(38)
Two things excite my interest: the most subjective details of my most subjective life, ephemeral trivialities, in their own factual, unstylised individuality, and the world’s big facts, in all their allegorical statue (Standbild)-like greatness: death, summer, sea, love, gods, flowers. One of the causes of my stylistic confusion is that the subject of my sentence is usually some analytical nicety, finesse, pictorial or conceptual paradox – and I pump into the description of the details of those details, in the form of subordinate clauses, compound words and rhythm-killing litanies of epithets, the mythical grand backdrops (sea, summer, death, etc.). I may write down, for example, the particular shape of a woman’s lips, and the even more particular lipstick taste on them, and I load the apparatus necessary for that description with the big, more generally interesting facts and problems of life and death, organs and blood pressure, love and artifice. That too is a phobia: I dare not start off with the "big", hence the grotesque sentences: the leaden weight of eternity bound up in the hairs of ephemerality. Rather than ten characters in a novel, I describe a single person and while analysing that (cravenly) narrate ten novels in parentheses. My sentences are masks: tumours lying immediately subcutaneously, pressed right up against the surface. All that is important is that the tiny mask, the skin, should be there at the start, the head: if I see that I wish to speak about death but the beginning of the sentence is talking about the slow dribbling of soap lather (in other words, the little epidermis is in place), then I am perfectly reassured, let the one and only important subject of death come in its own expanding ramiformness (stretching mask and skin endlessly) like simile, like a playful decoration, grammatically and in terms of sentence-structure subordinating the subject of soap lather: a square centimetre of "soap lather" (the epidermis), twenty square centimetres of "death" (the tumour beneath it).

 

A wealthy businessman’s daughter teaches piano for money; the son of an impoverished gentry family will not take on work cramming pupils – purely out of "pride". How wonderful (so it is said) that the filthy-rich girl does not wish to live idly: she may go around in a limousine, but she is working. What virtue! Yet how empty and immoral the pride in which the starving son of the gentry exists to consider work as humiliating. What naivety and confusion of ideas there is in this idealisation of "work", which is not a matter of morals, simply the kneejerk reflex of a businessman’s neurosis, just as gentry "pride" is not pride but a cult, the rational acceptance of a personality, of outer and inner loneliness, of the divine value of independence. The "work" ethic of rich businessmen is replete with cheap false logic, hypocrisy, old wives’ romanticism and neurosis, the world’s most stupefying humbug. Had it not been for this "work" hysteria imposed by the Puritans, there would be no unemployment today. What does a businessman’s "work" consist of: whatever will allow him to make money hand over fist, possibly at the expense of the life and health of thousands and tens of thousands so that the whole job, besides being inestimably useful, should appear ethical as well! The root and cause of the sweet capitalist "work" ethic in the totally unfettered unethicalness that characterises today’s social set-up.

As far as I am concerned there is just one fundamental ethical concept: the medieval idea of asceticism, the way the Christians did it. The moment that the place of asceticism is taken by "sacred work" (what a joke!), the moment that the so-called sterile, insane, sickly, comic, antirational Byzantine stylite gets down from his column in order to locate his morality in "work", that is when you will also find Capital. Choose: Byzantine madman or bloodsucking usurer, self-flagellating hysteric or a lethal grappling-hook lyrically transformed into a "managing director"?

 

How many primitive ideas abound in even the average person about the concept of "activity": a person should do this and that from dawn to dusk, women should also go to work, be productive, telephones should ring, book-keepers’ ledgers should swell – but why? To keep active just for the sake of keeping active? Even a blind man can see that humanity derives no benefit nowadays in this capitalist world from never-ending production and enterprise. Work is not an ethic; moving just to keep moving makes no sense: the whole thing is the sheer romantics (and bucks) of American films.

It is interesting that businessmen are the most sentimental, puerile-spirited people in the world: ten-year-old girls display more cynicism or realism than these "leaders" cranking out their unchanging "chop-chop! on the double!" Ever since work was first falsified as a value and morality by those who derive pecuniary gain from it, an unsuspected rule of fiction has got under way in the world. Businessmen have eradicated all sense of realism, prudence and common sense; the other day I went into a bank and marvelled that the officials were not roaring with laughter at one another at the sight of the precious chinoiserie of unreality that cocoons such an establishment. The underlying fiction, the first dogma of the imposers of the myth, of course, is that "reality = money" (or "reality = office work", "reality = sheep-farming", etc., etc.) Money! That is the blood capillary of everything: bills of exchange, contracts, currency speculation, commercial dodges, the thousand and one ethical masks of fraud. And is a fully grown man in full possession of his senses supposed to believe this is reality? It is my impression that anyone who maintains that is just joking or dissembling; a person can only say that sort of thing out of self-interest – for money.

 

And love, death, nature, God – those are "fictions": in their opinion. The sea, glaciers, flowers, music – they are just holiday fillers, recreations; the thing in which Bach almost died in, for a doorstepper, a little entertainment before supper. Charming. With generally educated people speaking about a "Flucht in die Neurose – an escape into neurosis", it would be far more to the point to speak about a "Flucht in die Fiktione" in regard to businessmen. A very high proportion of people, indeed the great majority, feel well solely in a fiction, in the abstract: senses reality within an invented set form of contract (the ephemeral of ephemera) and senses only decoration, the games and metaphors of weaklings, in a material sea, material woman, material death that has been held before our eyes from time immemorial. Those "weaklings" come in very handy all the same: they goggle at an anemone instead of a bill of exchange and leave the other to get on with his work, whereas the fledgling businessman ethicised to death by the work ethic goes off in his Rolls-Royce limo to give a piano lesson, and meanwhile the poor piano teacher starves to death.

 

(80)
The opposition of the "of this world" and "not from this world". And is this "of this world" not precisely the "not of this world" and the "not of this world" the "of this world"? Frederick the Great and Bach in church at night, up in the organ loft, both in shirtsleeves, with a big jug of wine, their wigs dangling beside them from the seats: the organ resounds and roars. Behind Bach his numberless brood, his "this world"; behind Frederick the Great is the army, the state administration, his "this world". But at night, in shirtsleeves, bald, and in an emerging toccata they forget about all else. They drink, they become delirious, they chatter: Bach is a perverted lecher, a Don Juan, an atheistic libertine; Frederick is a regicidal nihilist, a revolutionary, a traitor. By the morning both have grown quiet; Bach prays with his family, Frederick rides on horseback in front of his soldiers. The only thing preserving the memory of all that is an organ toccata. (In olden days the genres were so "romantic" that it would have made no sense to live romantically in addition: all the "anarchy" went into the work instead of life. That was hygiene for you!)