Read Online Adventures In Immediate Irreality by Max Blecher - Free Book Online
Authors: Max Blecher
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like a gallery of marble statues in a moonlit museum
at midnight.
One day the cinema caught fire. The film tore and immediately went up in flames,
which for several seconds raged on the screen like a filmed warning that the place
was on fire as well as a logical continuation of the medium’s mission to give the
news, which mission it was now carrying out to perfection by reporting the latest
and most exciting event in town: its own combustion. Cries of ”Fire! Fire!” broke
out all over the room like revolver shots. In no time there was such a racket that
the audience, until then seated quietly in the dark, seemed to have been storing up
great wailing and ululation, like batteries, silent and inoffensive unless suddenly
overcharged and then explosive.
Within minutes—and before half the cinema had been evacuated—the “fire”
had been put out, yet the audience went on howling, as if compelled to exhaust the
energy released. A young woman, her face powdered to a gypsum white, was screaming
shrilly while looking me straight in the eye and not making a move in the direction
of the door. A muscular pretzel vendor, convinced of the value of his strength in
such situations but not knowing what to do with it, grabbed one chair after another
and flung them at the screen. Suddenly a great crash rang out: a chair had hit the
old man’s double bass. One never knew what one would see at the cinema.
In summer I would go to the matinée and emerge only at
nightfall: I was waiting for the light outside to change, for the day to end. I
would thus ascertain that in my absence an important thing, an essential thing had
taken place: the world had assumed the sad responsibility of carrying on—by
growing dark, for example—its regular, intricate, theatrical obligations.
Again I had to accept a certainty whose rigorous daily return made me infinitely
melancholy. In a world subject to the most theatrical of effects, a world obliged
every evening to produce an acceptable sunset, the poor creatures around me seemed
pitiful in their determination to keep themselves busy and maintain their naive
belief in what they did and felt.
There was only one person in our town who understood these things and for whom I felt
admiration and respect: the town idiot. She alone among all the rigid townsfolk,
their heads brimming with prejudices and conventions, she and she alone retained the
freedom to shout and dance in public whenever she pleased. She would roam the
streets in rags, filthy, gap-toothed, her red mop disheveled, maternally cradling an
old box full of bread crusts and dustbin treasures. She would show her sex to
passersby with a panache which, were the intention different, would have been called
“a model of elegance and style.”
How wonderful, how sublime to be mad, I would tell myself, noting with profound
regret how far the powerful, stupid conventions I had been brought up on and the
oppressive, rational education I had been subjected to had removed me from the
freedom of a madman’s existence. I believe that anyone who has failed to experience
such a feeling will never know the world in all its glory.
My basic, elemental impression of the world as stage
took on a frightening intensity whenever I entered a wax museum, but the fright was
laced with a vague pleasure and to some extent with the strange sensation everyone
experiences at one time or another—that of having lived in a certain setting
before. Should I ever sense the impulse for a goal in life and should such an
impulse require a link to something truly profound in me, something absolutely
essential to my nature, I believe my body would have to become a statue in a
waxworks and my life a simple and never-ending contemplation of its exhibits.
In the mournful light of the carbide lamps I felt I was truly living a life all my
own in a manner unique and inimitable. All my daily activities could be shuffled
like so many cards: I cared for none of them. Man’s lack of
at midnight.
One day the cinema caught fire. The film tore and immediately went up in flames,
which for several seconds raged on the screen like a filmed warning that the place
was on fire as well as a logical continuation of the medium’s mission to give the
news, which mission it was now carrying out to perfection by reporting the latest
and most exciting event in town: its own combustion. Cries of ”Fire! Fire!” broke
out all over the room like revolver shots. In no time there was such a racket that
the audience, until then seated quietly in the dark, seemed to have been storing up
great wailing and ululation, like batteries, silent and inoffensive unless suddenly
overcharged and then explosive.
Within minutes—and before half the cinema had been evacuated—the “fire”
had been put out, yet the audience went on howling, as if compelled to exhaust the
energy released. A young woman, her face powdered to a gypsum white, was screaming
shrilly while looking me straight in the eye and not making a move in the direction
of the door. A muscular pretzel vendor, convinced of the value of his strength in
such situations but not knowing what to do with it, grabbed one chair after another
and flung them at the screen. Suddenly a great crash rang out: a chair had hit the
old man’s double bass. One never knew what one would see at the cinema.
In summer I would go to the matinée and emerge only at
nightfall: I was waiting for the light outside to change, for the day to end. I
would thus ascertain that in my absence an important thing, an essential thing had
taken place: the world had assumed the sad responsibility of carrying on—by
growing dark, for example—its regular, intricate, theatrical obligations.
Again I had to accept a certainty whose rigorous daily return made me infinitely
melancholy. In a world subject to the most theatrical of effects, a world obliged
every evening to produce an acceptable sunset, the poor creatures around me seemed
pitiful in their determination to keep themselves busy and maintain their naive
belief in what they did and felt.
There was only one person in our town who understood these things and for whom I felt
admiration and respect: the town idiot. She alone among all the rigid townsfolk,
their heads brimming with prejudices and conventions, she and she alone retained the
freedom to shout and dance in public whenever she pleased. She would roam the
streets in rags, filthy, gap-toothed, her red mop disheveled, maternally cradling an
old box full of bread crusts and dustbin treasures. She would show her sex to
passersby with a panache which, were the intention different, would have been called
“a model of elegance and style.”
How wonderful, how sublime to be mad, I would tell myself, noting with profound
regret how far the powerful, stupid conventions I had been brought up on and the
oppressive, rational education I had been subjected to had removed me from the
freedom of a madman’s existence. I believe that anyone who has failed to experience
such a feeling will never know the world in all its glory.
My basic, elemental impression of the world as stage
took on a frightening intensity whenever I entered a wax museum, but the fright was
laced with a vague pleasure and to some extent with the strange sensation everyone
experiences at one time or another—that of having lived in a certain setting
before. Should I ever sense the impulse for a goal in life and should such an
impulse require a link to something truly profound in me, something absolutely
essential to my nature, I believe my body would have to become a statue in a
waxworks and my life a simple and never-ending contemplation of its exhibits.
In the mournful light of the carbide lamps I felt I was truly living a life all my
own in a manner unique and inimitable. All my daily activities could be shuffled
like so many cards: I cared for none of them. Man’s lack of
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