Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  and, needless to say, it overpowers me, does not tolerate me outside itself, I merely belong inside it, belong to it, in any case: after all, the superreality is the totality of all current events, the magazines draw a weekly interim balance from it, a rough estimate, as it were, with the praiseworthy goal of telling me about everything as far as possible, letting me participate in the whole . . . On the whole, however, everything (including me) is one and the same, no matter how one thing or the other may behave (however I may behave); everything exists quite simply by dint of its existence, no matter how active or passive—hence I too am in it simply by dint of my existence, whether I intervene “actively” in reality or stay lounging here inactively on my chaise longue, experiencing the events at second hand. I realize I must not confuse the totality of current events with so-called current history. The latter, of course, requires my active participation. I must not be passive with it. Otherwise I might drop out of reality, be given the go-by, remain forever invisible, eradicated.

  To exist at all, then, I must act, I must become a member of the German parliament or detonate a bomb that shreds at least three members of parliament (if not a chancellor), I must fly to the moon or poison someone. The more effectively my action interferes with current history, the more defined is my existence. But superreality is simply not current history, it is the totality of current events in its fullness, and in this totality, current history dissolves, whereby all my efforts to intervene actively dissolve as well. There are, as one can clearly see, many different kinds of current history at the same time: that of the United States of America looks different from that of the Congo (hence, Frank Sinatra’s looks different from Lumumba’s, and mine looks different from Wernher von Braun’s). And yet all of us, with our various current histories, are contained in the entirety of current events—all present, whether as oil sheikhs or big bankers, lunar-rocket passengers or record-breaking athletes, movie stars or duchesses, popular singers, politicians, or gangsters, poisoners, bomb-throwers, or other foul-players—or else as amateur gardeners, animal protectors, good Samaritans, quiet book readers, anchorites, blissful navel contemplators, marijuana smokers. Everything exists in the superreality. Thus, it is not reality in motion, like history, but rather the unchanging state of Being in and of itself, of which sometimes this and sometimes that becomes visible. And, visible or invisible, everything exists in it; hence I do as well: whether as someone experiencing a collective destiny or someone shaping a collective destiny, whether as a head of state or as a Trappist monk, an anonymous nobody or a wanton seeker of fame and glory. Whatever occurs in the superreality occurs only as something extant, thus entirely without indication of value, the bomb-thrower peacefully next to the navel contemplator, the poisoner fraternally next to the Samaritan . . .

  In this sense, superreality is almost paradisal, its effect is paralyzing, soporific, like an old lullaby that goes “Such is life, my child . . .” I am challenged to stay on my chaise longue and content myself with what I can experience vicariously (on the weekly balance drawn by the magazines). But on the other hand, what I thus experience is so monstrous and violent, so fills my consciousness to the bursting point with phenomena events occurrences incidents, that it keeps stretching further and further, becomes more and more expansive. Superreality has the explosive character that physicists usually attribute to cosmic events; while I rest here as a silent nucleus of overall events on the chaise longue I simultaneously fly out into the universe at a furious velocity. It is ridiculous to hold fast to the old, out-of-date idea of action, to the obsession with activity or passivity vis-à-vis history—this would mean something only if I had a history in the absolute sense, were allowed to have a history. This history would be the skin, the solidifying envelope, of the person. It would give me contours—and thus form. What once held together my SELF (at least in my imagination), giving it distinguishable, recognizable form, was the notion of a personal history. But this now proves to be a typically subjectivistic error, showing only my infantile limitation of vision; it is schizothymically autistic, correlating with my bourgeois worldview and leptosomic habitus: superreality enlightens me, makes me understand that my conception of self is completely out of proportion. Hertzog ought to prescribe group sex for me, so that I can finally realize that I have no history. The trivial circumstances of my life are stereotypical, and they integrate me pitilessly into the masses. I am (despite the silly trials and tribulations that I regard as circumscribing my personality) ultimately, unavoidably, quite simply, a contemporary. As such, I experience a banal variant of global destiny as a member of Western Civilization—and as such, in turn, am merely a mote of dust in the cloud configurations of the history of mankind, nay, of the earth—in my present situation, I am nothing more than a phenotype of my historical position and destination, by necessity earning money (at least making a living, however tardily), an unwilling taxpayer, renter, consumer, transportation user, and, especially as the last, inevitably a zoon politikon.

  This is thoroughly impressed upon me here, each article is intent on firmly imprinting this upon my consciousness: The disciplined driving that I expect from others obliges me to maintain the same myself; this can also be understood in an extrapolated sense, in every aspect of life I must respect red and green lights, above all however the rules concerning right-of-way. Should this have escaped me up to now, it is here once more hammered into me. Individualism is suicide and more than that a crime against the collective. What could eventually set me apart from others like me would occur at the mercy of the journalistic organs that I hold in my hand. They alone are capable of thrusting me into the spheres of visibility, of elevating me to the status of being the subject of an interview, a photo essay, a report. But in the absence of such an (incidentally thoroughly untimely) occurrence, I’m not even able to upgrade the unwilling taxpayer in myself to an impressive evader of millions: my image would then appear in equal stature alongside other prominent figures like Aga Khan, Cordin the tailor, Eichmann, the member of parliament Rainer Barzel—so here too, nothing doing. The stroke of luck of extraordinary natural gifts (quiz show intelligence, photogenic beauty, golden vocal chords, etc.) is unfortunately not my lot, nor regretfully any stupendous abnormality (pyromaniac, Siamese twin, heart transplant patient).

  But even if I had, could, wanted, and did achieve all of it: it would again only place me within another multitude, a likewise progressively growing collective like that of the anonymous. For of course the other purpose of these pages, no longer strictly informational but rather instructional, seems to be to pin down the extraordinary, to track down all those who in some way, positive or negative, stand out from the masses, who in some way distinguish themselves, to photograph them, interview them, publicize them as representative bearers of experience. Not necessarily in order to rake up the old notion of merit and achievement as a means of character building, but rather solely for reasons of indexing: to set reference points for the inventory of the super-reality. And it’s astounding what doesn’t receive notice, what doesn’t merit attention, the group grows, in line with the zeitgeist, in a process of explosive expansion. Amazing what this right-of-way-obeying humanity still brings forth! This of course in a certain respect cancels out the potential for recognition, even the distinguished criminal heads of government leaders, the banker’s faces of politicians and church dignitaries can scarcely be told apart from one another, begin to become interchangeable, not to speak of the mass-produced film beauties, celebrity mannequins, notable athletes, Nobel Prize winners. Even if I were seized with the mad notion of being extraordinary, I would find this extraordinariness multiplied and typified into the multitudinous—for example as one of a few hundred thousand simpletons who delude themselves into thinking they could, with a masterpiece among a few hundred thousand not completely worthless masterpieces, influence the fate of mankind. And were I too actually a writerly talent that united in itself the qualities of Henry Miller with those of Dostoyevsky, and were
I actually to bring out a literary masterpiece that propelled me into the sphere of visibility of the illustrated press, I would only be allocated a place among yet another considerably proliferating group: namely, that of the successful literati; and my achievement would in no way raise me above that of the large-scale tax cheat, soccer goal scorer, or opposition politician. For in the super-reality of journalistic organs the concept of achievement is free of value, one’s rank is determined solely by topicality: what counts is its contemporaneity, be it the dynamic contemporaneity of a just done deed or—even better, more stable, more durable—the static contemporaneity of an exceptional condition. Consequently, the relatively speaking rare moral or ethical quality also pales before the more frequent topicality of the criminal or scandalous and of course the consistency of conditional extraordinariness: true, the song of the good man does occasionally get sung (the acknowledgment of beautiful souls is there in small print in the letters from readers), but what can this do next to the glamour of Jacqueline Kennedy, the demonic banality of Eichmann, the breasts of Anita Ekberg—these are existences, thank you very much, the Being ranks above the Doing; both can of course in a lucky case combine into peak-topicality as in the muscle-package of Mr. Schwarzenegger, but normally the conditional is the solid basis of contemporaneity in the super-reality: amidst all past achievement in fluttering topicality the extraordinary is more reliably established in radiation-intensities, vital superiorities, existential powers. But I possess none of these things. What I could in the best case bring to bear would be a book, and this would contain from me again only just the historical—thus the untopical; the account of a meandering career isn’t worth talking about in the all-American situation of today, especially not in the refugee-story-saturated German social solution. A Sinbad wouldn’t have anything special to tell here, world war and travel agencies deliver by the ton the experience of being geographically tossed around; at the level of a weekly magazine report no one would need such a thing. As a physiognomically recognizable, even name-bearing SELF, not even the fleeting topicality of a shooting star would be allotted me, not to mention the constant, if scarcely individualizable, contemporaneity of a fixed star in some galaxy or other. It’s more realistic to keep in mind that in reality I don’t exist at all: the super-reality of media is denied me, there no notice is taken of me, I don’t at all pass over the threshold of public consciousness, don’t take up even the slightest place in the superreal order of occurrences and am therefore actually not at all extant, a little particle in the giant collective of the anonymous without reality.

  To grasp the notion of the self physically, at least, I must bite heartily into my ham sandwich, chew, swallow, wash it down with a small glass of Bommerlunder or kümmel, smear a blob of liverwurst on crispbread, munch the hard, splintering crumbs well salivated with the soapy mass of liverwurst, push in a cheese stick, rinse my greasy mouth cavity with corn whiskey, counter its sharpness with that of a chocolate-covered peppermint. So I am eating dialectically at least, in boorish theses, antitheses, and syntheses of palatal stimuli. It helps me to feel that I do exist. How? This is given by the situation. Where? This is harder to establish. Hamburg is no longer what surrounds me here; it could just as well be Detroit or Sofia or even Minsk. It is purely and simply suburbia, a geographic superreality with no precise location. That too is an antiquated prejudice, an outmoded experience-cliché of the nineteenth century—Fridtjof Nansen struggling to get to the Pole, Mister Stanley I presume to the sources of the White Nile—but forget that nonsense, one cannot escape suburbia today, it devours the cities exactly the way it does the so-called (here truly) flatland. By tomorrow, I’ll be able to take the subway from here all the way to Palermo without leaving the jurisdiction of suburbia, without arriving anywhere but in suburbia, without experiencing anything but the sapping experience of the unreality, suffocating emptiness, abstractness of these death houses larded with a lemur people, the desolation around them, before them, behind them, beyond them . . . It’s to be had everywhere, in Palermo as well as Salonika, in the same consistent quality, the same picture here as there. No matter from what side one views the buildings, they have both a phallic and a sepulchral quality, always looming apocalyptically over the horizon—a horizon without foreland: a bare patch of curving earth. Like arm-amputated grave crosses seen from a frog’s-eye view, they bore into the sky, which soon bleeds to death.

  But before this happens, I still have a good half hour. I usually come by around five in the afternoon; so on cloudless days, even in late fall (already early winter in the Alpine foothills but still a coolly restrained slum summer here), I’ve got at least one and a half hours of surrender to the magazines in the sterile light of an eternal Sunday-afternoon emptiness, while the broad, who has been in the kitchenette since four o’clock, prepares something tasty for supper: “No, no, dear, you really can’t help me, this is women’s work—besides, you’ve got something to nibble on, anyway. I’ve got smoked eel too, dear, really fresh, from Kiel.”

  I could use it, thank you, I need something solid. Otherwise, the superreality will carry me weightlessly out into the void; my collective ego is in a moral clinch, so to speak, with my superego. Like Atlas, I carry the earth on my shoulders—and behold: it is light. Notwithstanding all the problems of determining a fair border for Manchuria, notwithstanding all the difficulties in Nigeria’s domestic politics, notwithstanding the mass slaughter of baby seals off the coasts of Newfoundland, even notwithstanding the peril of overpopulation, the globe does not press down on me at all. On the contrary, it is as weightless and iridescent as a soap bubble and carries me, floats with me, into space.

  There, incidentally, the day is actually vanishing, rarefying in a way that makes me experience the forlornness of the planet in outer space. The sun is not setting, but has disowned its satellite forever, its light is now a mere echo fleeing after it, the sun steals away, slips behind the diagonally echeloned triple formation of the Western high-rise block, transforming it for brief seconds into the modernistic trinity symbol from the display window of a progressive shop for devotional kitsch, a few final preclusive rays even quickly imitate the monstrance, then the dazzling humbug is snuffed out, three angular, leaden-gray thorns stick bluntly in the flesh of the sky, making it decay, its vital juice decompose, its hemoglobin (horribly filled with pus) congests over the curvature of the earth, running out beyond it, into the universe, only lymph remains, watery so long as a final reflection of solar gold is still trapped in the 396 windows of the southern squadron wing, this final reflection oozes away upward, strangely (as if through a fine-meshed latticework), then comes the moment of tipping over, I have anxiously looked forward to it the whole time.

  The instant I press the buzzer into the aluminum plate on one of the seventy-two entrance doors, I know: I have come to experience this dying of the world. The monosyllabic signal exchange by telephone (“Are you going to be home this afternoon?” “What time are you coming?”) is already the upbeat for this overture, the leitmotif for a tormenting poetry, a poetry with exchanged light values, as it were, a negative of poetry. It now drenches the essence of the final moments of a day whose borrowed light nevertheless simulated a possibility of life on the lost planet, a fata morgana play of definitive refractions. But now it’s past, the sky is a flinty polish, with three triple groups of thorn-shaped lead inclusions sticking in it, I feel its dead weight on me, it presses me into the rock where I lounge on a basalt chaise under the dome of a brazen sunshade with toadstool-shaped iron-oxide spots, it pushes me down with my last shriek of anxiety in my throat—I don’t want this, let anything happen, let the world petrify, but this must not happen, I must not be discovered in this geological era, this will lead to paleontological errors. I do not belong to this epoch of the world, it is not my epoch, it has swallowed me together with my former world and its various Middle Kingdoms, and it is deceptively using their myths. I protest. It was a human myth that designed ANTHROPOLIS, the city of man
kind; it was the dreams of human beings, not of horlàs, that this nightmare stole for its own monstrosity. This is corpse robbery. Every cubic meter of concrete from which this Stone Age was formed contains a cynical utilization of rubble. Even its barrenness, its heartrending emptiness, was finagled; it has appropriated the tormenting poetry of the bomb-crater fields of my era; everything that might hint at the former presence of human life is stolen from my epoch and falsely taken over into this nowness, is abstracted, is doctored into its own negative. I must warn the twentieth millennium’s explorers of primordial times: if among my fossils, beneath the stony cigarette butts and petrified ashes, they find the affected figure of a Montgolfier on a porcelain shard, that cannot enlighten them about what a balloon in the sky meant to me in my childhood. The petrified spinning wheel that may be found in one of the honeycomb cells as a decorative old-fashioned domestic item (transformed into a flowerpot holder) does not belong here. The power shovels that dug the foundations of these gigantic death houses bumped into this spinning wheel, unearthed it with other junk, perhaps from houses that once upon a time stood in this place, and pushed the archaic (almost African) ornamentation of their half-timber gables from the blossom balls of the cherry trees into the melting of airy spring cloudlets in the blue sky—in a long-submerged past before the past.

  But how am I to prove this? I will be dated not according to the memories under the potsherds of my cranium but according to the contents of my stomach. Remnants of black bread and cottage ham, liverwurst and country butter, kümmel and corn whiskey will corroborate the erroneous assumption that all these things belong together. No one will stand up to testify that this necropolis employed all kinds of anachronisms to feign life. Even the nature of this past before the past, long assassinated, still haunts the detergent-blue sunniness of the ads in the glossy magazines. What can I do to denounce this perfidious abstraction? It is too late, I did not depart from the evolutionary cycle in time, I neglectfully outlived myself and have been taken over as an anachronism into the new geological era. And now I’m paying for it. For three decades of life (misappropriated by the science of prehistory), I (along with untold other museum pieces) have served this stone world as a biological alibi. I will be ruthlessly counted as a part of it in the omnium-gatherum of its archaeological treasures; whether the investigators stumble upon a hand ax or the crank of a funnel gramophone in the stratum a few meters under me, not even a dog will be taken in; I’ve held both objects in my hands, either one could be my burial offering. Geologically, I belong to the era between the Neanderthal and the horlà that comes after man, a tiny span of time in the history of the planet, and whether I would rather be located a minimal fraction of a particle closer to the one than the other in this tiny splinter of infinity is irrelevant; given the spaces of eternity one has to factor into one’s calculations these days, half a dozen zeros more or less makes little difference . . .