sarma

"That's sad, isn't it?"
"I can enjoy sadness so much sometimes! Yes. in fact I often find the saddest things the most beautiful."
"Yes, there's nothing so boring as someone who's happy."
"Happiness isn't boring in itself, but it is boring to give it a shape."
"Terribly difficult."
"Terribly difficult, yes."
Jan D. /Grace

"It's absolutely impossible to live with anyone who fully accepts chaos."
"That's right, you have to find order in the chaos"
"Some people experience it the other way round. They start from order.
Well, some kind of orde... They are just holding onto an illusion."
"I have always thought that art creates order out of chaos. Whereas politics and power actually create chaos out of order."
JanD./Viviane

"Ahead-butt..."
"Yes."
"That's put very negatively, isn't it? You said yourself that at a certain moment in your life you were confronted with limits. Because it will always have something to do with.
"It always has something to do with..."
"... with something definitive..."
"Yes."
"With limits."
"Yes."
"And then you suddenly get a sort of lucidity."
"Yes."
"Whatever that means. But it fades away, by definition."
"Yes, but by then you have taken a step."
Jan D./Viviane

"One big family, eh?"
"No, no, no."
"No?"
"No."
"I really thought Needcompany was a family."
"I consciously oppose that. You lack freedom in a family."
"There is the illusion that it is a big family."
"No, no, no, we do our work and that's the end of it."
"Wham bam."
"Crash boom bang."
Paul/Jan D./Carlotta

"I'll ask you for one word. That's it."
"It can only be one word?"
"Yes, I would like just the one."
"I have something in my mind, but it isn't one word, it's three. But in fact it's... They belong together."
"Say the three words."
"Lack of love."
Jan G./Mil

"Fear, embarrassment... That's my biggest problem, but not only on stage. It's a problem in my life."
"Do fear and embarrassment have anything to do with each other?"
"They are two separate things. Embarrassment is exposing yourself to... There are limits of course, but, but..."
"Let's talk about fear."
"That's my big problem. The fear that comes from an... no, no, it doesn't matter... inferiority complex, which I have had all my life. Am I good enough, and not only in the theatre? Am I good enough, in daily life? Am I good enough? I am probably not good enough. I am doing it wrong again, I am making another blunder. And there's an awful fear of experiencing that over and over"
Mil/Jan G.

***

"Lucidity": the pursuit of clarity, a way of self-examination in which one attempts to develop a relationship, without illusions, with the ethical imperative to "live in truth'7. Irrationality of this moral duty, felt to be absolute, the impossibility of calling oneself lucid: possibility that one is incapable of containing the intended "self-truth". Or that one will not be able to sustain or tolerate it. Lucidity implies modesty.

Perhaps the capacity for truth, in the radical sense of the word, is not given to mankind, perhaps we are pursuing an ultimate object which will forever elude us. Possibility of a God, if necessary as a Pure Hypothesis. Possibility of a Devil who, in the name of morality, constantly incites us to self-analysis, on the grounds of the illusion that "I think". Possibility to consider these possibilities and to theatricalize the space of thought. Possibility to virtualize every thought and to view one's own thinking as nothing but a machine of possibilities. Only the passing of the time needed for the crystallization of a thought can be called absolute. Thinking is a waste of time.

The "self" is nothing... and the capacity to incessantly flood this nothing with thoughts, sentiments, ambitions,... Necessity of a spiritual asceticism, directed towards a literally automatic, anonymous thinking. Necessity of absolute concentration. Necessity to transform consciousness into awareness. Into a pure capacity, into a pure force, into nothing more than intensity. Necessity to desire as an automaton.

Truth is... nothing. Hole. Emptiness. Bottomlessness. Sacred centre. To think without a ground and not accept this insight as a ground either; to think that perhaps one is not thinking überhaupt, but sinking away into an unfathomable depth while mistakenly taking the concomitant motions of the brain, the complacent expressness of which is by definition suspect for thoughts. Consciousness which consciously doubts the possibility of being conscious. Lucidity ends time and again at the contemplation of paradoxes: beyond this limit, the realm of mysticism begins. Is (to want) to be lucid actually a sign of lucidity?

Death is... nothing, and so is self-selected solitude, which always entertains an ambivalent relationship with death: it vacillates between submissive embrace and decisive energy. The orientation towards the ultimate usually wants to perform one single ultimate act. Paradox of suicide.

Expectations, always and everywhere. About things, people, the future. Even regarding death we have great expectations. Those exclamation marks, over and over again, which are to lend a semblance of importance to a contingent experience or thought. Always and everywhere those absurd dances of language, the choreographic accuracy of which leads one to suspect their human origin.

Objectivism, but radical: every human being lives and dies alone, in an inexorable loneliness, of which the tragic anonymity of the flesh is still the best image. Only in the redeeming representation of this image does obscenity change into lucidity. Rembrandt as the eternal illustration of this.

Acceptance of the truth of the social: to efface oneself in favour of others. To play one's role, to leave one's own person in the wings. Not to claim any merit, to perform institutional tasks with dedication and care - because they are based on a social belief, with no particular reason, in value, efficiency, use. To be a believing unbeliever. To combine a civilised indifference with a reserved commitment. Never fully speak one's mind.

To write and communicate in full awareness of the fact that language makes communication possible on the condition of the individual's not being understood. To no longer want to understand one's own words. Irremediable intransparency of consciousness. To therefore surrender oneself to the anarchic way in which it deals with language: jerking, twisting, destroying. Ultimate attempt to resist the fascism of language, its ceaseless slaughter of every form of particularity - of the indifference of reality. A futile resistance, doomed to failure. Stammering, stuttering, muttering, and finally silence, thus as yet showing the truth of language in language: Beckett.

Do you maintain that your writings merely bear witness to, as you call it yourself, "the state of mind of the modem engineer"?
"I am a machine, a complex whole of mechanical and digital systems carefully attuned to one another. The only thing that distinguishes my thoughts from those of others is a certain pitch, a specific tone. A particular humming one becomes accustomed to, slowly but surely. For the rest, everyone disposes of the same mechanical powers. Differences in content are the consequence of differences in implementation. Not everyone has the patience to try out the countless possibilities of the machines one lives and works with."

You are blaming humanity for something like metaphysical laziness?
"No. The majority of modern people still have not sufficiently assimilated the most formidable creation of humanity, technology. It is exactly from the possibility of a radical objectification that the average person wants to shield his inner self. Self-analysis only concerns these people insofar it allows them to say 'I’. This is completely irrelevant, anyway."

How would you then judge the value of your writings?
"My work is an attempt to fathom the mechanics of the mind, without drama, motivated perhaps by no more than an improper curiosity. Others examine the mechanics of pleasure, still others those of language and writing. This configuration must suffice."

Vanity is totally alien to you ?
"In everyday contact with other people, particularly those of the female sex, I have lapsed into affectation more than once. My conscience always felt instantly unburdened by virtue of all those moments when I have done my work with the simplicity of a cartographer."

But why all this effort? What are you aiming at?
"A minimum of the art of existence, with the hypothesis that there are secret interfaces between life and art."

Our desire never concerns truth: it always wants the True (the Good, the Beautiful). To desire is the desire for capitals. The only delightful thought is the one which succeeds in assuming an aura of absoluteness. Only the ultimate really concerns us: the Truth is necessarily the last truth; it will destroy all other possibilities and hypotheses, so at the moment of its formulation, thought condemns itself to the eternal repetition of one and the same phrase. What we desire is always and everywhere: an End - that thunderbolt of Truth, Goodness or Beauty which stops time for good and freezes every life in a perfect form. Original sin of mankind: to wake up after such a flash in a world brimming with possibilities. The burden of choices, preferences, liberties, all over again: "The Messiah exists only as a second." Every momentary death is an inane form of self-deception: pleasure as a compensation for idiocy.

Conscious affirmation of a consciousness of seconds, whereby self-loss goes hand in hand with a pathetic thrashing about; whereby the moment of salvation also marks the transition to a state of bodily ridicule; whereby existence is abolished fractally in favour of a maelstrom of chaotic sensations, a formless nothing. Whereby consciousness hesitates for a fraction of a second and proceeds to condemn itself to the misconception that what happened was a moment of eternal thoughtlessness. Perhaps mention was only made of an immeasurable leap of thoughts, an extended interval in which nothing of any significance happened, after which the interrupted self-communication continues to run its course. "Where were we again? Oh yes,..” Insignificant malfunction of the self-correcting machine.

Ultimate limit of every desire for the ultimate: the world of objects, those things putting up a resistance to the body hic et nunc. To recognize an unattainable ethical ideal in the indifference of things.

Distance. To know in silence. A piercing awareness of futility and therefore do what has to be done. Whatever presents itself as duty. Morality without words. Virtue. To produce art, and know that one is embalming a corpse. To be faithful to one single person in an utterly unromantic fashion, never to think that the other is an ever-understanding alter ego: to be faithful to a stranger. To think and live without illusions, taking into account, of course, the possibility of thus being the prisoner of a supreme illusion. To always consider the impossible possibility; to always see the crack in a fascinating thought, the wound in a perfect body. Civilized iciness. "Verfrorenheit".

Aversion to vanitas, love for the flash of insight which humiliates self-consciousness; aversion to the contrived, polemics, chit-chat: love for the mask that does not hide anything; aversion to all forms of emphatic openness, love for those who keep on gambling patiently for a brief moment of self-understanding, a moment of initiation into the secret they are. We are few; we recognize each other in gestures and intonations. In a fundamental reserve in all enthusiasm: all devotion is greeted with indifference. Across every thinkable social boundary, there is a we that describes a nameless union - which secretly knows itself to be bound by an idiotic silence, an unspeakable refusal, an impossible violence. From the ashes of this unnameable collective, a star will one day rise to blind the world. Its prefiguration is in every work of art that condemns us to muteness.