Lars Iyer's Blog, page 2

Domenico is an old man. He shuffles through the streets and through the vacant building where he resides. Domenico was a scholar until he locked his family in their house for seven years to protect them from the end of the world; an end which never came. The police freed them and Domenico spent time in a mental institution. When it was shut down, he was left to shuffle through the world with his dog, Zoe. ���You know I���m scared of being alone,��� he whispers to her.

Domenico is infamous in the village for having locked his family away for seven years in order to protect them from the outside world. He is a fascinating subject for Andrei and the audience because he represents nostalgia taken to its extreme���a nostalgia which, in order to protect its object, elects to drown it in amber. Having rendered his family dead to society by cutting them off from the outside world, Domenico lights himself on fire to the tune of Beethoven���s "Symphony No. 9���Ode to Joy" in the film's haunting penultimate scene. His self-immolation recalls his first interaction with Eugenia, whom he asks, ���I don���t smoke, but could I have a cigarette?��� She replies, naturally enough, ���Of course, seeing as you don���t smoke,��� and lights it for him. For Tarkovsky, cinema was never about the rush of the drag. Rather, he desired nothing more, nor less, than desire itself.

On Tarkovsky's Nostalghia. Source unknown

What ancestor speaks in me? I can't live simultaneously in my head and in my body. That's why I can't be just one person. I can feel within myself countless things at once. There are no great masters left. That's the real evil of our time. The heart's path is covered in shadow. We must listen to the voices that seem useless in brains full of long sewage pipes of school wall, tarmac and welfare papers. The buzzing of insects must enter. We must fill the eyes and ears of all of us with things that are the beginning of a great dream. Someone must shout that we'll build the pyramids. It doesn't matter if we don't. We must fuel that wish and stretch the corners of the soul like an endless sheet. If you want the world to go forward, we must hold hands. We must mix the so-called healthy with the so-called sick. You healthy ones! What does your health mean? The eyes of all mankind are looking at the pit into which we are plunging. Freedom is useless if you don't have the courage to look us in the eye, to eat, drink and sleep with us! It's the so-called healthy who have brought the world to the verge of ruin. Man, listen! In you water, fire and then ashes, and the bones in the ashes. The bones and the ashes! Where am I when I'm not in reality or in my imagination? Here's my new pact: it must be sunny at night and snowy in August. Great things end. Small things endure. Society must become united again instead of so disjointed. Just look at nature and you'll see that life is simple. We must go back to where we were, to the point where we took the wrong turn. We must go back to the main foundations of life without dirtying the water. What kind of world is this if a madman tells you you must be ashamed of yourselves! O Mother! The air is that light thing that moves around your head and becomes clearer when you laugh.

Domenico's speech from Tarkovsky's Nostalghia

Consider a representative Sebaldian scene: A man wanders the historical quarter of a European city in which he is a stranger, and stops at a shabby caf��. A clock chimes on the wall of that caf��, and it reminds him reminds him of a totally different clock in a totally different caf�� in a totally different part of a different city. He recalls that in the other city, he had been neighbors with a man whose father was a professional clockmaker. This neighbor was not himself a professional clockmaker, but he had an amateur passion for horology and an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of the clock-making industry back to the 15th century. The narrator recalls the apartment in which he spent hours drinking lukewarm coffee with this neighbor and talking, talking, talking about the mechanics and history of clocks. Then the narrator recalls, vividly, perhaps for the first time in many years, that one day this neighbor, the clockmaker���s son, disappeared, packed off for another city without saying goodbye. And then the narrator remembers the first meal he had after the neighbor���s disappearance, a tuna sandwich very much like the one he is eating right now, in this very caf��, where this clock is still chiming, chiming, chiming.

The above is not a scene one can find in any actual Sebald text, but that���s the point. The working of memory���the narrator���s own, that of others, both of particular others (the neighbor) and of whole groups (the clockmakers of Europe)���is simultaneously the content and form of the novel, and the method of its composition. Anyone who���s ever struggled to produce pages on a deadline can see the appeal of this ��criture that is seemingly as contingent and abundant as life itself. If Sartre famously admired Husserlian phenomenology because it was a system of thought with which one ���philosophize about an ashtray,��� Sebald developed an aesthetic program that could in theory produce a whole novel or a whole series of novels about a spoon, or a particular variety of fig.

Wittgenstein says that ���a language is a form-of-life.��� Cards on the table: I think that the visceral appeal of the Sebaldian mode lies not in the method of composition nor in the style of his novels, but in the form-of-life of which that style is a concrete expression. That form-of-life need not and perhaps could not have been Sebald���s own, biographically, but is rather that of an ideal and idealized Sebaldian subject. In short, the Sebaldian narrator models a mode of being-in-the-world, a way of relating to one���s own life and to the (inevitably tragic) fact of one���s historicity, a mode that is particularly attractive to a certain class of writers today.

Melancholy sounds pretty damn unpleasant, but it occupies a privileged epistemological and ethical place in Sebald���s work. The melancholic knows something, and persists in that knowledge. He might suffer for what he knows, but at least he is not duped. This, I think, is how I and my contemporaries encounter Sebald���if not as a great pessimist, then at least as an honest skeptic, a writer who simply cannot accept the infantile compensations of narrative. And so his narrators move through these old European cities in a curiously disembodied way: they are described as hungry and thirsty, feverish and panicked, frantically paranoid or near-catatonic, but they never completely shedding their dignity even in the gutter, never retreat into the arms of a comforting illusion. There is a stillness deep inside each of them, what Virginia Woolf once called a ���wedge shaped core of darkness��� at the bottom of each self that is untouched by the world, that is the self, that is thereby somehow the condition of possibility for the extraordinary negative capability that these selves exhibit in their self-dissolving journeys through the winding gyre of Memory with a capital M.

Sebald���s narrators are haunted by something, and critics have long identified this ���something��� with the Holocaust: a historical event that remains absolutely unrepresentable, unassimilable to any coherent historical narrative, even as it demands the practice of a kind of aesthetic negative theology, the constant attempt at representation that always fails and encodes its own failure within itself, of which the latest celebrated attempt is of course the astounding film Zone of Interest. According to this logic, still hegemonic nearly 80 years after Adorno declared it barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz, the Holocaust becomes for the late-modernists the dialectical inverse of that other impossible object���History itself, conceived as a total dynamic process without Origin or Telos.

And so the world of the Sebaldian novel, shattered by the Great Trauma, appears as a massive open set of fragments without a whole (lost or otherwise), connected purely by coincidence and adjacency, by a Deleuzean logic of pure conjunction, of the ���and.��� The narrator is the agent of these connections, which come into their foggy pseudo-being only through his heroic memory, and his unflagging attention to the tiny details of urban European life are cast as a contemporary version of Tiresias drinking the blood and calling up the shades from Hades to say their lines and disappear again. An ontology of coincidence, and an ethics of bracketing, of bracketing the self and refusing to stake out any point of certainty about the Whole, to persist absolutely in melancholy.

What Sebald���s melancholic encounters among these fragments is not History, nor any particular properly historical situation, but mere historicity. He does not live in this time, this place, this life, this moment in medias res, but always in ���a��� time, ���a��� place, ���a��� life, ���a��� moment, as purely abstract singularities. The details recounted ultimately indicate nothing but the fact of their being ���mere��� details, reminders to always and exclusively speak of oneself and one���s own with the indefinite article���in effect, self-cancellations.

Finitude, singularity, limitation-as-such are the index of all the Sebaldian subject���s encounters, however infinitely precise his sensory apparatus and however infinitely obscure the facts are that these sensations dredge up in his memory. It was Sebald���s genius to develop from this ontology of finitude the infinite variety of this spiraling and self-reflexive text. The price he paid for that infinity was History itself, which he could only bear after having reduced it to a cabinet of curiosities, stinking of formaldehyde, inert and unredeemed.

Source unknow.

Who Is the Sender?���s penultimate song, "World of Life", is buoyed by strings and a fanfare of horns. Fay delivers the opening verse like he���s toasting an heir. He���s hardly singing as he turns his gaze outward: "This can���t be all there is," he says, and there he is saying that at his age with a sense of wonder that will just about liquify you. Fay���s brothers and sisters���and make no bones about it, they are his brothers and sisters���in the Jesus music movement longed for transcendence, for the chance to escape even momentarily from this world. But it���s transformation that Fay longs for. "May gates be thrown open wide to receive you," go the last lines of the song, "into the world of life." It is, in the truest sense of the phrase, a redemption song.

On Bill Fay. Source unknown.

In the 1945 broadcast, to take just one example, the sense of relief is almost physical:

After so many years when good and evil changed place and one had begun to get used to it, after the years of Wagnerism, of Nietzscheanism, of Gobinism, which had penetrated even ourselves, the return to the truth of these six years, sight confirmed by world events, that took the breath away, that took you by the throat. Good became good again, evil, evil. The lugubrious masquerade was over.

The liberation from the obligation to confront Nazism at the level of philosophy brought with it the new obligation to introduce positive aspects of the experience of captivity into philosophy and politics.

Emmanuel Levinas. Source unknown.

In S��t��ntang��, the problems were not because I wanted a faithful rendering. It was not an adaptation, because we don���t do adaptations. I tried to make something that B��la could feel he could do what he really liked with, and that was the script, the novel was a sort of inspiration. Almost everything was decided in the time of shooting, and everything depended on the state of the characters because that was a very long shooting. Everyone was almost always drunk.

MJC: The actors?

LK: Not only the actors, but the people behind the camera, the lights people, everyone.

MJC: And that bar scene, the one we were talking about earlier, the one with my favorite Hungarian word, babtetu, which is repeated over and over���

LK: The one who repeats that word, for example, he���s not an actor. He was a wonderful cameraman who photographed small things, fantastic pictures of surfaces. And some of the other actors were painters, musicians, an actress from Yugoslavia, B��la could handle these characters very well. Sometimes cruel and sometimes very friendly.

MJC: And in that long bar scene, was that choreographed quite a bit or were they just drunk?

LK: Everybody was actually drunk. In real time, when the camera was shooting, B��la or I or Agnes would give them directions, go left, and they would go, ���Ah? What?��� ���Left, left!��� ���What?!���

MJC: There���s an interview in which you talk about a beautiful moment that happens to you and B��la Tarr when that same actor, the cameraman, in that same bar scene, starts singing, ���Tango, Tango������

LK: That was the turning point for B��la and for me. Until then we were absolutely unsure why we were doing this shit. But this man, this cameraman, began to sing, and that was absolutely an improvisation, we had an idea that if he can sing, or if he can remember something, because he was drunk all day��� He���d brought a harmonica, suddenly he tried to play this song and sing, ���Oh the tango, my mother used to sing! Oh the tango, my mother used to sing! Do you know this? Oh the tango!��� And so B��la and Agnes were, ���Please, shoot it, shoot it!��� That was outside the story, actually, and that was so heartbreaking, that I felt B��la holding my leg, because we were sitting next to each other, and B��la���s hand was so strong, that after the minutes I had a big bloody fleck here on the leg and B��la wept. B��la is not a sentimental figure. But that was so heartbreaking, him singing for us. And after that we understood, okay, we got the film. Because of this.

[...]

LK: Yes, these are the very important figures who allow us to be in the world, this kind of people who are sacrificed, who are victims of this world, in the sense of the Russian literature, in the sense of Dostoyevsky, in the sense of Tarkovsky. They are the prize for us so that we can live with compromises in this world. They are the prize which we pay for the possibility to live with compromises in this world. There are of course similarities between these figures, but they are not absolutely similar. Estika is the purest, simplest victim, because she believes everything that���s promised to her from whom she loves. But she���s absolutely defenseless. And this kind of people I love very much. In a big crowd I immediately recognize this type of person. And they perceive each other in the world. This is a secret community between these kinds of people. But they are always alone. They cannot help each other. They have only one fate: to lose himself or herself. Because him or her, they are really victims. This is their only one task, one very cruel task in this world. Without these figures, the whole machinery of the world doesn���t work. S��t��ntang�� is the best example of this fact. The whole machinery of S��t��ntang��, this whole story, the state of the men and women there, couldn���t exist without a victim, without a sacrifice. These people there, these characters there in this novel S��t��ntang�� couldn���t make their fate without Estika���s victimization. Valuska���s a little bit of a different case. Valuska is like a small animal, Valuska is made of belief, because Valuska has a secret contact with the whole creation, and the whole creation is wonderful, and Valuska sees only this fact. And for Valuska the world is absolutely the same like the created world and humans are only a very, very small part of this big huge creation, and this is not so interesting for him, a very small mistake, or failure in the creation because the whole creation is really wonderful. Actually, you and I are sitting now very close to nature [gestures toward a view of the Pacific Ocean], and if you find a place where you can see only the nature without human beings, this is actually the paradise, but in the next moment the human being walks into this picture and we are immediately and suddenly in the first chapter of the old testament. And we���ve lost it.

Krasznahorkai, interviewed

Jack Hanson mentions My Weil briefly in his essay 'Whose Weil? Simone, Patron Saint of Everyone', published in The Drift.

Heiner M��ller:

THE LUCKLESS ANGEL Behind him swims the past, shaking thunder from wing and shoulder, with a noise like buried drums, while before him the future stagnates, penetrating his eyes, his pupils explode like stars, the word wound up into a vibrating mouth-gag, strangling him with his breath. For an instant one can still see his wings beating, in the roaring one hears the hail of stones fall above behind in front of him, the vain movement more loud than violent, sporadic, gradually slower. Then the moment closes in on him: standing, in that quickly filled place, the melancholic angel rests, waiting for history in the petrifaction of flight view breath. Until the renewed noise of mighty wing-beats reproduces itself in waves through the stones and announces his flight.

The Luckless Angel, 1958

I am the angel of despair. With my hands I provide rapture, confusion, oblivion, pleasure and pain of the body. My speech is silence, my song is the cry. In the shadow of my wings terror dwells. My hope is the last breath. I am the knife with which the dead man opens his coffin. I am he who will become. My wings are the revolt, my heaven is the abyss of tomorrow.

Der Auftrag

Angels always appear when it is no longer possible to imagine the realization of hopes. These figures then become necessary; with Benjamin this is true also. Angels are figures that go beyond hope and despair.���

Interview, 1991

Mayor: We indeed want to build, here on earth, the kingdom of heaven.
The mayor���s son: No paradise without hell. No heaven without hell. And capitalism is the purgatory in which
money is recycled.
Schumanngerhard: In blood.

Germania 3

In the UK, the business school academic generally lacks cultural capital, largely because the economic utilitarianism of business has always sat uneasily with the pretensions to cultural reproduction which are held in other parts of the university. Knowledge about business might claim to be really useful knowledge, but it is unlikely to help the Professor of Management have tea with the Professor of History. But this is not a stable state of affairs. As the business school becomes a central part of the university, and the university becomes more like the business school, it becomes possible to absorb disciplines that seem to have nothing to do with management. It is hence quite possible that a wider sense of culture and history might become the next fashionable turn that would begin to provide the cultural capital that is widely lacking within the business school. Just as corporations gain some reflected status by sponsoring The Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger plays Ned Kelly, and Keith Richards becomes Jack Sparrow���s dad in the third Pirates of the Caribbean film, so could management academics sponsor themselves by claiming to understand cultural resistance. The business school has managed to ingest everything else that it has been faced with so far, and there seems to be no good reason why the economic outlaws and their alternative businesses might not become both a topic and a resource, too, inlawed whether they like it or not.

Martin Barker, Alternative Business: Outlaws, Crime and Culture

Ethan Taubes: [...] Although a decade earlier, I once did confront my father about the book after it had come out. It was one of those charged conversations between fathers and sons. So, I asked him, ���What do you think of Divorcing?���

Rachel Pafe: What did he say?

Ethan Taubes: He looked at me���gave me this kind of Mephistophelean smile���and said, ���Well, I was taken down in ���ames and put on the operating table.��� But he added with a kind of wicked, nefarious, cunning look, ���But let���s not forget that she did sign the book ���Susan Taubes,��� not with her maiden name.��� For my father, it was always better to revel in notoriety than receive no recognition at all. He was always very clever at ���nding the silver lining in disasters.

Conversation on an Afterlife