kagablog

THE TONGUE OF REDEMPTION

He arrived back in Berlin in the morning and spent the day looking for a way to get the hell out again as soon as possible. After a lot of hassles he was able to organise a ride to Bratislava in two days.

He sat in Cafe M in the approaching autumn weather listening to French rap music. He read the Herald Tribune for about five minutes and then threw it down again. The first thing he noticed on his return was that he didn’t like people’s eyes here. They were dishonest.

He made a phone call to Amsterdam. He called an old girlfriend who tried to console him. She said nice things. “I’m nothing but an ass-hole, pining away for some impossible love,” Pierre told her. They talked awhile and then said goodbye, and then he was suddenly transported back to the busy intersection in Friedrichshein. Alone again amid the nauseating farts of automobiles. He stood there and looked at the dead street corner. Jesus, Berlin was sure a city of ugly street corners. It was also a city of apothekers and travel agencies. Never had he seen so many drugstores in a city before, except possibly in Brussels. Pills and vacations. A paradise of headaches.

In a cafe, sitting next to the window, he watched as the waitress poured his wine into a cheap glass. Pierre believed that wine should always be drunk from crystal. The materials of this world were becoming more and more insensitive, less and less aesthetic. What people called progress these days had only to do with the victory of mass-production and had nothing to do with the true quality of things.

Reality could be as harsh as any serial killer.

But at least serial killers chose their victims without discrimination. Reality on the other hand had a way of coming down hardest upon those who should be given a break. That Christ was crucified wasn’t a flaw or exception, it was a reality principle.

“The meek shall inherit the world”. Well, as a revolutionary Christ might have been brilliant, but as a prophet he was shit.

It’s true, Pierre thought to himself, what Jean Genet said: “Only violence will stop man’s brutal ways.”
A very unpopular point of view, he realised, in the sheepish pacifism of the present software world.

The Germans he met shit upon history. Maybe this was because Germany had shit upon history so well in the 1940s. In any event they did at least become scatological and poke at it with a stick from time to time, but only to reject it again. They were smeared and blurred by distraction and by envy and guilt, and especially by the avoidance of guilt. An inbreed predilection for catastrophe.

He had the sensation that the world was narrowing down on him. He could no longer believe in many of the things he was naive about earlier in his life. How is one, in all this clutter, to keep a wide horizon, like the one has in one’s childhood? He thought about fleeing to the countryside. But there was always the problem of money. Almost the entire planet had been monopolised by it, everything was subject to its reign. It had become the blood of this civilization. Blood-money. Shoot someone and coins fall out.