I’ve been living in complete silence for months, I might say for years, with just the usual dull sounds you hear at the outskirts of town, the occasional echo of steps in the corridor and, further off, in the stairwell, someone dragging a sack, a carpet, a package, or a corpse, God knows what, along the ground; or the sound of the elevator as it slows, stops, opens, then closes and starts to rise or descend. Every so often a dog barks briefly, someone laughs or shouts. But everything dies away, soon lost in the constant low-level murmur of the street outside. That is what complete silence is like round here.
There are of course times I put on a Zelenka mass or listen to one of Schiff’s “Wohltemperiertes Klavier” interpretations, or take out Spoon, Karen Dalton or Vic Chesnutt, but after a few bars I turn it off so it may be quiet again, because I want to be ready and I don’t want anything disturbing going on when he arrives and finds me.
To be honest I wouldn’t have been surprised if he hadn’t knocked but beat at the door, or simply kicked the door in, but now that I hear the knocking, it’s clear there is no difference between his knocking and beating or kicking the door in, I mean really no difference, the point being that I am dead certain it is him, who else; he of whom I knew, and have always known would come.
The most tragic figure in history is the one in whom two terrible conditions meet. The two conditions that meet and combine in him are bottomless idiocy and unbounded aggression. Someone —a self-exiled Hungarian writer in San Diego — once said that this kind of person inevitably crawls from the gutter during one of those historical lulls. I don’t agree, there is never a sufficiently long lull in history. If he did ever live in one of those filthy historical sewer systems, he has been at liberty for many a long year now, for decades, ready to raise flags, discover kindred spirits, move about in groups and organize secret meetings. He is rarely alone but is always to be found in one of those indeterminate military uniforms, his ideas nonsensical or non-existent, since these are simply obligatory forms of hatred, hatred being his raison d’être, his guiding principle, a hatred whose object is usually only hinted at, though hatred never lacks an object, an object being very much the point and I should know since I am that object.
Say I am sitting in a bar and he steps in. I can immediately see that he has immediately singled me out. My eyes are light blue, I am thin and don’t stand straight, that’s all. I have no idea how this tells him, makes him so certain that I am the one but there’s no denying he has an instinct for picking us out, picking out the weak — I say weak because weakness, I suspect, is the thing in me that irritates him — so he stands beside me, and everyone near us feels the tension, and both he and I know what must follow. It doesn’t in fact matter where I am, whether I’m at a railway station where he picks me out in the waiting room, or in a store I happen to be shopping in, our eyes will lock and then it’s too late, too late for me that is, to look away, because I always know what is coming and am simply incapable of making an escape. I know it would be in vain.
If he could find the words to articulate his hatred he would say he is defending himself, that he feels threatened, by me as it happens, though I wouldn’t hurt a fly. He goes to the gym, does martial arts, and trains day and night so that after a while his body is, as they say, pure muscle, nothing spare, his skin merely an ornament to his physique, no superfluous hair, eyes, nose or ears, needing nothing but this pure muscle, because he had better be prepared, as the others tell him, I mean the pack he goes to the gym with, to shoot with, and to train with, prepared because the enemy is all but invisible. The enemy can be named and is everywhere, but as soon as you put your hand out to grab him —at least in is his own experience — the enemy slips through those pure-muscle fingers, wriggles free, slips away and pretty soon disappears so there’s nothing left in the pure muscle fist and he has to start all over again, searching, fencing him in, and pounding him with his fist again and again.
When asked to give his name he prefers to remain silent because even if he has a name as such he doesn’t really have one because he has no need of one; he is entirely subsumed in his function, his hatred, the hatred that should be his proper name, that is if he has to have a name, though what he loves best is having no name, anonymity being his natural condition, his desire to become of sufficient weight to kill, to deliver a fatal blow, a single terminal blow that has accurately located its object.
He dreams a lot. But not of that single blow, rather that, should he find the person he is looking for, he might grind him between his fingers and make mincemeat of him, not the way the slaughterhouse man deals with the pig in the abattoir, that is to say quickly, but the way the butcher deals with his meat, with a certain languorous pleasure, so the enemy should feel, really feel what he himself had suffered down there in that dark, filthy labyrinth of tunnels until he emerged to crush this, his object. Most of his dreams end like this: he keeps punching the face which by now is a bloody pulp, but he keeps hitting it, beating and beating it, unable to stop, and he wakes in a cold sweat, his mouth dry, his knuckles so painful it might not have been a dream at all.
by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: Balint Zsako
There are of course times I put on a Zelenka mass or listen to one of Schiff’s “Wohltemperiertes Klavier” interpretations, or take out Spoon, Karen Dalton or Vic Chesnutt, but after a few bars I turn it off so it may be quiet again, because I want to be ready and I don’t want anything disturbing going on when he arrives and finds me.To be honest I wouldn’t have been surprised if he hadn’t knocked but beat at the door, or simply kicked the door in, but now that I hear the knocking, it’s clear there is no difference between his knocking and beating or kicking the door in, I mean really no difference, the point being that I am dead certain it is him, who else; he of whom I knew, and have always known would come.
The most tragic figure in history is the one in whom two terrible conditions meet. The two conditions that meet and combine in him are bottomless idiocy and unbounded aggression. Someone —a self-exiled Hungarian writer in San Diego — once said that this kind of person inevitably crawls from the gutter during one of those historical lulls. I don’t agree, there is never a sufficiently long lull in history. If he did ever live in one of those filthy historical sewer systems, he has been at liberty for many a long year now, for decades, ready to raise flags, discover kindred spirits, move about in groups and organize secret meetings. He is rarely alone but is always to be found in one of those indeterminate military uniforms, his ideas nonsensical or non-existent, since these are simply obligatory forms of hatred, hatred being his raison d’être, his guiding principle, a hatred whose object is usually only hinted at, though hatred never lacks an object, an object being very much the point and I should know since I am that object.
Say I am sitting in a bar and he steps in. I can immediately see that he has immediately singled me out. My eyes are light blue, I am thin and don’t stand straight, that’s all. I have no idea how this tells him, makes him so certain that I am the one but there’s no denying he has an instinct for picking us out, picking out the weak — I say weak because weakness, I suspect, is the thing in me that irritates him — so he stands beside me, and everyone near us feels the tension, and both he and I know what must follow. It doesn’t in fact matter where I am, whether I’m at a railway station where he picks me out in the waiting room, or in a store I happen to be shopping in, our eyes will lock and then it’s too late, too late for me that is, to look away, because I always know what is coming and am simply incapable of making an escape. I know it would be in vain.
If he could find the words to articulate his hatred he would say he is defending himself, that he feels threatened, by me as it happens, though I wouldn’t hurt a fly. He goes to the gym, does martial arts, and trains day and night so that after a while his body is, as they say, pure muscle, nothing spare, his skin merely an ornament to his physique, no superfluous hair, eyes, nose or ears, needing nothing but this pure muscle, because he had better be prepared, as the others tell him, I mean the pack he goes to the gym with, to shoot with, and to train with, prepared because the enemy is all but invisible. The enemy can be named and is everywhere, but as soon as you put your hand out to grab him —at least in is his own experience — the enemy slips through those pure-muscle fingers, wriggles free, slips away and pretty soon disappears so there’s nothing left in the pure muscle fist and he has to start all over again, searching, fencing him in, and pounding him with his fist again and again.
When asked to give his name he prefers to remain silent because even if he has a name as such he doesn’t really have one because he has no need of one; he is entirely subsumed in his function, his hatred, the hatred that should be his proper name, that is if he has to have a name, though what he loves best is having no name, anonymity being his natural condition, his desire to become of sufficient weight to kill, to deliver a fatal blow, a single terminal blow that has accurately located its object.
He dreams a lot. But not of that single blow, rather that, should he find the person he is looking for, he might grind him between his fingers and make mincemeat of him, not the way the slaughterhouse man deals with the pig in the abattoir, that is to say quickly, but the way the butcher deals with his meat, with a certain languorous pleasure, so the enemy should feel, really feel what he himself had suffered down there in that dark, filthy labyrinth of tunnels until he emerged to crush this, his object. Most of his dreams end like this: he keeps punching the face which by now is a bloody pulp, but he keeps hitting it, beating and beating it, unable to stop, and he wakes in a cold sweat, his mouth dry, his knuckles so painful it might not have been a dream at all.
by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: Balint Zsako
