Spurious

The Book of Revelations

Your trip overseas. Your period as a world traveller. It's W.'s favourite story. You'd flown off to the Mediterranean, hadn't you?, W. says. You'd flown there as a world traveller, never to return! Did you speak the language? Had you made preparations for your visit? Did you know anything about the culture and mores of the country you were going to? The answer is no in each case, says W. You just went, didn't you? Off you went as a world traveller.

What did you expect? What did you think awaited your there? No sooner than your plane had touched down, no sooner than you were through the airport, but someone would recognise you for the wit and bon vivant you were, someone would invite you for lunch, someone for cocktails - you would be already on your way to becoming a local sensation, a favoured visitor from overseas, a man to be welcomed and passed around, introduced here, introduced there.

Soon, you'd be the centre of a whole circle. Soon, right at the heart of things, the social world orbiting around you, you'd caused a kind of frisson, women were throwing themselves at you, men were vying for your company. Your conversation was legendary, your learning magnificent, you could talk on every topic, from the petty to the world-historical.

Yes, you'd be recognised for what you were, at last. The world knew you, lauded you, carried you on its shoulders. All it took was a trip to another country. All it took was some resolve, a plane ticket, and there you would be, in a country that would celebrate your talents.

Was that what you dreamed of, W. asks, with your plans for world travel? Is that what you thought awaited you on the other side? And instead, what happened? You lurched from disaster to disaster, didn't you? No sooner were you off the plane than you were beaten down by the sun - beaten by it. You'd never experienced Mediterranean heat before, had you? You'd never seen a cloudless sky. And that blue - the fierce blue of a sky without clouds. It was too much for you, wasn't it?  

You became curiously mute. You'd been stunned into silence. You didn't say a thing. What could you say? What could you have said? Nothing was going to happen to you. You'd be picked up and carried along by no crowd. There was no one to whom you could prove yourself.

Who was interested in you? Who knew your name? If you were a little younger, a paedophile might have followed you around. A little younger, a little cuter, and some pervert with a camera might have taken pictures. But then, there, in the Mediterranean heat, no one wanted to know you. No one spoke to you, even out of pity.

Because you had the wrong personality, didn't you? The entirely wrong personality. You were not a world traveller. You were not a go-getter. You weren't a hail-fellow-well-met kind of person. You were surly, as you are now. You were churlish. You kept to yourself - who else would have you? You spoke to no one - who would want to listen?

What had the Mediterranean have to do with you? - that was your thought, wasn't it? What had it to do with you, the remorseless sky, the heat, the beaches, the sunbathers? And what were you to it in turn - the towns of white houses, the cafe bars, the tavernas? Where did the Venn diagrams intersect: the Venn diagram of the Mediterranean and the Venn diagram of Lars?

You slept rough, didn't you? You slept in a building site and then out in the open, on the rocks, the loop of your rucksack strap around your arm, for security. You slept on a beach, didn't you, and the sea came up? You thought: I'll sleep on this beach, how romantic, and then the sea came up and soaked your rucksack. The waves came in and you had to flee, didn't you, world traveller? Up they came, the waves, and off you went into town, towards God-knows-where in the darkness, because there you were lost, hopelessly lost on a Mediterranean island.

Why had you travelled to that island to the first place, anyway? Why did you book a ticket there, to island, among all the others? It was something about the Book of Revelations, wasn't it? It had been written there, hadn't it? Did you think some great vision was going to befall you? Did you think you'd see the end of the world? What did you see on the beach, as the waves came up? What, as you were driven into town, looking for somewhere sensible to stay?

How long did you last out there in the Mediterranean? How long, in your new life as a world traveller? A few days, that was it, wasn't it? A few days - a handful - instead of a lifetime. And there it was, green England, that you could see from your plane window. Green England - lush, verdant - and not the rocky Mediterranean. Had you had any visions?, W. says, rocking back and forth in laughter. Had you finished a new Book of Revelations? Had something of the apocalypse been revealed to you? Ah ... it's his favourite story, W. says.

The Scorpion

We were laughing, but at you. You were laughing, but you were alone in your laughter, on the other side of our laughter. We were on one side, laughing, and you were on the other, similarly laughing. But everything depends upon where you are when you laugh.

We were watching you as we'd always watched you. And you - you'd seen yourself for the first time. And what had you seen? What we had always seen. What we had been watching for some time. And now you'd seen it. Now you wanted to join the club - the laughing club.

But do you really think you could laugh at yourself the way we laughed at you? Did you think you could join our side? You're alone, that's the truth, and how long can you laugh? Alone - laughing in your cage, your box. Laughing in the cell of your stupidity. And listening to your laughter echo. And listening to your laughter die away.

In the end, we don't envy you. In the end, you should never have found out. You should have believed your own lies, your alibis. And now you know? And now it's become clear? But nothing is clear. A scorpion can't sting itself. A tarantula is immune to its own poison. And the actor cannot be his own audience - not right there, not immediately.

Then who are you? Who are you now? Caught between yourself and yourself. Lost between two facing mirrors, and that's the curse, isn't? You have to live on, don't you? You've survived your collapse, when you were only collapse. So what are you now?

The Dresser Crab

A dresser crab builds its shell from whatever's to hand. It takes what it can, what it must, in order to have a shell. Its defence is borrowed. And you? You've built your life, which is to say, the failure of your life, from whatever you could find. And what you've found! What you've stumbled across!

You chanced yourself into a library, didn't you? You read. You thought you were entitled to read. You snuck in when no one as watching, and there you were with all the others, reading. Reading like a reader. But unlike them, you had no idea how to read. Unlike them, fluent readers, turning page after page, you were only a would-be reader, a reader-pretend. You turned pages as they did; your eyes scanned the lines as theirs did. But what could you take in? What could you read, really read?

And one day - and what a day! - you thought you'd begin to write, too, didn't you? That was the next step, the most hilarious one. You thought you could write, that you were entitled to write. And couldn't you fill a page like the others? Couldn't you type, or at least perform a simulacrum of typing, your fat little fingers hitting the keys? It's a wonder you could type, with your fingers. What a joke! If you began laughing, you could never stop. You began writing, and you couldn't stop that, either. Logorrhea. Literary diarrhoea streaming down your legs.

You read, you thought, so you could write. But in fact, you could do neither, and were entitled to neither. You could not read - reading is alien to you - but writing is yet more alien. The ability to write is the most distant thing from you of all. You - write? But you did write, didn't you? Or you called it writing. You thought it was writing. No one else thought so, but you thought so, didn't you? For a while at least. For too long, but not forever ...

A dresser crab, scuttling along the sea-floor. A crab, clothing itself in whatever was to hand. And what was to hand was the scholar's mantle, wasn't it? What was to hand was the library-ruse and the writing-ruse - my God, what a joke! But if you began laughing, what then? If you even started to laugh?

The Humiliation Artist

The circle of your obsessions has become narrower, says W. That's the change in me. That's the essential change he's seen over the years. 

Once they passed through the whole world, my obsessions. You confused them for ambition, genuine ambition. You wanted to learn things, master whole areas of knowledge. My God, you could confuse yourself with someone with ability! You studied, didn't you? You read. You even wrote. You - wrote! It's amazing. You wrote and published.

What temerity! What lack of understanding! Yes, you'd deluded yourself completely, it was quite magnificent. You confused yourself for a scholar, a man of letters. You wrote learned articles. You spoke with learned people on learned topics ...

You thought you were part of something, didn't you? You walked in cloisters, in Oxford colleges. Ambition - that's what you had, wasn't it? The horizon couldn't limit you. Ah, what aspirations you had! You would write one book, and then another. And you did it: you wrote one book and then another.

Everyone laughed. We were all laughing up our sleeves, but you didn't notice, did you? The circle of your obsessions had not closed tight around you. You weren't yet being strangled. It wasn't yet a garrotte.

Your obsessions reigned as far as the horizon - further! You thought, you really thought you were entitled to write ... And then what? What happened? Doubt crept in. Doubt snuck in the door. Were you really permitted to write? Were you elected to read? To publish? To share your thoughts with the world?

What a disgrace!: that's what you said to yourself in your loneliest hour, wasn't it? I'm a disgrace: that's what your heart whispered. For the most part, you could choose not to hear it. The world was too loud. You were too loud. But then, in the quiet of the night ... Then, just after you turned off the light ... A new obsession began to form: your disgrace. What was its origin? Where had it gone wrong? At what stage did it all go wrong, as it so clearly had?

Doubt crept in. Obsession. Your ambition was eaten out from within. It rotted from inside. It had dawned on you, hadn't it? What had you done? For what had you been responsible? Guilt: that was the word, wasn't it? Humiliation. Because you'd humiliated yourself, hadn't you? You were a dunce turned to the wall in your corner ... 

What had you done? What hadn't you done? What hadn't you spared the world? Your thoughts. Your books. My God, your books!

One day you understood that there were no excuses. That you were inexcusable. That you couldn't apologise enough for yourself. That your life was already that: an apology, an excuse. A scorpion stinging itself to death. A tarantula seething in its own poison.

Your obsessions didn't range as freely. Your horizon shrank. Once the sea - the far blue distance, and now? A room. Less than a room. A cone of light. A modem and a computer. Type, fat boy. So you typed. You typed, and what did you type? Your confession, your autocritique ...

Tighter still it drew, the circle of your obsessions. Tighter until it was taut around your own neck, and strangling. Tighter until your face turned blue. And that's what it is now, isn't it: blue. You're gasping for breath, aren't you? But you can't allow yourself to breathe. Your obsessions are strangling you.

My God, how do you spend your time? What do you actually do? Write endlessly of your own failure. Write your autoconfession, your apology. You're sick of yourself, aren't you? But you can't be rid of yourself. And that's it, your life - the whole drama of your life. The circle of your obsessions. The circle become garrotte, become noose. The circle pulling tighter ...

Type, fat boy, make us laugh! Because we're all laughing at you. We're watching you humiliate yourself. We're watching how far you can take it, your humiliation. You're not a hunger artist - you're an humiliation artist. And we're here to watch your disgrace. We're here to watch your ongoing disgrace.

The Concrete

W. has grown increasingly convinced that intellectual conversation itself is an affectation. At first, he had supposed it was bad manners to talk of abstract things at dinner. When you eat, eat, that's what he had thought, and save the abstract matters for later.

But now? Intellectual conversation - so-called intellectual conversation - is itself a ruse, an excuse, he says. We have to plunge into concrete matters, W. says. Our conversation must be as concrete as our eating.

Friends of the Chicken

Herzog trained that chicken, the one in Stroszek - did you know that?, says W. He trained it to dance longer than the 3-5 seconds it was used to. For months he would train it (as well as other chickens - a whole troupe - just in case this one died), withholding the food it would usually get after its dance, extending the dancing period, until he reached 15 seconds.

15 seconds! It's not much. Herzog likes to film in still shots, with no cuts. An image, just an image. But this time, he had to cut - he had to intercut the dancing chicken with other images. The car that was set to circle outside the arcade. Bruno on the chairlift. Luckily, these are very fine images ... But the chicken is at the core. The chicken is the centre.

Herzog talks of finding images adequate to the world, to the new world. The chicken is cosmic, that's what we have to understand. The chicken, the dancing chicken, is everything.

W. dreams of a thought that would be the equivalent of that chicken. A thought, a single thought adequate to the disaster, equal to it ... He dreams it will coalesce from a feeling, like a star. That a feeling could be reduced to a precise point ...

Above the sense that it's all at an end, that it's all finished, which mustn't be simply an intellectual idea. It has to be felt. You have to take it to your heart. The flat, wide plain must be at your heart. The blasted plain. So that above it, like a star, a single idea might be born. A single thought, like a crown.

In some sense, W. says, we have to exhaust thought. We have to run it ragged, run it to its very end, like the car Bruno sets running in circles outside the arcade. It has to run until it burns, until it catches fire. Then and only then, something might happen.

We have to think like a chicken. We have to dance, says. W. Go on, fat boy, do your chicken dance. Go on, do the funky chicken ... Perhaps I am the chicken, and W. is the thinker. Perhaps I am the chicken dancing, endlessly dancing, and he is the one who has to think what that means.

But sometimes W. thinks he is the chicken, that he is only a chicken-thinker and a dancing-thinker, which is to say, not a thinker at all. He supposes he is cursed to be able to accomplish only a simulacrum of thought, when what is essential is to think, really to think.

Perhaps I am a purer dancer than he is. Perhaps I am more ready to dance, and to the limit of my abilities. Perhaps that's the pinnacle of my life, W. says, my dancing, my continuous dancing which is there beneath everything I say and do.

It's glorious!, W. says of this dancing, though it just irritates most people. Why are you hanging out with Lars?, they ask him. They can't see it, W. says. It's been up to him, W., to see my significance. That's his gift, his only gift. He's like a man with a dancing bear, only no one can see that's it's dancing. Can't you see it, can't you see the bear?, W. says, although sometimes he says chicken instead of bear. And they can't, W. says. They can't see a thing.

It's like theology, W. says. The theology of an absent God. The theology of an absent chicken. No one can see the chicken. No one believes in the chicken. But still, the chicken is there. And the chicken won't stop, says W. The chicken won't stop!

Sometimes, though, W. supposes that the chicken, the dancing chicken is between us. We have to think of the chicken as a form of relation, W. says, with great seriousness. He and I might be the terms of this relation, but the relation itself precedes us, and we only make sense because of it.

Perhaps that's what our friendship is, W. says: a chicken dancing. Perhaps our friendship is itself a great duty to the world, a great sacrifice. Oh, it's not a sacrifice for me, W. knows that. I've been lucky! It was pure luck for me, becoming the term of a relation. How else would I have redeemed my life? How else the misery and squalor of my life?

The chicken is between us, W. says, almost mystically. That's what we have to understand: it's the mode of our relation. It's what happens between us. We depend upon it. Our very friendship. Our interaction. We belong to the chicken, to the dancing chicken. We are friends of the chicken. No: we are friends by way of the chicken.

WH: Whether Philippe's walk between the Twin Towers was witnessed by anyone down in the street really didn't matter. Philippe once secretly put a cable across a 2,400-foot ravine and walked across it and danced on the rope. Only a farmer who was driving his cattle at sunrise realized that someone was there. He rushed into the village to wake a policeman. And when they came back on a motorcycle, there was no Philippe, there was no wire left.

PP: But the cows remember.

Philippe Petit and Werner Herzog in conversation

... the crew couldn't take [the scene with the dancing chicken], they hated it, they were a loyal group and in case of Stroszek they hated it so badly that I had to operate the camera myself because the cinematographer who was very good and dedicated, hated it so much that he didn't want to shoot it. He said, "I've never seen anything as dumb as that.” And I tried to say, "You know there's something so big about it." But they couldn't see it.

[....] the dancing chicken was shot in Cherokee, North Carolina. When you are speaking about these images, there's something bigger about them, and I keep saying that we do have to develop an adequate language for our state of civilization, and we do have to create adequate pictures - images for our civilization. If we do not do that, we die out like dinosaurs, so it's of a different magnitude, trying to do something against the wasteland of images that surround us, on television, magazines, post cards, posters in travel agencies…

Herzog, interviewed

- And it is mysterious how cinema works in that respect. It is the placement of a shot that makes it so important, and makes it highly significant. It’s like the end of “Stroszek”, for example, with the dancing chicken. But then, the technical crew or almost everyone on location hated the film so much that ultimately the cinematographer refused to shoot it (the shot) and said: “We are going for lunch now if you want to film that shit. “ And I said: “I’m gonna film that shit, sure.” And I tried to tell them. “Don’t you see there’s something very very big here?” And nobody saw it. It was really big. And it’s still one of the best things I ever filmed in my life.

- That’s one of the most beautiful endings of a film…

- Even the crew that I paid and who were loyal to me went on strike.

[...]

- And one thing about that scene, it is a rare occurrence of inter-cutting different things happening simultaneously, from Bruno on the mountain to the animals (chickens, ducks, rabbits) dancing and playing music and to the truck on fire making circles outside. Usually your scenes are rather large segments, set in one space, one situation, often shot in long takes....

- Yes but the animals dance for quite a while so you hang on to that. The problem was that the chickens wouldn’t dance for more than 15 seconds and then they would retreat. We had them in special training for dancing as long as they could. When you fed a quarter into the machine, the music would play and the chicken would dance. And as a reward it would get some corn. They were accustomed to dancing for 3 to 5 seconds. Now I held them in training for a couple of months to dance as long as they could. But they would only dance for 15 seconds. The problem is, I couldn’t get away with an ending that was a 15 second shot. I had quite a few of those shots and I had to add them together. There was always a jump cut. So there were technical reasons behind it as well. Very often it’s not an ideology or so that’s behind something.

Herzog, interviewed

In myths people live forever. In fairy-tales they live happily ever after. In novels there is, at the end of the 'ever after', the beginning of unhappiness, and usually even before.

from Cees Nooteboom's In the Dutch Mountains