darkwall
Well-known member
I hate life when it gets like this. The cramped, sucked-up sort of hole that lets in water but no light. Where everything is dirt, and you can't get satisfaction, or even pity. I look out the window and the dim Berlin rain falls as ever over the streets full of machine-people with hair looking so unnatural over their skin - you're so pretty, mein fraulein, but you're so empty. I tried to be tender with the bar-maiden of slipped winks and dropped smiles. She wouldn't have me; she devotes herself to her art, which is that of the con-man's. She is in love with the paint on the walls, she is in love with the jazz club signs in the night-time, and the sunglasses that foreigners wear. She makes herself seem happy, when she isn't - who could be happy when they are so isolated from their own depths, when they consider themselves to be no more than an ornament?
Don't think me a misogynist; I hate men too. I am meant to be meeting a friend of mine, but I don't think I'll go. We'll stare at each other while our coffees grow cold and wonder whether the other is perceiving the same things that you are in him: how he has aged, how he has lost his humour, misplaced his smile - and only his ironic comment about some human flaw makes you laugh, until you realise that it is the only way you yourself have derived humour these past ten years. If my darling at the bar thinks of herself as the object of her men's gazes, then my dear friend thinks of himself as above such gazing. He sits there making comments about how people are slaves and then gets back to his job as columnist, filling space with adjectives and hyperbole - anything to fill the void of an issue, a dead thing repulsive and compelling at the same time. Simple words have made him brusque - simple thoughts have made him blind, and given him a spareness akin to eloquence.
A couple across the street stand in the pouring rain, embracing in that idiosyncratic way each long relationship develops. At first everyone kisses like Bacall and Bogart, and then they discover the shapes to each others' faces, their bodies, their insides - how they like to be touched, held, looked at. I imagine them speaking to each other. Don't leave me, he says, and his eyes are sad and wholesome. Don't leave me. She cannot look at him straight, either because she still loves him a little or because she no longer loves him at all. Her dress is wet, and he thinks about the times they made love. The whole situation becomes impossibly unreal to him, and his soul verges on distaste and desperation. He gives up too easily, as she knew he would. If you were a real man, she says, and she looks him in the eyes now, you would have fought for me.
I could take out my pistol and shoot them dead, like the time my father went down drunk into the basement and started shooting the rats. No-one ever really expects to die, no matter what situation they're in. When someone says they're ready to die, they think of it like passing into another room - they don't expect to cease at all. For these two, dying would be just another fact in their lives, and all their lives have been is facts. The first two shots, they wouldn't know what was happening, and then perhaps the man would throw himself romantically on top of the woman, or more likely they'd run for it like ants when you lift up a rock. I hunger for them: I fantasise that they come into my room and merely talk to me, in strange sentences that one will finish for the other. I search for some sign of myself in the room, in the street, anywhere; I am satisfied that there is nothing. I am that sign, and when I am gone there will not even be a name, nor any pretence at there being anything but nothingness.
I am a reaper of the grass; I, too, am of the grass.
Don't think me a misogynist; I hate men too. I am meant to be meeting a friend of mine, but I don't think I'll go. We'll stare at each other while our coffees grow cold and wonder whether the other is perceiving the same things that you are in him: how he has aged, how he has lost his humour, misplaced his smile - and only his ironic comment about some human flaw makes you laugh, until you realise that it is the only way you yourself have derived humour these past ten years. If my darling at the bar thinks of herself as the object of her men's gazes, then my dear friend thinks of himself as above such gazing. He sits there making comments about how people are slaves and then gets back to his job as columnist, filling space with adjectives and hyperbole - anything to fill the void of an issue, a dead thing repulsive and compelling at the same time. Simple words have made him brusque - simple thoughts have made him blind, and given him a spareness akin to eloquence.
A couple across the street stand in the pouring rain, embracing in that idiosyncratic way each long relationship develops. At first everyone kisses like Bacall and Bogart, and then they discover the shapes to each others' faces, their bodies, their insides - how they like to be touched, held, looked at. I imagine them speaking to each other. Don't leave me, he says, and his eyes are sad and wholesome. Don't leave me. She cannot look at him straight, either because she still loves him a little or because she no longer loves him at all. Her dress is wet, and he thinks about the times they made love. The whole situation becomes impossibly unreal to him, and his soul verges on distaste and desperation. He gives up too easily, as she knew he would. If you were a real man, she says, and she looks him in the eyes now, you would have fought for me.
I could take out my pistol and shoot them dead, like the time my father went down drunk into the basement and started shooting the rats. No-one ever really expects to die, no matter what situation they're in. When someone says they're ready to die, they think of it like passing into another room - they don't expect to cease at all. For these two, dying would be just another fact in their lives, and all their lives have been is facts. The first two shots, they wouldn't know what was happening, and then perhaps the man would throw himself romantically on top of the woman, or more likely they'd run for it like ants when you lift up a rock. I hunger for them: I fantasise that they come into my room and merely talk to me, in strange sentences that one will finish for the other. I search for some sign of myself in the room, in the street, anywhere; I am satisfied that there is nothing. I am that sign, and when I am gone there will not even be a name, nor any pretence at there being anything but nothingness.
I am a reaper of the grass; I, too, am of the grass.
