I was unable to perceive any pattern in those lapses or determine what triggered them. At first I thought it might be alcohol. But abstinence didn’t help; on the contrary, it made things worse. My condition could be described as an absolute lack of interest in the present, let alone the future. My mind was constantly going into rewind because everything I cared about was in the past.
2
I don’t believe those stories about pristine beginnings. True, time spoils everything. And yes, everything gets worse over time. But what is prone to spoil is not necessarily good in the beginning. Everything is bad, even at its inception.
Nor do I believe the stories about the wisdom pronounced by children in their alleged innocence. I’m sure there are children cleverer than I was, and perhaps there have been three-year-olds who walked the earth and had something vital to say. But as a small child I only ever blabbered nonsense. We derive that habit from our childhood, ultimately, and it remains with us even in our so-called mature years and through to our death. There is little consolation when you realize that, until the end, you will write and say things it would have been be wiser not to. And it is small comfort that occasionally people manage to utter a few last words before they die that are not necessarily wise but at least not stupid.
When I was a boy, a year seemed as long as eternity to me. Once my grandmother planted an olive-tree seedling in front of the house. I pranced around the fragile sapling for a while and then decided to be pragmatic and ask when we would be able to pick the first olives.
“In ten years’ time,” she said. She could just as well have said ‘never’ – it would have meant the same to me. But from then on I imagined a year like an olive tree. The tree grew as the year passed: quietly and slowly, visible only to the persistent and patient eye.
For me today, the years don’t pass: They fall like trees – not olive trees but the massive trunks of the northern forests. One minute they’re standing tall beneath the sky, the next they’re beneath the boots of the lumberjack. Nothing remains of their might except the tremble of the moist earth when those giants come crashing down.
Yes, today the years fall like chainsawed trees. And the warning voice that shouts, ‘Timber!’ is in vain: they always fall on me. They fall, and it hurts. Maybe the logic is, the more we get battered, the better we can measure time.
Why not throw away our watches and purge all digital devices of the numbers signifying the passage of time? Clocks only ever measure the time of material things: an abstract entity we measure life with, although it is a sterilized and preserved entity that passes life by. People’s time is entirely different; it doesn’t flow uniformly, no two minutes or hours are the same, and its only real measure is the desolation it leaves in its wake.
History is an uninterrupted series of catastrophes – shipwrecks, avalanches, take your pick – where nothing is less important than whether my poor self is going to be dragged under or buried alive. Only arrogant fools expect satisfaction from history; the ordinary, little person is always on the losing end in every brush with history.
And yet that house of ruins, that past built of catastrophes, is all we have.
Maria and I shared a love of Walter Benjamin. Both she and I placed him before all other philosophers, even before the majority of poets, but not above Trakl and Celan. How many bleak winter nights we spent in drunken discussions about his Arcades and the Angel of History... We both had a passion for knowledge, which is so rare in our time. Living in a provincial backwater surrounded by people who consider selfishness and greed an expression of faultless utilitarianism only intensified that passion. If you’ve never lived in the backwoods, you don’t know to what extent your enjoyment of knowledge sets you apart from others... How complete is the solitude of bibliophiles and thinkers, and how strongly such people bind together and become totally dependent on each other when they meet, against all probability, near the scaffolds of the soul that are our small towns.
I’m sure I still know all of Benjamin’s historic-philosophical theses off by heart today, just as Maria did. In the second thesis he says:
“One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature, writes Lotze, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, is the freedom from envy, which the present displays toward the future. Reflection shows us that our image of happiness is thoroughly coloured by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us. The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to and women who could have given themselves to us (...)”
3
As if it wasn’t bizarre enough that I experienced the memories of other people, whose identity I woke up in, what I considered my own memory now lost all narrative continuity over time. Not only did I not know what I had in common with the people I remembered, but I didn’t even know what I had in common with the me I could remember.
My time seemed to shrink and then to scatter in all directions, forwards and backwards, up and down, into yesterday and tomorrow, exploding into thousands of droplets – fragments I tried again and again to unite, in vain. It was like a ball of wool that rolls down the hill into a stream and ends up all tangled in the waterweed, or like a piece of Czech porcelain from grandmother’s chest of drawers that falls to the terracotta floor. It demanded an exceptional effort to re-sort the findings about my own existence and assemble an even slightly convincing narrative about myself. Social contacts were becoming ever harder for me. I was terrified of questions and prop-phrases like ‘remember the time we...’ or ‘you know how...’ because I had no answers to them. Actually I did, but they weren’t socially acceptable. A short, honest ‘no’ was out of the question. No, I don’t remember. No, I don’t know you. No, I really don’t know who you are. Lots of little ‘noes’, which each individually and all together meant one thing: no, I don’t know who I am.
In turn, finding consolation in solitude now ceased being a matter of choice and became a necessity. If I wanted to stay outside of institutions I could be put into for my own good by people I knew nothing about, but who claimed to be well-intentioned and even friends, I had to reduce my contacts with the outside world. In that way I created the time I needed to tell myself about myself.
I built myself of water. I tried to give the water shape and hold it back, at least for long enough to glance at myself briefly in the mirror. All that I touched and all that I owned ran between my fingers, trickled away from me, met weirs and then changed course and shape, flowing, falling, gushing away and sinking into the ground, only to well up again, elusive and completely unable to retain any shape.
It was no easy task, but I managed to put my life in order so that I could function in spite of my ‘condition’, which was constantly worsening. There is only one recipe for happiness, and that is to desire as little as possible. A simple life, even if spent in privation, is the closest you’ll get to happiness. When you accept that you have little, most of the problems that have dogged you will vanish – because those problems were fuelled by all the futile efforts to gain more. It’s a simple matter: to have a lot takes a lot. Everything I had gained cost me dearly. It wasn’t worth it.
4
I only went out at night, when I could stroll through the deserted town to my heart’s content. No one was out in the streets after one in the morning except the schizophrenics hurriedly walking in the squeaky flip-flops they wore summer and winter alike, looking straight ahead. They were my brothers. Their families kept them under lock and key during the day because people in small towns try to hide what is considered shameful. They would let them out at night to get their fill of fresh air and wear themselves out on their sometimes long and always frenzied walks. Before dawn, they would be rounded up, like animals that have strayed from the flock, and returned to their rooms, where they would sleep all day on sedatives.
Drugged-up kids would squeeze into unma
nageable cars and race to discos in the suburbs. They didn’t notice me. Young couples had fast sex in the woods and on the beaches. They had enough problems of their own even without me turning up – difficulties and embarrassments that, when the night’s amorous experiences were recounted the next day, would morph into anatomically impracticable acrobatics and fireworks of passion. Teenage sex is proof that Karl Kraus was right when he maintained that intercourse is a poor substitute for masturbation. Out of consideration for the ordeal they were going through, I always gave the young people a wide berth and tried not to disturb them.
But most of all I liked the dawns. In nature, I have to admit, there is no kitsch. That is also the nicest thing that can be said about nature. It is people’s perspective that fouls everything up. When dawn comes like the writing on the wall and the day that arrives in its wake is unwelcome, like all it can possibly bring, there can be no kitsch even in the scene of a person standing at the shore and watching the morning rear up, slowly and terrifying like Godzilla – that gleaming monster one should flee before, to find a refuge and try to survive until the following night. Yes, the dawns were beautiful.
Beauty is difficult.
5
I wrote for the newspapers and that’s how I made ends meet. For a while, I used the money my grandmother had left to me, but I soon learned to save, and what I earned from six articles would last until the end of the month.
I wrote quickly and with ease, and what I wrote had an audience. They were commentary pieces at first, fiery and provocative. People liked to read them, especially those who didn’t agree with me – and there were quite a lot of them. If you tell people what they don’t want to hear in the way they least want to hear it, you’ll have their undivided attention and they will become your most loyal readers. I owed every single ‘success’ of my journalistic career, if we can call it that, to people who would curse and swear when reading my pieces, who would screw up the newspaper and trample on it, only then to wait impatiently for my next article that would drive them around them bend all over again.
Over time, I developed a special style of my own – a kind of hybrid – mixing investigative journalism, cultural criticism and conspiracy theories. The ‘investigative’ bit shouldn’t be taken literally. Naturally I didn’t have any ‘insider’ sources, access to classified information or anything like that. I examined information that had already been published and drafted my articles in the margins. But I dissected these texts like a forensic scientist, and a whole host of things came to light. I discovered logical lapses, discrepancies and incongruities in the statements of the players. If you knew where to look and what to search for, an author’s style provided ample information about masked intentions, hush-ups, and the toxic influence of editors and media barons. The lies of politicians melded with the lies of tycoons, who used their media to expose the former’s skulduggery. I studied the ownership structures of the media and the ownership structures of firms. I learned to link what I read in the crime columns with the movements of stock-market indices, and I became skilled at recognizing the jargon of party spokespeople in the words of academicians. In my articles, stories about crimes in village schools rubbed shoulders with the theory of the Frankfurt School, the names of bankers stood next to Brecht’s, and the tragic fates of Bosnian refugees bore so many similarities to Walter Benjamin’s final days. My speculations were no less truthful than supposedly objective information, and were far more interesting.
From the first day on, I felt the deepest disgust for the job I was doing. Journalism is not for the respectable. Which is to say, it should have been the ideal job for me. But there was too much lying and falsity even for my taste.
Today journalists not only play the role of committed thinkers, who communicate important realizations about human existence and work hard to unmask society’s hypocrisy. Journalists today are also detectives, exposing what is hidden. It is they who visit criminals in their troubled dreams, where they dread what will be discovered and what dirty work the reporter’s X-ray vision will alert the public about, and with the sensitivity about injustice being so great the public prosecutor and police are bound to react. It is a story about bold journalists who uproot society’s weeds, a yarn intended for brains readily narcoticized with fairy tales. Journalists are like the animals in the story who band together, holding each other by the tail, and tug and tug until they finally pull a turnip out of the ground.
There is nothing noble in public activism, nothing enlightened or heroic. All that talk about incorruptible public intellectuals and their virtues is a naive fantasy. It’s a simple, even trivial matter – a question of the market and the stock exchange, but not of the spirit.
Everyone who participates in ‘public life’ possesses a certain symbolic capital. The media are just a market for symbolic capital that can be enlarged by the action of the media: Or diminished. Like information, symbolic capital can be transformed into money in one way or another. And just like the dollar, the global currency, symbolic capital has no firm foundation.
The idea of free media flows from the idea of a free market. Both one and the other are pure ideological constructs. Neither one nor the other exists.
The media are a tool for achieving the interests of their owners. Those interests meld with the interests of other ownership structures and political groups, and together they form networks of interest groups.
Publishing in the papers means to serve one of the networks of power. Every communicable truth, however well hidden and dangerous, is a truth to the detriment of one person and the advantage of another, who probably, or rather certainly, has skeletons of their own in the closet. Such a truth is only a partial truth and therefore not the truth at all. Your most brilliant stroke is just the move of a pawn: You are lifted up and put down again on the board so as to keep playing your paltry role as a fighter for the truth, for which you will of course be paid and perhaps even recognized by society.
You’ll be the hero of a game in which the media raise the symbolic capital of the interest groups behind them and undermine the symbolic capital of their rivals, who retaliate in kind.
The thought that anyone could consider me the conscience of society was frightening. I despised society, as deeply as can be, and it choosing me to be a guardian of its conscience was irrefutable proof that I was right to do so.
One of my really top-notch pieces, or so I considered it at the time, set off a chain of events that saw me leave the safety of home and reject the precious rituals that had given my existence a degree of predictability and structure. The water flowed out of the narrow, concreted channel it had crept along, never to return.
6
Do you like anniversaries and find them meaningful? Do they give you a sense of security and continuity? People need something to keep them grounded, you think, and just can’t allow themselves to be swept along by the floodwaters of time?
Then here’s a good anniversary for you.
On Sunday it was four decades since Theodore Robert Bundy, nicknamed Ted, killed Lynda Ann Healy and thus began his killing spree. All that remained of the girl were the blood-stained sheets in her basement flat in Seattle. Two and a half months later Ted killed Donna Gail Manson, who was not related to Charles or Marilyn Manson.
Bundy went on killing, absolutely unhindered, until September of the next year. He was one of the most infamous serial killers. When he was finally arrested, the American authorities were so inept that they allowed him to escape twice: Once only briefly, but the second time, in January 1978, for long enough to break into an isolated house, where he raped two women and beat them to death with a wooden club. One hour later, Ted had moved on and bludgeoned a woman in another house. It was not until July 1979 that he was arrested again and condemned to death.
Ted diligently penned appeal after appeal and, as a God-fearing American, was able to have his execution postponed for ten whole years. He even
acted as a police consultant in the case of the Green River serial killer. That slayer was never caught, but Bundy’s public-private partnership with the police served as a model for the cooperation of the law-enforcement agencies and the maniac in the film we all love – The Silence of the Lambs. Before he was executed, he confessed to twenty murders, although it’s estimated that he left over one hundred victims in his path.
Apart from being a serial killer, Ted Bundy was a Republican Party activist.
John Wayne Gacy was... you know, different to Bundy. A Teddy-boy who raped and killed girls – Gacy preferred boys. Bundy was a handsome, charismatic killer, while the namesake of John ‘The Duke’ Wayne was a paunchy, nondescript boy from the block. Bundy behaved like a star, while Gacy did his best to be friendly to everyone and, if possible, to blend into the background.
Till Kingdom Come Page 3