“People need to taste the whip,” said Strauch, “the knout of the executioner.” He urged me to put on sturdier shoes, he found it unbearable to see me in such “luxury items” as the shoes I had on every day. But I have no sturdier shoes. I own just two pairs, a pair of boots for the winter, and a pair of ankle-high shoes for summer, which I left at home. “Things change here very quickly,” said the painter, “quite without notice. Suddenly it’s so cold, it can freeze your sinuses. A sudden blow, and you go from one thing to the opposite.” He didn’t think it would snow any time soon, but there would be an iron frost. He could tell by all sorts of things, by plants, by everything, that a frost was in the offing. “A terrible frost. You can see it in the trees and rocks. You can hear it, when you hear the animals.” And one day everything would freeze, “and be dead. The world as presently constituted. Even the air will go rigid, and the snowflakes in the air.” When he was walking out of an inn once, in the Tyrol, where he used to go at times, “into the clear country,” as he says, he suddenly jammed his stick into a pig that had frozen solid. He had wanted to drive the beast on, but the stick was caught fast in the pig, as if it had been made of snow. When he pulled out his stick, the pig made a squelching noise, which disgusted him. “The frost eats everything up,” said the painter, “trees, humans, animals, and whatever is in the trees and the humans and the animals. The blood stalls, and at great speed. You can break apart a frozen human like a piece of stale bread.” He said: “Did you notice that country people never wear a coat, no matter how low the temperature? At least not here, in this region. In the flatland, yes, but not here. In the lower Alps, but not in the Alps proper. The men put up their collars, the women come down from the mountains in their folklore outfits. Even at twenty below zero.” The cold drew people together as much as the beasts in the sty, around a dish or a book. “Cold is the most sharp-witted state of nature,” said the painter. Schoolkids usually got no further than an outcrop of rock, and then they turned back, for fear of freezing to death. Or the schools were closed on account of the low temperatures. People died in midsentence. In the middle of a cry for help. The stars flashed like nails driven into the night sky. “Air composition that makes reason ring out like the tongue of a bell.”
Had I ever had a frozen limb or digit, he wanted to know. “There are many men who have been marked by frost.”—“No,” I said. “In the war, I should tell you, men had the feet freeze off their legs, and the ears off their heads. By thinking on a certain subject, a condition that may be thousands of years away, or at the very least a beautiful memory, it is possible to generate warmth in oneself, even heat, but only to a certain, finally unsuccessful, degree. Even those soldiers who burned with homesickness during the Russian winter campaigns were not enabled to survive by their homesickness.” He said: “When the days get that cold, I sit in my bed, and stare at the frost flowers on my window, that in a succession of miracles evoke landscapes from painting, from nature, from inner despair, only to crush them again, and to draw from them such truths as, to my conviction, are dispersed in their hundreds of thousands and their millions in our lives, and portray more than an intimation of a world that lies alongside our familiar world, a universe we have failed to recognize.”
Then, in front of the trunk that looms out of the middle of the pond, he said: “We all live the lives of death masks. Everyone who is really alive has taken his off at one time or another, but as I say, people don’t live, it’s just, as I say, the life of death masks.” There were no real humans anymore, just death masks of real humans. And the whole thing was so grotesque precisely because it amounted to a vast “crippling by reason,” spreading from our brains to those of friends and neighbors. “A seeming life, no longer capable of real life. Cities that are long since dead, mountains too, long dead, livestock, poultry, even water and the creatures that used to live in the water. Reflections of our death masks. A death-mask ball,” he said. He became agitated when I told him I didn’t believe in his “death-mask ball.” “You young people don’t believe,” he said. “The whole world is nothing but a death-mask ball.” In accordance with its development, and the development of the cosmos. “The influence of the stars, the astral bodies is not open to doubt.” He said: “What I tell you is intellectuality pondering logically.” What is that? “Nothing you can touch, nothing you can think, nothing apparent, nothing real, as we have come to refine the idea, nothing we can ‘deal with,’ nothing for Pascal, nothing for Descartes. Nothing for humans. Nothing for swine. If monstrosity could breed in one man’s head, where would that get us,” he said. “The incomprehensible is our life. Nothing else. That sometimes finds form in humans, just as swarms of birds take to the air and turn it black. The incomprehensible is the miraculous. The un-understood world is the world of wonders, the one you understand has no wonder in it.” Each step toward knowledge was a step away from wonder. “Science of course claims the opposite. But just as any science always claims the opposite of any other science.” And then things weren’t quite that simple. For: “Science lies, that’s its principle, it destroys, and makes megalomania possible, and the miraculous. What science wants is to stop being science, at a certain point it wants to select. That’s its endeavor. And that’s worthy of our support.” A man was never in the way of science at that point where it was seeking to emerge from itself, and go back to humans. He said: “Then, when science has achieved its end, the death masks will become human beings again.”
Pub gardens in summertime were often full of people who clearly “take themselves to be the center of the world. They draw attention to themselves immediately. Go up to a table in the deepest shade (or, in the present season, we would say: next to the open fireplace!) and that may have been reserved for them. What goes on in a brain that conceives itself to be the center of the world. Millions of lights going on and off in millions of centers! That’s the world. That’s all it is. The ordinary sits at a table with the extraordinary and drinks a pint of beer, or eats a plate of scrambled eggs. Plays chess or a game of cards. Each ordinary and extraordinary individual that makes up the world. But what is ordinary? What is extraordinary? In the summer heat (as in the winter cold), humans are less confined, because more helpless. They pull on ropes, and pulling on the other end is the world: ‘my world.’ That’s where they think it is, or that’s where they think they are. And that’s how they come to think of themselves, sitting there with head erect, as being what they claim to be, the center of the world. ‘When I’m dead, the world will die’ is what they think.” He, the painter, thought of humans as “aboriginal outgrowths, bordering on the unfathomable, but only bordering on it.” His picture of pub gardens in summertime enabled one to follow the trails of humans in their greatest folly. “To identify their world. To identify the world. Tactics? Where vulgarity carries its head as high as royalty. Brutality wanders along like the epitome of gentleness, celebrated, ethical, inimitable. The thought of a glass of beer leads to the wildest overestimates and thoughts: the world is what I am! Begins where I begin. And ends where I end. Is as bad as me. As good. No better, because me. No question, me. Likes to drink. Likes to eat. Doesn’t know one percent, because I don’t know one percent either. Famous? Well, yes and no. Too much, that would mean knowing more than me, wouldn’t be good for it, because that would mean I was sick. Without appetite. That’s the world: confined to a head of cattle, confined to roast beef. A human will never go beyond where he thinks the world will go. His personal edge is also the edge of the world. Its defeat is his. In a pub garden in summertime, the world is confined to the hunger and thirst of the world. Of each individual in it. Each single individual. ‘A beer, please,’ means the world is asking for a beer. It downs it, and after a while, it feels thirsty again.”
Women were like rivers, their banks were unreachable, the night often rang with the cries of the drowned. “Living together as husband and wife, you know, that’s the same as unjustifiable torment till the end of the marriage. When the states o
f two individuals are pushed together into unbearableness like seams of rock. Then black ceases to be black, and a child is no longer a blessing. Everything turns into its obverse. You know, poverty looks quite different, wealth turns out to have been a deception, ahead of a further, catastrophic deception.” It soon turned into a stagnant pool, where the two partners stared emptily at one another. Each of them destroyed by figures and calculations. A head full of shame and waste, that was marriage, for man and woman alike. “They walk in through the church gates, and walk out through the brothel door. There are mirrors where you can see everything to the point of cruelty, to the deadly thumbs-down.” And it was all an immutably fixed underground process. Why? Waking dreams suddenly come out, suppositions turn into bitter truth. Blows, received in a dream, send you reeling. The frustrated fantasy dreams of travel, of returning to a solitude that wasn’t solitude at all. In the middle of the city, there’s a sudden gust of wind you thought had long passed. But you can no longer shake the tree to bring down the overripe fruits. No. A dog runs against your shin, and you wake up feeling embittered. There’s a bricklayer hunkered down on some scaffolding planks, there’s a railwayman standing looking at his watch because he’s tired, there’s someone walking along a roof carrying a sheet of glass for a window … Removal men with weight lifter belts are good for hefting tables and crates about, you think, and you feel like the saddest man on the planet. And the world is miles away from the spectacle that abandoned it, as ruthless as a bad mother, running after her lover. Strauch said: “The truth is like some crazy gardener, uprooting cabbages and letting them lie. It’s a spree.” The man walks beside his wife to the edge of town where the factories are and the mines that feed him, with his child by the hand, he walks into an endless unhappiness. And it must often come to him, the glib saying that thousands of people are used like pieces of sacking, and then discarded. And he thinks of words such as “added” and “subtracted” and “oppressed” and “beaten.” And wherever his wife looks, she sees only addled faces. And the scabies on her daughter’s face. Whatever it is you might want is not on the menu. To walk together till it means falling together, till it means murdering each other together. “If at all, then take the child as well.” And he: All he proposed was the effort to get crushed. To the rail embankment. Just a few yards off. Oh, yes. But brutality always intervenes, everywhere. The thing that glistens softly over the rooftops, well, it might be warm air, but actually it’s the beginning of the end. And the creaking tree: malign, the blackness of its trunk. And still, everything takes its usual course. No one says anything. Which makes everything even worse. The child is put to bed, and then you dread everything ahead of you. The one lying beside the other in bed thinks everything that is so terribly evil could—an ill spark crosses the other’s face—be the truth. And even if it’s not, it still hurts.
TO-ING AND FRO-ING
I have to say, there was a real to-ing and fro-ing today.
We came out of the larch wood, making for the village and beyond into the deep forest. I was leading the way. The painter followed me, all the time I had the sense he’s about to lay into me, he’ll attack me from behind. I don’t know what prompted me to think that way, but I was unable to lose the fear that was oozing out of me. From time to time I picked up a word he was saying, it was completely incomprehensible to me, I couldn’t answer him when he asked me something, because really he was only asking himself. He growled at me: “Kindly stop when I ask you a question!” I stopped. “Come here!” he commanded. Suddenly I realized (it was in his tone, and I felt only I was in a position to realize this) the resemblance to his brother, the assistant. He said: “The air is the only true conscience, do you understand me?” I replied: “I don’t understand you.”—“The air, I say, is the only true science!” he repeated. I still didn’t understand, but nodded anyway. He said: “The gesture of the air, the great aerial gesture, you understand. The nightmarish sweat of fear, that’s the air.” I told him that was a great thought. In my opinion it was even poetry, to me what he had just said was the distillation of all memory, of all possibility. “Poetry is nothing!” he said. “Poetry as you understand it is nothing. Poetry as the world understands it, as the poetry hound understands it, is nothing. No, this poetry is nothing! The poetry that I have in mind is something else. If you meant that poetry, then you’d be right. Then I’d have to embrace you!” I said: “What is your poetry?”—“My poetry isn’t my poetry. But if you mean my poetry, then I’ll have to admit I’m unable to offer you a description of it. You see, my poetry, which is the only poetry, and therefore also the only truth, just as much as the only truth that I find in the air, which I feel in the air, which is the air, this poetry of mine is always generated at the center of its own thought, which is all its own. This poetry is momentary, is instantaneous. And therefore it isn’t. It is my poetry.”—“Yes,” I said, “it is your poetry.” I had understood nothing of what he had said. “Let’s go on,” he said, “it’s cold. The cold is eating into the center of my brain. If only you knew how far the cold had already advanced into my brain. The insatiable cold, the cold that insists on its bloody nourishment of cells, that insists on my brain, on everything that could make anything, could become anything. You see,” he said, “the brain, the skull and the brain within it, are an incredible irresponsibility, a dilettantism, a lethal dilettantism, that’s what I want to say. One’s forces are attacked, the cold bites into my forces, into my human forces, into the lofty muscle power of reason. It’s this ancient tourism of cold, billions of years old, this exploitative and pernicious tourism, that penetrates my brain, the entry of frost … There is,” he said, “no longer the category of ‘secret,’ it doesn’t exist, everything is just frigor mortis. I see the cold, I can write it down, I can dictate it, it’s killing me …” In the village, he popped into the abattoir. He said: “Cold is one of the great A-truths, the greatest of all the A-truths, and therefore it is all truths rolled into one. Truth is always a process of extermination, you must understand. Truth leads downhill, points downhill, truth is always an abyss. Untruth is a climbing, an up, untruth is no death, as truth is death, untruth is no abyss, but untruth is not A-truth, you understand: the great infirmities do not approach us from outside, the great infirmities have been within us, surprisingly, for millions of years …” He says, staring through the open abattoir doors: “There it is clearly in front of you, broken open, sliced apart. And there’s the scream as well, of course! If you listen, you’ll catch the scream as well. You will still hear the scream, even though the facility for the production of the scream is dead, is severed, chopped up, ripped open. The vocal cords have been rendered, but the scream is still there! It’s a grotesque realization that the vocal cords have been smashed, chopped up, sliced apart, and the scream is still there. That the scream is always there. Even if all the vocal cords have been chopped up and sliced apart, are dead, all the vocal cords in the world, all the vocal cords of all the worlds, all the imaginations, all the vocal cords of every creature, the scream is always there, is always still there, the scream cannot be chopped up, cannot be cut through, the scream is the only eternal thing, the only infinite thing, the only ineradicable thing, the only constant thing … The lesson of humanity and inhumanity and human opinions, and of the great human silence, the lesson of the great memory protocol of the great being, should all be tackled through the abattoir! Schoolchildren should not be brought to heated classrooms, they should be made to attend abattoirs; it is only from abattoirs that I expect understanding of the world and of the world’s bloody life. Our teachers should do their work in abattoirs. Not read from books, but swing hammers, wield saws, and apply knives … Reading should be taught from the coiled intestines, and not from useless lines in books … The word ‘nectar’ should be traded in forthwith for the word ‘blood’ … You see,” said the painter, “the abattoir is the only essentially philosophical venue. The abattoir is the classroom and the lecture hall. The only wisdom is abattoir w
isdom! A-truth, truth, untruth, all added up come to the vast abattoir immatriculation, which I would like to make compulsory for humans, for new humans, and those tempted to become humans. Knowledge in the world is not abattoir knowledge, and it lacks thoroughness. The abattoir makes possible a radical philosophy of thoroughness.” We had gone into the slaughterhouse. “Let’s go,” said the painter, “in me the smell of blood turns into the extraordinary, the smell of blood is the only parity. Let’s go, otherwise I should have to uproot the possibility of new intellectual disciplines from my own thinking materiality, and I don’t have the strength for that.” He took large steps, and said: “The beast bleeds for the human, and knows it. Meanwhile the human doesn’t bleed for the beast, and doesn’t know it. The human is the incomplete beast, the beast could be fully human. Do you understand what I mean: the one is disproportionate to the other, the one is massively dark to the other. Neither is for the other. Neither excludes the other.”
Frost: A Novel Page 25
