The Story of Those Whose Ideals Do Not Outlive Their Lives

A blood-red wooden mansion is burning. Only a nightmare. Or a dream. There is hardly any difference. What day is it? What hour? Which night among nights? I do not need to know. A writer who cannot manage to write. Funny. I do not care. Had the city newspaper replied? How many people will read the last thing I wrote? Will even one person read it? Never mind, these thoughts are stupid. I too want to catch a fragment of daylight. I do not want to simply slip away while there are still so many moments left in which I may yet be disappointed. Only a simple thought. If I did not have the hope that I might feel an even bitterer, deadlier sorrow, and if I did not know that this hope, however slightly, soothes me, I would not even attempt to endure the one I feel now. Perhaps I cannot write. Yes. But that does not mean I do not think about decay and sabotage, above all the sabotage that is living itself. At the very least, I dream—is that not something? I cannot dream in the way they taught us back in school, but dream I do. Placed squarely in the middle of uselessness, and while lying half-conscious on paving stones, I find the reality of life in those misty hours I dreamt—hours that, with each passing minute, made the night a little colder, staging an assassination attempt against the homeless, the garbage pickers, and all the whores who warm themselves by the glow of their cigarettes. Those nights… a card game played in an endless state of death-throe. Between dying and remaining. The blessed cruelty of luck and time. Who could resist it? Of course I spin other dreams and downfalls too: that we, the owners of the earth, play the buffoon, and so on… All of it, as my neighbor says, is nothing but absurd flailing. Pull yourself together, this and that… Fault, fault, fault!

Look, now I remember what it was! An opportunity arriving at the most inappropriate hour. Yes, yes… I recall an envelope that came on a day when I was dreaming of circus monkeys and ailing old hyenas fighting. It was a cheap envelope, but inside, on rather glossy paper, there was an italic invitation, I think. I did not read it very carefully; everything looked blurred to me at that moment. I felt such a great hatred for the disgusting texture of that envelope and the gaudy paper inside, even before reading a word of it. Yes, prejudice. How satisfied it made me to think that this prejudice would, in all likelihood, prove true. According to the narrative printed on the envelope, it had been designed to inspire. At first it seemed rather absurd that it should be expected to inspire even me, rotting in the rust of my infinite incompetence. Yet afterward I could not entirely say they were wrong, to be honest. Is pure anger not a kind of inspiration too? If it were not, perhaps we would not still hear Beethoven’s notes on our finest radios today, would we? Oh, to hell with it! I need to find that envelope and read it! I found it beneath one of the ashtrays whose disgusting smell recalled the corpse of a head of state and the rot of all the guilt hormones it secreted. There it was, then. An invitation—what is more, to a local short story competition:

“…its desire to go on living…perhaps the finest eulogy, to absence…is resistance perhaps…is there not in life itself a desire to resist…a tree in autumn…the silkworm sworn to fulfill the butterfly’s dream…for this it abandons…its cocoon…an infant…cry out…to absence…resistance…the rustle of a writer’s pen scraping paper…those who can exist…the story of those who bear ideals longer than their lives…your story?”

Ah! I cannot say I was unmoved. You have written things here that could stir even a pedophilic kindergarten teacher. A text truly befitting that gaudy paper bought with money that constitutes the sum total of a beggar’s dream. How beautifully you have lined your sentences up one after another. How beautifully you have told it, how beautifully you have written! Ah! How impressive that font of yours is. Those inverted sentences; those exclamation marks, those question marks… Your periods! Your quotations! And that butterfly-silkworm analogy of yours—what an exquisite thought! Your manifold similes… You hoped it would inspire… It turned my stomach, you ornate gentlemen and ladies. If I were to throw myself from one of these skyscrapers and turn into a butterfly—the one whose resistance you praise—would I then have fulfilled my dream? Or else… or else an autumn tree! How beautifully you arrange those letters one after another. And your talk of the desire to live! It reminds me of a Hollywood star smoking in her villa on a cool evening. As though the city, the people, lay beneath her feet, and the lady, stroking her blonde hair, simply breathes that lovely phrase out together with cigarette smoke. Yet in that ugly city beneath her feet there are so many whores who stroke their blonde hair just like her and dream only of not being alone for a single day. But yes, of course… the desire to live… Silk, worm, flower, insect, resistance… You are right! But I cannot sleep! Do you have no other fairy tale? Or a sip or two of liquor? A box of medicine? A sack of peace? Still you tell me of “eulogies,” ladies and gentlemen. Each time we say “We are hungry!” you answer, “Resist, then.” You have loaded a single long-playing record and set it on the gramophone at every opportunity. It keeps playing the same song; as the needle skips across the record, you go on accompanying the same bourgeois lies. “Longer than your lives,” yes… “Ideals,” yes, yes. Ah, go and tell that too to the city whore of ours. Go and tell that lady who works for less than a full stomach what “life” means.

Oh! And what about that painting hanging on the opposite wall? On naked plaster, in its revolting broken frame, an expression vomited up by a yellow brush. Women are bent there, standing still. Straw hats on their heads. They work day and night. I am sure they have lovely ideals too, just like the butterfly you speak of. In Vietnam, in Cambodia, in Sri Lanka, in Japan… Ah, gentlemen, ladies, sirs… Can napalm be resisted with your praises? Or can one swear to realize dreams while a broad-winged mass of iron rises above the city? And at dawn, no less. That painting there, glaring at me! I want to run at it, run straight at it. To snatch the bread knife from the counter and drive it into the very middle of the canvas. Right into the middle. Then pull it out and plunge it directly into the middle of my chest. To sink the knife into my chest, press my head against the painting, and roll across the cold parquet in pools of blood. To turn somersaults in screams, in blood, inside the warmth of my own blood. To pray that my screams might turn into laughter. And also to imagine that actress from the last television film making love in wine, while I keep turning somersaults… Ah, and I imagine removing that painting with such delicacy! Like the waltzes you perform in palaces, or the way you titter when a ballerina stumbles and falls in the middle of the salon. So delicately that the gentleman of the house in the hat would not be angered in the least. Do you think those looks do not frighten me at all? Do you think I would want that aristocratic gentleman, while I lay there in blood with my ribs shattered and my eyes turned in opposite directions, to stare at me under his furrowed brows? No, no… I am far too aristocratic ever to harm that naked plaster.

Ideals! The sophistries of those in good health! My stomach is filling with blood. I do not know how we are to explain these ideals to those who collapse face down in the street and die. How will we speak of this desire to resist to married couples who cannot even lie naked in one another’s arms? How shall we tell garbage-fed, stove-burning, hunchbacked dead men, and the murdered, of this same desire to resist? I do not know! I have said it already: I do not know, ladies and gentlemen. I do not know! I cannot believe; I cannot think, and thus I cannot tell you. I cannot think, and therefore I cannot write on gaudy paper and enter your short story competition. But I cannot do it, dear sirs who can sleep eight hours a night. There is no place among you for me. That I understand very, very well, sirs. But I cannot fully understand you—least of all your aristocratic air, the way you cast your eyes about like fops as though goodness itself were your invention. That enormous ego of yours making noisy love to you all through the night, and when you awaken, you put on the airs of a fairy godmother so that you may, perhaps, better endure the unbearable pain of still breathing. With your false smiles you scatter flowers and ornate inverted sentences all around. Let me tell you this, ladies and gentlemen: neither your flowers nor your crazily arrogant words put food in anyone’s belly, do you know that? Not a single penny has entered my home for months, do you know that? And still, in your letters and on your colorful televisions, you speak to me of “the beauty of managing to remain standing.” Here is all that remains of my being! A quarter-pack of cigarettes! This is all that remains of me against your refinement. And that is the hardest part of all: to resist your refined thoughts! It is like a fraudulently endless fit of flailing at the end of a rope.

I am a postmodern Prometheus who is good for nothing but enduring you, and beyond you, enduring myself—and worst of all, one who cannot write! I offer you the ember of my cigarette, O cruel humanity! And you, sirs, are truly like birds of prey. Yet I was born with an ordinary soul. And I had imprisoned that most ordinary soul inside this infected, disgusting body. I have endured you and your most honorable words enough. This ugly world of yours, which you have filled with misery, drought, disease, and a thousand enigmas, is worse than the Devil offering you sugared tea! That is how it is, fair ladies, fair gentlemen. I have not found your generous tolerance toward me and others like me very satisfying. I am sorry. Nor do I wish to be disrespectful to your gaudy paper, but it seems I shall not be able to write for your competition after all. Besides, your expectations always run in another direction anyway, do they not? Ornamented bourgeois phrases like yours, two or three fairy-tale similes, two or three circus aphorisms… To accept anything else would seem to you an insult to your lovely egos and your peaceful awakenings in the morning.

Forgive me, sirs. Pardon me. I can feel the heat of hell in my temples, and the radio is forcing its disgusting static down my throat, while all the acid in my stomach longs, volcanic, to melt these vile cold floorboards and break through the path clogged by these parasites. This is freedom! I light one more cigarette and pace at the edge of yet another abyss. And another cigarette, trampling inside my lungs with its smoke! Ah, what insolence I possess! These thoughts of mine that shatter the sentence to life you have imposed on me! You must be very angry now, sirs. I do not know which agony I ought to resist. Forgive me, I beg you. My kidneys are in pieces and all my muscles are stretched so taut! There—it was my last cigarette, gone. Music is flooding my disease-spewing veins. Darkness. Night. Heat. Fire. Sewer. Blood. Noise. The disgusting sounds of partial rape from upstairs. Loss of appetite… Skyscrapers… Pen… They are all clogging the vessels of my brain! Thank you so very much, sirs! Bless you! City… Hollywood star… Lights. Shop windows… Enemies. That painting… The blind knife on the counter. Ash. Money. Smile… Diamond rings… Eulogies… Silkworms… Dreams… Waste-paper collectors. Garbage workers. The dead. Stillborns. Aphorisms… Bourgeoisie… The rustle of a pen scraping over paper… Ideals… The heat that turns my stomach. The ugly city whore. In resisting… The cold barrel of my gun!