|
Armin Petras is appearing in the 2009 PEN World Voices Festival.
Twenty years already, not bad. The wall is open, Germany reunified. The current of memories has become weaker from day to day and even prosperous. Prosperous as it was the case with the weather forecast of Bitterfeld where we had swans coloured in dark red and we never hung the washing up outside; there was too much dirt and dust in the air.
However, time had another weight, it was more like the watches in the pictures of Dalì–crimped and dripping. Already then I preferred waterproof watches.
But there was that yearning: it was huge, much vaster. There was no lack of desire. We had anything remote, the virgin forest, Godard–now we have travel agencies, the fear of facing more destruction anywhere else than it is the case at home, and the International Film Festival Berlinale. The configurations of power have changed–a fearful, featherbrained, sometimes dangerous province regime, the working-class utopia of which had mutated into a sticky bourgeois wallpaper furnished with a real barbwire, has finally evolved to become a dictatorship of consumption, devouring, exhausting, destroying, any resources, all the worlds and cultures. What remains are remnants /products/ trash and the desert (THE DETONATION OF THE SKY THROUGH ENHANCED HUMAN-BEING).
Capitalism as the first religion without salvation. Heaven is not part of the scheme, as it is the case with penitence. Only the apocalypse is part of the plan. Nothing else. First, the large animals will be destroyed, then the small ones, the rivers, then the people. The internet will remain, the empty towers of the banks and a couple of frogs. For them, bridges are built over the highways. Germany: a swastika made of highways–as a painter from Montenegro says, the frogs will be added to the picture, later.
2
The other side of destruction is the exhibition of the world of rulers aiming at conservation and finally at absolute destruction. To me museum means any place, thing, term, activity and procedure, suitable to simulate non-alienated life (in the sense of Marx and Lévy-Strauss) exemplarily and beyond the existing reality. So, a museum can be: a museum, a cinema, a national park, honeymoons, stag nights, clubs with loud music, good alcohol and good stroboscopes, some theatres, alternative research, kindergartens, the latest Tarantino movie. But also places that make alienated places appear as if they were non-alienated, as the spiral of destruction has become invisible and predominantly feelings of happiness are being produced, through labels and events such as: Starsearch, Rallye Paris-Dakar (in Argentine), breast implants, holidays at Mauritius, club holidays, holidays at Second Life, leisure centres, any kind of pornography, Wolfsburg, city of car production, frog bridges at, on or beneath German highways.
The problem of creative people nowadays is that they spend 90 per cent of their lives in a museum, before a disease might occur or the windscreen of a Saab will be hit by a Polish truck, with yourself ending up like a highway frog crucified on a Kippenberger picture. Therefore I would suggest referring to them as “visitor” (in the sense of Botho Strauß) instead of using the term “human being.”
What I want to say is that the entire oikonomia of our lives, which means all the medical practices, any piece of knowledge, measures, institutions that administer, reign, control our ways of behaviour, our gestures, our thoughts meant to allegedly steer them into a useful direction, are (currently) here 1. to destroy life as a non-alienated life (e.g. capital, the economy, the military) or 2. to simulate the copy of a copy of a non-alienated life (e.g. sports, media, culture/science).
We know that animalism is humanism, nature an equivalent to arts, matter to shape, and this means that there is no distinction between the economic basis and the cultural superstructure. This also means that I do nothing else than take part in destruction. That is something that matters, and I can’t find a solution, not really.
3
With regard to socialism that really died out in Germany and still languishes in Cuba as real socialism, I have suffered from poisoning as it was the case in D.O.A. D.O.A. is an awfully bad American movie, from the early ‘90s I assume, no idea. A middle-aged former bestseller author teaches literature at a moderate American university. He suffers from the fact that he is no longer able to write and so does his wife. Therefore she offers him the divorce papers on Christmas eve as a gift. He offers her a pretty large big wheel model, a big wheel made of coloured iron sheet, probably hand-made by children in Liberia. Both stare at the big wheel and cry, for a minute or so. Nobody understands why it has to be a big wheel made of sheet and why they actually cry and at the same time everything is obvious, is clear. Then she leaves. He gets drunk in a bar. He wakes up with one of his students. He feels terrible. A black woman doctor tells him: “You have been poisoned, last night, there is no help, you have 24 hours left. Then it’s over.” Maybe this is one of the situations which go along with Walter Benjamin’s “passage of the planet Human through the house of despair in the absolute loneliness of his trajectory.”
Shortly after he left the hospital, my DVD projector exploded, unfortunately.
4
1989
there she was, in the middle of masses of meat, white steam, to the left and right of the rosette bathing cabs, purple haze brewing
she only wore a t-shirt, and these much too large gym trousers with three stripes glued at her belly and it was too large at the bottom–it had already disappeared, to the inside, she, however, spoke with the kid about things that would happen and had not been there before
a water lily overwhelmed everything
and a hundred pairs of eyes, old peepers eyes in tears with thin foil had an envious look at this belly reminding them of leather medicine balls, 4 kilo balls and
she spoke only with that little thing dithering inside her and hit with the tongue the edged line of a broken tooth wondering whether there are no coloured teeth as it is the case with coloured hair
a hundred pairs of eyes still had a look at that thing longing to escape as they knew that it was a replacement to themselves and already for that reason they necessarily had to hate her, she knew that it was like that and that she would be standing in the other corner one day but that point in time was remote she still stood in the middle of the pool between pegged tiles and the metal blast pipe and she saw something outside behind the ghosts – it was the moon and it was in silver and the sky in black and the stars so bright and she laughed through the stars and swam her belly turned up to the sky
wet tears dropped into wet water ....
5
D.O.A. tells the story of a man who had become tired of a world that had made him tired. A story of configurations of power that completely converted his economy of life (means in Greek language oikonomia, an equivalent to the administration of the oikos, the house, and in a larger sense its leadership, today management), so his genius inevitably had to disappear.
A tragic event (through no fault of one’s own) leads to a change/turn in his life that empoisons him but also destroys his paralysis (catharsis). The interesting point is that now a third life can start, however, at the price of the existential uncertainty of the approaching death. Once he realises what life could be it is too late for him to live. This is what I call contradiction, I call it drama. I was also empoisoned that night when I left for West Germany. I left the place I was never allowed to get back to, now cannot go back to. That shock remains. I do not know who has empoisoned me, probably God, but when I wanted to fight with him, he was not there and I act as if I didn’t care and I succeed in betraying myself, sometimes at least, and I am really still full of that stuff, and every day I cross the line of paving stones, commemorating, drawing the line of the former wall without being any kind of impediment for pedestrians and traffic, I can feel something (?). And I have lived 20 years longer than the 24 hours with the poison, that’s why I worry. That’s why I won’t buy D.O.A. again; maybe the movie has a bad ending and me too.
6
The author is only a principle of composition building banks to the signs of the world, holding back the water for a couple of seconds, and then it returns, the flood.
Let the words break until it shines through the sky. In that game the author is absent from construction and destruction. Not in the sense of the dead but maybe as a representative of the dead. Once practice becomes the criterion of truth, and the experience of the practice is our only chance to build new criteria, new ideas to make decisions some time, even though it might be too late, in the sense of a new oikonomia of life, it will be important to speak with the dead and to bring their experience to life (because this is the most powerful experience ever). Also with the dead in us, with those that we were before we were empoisoned and thrown into a new life; even though this country, in which we were dead, was terribly grey and the swans in dark red, everything is important to resist life. Death is not an encounter with the unknown but a farewell from anything familiar. Nothing exotic but a search of clues. As man can only realise things in imagination.
Nothing will be pretended in the game, we will live.
Copyright © 2009 by Armin Petras. All rights reserved.
|
