emptiness, 1930

 

What is alienation to the circulation worker?

One understands the toiling of the miner, the assembly worker, the jack of all trades in the building and maintenance world, and one understands that the alienation there ranges between physical fatigue and the sense of that one’s essential possession, one’s life, is being led on rental terms – we are renting it from the boss.

The circulation worker becomes physically exhausted too. But in the middle level, managing, writing, teaching, talking, meeting and meeting and meeting, there is a different form of alienation. It is a sort of addiction to stress, and like any addiction, when it isn’t fed, there ensues an existential distress.

Kurt Turcholsky, who wrote of all things in his busy life, wrote a little piece entitled ‘Emptiness’ which, pari passu, applies even more to our plugged in existences, our little phone toting existences, in which the phone we tote becomes ever more useless as, precisely, a phone – and ever more better as a portal to internet trivia and games.

It is Sunday. Translation day!

So here’s EMPTY

 

„Often, when the phone doesn’t call, when nobody wants anything from you, when the trumpeter of life pauses and puts its instrument down, when the spook trickles out… then you hear yourself. And what is there is an emptiness. Because there is nothing at all. The noises are silenced; now the most genuine ‘you’ must sound out – and nothing sounds. Hark, wrinkle your brow and listen – but perhaps it is not there that you will find the one real thing?

Perhaps it just isn’t there. Overfed with things to do, cares, with life, hmm?  And the upshot? Emptiness. Our gentleman must fall in love again! Our gentleman must not smoke so much! Hmm, sleeping badly, eh? The wit dribbles out of you; it is all nothingness. Empty, empty like an old pot – it rings hollow, when one bumbles around in there…

This would be an excellent moment to crawl into the lap of Mother Church. No, we don’t trust the soul-doctor any more – we know too much about him; how he does it, how it functions… a doctor must have a secret. The soul doctor, as far as we are concerned, is no good. But the prayer instrument is appropriate. What’s wrong? Life fears? You are afraid of death. All at once you can say it, all at once it comes out of you. “I will miss you”, you told your soul once. Yes, the fear of death and then the feeling: what’s the point? And why all of this? For whom? Exactly in the moment when you have nothing to gorge yourself on, then you will take a walk and something will glue itself together for you, something, even if it doesn’t have to be the authentic genuine meaning of life. Mon cher, don’t overthink it. You test the altar wine, you calculate the amount of cloth  needed for the pennants to flap in the wind, you read the books from cover to cover – god bless your understanding.

Then you become slowly older; if the brain doesn’t want to do anything any more, slot in a warm mood, which can be taken for a feeling. Observe the small beasts, how they, God’s miracle! Crawl in the sand! Look at your own little fingers, each one a small world, even these are miracles of form, it lives… even if you don’t quite know what “it” is.

And then, once again: get up, now a big “pick yourself up” and get out there and forget!

Forget and crawl back to Ingeborg like a little tot in his mother’s body; and again: “Hello young oldster! Still there? This evening? But with pleasure! Where? To the girls – hurray!“ And so again: a fat book and half the library wound around your neck, drowning in books… and yet again all that old litany on repeat. Only with this under the floor boards ground bass: In vain in vain in vain.

“Every time“ wheezes the flattest of all commonplace, “is a time of transition.” Yes. Just stand up and light the lights – that he doesn’t want to go along – that it is all a thieving his time, and that is should be otherwise, and that things should not rule, but people should rule – oh, good heavens! So here you have a philosophical dialogue topic: every life is a transition – from birth to death. Make yourself a satisfactory evening of life.

How much do we do in order to fill in the Hole! He who fills it in even by a meter is a great man. Where one has his head high among the clouds – that doesn’t matter very much. But he whose feet stand on the surface of the earth or deep under it … that utterly sets him apart. And he who can laugh, let him laugh!

“You can’t deny that the development of modern industry…” The trumpet blasts. Yes, I’m coming.”

Thus, Tucholsky, thus 1930, thus the chattering class, a hundred years of filling in the Hole.