the decline, the terrible lability, and who is he to resist? Depressed, penniless, what life can he offer Eva? She closes her door to him. She sleeps with lorry drivers, disappears with them. Ah, fate has caught up with him, Bruno! He tried to stand up to fate, but fate broke him apart. Now the downward spiral, now the road to the end …

In real life, Bruno S. would say 'they threw him away' of what happened after his film success. He never acted again; he couldn't speak of Herzog except with great pain. They threw him away, but he still performs, he still sings and plays.

Fate and the Chicken

Bruno S., Bruno Stroszek, knows it's going to turn bad. He knows it's heading in the wrong direction. Things were set in motion long before he appeared. Someone's put money in the slot. He'll do what he should. He'll dance like the chicken in the arcade – it's his fate.

What can he do but dance? And it's not even dancing. It's what he has to do. It's the only thing he can do, just like Kafka's hunger artist, who has no choice but to starve. He has to pick his feet from the hot plate, or they will get burnt. He has to act, he has to do things, otherwise there'll be trouble.

What if had let Eva be mistreated by her pimp? What if he hadn't brought her back to his apartment? Trouble followed her, of course. They roughed up Bruno. He had to leave. It was the best thing to go with Eva and Mr Scheitz to live in Wisconsin. What choice did they have? To have stayed would have been madness. And to move … Bruno has to move. He's like the dancing chicken.

And what could he do, while in Wisconsin, but find somewhere to live for Eva and himself? They couldn't live on the plains of Railway Flats after all, could they? The mobile home – a double width 1973 Fleetwood mobile home – was the obvious choice. Bruno deserved a little luxury. A console TV. The Winsconsin plains were the hot plate. 

But didn't he know, even as he signed the contract, that he would have to make payments – payments he was in no way capable of making? Of course – but what could he do? There was a hotplate underneath him. He moved – he danced. He twitched, that was all. It was a reflex – and how could he be blamed for that? It was going to turn bad, he knew. Things always turned bad … 

It wasn't as if they were cruel to him, the Americans. Clayton, Mr Scheitz's nephew, was nice. Bruno works for him as a mechanic. So was the bank official, who seemed embarrassed to bring up the subject of money, but who warns Bruno nevertheless about the dangers of repossession.

But Bruno's bored with his job. He can't pay his bills. He becomes depressed. Eva closes her door to him. She sleeps alone now. And eventually, the mobile home, which came in towed by a truck, is auctioned off. Where's he going to live? It's all falling apart, as Bruno knew it would. It had to fall apart. How could it be otherwise?

Desperation: Bruno and Mr Scheitz are convinced there's a conspiracy against them. They have to act! The hotplate again. So they take a rifle and go to rob a bank. Only the bank's closed. They rob the barber shop next door instead. They net 32 dollars. Then they head across to the supermarket, Bruno picking up a frozen chicken.

Mr Scheitz, with his rifle, is arrested. Bruno drives their getaway car, which they'd left running, to an amusement arcade. He leaves his car running in circles outside. He feeds quarters to make a real rabbit ride a fire truck, a duck play a bass drum, and a chicken dance. Then he goes off to ride on a chairlift with his frozen chicken.

What else could he do? Off he goes, his chicken on the seat beside him. We hear a gunshot. Bruno's shot himself. And we return to the chicken. We watch the chicken dancing, the chicken made to dance on its hot plate, Sonny Terry's harmonica on the soundtrack.

Fate means what we are at the mercy of. And we are at the mercy of what cannot yet become word.

Salvation always comes from where nobody expects it, from the depraved, from the impossible.

Evil increases automatically. Inertia, laziness, cowardice, death are self-multiplying. Good 'is' not, except by propagation; it is not in any man, but originates only between. No man is good. But the word or act that links men may be good. And by linking evil has to be constantly combated.

Man must be torn open again and again by the plowshare of suffering.

Nothing great in this world can be achieved without great expectation. The expectancy of the listeners is a condition for every communication. Only in response to the messianic expectancy of all peoples could the Messiah come. And only what fulfils a longing finds an enduring place in history.

Only by his great outcry, 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me,' did Jesus become our brother[….] Faith cannot live unless it remains intermittent; that bitter truth admits death where it belongs in our belief, as a bringing of new life.

The combined expectation and delay of Christ's return is the contradiction on which the Christian lives, a tension which is the paradoxical essence of Christianity.

The greatest temptation of our time is impatience, in its full original meaning: refusal to wait, undergo, suffer.

The history of the human race is accordingly written on a single theme: How does love become stronger than death?

Death is not overcome by not dying, but by our loving beyond death.

Rosenstock-Huessy, cited here.

Walser

It was a job like any other, Robert Walser said of writing; he wrote just as a farmer would sow and reap, or would feed his animals and muck out after them. He needed to eat, after all, and he had a sense of duty … It was just like any other job, he said. He could make a living, publishing in literary magazines. Shouldn't artists fit in with the ordinary? Shouldn't they be like anyone else? But then writing depends upon some measure of creative strength, and you can't count on that. Walser wrote best in the morning, before noon, and later, much later at night. 'The hours between noon and night found me stupid'. 'Things can only grow from me unforced', he said; this meant he couldn't bind himself to any particular newspaper, to any particular publisher (I'm quoting from Seelig's memoir of Walser, available in its entirety here). 

Walser's books. His first novel, The Tanners, published in 1906, was written in six weeks. The next year saw The Assistant, and in 1909, his own personal favourite among his books, the great Jakob von Gunten. In the same year, a volume of poems was published. Walser makes little money. He writes three more novels, but burns them, finding the form too long winded. He decides to return to the short stories, playlets and feuilletons which, he feels, were more suited to his talents.

Looking back on his youth, Walser worries later that he wrote too much. Shouldn't a writer save up his creativity for old age? Sometimes a writer will have nothing to say. 'Always pacing about the same room can lead to impotence'. Doesn't writing demand the full strength of a human being? It can suck you dry. Perhaps this was why he appeared to enjoy moving home. Each time, he began again. Each time, he forgot the past and immersed himself in his new surroundings. 'Ordinary people like us should be as quiet as possible'. He never had a library, only a few Reclam editions. 'What else do you need?', he said.

Walser living became more precarious. His short stories and feuilletons, which he'd been writing steadily for some years, made little money. He was offered money by generous benefactors to go abroad – to India, to Turkey. But why should he go? 'It's nice, just to stay'. He remained, but in increasing poverty and isolation. He'd never got on with his fellow writers; he held back from those artistic circles where, if he did attend, he was liable to drink and become aggressive.

In spring 1913, he returned to Switzerland, to Biel, where he'd live for seven years. 'I thought it was advisable to be as inconspicuous as possible'. He lived in his sister's apartment. He saw almost no one. 'I went walking by myself, day and night'. He continued to write, but due to the war, it had become harder to publish. Several volumes of prose appear nevertheless, although tastes in the reading public were changing. Who wanted to read feuillitons now? He had his admirers, of course; but they were busy with other things.

Walser moved into an attic room of a hotel. 'There was only a bed, a table and a chair. A cheap map of Europe was tacked to the wall', a visitor remembered. He wrote in a greatcoat and slippers, fashioned from scraps of worn out clothes, to protect him from the cold. Imagine it, the writer bent over his manuscript, his breath visible in the air … Soon he felt he'd written himself out. 'I had exhausted all my subjects, like a cowherd his pasture'.

In 1920, he moved to Berne, taking a job for a few months as an archivist, before being dismissed for insubordination. He was soon back at his 'short prose factory', i.e., his desk. Walser took long walks as he always done. But by now he was drinking heavily, and displaying the signs of depression which ran through his family. He tried to take his life, but 'I couldn't make a proper noose'. Eventually, in 1929, his sister took him to an asylum in Berne. 'I asked her just outside the gate, "Are we doing the right thing?" Her silence gave me the answer. What else could I do but enter?'

'The patient confessed hearing voices', it said in his medical records. 'Markedly depressed and severely inhibited. Responded evasively to questions about being sick of life'. Walser would recover, and continued to write and publish. In particular, he followed a way of writing he called the 'pencil method' – composing poems and prose on the back of envelopes, bank statements and other correspondence in a tiny hand, with individual letters no more than a millimetre in height. For a long time, these writings were assumed to be entirely hermetic, written in a private code, but they were deciphered – Walser had simply adopted an erratic style of abbreviation – and published in the 1990s.

Why did Walser adopt the pencil method? He experienced cramps in his right hand, which he interpreted as a psychosomatic hostility towards the pen with which he wrote. His switch to the pencil, then, allowed him to write, albeit with a completely altered script. But then, too, it seems that writing with a pencil allowed him to attain easily that state of mind in which he could produce his whimsical, dreamily associative prose. Although he continued to use a pen for fair copies and correspondence, Walser produced some 500 pages of microscript in these years, 24 of which yielded The Robber, 141 pages in print, a novel whose existence he didn't mention to others. He also returned to writing poems, many of which, unlike his microscripts, were published. (I'm drawing here on Coetzee's excellent essay. See also this volume of translations from 'the pencil area').

Walser continued to publish until he was moved, against his will, to a mental hospital at Herisau, where he could receive full welfare support. 'It's madness and cruelty to demand that I continue to write in the sanitarium', he says to Seelig, 'The basis of a writer's creativity is freedom. As long as this condition is not met I refuse to write again'. And he did not write; but the room, paper or pen he claimed were not available to him could have been so. He lived quietly, unprotestingly carrying out the tasks the institution set for him. 'I'm not here to write, I'm here to be mad', he told a visitor. Was he mad? His doctors wavered in their opinion. But Walser didn't want to leave, and resisted all attempts to resettle him.

Walser said he'd found the quiet he needed, in the asylum, he said to Seelig. He lay 'like a felled tree'; his desires had fallen asleep 'like children exhausted from their play'. He lived as in a monastery or a waiting room, he said. 'I was happy as things stood'. He wonders whether Hoelderlin's last 30 years might have also been happy. 'To be able to dream away in some quiet corner without having to satisfy obligations is certainly not the martyrdom that people make it out to be'.

He was content; his needs were met; he could go out on the long walks he enjoyed. But there was another reason why he no longer wrote, at least initially. As he says to Seelig, 'my world was smashed by the Nazis', he said. 'The papers that I wrote for are gone; their editors hunted down or killed'. The world had changed around him. He wanted to find a still point – first of all in writing, whose source was always uncertain, always liable to fatigue, and then, when that was exhausted – when there was nowhere left to for him to move, no more bedsitters, no more attic rooms in which to rediscover his strength, his freedom - the sure world of the asylum.