[17] Conversation about one’s own situation — Helmut Heissenbuttel . Gespräch über die eigene Lage
All: It has happened to the masses as it has to the individual, who has seen much that is new, experienced much that is unusual and who, with the nil admirari, has gained the suppleness of external custom.
Helmut Maria Wildermuth and the tortoise quote E.T. A. Hoffmann: “As we let our gaze wander through the colourful bustle of the surging crowd, we occasionally catch sight of young girls who, accompanied by neatly dressed cooks, are roaming the market and haggling over household necessities such as those offered by the market.
Eduard, Bertolt Wildermuth and Mrs d’Alembert recall and quote Heine: Hence the secret concordance of all life and weaving, which at first sight seems to us only a scene of confusion and contradiction. Abundance and misery, orthodoxy and unbelief, freedom and servitude, cruelty and clemency, honesty and crookedness, these opposites in their wildest extremes, above them the grey misty sky, machines humming on all sides, numbers, gaslights, chimneys, newspapers, porter jugs, closed mouths, all these are so connected that we cannot think of one without the other, and what would excite our astonishment or laughter in isolation appears to us as quite ordinary and serious in its union.
D’Alembert in turn quotes Poe and narrates: Then, when the shadows of evening came, I was tired to death; I stopped; I stepped into the middle of the way of the wanderer, and stared him persistently in the face. But he took no notice of me, but walked on solemnly, while I refrained from following him any further, and remained absorbed in thought. This old man is the archetype and genius of deep guilt. He cannot bring himself to be alone. He is the mass man, the man in the crowd. It would be fruitless to follow him henceforth; for neither about him nor about his deeds will I learn more. 183 184
Helmut Maria Wildermuth and the Turtle fall in: Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, live, may be a sentimental spectacle, put on by capitalist so-called culture industry to cover up the antinomies of this capitalist society with country and western in front of a gathered prisoner crew: yet the record of this play moves us as a testimony to the inescapable situation in which we find ourselves, the sentimentality manipulated for our sake strikes out in us as emotion as before the Brecht songs of Hanns isler, sung by Fritz Busch, or as before the Lectures of John Cage.
Andie Wildermuth: If it means speechlessness, that we cannot articulate what is, what is causing the situation of man on this earth at this histo- rical moment, then we may be speechless. Less than others ever before do we know whether we articulate it. We have no confidence in the incessant attempts we make to do so. Yet we are constantly doing what we have no confidence in doing. That we do what we have no confidence in is our ambition.
Mrs d’Alembert: Everyone who can be experienced in a crowd from the outside as the object of one or more behavioural sciences nevertheless has their own individual experience. How does this coordinate with the external experience? Not at all. Necessity of livelihood, fashion trends, coincidence etc. mix them with each other and with themselves. Who are we as individuals in the crowd? Indistinguishable. What distinguishes us here in our eyes and perhaps even, though less than we think, ob- jectively? That we talk about it explicitly.
Eduard, Bertolt Wildermuth and Mrs d’Alembert now take up the quotation from Poe and recall the beginning of the story of the man in the crowd: “At first my thoughts took an abstract and generalising direction. At first I only saw the passers-by en masse and thought about them as a herd-whole. Soon, however, I moved on to details and observed with meticulous interest the innumerable varieties in clothing and form, in gait and demeanour, face and facial expressions. By far the greater number of the passers-by showed a contentedly busy demeanour and seemed to be thinking only of making their way through the throng. Their foreheads were wrinkled and their eyes rolled quickly; if they were bumped into by passers-by, they showed no sign of discomfort, but tidied their clothes and hurried on. Others, a class equally numerous, were restless in their movements, had red-hot faces, and talked and gesticulated to themselves as if they felt loneliness just in the midst of the mass of company around. The group of higher clerks, the boys from good old homes, belonging to solid companies, was simply unmistakable. Further on, I saw a lot of nimble existences who, it was easy to see, belonged to the splendid race of pocket martens. Further down the ladder of what is called the bourgeoisie, I found a number of phenomena that darkened and deepened my pondering.
Bertolt and Helmut Maria Wildermuth and the tortoise want to make a fundamental point: Not that we don’t have an opinion. Perhaps we have too many of them. Having an opinion means forming an opinion. Forming an opinion means: being involved in the things about which one forms an opinion. To be involved means to be inside. But forming an opinion also means standing outside and critically sorting out 185. Are the new extra-parliamentary politicians more involved than the old parliamentary ones? Do they, like the others, only have the tendency to critically sort out what they are stuck in? Is their struggle not a sham struggle with the battle cry: let’s have a go at it.
Bertolt Wildernruth: The stinking carcass of the subject that recognises itself. I86
Ortilie Wildermuth quotes Lichtenberg: “I stayed in an inn where, counting one person for the next, a person passed by every second, that is, every hour 3600 people with all kinds of faces, figures and intentions.
Dr. Johnson continues quoting Lichtenberg and says: On both sides high houses with windows of mirror glass. The lower floors consist of boutiques and seem to be entirely of glass; many thousands of lights illuminate silver shops, copperplate shops, bookshops, clocks, glass, tin, paintings, women’s room plaster and unplaster, gold, precious stones, steel work, coffee rooms and lottery offices without end. The street is illuminated as if for a jubilant festival, the apothecaries and materialists display glasses of coloured spiritibus and cover whole square rods with crimson, yellow, green-spangled green and sky-blue light. The confectioners dazzle the eyes with their chandeliers, and tickle the noses with their tops, for no more trouble or expense than to turn both towards their houses; there hang festoons of Spanish grapes, alternating with pineapples, around pyramids of apples and oranges, and between them slip guarding and, what makes the devil quite loose, often unguarded white-armed nymphs with little silken hats and silken saunters. They are wisely added by their masters to the pies and tarts in order to make even the satiated stomach lustful and to rob the poor purse of its second last shilling, for the pies with their atmosphere alone would be sufficient to tempt the hungry and the rich. To the unaccustomed eye, all this seems like magic; all the more caution is necessary to look at everything properly; for as soon as you stand still, bang! a porter runs against you and calls: by Your leave when you are already lying on the ground. In the middle of the street, chaise rolls after chaise, carriage after carriage and cart after cart. Through this din, and the buzzing and noise of thousands of tongues and feet, you hear the ringing of church towers, the bells of the post office servants, the organs, violins, lyres and tambourines of the Savoyards, and the howling of those who sell cold and hot things in the open air at the corners of the street. Then you see a bonfire of shavings flaring up floors high in a circle of jubilant beggars, sailors and rogues. Suddenly, someone who has been robbed of his handkerchief shouts: stop thief, and everyone runs and pushes and shoves, many, not to catch the thief, but perhaps to catch a watch or a purse themselves. Before you know it, a beautiful, cutely dressed girl takes you by the hand: come, my Lord, come along, let us drink a glass together, or Ill go with You if You please; then a misfortune happens 40 steps in front of you; God bless me, some shout, poor creature another; there is a faltering and all pockets have to be guarded, everything seems to take part in the misfortune of the wretch, suddenly everyone laughs again because one has accidentally laid himself in the gutter; look there, damn me, says a third and then the procession goes on. In between you might hear a shout of hundreds at once, as if a fire were going out or a house was collapsing or a patriot was looking out the window. Where it gets wider, everything is running, no one looks like they’re going for a walk, but everything seems to be called to a dying man.
Andie Wildermuth: Are we the real parasites? The ones that sit on top of the functioning whole? Is what we do necessary or superfluous?
Helmut Maria Wildermuth and the turtle: We see ourselves in the unifying experience from the inside in relations that are determined by this inside: be it emotional, reflective, practical, economic or social. Our functional behaviour appears in the isolating experience as a projection of this inner self-experiencing reference. In the crowd, however, we experience from the outside: patterns of behaviour, group reactions, mixed reactions, patterns of behaviour that have become established or have been imposed, fashion variations, variations of suggestive ideas, imitations of beat singers, imitations of film actresses, imitations of TV star gestures, imitations of clothing, ways of speaking, ways of walking, movements when eating, drinking, smoking, many of those who only try to keep to the limits of a middle line, some regional-local cliché of behaviour, etc.
The turtle now repeats, like Mrs d’Alembert: everyone who can be experienced in a crowd from the outside as the object of one or more behavioural sciences nevertheless has their own individual experience. How does this coordinate with the external experience? Not at all. Necessity of livelihood, fashion trends, chance etc. mix them with each other and with themselves. Who are we as individuals in the crowd? Nothing distinguishable. What distinguishes us here, then, in our eyes, and often even, if less than we think, objectively? That we talk about it explicitly, perhaps.
Helmut Maria Wildermuth: The first sentence is: all are equal and all are unequal. The first conclusion from this is: unrestricted adherence to equality in all possibilities; unrestricted recognition of the otherness of every other. No one is elevated above others by birth, merit, ability or acquired position; no one can transform solidarity into identity. Oppression only as oppression of oppression. What is not practicable is practicable only under the consciousness of compromise.
D’Alembert: Everyone experiences and is interested in what is going on and happening uninterruptedly everywhere. In the passage of such information, which is not sorted or only schematically sorted, everyone also resembles each other from within. In a crowd gathered somewhere, almost everyone can talk to almost everyone about almost every subject of such information. Almost anyone on almost the entire planet can talk to almost anyone at almost any time about the Vietnam War, the President of the United States, John Lennon or the last conference of the communist parties.
Eduard, Bertolt Wildermuth and Mrs d’Alembert ask how far those who write literarily, politically or philosophically are actually serious about what they say. Isn’t what is one man’s Cuba another man’s fame or a third man’s institute?
Dr Johnson and Mrs d’Alembert note that some of us are almost officials. But we avoid officialdom. We only accept official functions when we can’t avoid them.
Bertolt and Helmut Maria Wildermuth and the tortoise repeat the quotation from Heine that Eduard, Bertolt Wildermuth and Mrs d’Alembert had quoted: Hence the secret concordance of all life and weaving, which at first sight seems to us only a scene of confusion and contradiction. Abundance and misery, orthodoxy and unbelief, freedom and servitude, cruelty and clemency, honesty and crookedness, these opposites in their wildest extremes, above the grey misty sky, machines humming on all sides, numbers, gas lights, chimneys, newspapers, porter jugs, closed mouths, all this is so interrelated that we cannot think of one without the other, and what would excite our amazement or laughter in isolation now appears as quite ordinary and serious in its union.
Helmut Maria Wildermuth: When we assess our own situation, we think only of how we will get through. We don’t think about whether the others will get through, or if they do, then only in the abstract.
The turtle: Who pays us? The institutions that distribute and trade information. Newspapers, magazines, broadcasters, publishers, galleries, public and private buyers.
Andie and Ottilie Wildernmuth remind us once again of Heine. They quote: When I looked more closely at the people passing by, it seemed to me that they were nothing but numbers, but Arabic ciphers; and 189 I90 there walked a crooked-footed Two beside a fatal Three, her pregnant and busty consort; behind her walked Mr Four on crutches; waddling along came a fatal Five with a little head; then came a well-known little Six and an even more well-known evil Seven — but when I looked very closely at the unfortunate Eight as she staggered by, I recognised the ace curadeur who usually walked preened like a Pentecostal ox. Among the zeros rolling by, I recognised many an old acquaintance.
Helmut Maria Wildermuth and the turtle ask: Are we dependent? On what? Ottilie, Bertolt and Eduard on their programme directors and artistic directors. What is their leeway? They can put more or less what they want into the programme. They have a free hand in the engagement of staff and in the selection of topics. Of course, there are controversial cases, such as the appointment of Hans G. Helms or Peter O. Chotjewitz. Television is more dependent on the public, which makes the in- vestment more attentive. But Ottilie also has a fairly free hand. Dr Johnson is dependent on editors. We art critics are more dependent on money than on people. Of course, in order to earn it, we have to maintain our prestige. To do that, we have to know what’s going on. Do you know what’s going on, Lonnie? Mrs d’Alembert, Lieselotte, and I are in an intermediate position as journalists. We’re relatively independent. Lieselotte writes what she thinks. I have a good position. Although, of course, I have to be careful sometimes, behave tactically. Andie as a painter and Eduard not as an editor but as a writer are on the open market. In any case, they are both well known. Andie has a chance to assert himself. If he asserts himself, others depend on him. Others depend on all of us. To what extent are we and are those on whom we depend persons, how identical is a person with the institution in which he earns money? Does not everything we do happen in a freely usable space of play with limits and edges of uncertainty? Can’t our relative space disappear in an envelope of the whole? Can we do something about it or change it?
Everyone now repeats what the turtle and Mrs d’Alembert had said: everyone who can be experienced in a set from the outside as the object of one or more behavioural sciences nevertheless has his or her own individual experience. How is this coordinated with the external experience? Not at all. Necessity of livelihood, fashion trends, coincidence etc. mix them with each other and with themselves. Who are we as individuals in the crowd? Nothing distinguishable. What then distinguishes us here in our eyes and perhaps even, if less than we think, objectively? That we talk about it explicitly, perhaps?
Bertolt Wildermuth and Mrs d’Alembert: If the pri- mat of critique is a characteristic of liberalism, we are liberal. We are convinced, to a degree though, and not all of us in relation to the same things, that everything that happens, is done or said must remain open to criticism. Helmut Maria is perhaps the most inclined to make exceptions. Andie, in his own way, too. Eduard and Lonnie are really convinced.
All: Are we the real parasites? The ones who sit on top of the functioning whole? Is what we do necessary or superfluous?
Helmut Maria Wildermuth and the turtle: There are pay scales and better or worse paid jobs. There are different needs according to family status, habit or aspiration. There are different social standards in different domains. There are differences of intelligence or emotio- nality. But otherwise?
Eduard, Bertolt Wildermuth and Mrs d’Alembert? Nothing would be worse than if we saw ourselves as surrogates. I91 I92 We are nothing less. We no longer take sides in a cause. If we are committed, it is because of the experience from which we cannot escape and above which we are unable to rise.
Andie Wildermuth repeats the question posed by Eduard, Ber- tolt Wildermuth and Mrs d’Alembert, namely to what extent those who write literarily, politically or philo- sophically are actually serious about what they say. Isn’t what is one man’s Cuba another man’s fame or some institute?
Helmut Maria Wildermuth and the turtle again: There are pay scales and better or worse paid jobs. There are different needs according to marital status, habit or aspiration. There are different social standards in different areas of power. There are differences in intelligence or emotionality. But otherwise?
Andie Wildermuth: Who pays us? The institutions that distribute and trade information. Newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations, publishers, galleries, public and private buyers.
Mrs d’Alembert once again repeats the quotation from Heine that she had put up for discussion with Eduard and her brothers Bertolt and Helmut Maria: “Hence the secret unity of all life and weaving, which at first sight seems to us only a scene of confusion and contradiction. Abundance and misery, orthodoxy and unbelief, freedom and servitude, cruelty and leniency, honesty and crookedness, these opposites in their wildest extremes, above them the grey misty sky, machines humming on all sides, numbers, gaslights, chimneys, newspapers, porter jugs, closed mouths, all this is so connected that we cannot think of one without the other, and what in isolation would excite our amazement or laughter now appears to us quite ordinary and serious in its union. Eduard, Bertolt Wildermuth and Mrs d’Alembert, like Bertolt with his brother Helmut Maria and the tortoise: not that we don’t have an opinion. Perhaps we have too many of them. To have an opinion means: to form an opinion. To form an opinion means: to be involved in the things about which one forms an opinion. To be involved means to be in it. But forming an opinion also means standing outside and critically sorting things out. Are the new extra-parliamentary politicians more involved than the old parliamentary ones? Do they, like the others, only have the tendency to critically sort out what they are involved in? And what are they in? Isn’t their struggle a pseudo-fight with the battle cry: let’s have a go?
Bertolt and Helmut Maria Wildermuth and the tortoise, like Ottilie Wildermuth, quote Lichtenberg: “I stayed in an inn where one person passed by every second, that is, 3600 people with all kinds of faces, figures and intentions every hour.
Bertolt Wildermuth: Random Federal German Intellectual. Does it depend on this adjective? We speak and write German and are attached to this language not because we belong to the German nation, but because, speaking in it, we can say all the more clearly that this adjective does not mean a quality.
Ottilie Wildermuth: Our arrogance consists in the fact that the situation in which we find ourselves really gets to us. That we are serious.
Dr Johnson: When we say we, we mean the plural of me. That plural is not a big number. Two three seven nine a dozen. Two dozen would be too many. Andie Wildermuth: A question that moves us more specifically than any other: is it produced so that each individual can preserve or gain his or her own private space in emotional, physiological, sexual, imaginative, reflective arbitrariness? Or must private arbitrariness adapt to the production process, follow and obey it? 193 I94
Helmut Maria Wildermuth repeats the Heine quotation of his siblings Andie and Ottilie with the turtle. The turtle, like Eduard, Bertolt Wildermuth and d’Alembert and his wife, asks how serious those who write literary, political or philosophical texts really are about what they write. Isn’t what is one man’s Cuba another man’s fame or some institute?
Helmut Maria Wildermuth repeats: Everyone experiences and is interested in what is going on and happening everywhere without interruption. In the passage of such information, which is not sorted or only schematically sorted, everyone becomes one from the inside. In a crowd gathered somewhere, almost everyone can talk to almost everyone about almost every item of such information. Almost anyone on almost the entire planet can talk to almost anyone at almost any time about the Vietnam War, the President of the United States, John Lennon or the last conference of the communist parties.
D’Alembert: But we still think about others more than others. Thinking of others is part of our business, so to speak. Art, art criticism, newspaper work, radio work, television work, literature, political commentary, etc.: all this is not concerned with our person, but with others. And if with our person, then with it among others, because we cannot exclude ourselves when we talk about pop or minimal art, foreign policy, student movement, rock music, monopolisation of the means of production, Mauricio Kagel or expansion of consciousness.
Eduard, Bertolt Wildermuth and Mrs dAlembert: The telephone as an image of equal communication. As soon as we use the telephone, we communicate on an equal footing with all other telephone users within the telephone network of the earth.
Dr Johnson and Mrs d’Alembert quote: People are very unhappy. Everything beautiful happens without them. Their work is cholera and commonplaces. They seethe with jealousy or degenerate with boredom, which amounts to the same thing if they do not succeed in intervening. If they do intervene, it is the price of hypocrisy and madness. But then: what vantage points when you don’t arrive, and how reassuring it becomes. Bertolt Wildermuth repeats with his brother Helmut Maria and the turtle what he said with Eduard and Mrs d’Alembert: The telephone as an image of equal communication. As soon as we use the telephone, we communicate on an equal footing with all other telephone users within the telephone network of the earth.
Helmut Maria Wildermuth: Second sentence: any use of violence is taboo. Aggression is to be sensibly reduced. Abreactions only against dead material or oneself. Self-destruction before the use of violence.
The turtle: Are we the speechless intelligence? At least we don’t talk about it.
Andie and Ottilie Wildermuth repeat: Nothing would be worse than if we saw ourselves as proxies. We no longer take sides. If we are committed, it has to do with the experience from which we cannot escape and above which we are unable to rise.
Helmut Maria Wildermuth and the tortoise: From the point of view of the parasitic, that of the dispensable addition to the producing, productive and in production organised whole of society: our emotional, physiological, sexual appears strangely proportional to the public, as with all others.
Everyone quotes Defoe and narrates: The wagon contained sixteen or seventeen bodies. Some were in sheets, some in coarse woollen blankets, some were nearly naked or so loosely wrapped that their wrappings fell off when they were thrown from the wagon and they came to lie among the rest quite naked; but it did not matter much, or I95 196 no one else cared about the indecency, since it was seen they were all dead and were to be thrown motley into the common grave of mankind, for no distinction was made here, but rich and poor went together; there was no other mode of burial, nor was it possible that there would be, for coffins were not to be had for the immense number of those who fled to the sacrifice.
Bertolt Wildermuth and Mrs d’Alembert repeated what everyone had started the conversation with at the beginning: The masses have fared as well as the individual, who has seen much that is new, experienced much that is unusual, and who, with the nil admirari, has gained the suppleness of external custom. All repeat once again: nothing would be worse than if we saw ourselves as representatives. We no longer take sides. If we are committed, it has to do with the experience from which we cannot escape and which we do not want to rise above.
Helmut Maria Wildermuth and the tortoise: For all that can be said against us, for all the differences of ability, insight and business decency, we act in good faith that we mean business. Our arrogance lies in our contempt for the ambitious, the careerist and the overstretched know-it-all. Of course, one must take advantage of opportunities.
Eduard, Bertolt Wildermuth and Mrs. d’Alembert: With the defence against the possibility of suffering, humour occupies a place in the great series of methods that human soul life has developed to evade the compulsion of suffering, a series that begins with neurosis, culminates in madness, and includes intoxication, self-submersion, ecstasy. D’Alenmbert: Shall we say then: we will have achieved a lot in our lives?
Helmut Maria Wildermuth and the tortoise: Are we the intellectuals? The incorrigible ones who still think they can do something with language, even if they do nothing more than unhinge this language from its historically developed conditions and forms? Who still think that something like art can visibly or audibly show us where we are and who we are?
Andie Wildermuth: Stewards, buyers and sellers of information? Is what we do not unproductive in terms of life needs and pleasure satisfaction? Is production our newly acquired trauma?
Ms d’Alembert agrees with Dr Johnson: When we say: we, we mean the plural of I. This plural is not a large number. Two three seven nine a dozen. Two dozen would be too many.
Eduard, Bertolt Wildermuth and Mrs d’Alembert: What gives a clearer picture of the crowd gathered in a building to work: an imaginary cross-section of the workplaces or the car park with the cars parked in a regular arrangement?
Helmut Maria Wildermuth, together with his brother Bertolt and the turtle, repeats noh once: When we assess our situation, we think about how we will get through. We don’t think about whether the others will get through. Or if they do, then only in the abstract. Bertolt Wildermuth: Can it be achieved that everyone is practically and consciously responsible for everyone? Is that the goal?
Ottilie Wildermuth repeats: If the primacy of criticism is a sign of liberalism, we are liberal.
Dr. Johnson, once again, quotes Lichtenberg: I lodged in an inn where, counting one into the other, a person passed by every second, that is, every hour 3600 people with all kinds of faces, figures and intentions. Andie Wildermuth: Are Eduard and I, for example, typical of writers or painters in the current situation? We both belong to the so-called avant-garde group. We are both in contact with the mixed and the political. We are in contrast to the traditionalists. Is that typical? Is it typical that Eduard would prefer Mon, Helms, Jandl or Schuldt among German writers, or that I don’t like Horst Janssen and Paul Wunderlich and am currently partial to Stella and Ruscha? What is typical, perhaps, is that at the moment a progressive peak can be discerned in all the arts, which defines its progression in that it now finally wants to change the basis of art and clear the way for art and non-art to become finally indistinguishable. Our two critics are basically bourgeois. They fulfil the same functions as their colleagues in the 19th century. Even if they are always discussing how to get away from it. Dr Johnson is the most musical of us. But he is an outsider. Helmut Maria Wildermuth now repeats together with the turtle : Second sentence: any use of violence is taboo. Aggressions are to be sensibly reduced. Reactions only against dead material or against oneself. Self-destruction before the use of violence.
The turtle alone: close to the unrecognisable, the rest of the impenetrable, into which knowledge can only penetrate further and further for all eternity without ever dissolving it. Uninterruptedly aware of it. For death is incomprehensible. Reason is only possible against the background of this incomprehensible horror.
Helmut Maria Wildermuth: Strange groupings, sortings. Crowds gathering on seashores or around swimming pools; occupants of subways; crews of D, F and TEE trains; gatherings in cinemas; chains and groups of cars at high speed; inmates of prisons; incessantly changing accumulations of means of transport at roundabouts; crowds lying together in mass graves.
D’Alembert: When we are in the crowd, we lose all experience of ourselves. Possible experience reified in series of eyes, ears, noses, lips, all in differently varied constellations to each other; series of gaits, ways of dressing, calves, herds. All variations of something that is always the same without ever becoming the same.
Eduard, Bertolt Wildermuth and Mrs d’Alembert add to this: Rejection of everything predetermined, revealed, mythological. D’Alembert and Dr. Johnson sometimes have a tendency to relapse here.
Dr Johnson and Mrs d’Alembert add: Egoism is less reasonable than solidarity. Compared to bourgeois morality, especially in matters of etiquette and sexuality, destruction is the most reasonable thing.
Bertolt Wildermuth repeats once again with his brother Helmut Maria and the tortoise: rejection of everything predetermined, revealed, mythological.
Helmut Maria Wildermuth asks: Aren’t we simply those who are always trying to exclude ourselves? Them: Yes. But we: Not.
The turtle adds: We are aware of the historical role of theology. But we don’t discuss it as something topical.
Andie Wildermuth, together with his sister Ottilie, repeats again: If it means speechlessness that we cannot articulate what is, what causes the situation of man in this historical moment, then we may be speechless. Less than others ever before, we know whether we articulate it. We have no confidence in the uninterrupted attempts we make to do so. Yet we keep doing what we have no confidence in doing. That we do what we have no confidence in is our ambition.
Helmut Maria Wildermuth and the tortoise: We consider the inheritance that has come to us more or less directly from our fathers to be a burden; but we consider it silly to incapacitate our fathers or to renounce them. He who cannot bring himself to agree with his father in himself, how can he be involved in what is going on! I99
All repeat: When we are in the crowd we lose all experience of ourselves. Possible experience reified in series after series of ceaselessly moving living things. Variations of something that is always the same without ever becoming the same.
Bertolt Wildermuth repeatedly with Ms d’Alembert: Accidental Federal German Intellectuals. Does 200 it depend on this adjective? We speak and write German and are attached to this language not because we belong to the German nation, but because, speaking in it, we can say all the more clearly that this adjective does not mean a quality.
machine translation by DeepL, second edit by me, any and all errors deliberately allowed by… etc. original pages numbers embedded in text.
