Spurious

As Jon Savage points out in England's Dreaming, the London of punk was still a bombed-out city, full of chasms, caverns, spaces that could be temporarily occupied and squatted. Once these spaces are enclosed, practically all of the city's energy is put into paying the mortgage or the rent. There's no time to experiment, to journey without already knowing where you will end up. Your aims and objectives have to be stated up front. 'Free time' becomes convalescence. You turn to what reassures you, what will most refresh you for the working day: the old familiar tunes (or what sound like them). London becomes a city of pinched-faced drones plugged into iPods.

Mark Fisher, introduction to Laura Oldfield Ford's Savage Messiah

Inside the heavily secured complex outside Shenzen, China, known as the Foxconn City, we find the home of about 420,000 workers[...] Foxconn is perhaps most famous for the recent string of suicides[...] On the surface, Foxconn does not look like a labour camp. A guided tour through the premises yields a picture quite unlike the factories of the industrial dark ages. Here we find swimming pools, tennis courts and gyms as well as numerous clubs for employees, in chess, calligraphy and fishing, to name a few. The only catch is that none of these facilities are to be used. Apart from short breaks for lunch and sleep, the workers have no free time[...]

To investigate the working conditions at Foxconn, the Chinese newspaper Southern Quarterly sent a team of undercoer reporters. After 28 days of immense suffering they came back to report about a life completely overtaken by work. As they reported: 'The workers we have spoken to say that their hands continue to twitch at night, or that when they are walking down the street they cannot help but mimic the motion. They are never able to relax their minds. As one of the reporters surmised, 'for many workers, the only escape from this cycle was to end their lives'. In the attempt to curb the suicide epidemic, Foxconn management have gone to great lengths. They have put safety nets between buildings to catch falling workers. They have opened a stress room, where employees can beat up life-sized dolls with baseball bats. Only a hundred counsellors have been called in. And thirty Buddhist monks have been summoned 'to release the suicide souls from purgatory'. Foxconn are now leading innovations in a new field of management ... suicide management.

from Carl Cederstrom and Peter Fleming, Dead Man Working

The power of committing suicide is regarded by Pliny as an advantage which men possess even above the Deity himself.

David Hume

There are many things in place Saint-Sulpice [...] A great number, if not the majority of these things have been described, inventoried, photographed, talked about, or registered. My intention in the pages that follow was to describe the rest instead: that which is generally not taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds.

Perec, introduction to An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris

Attempt was one of Perec's clearer efforts to grapple with what he termed the 'infraordinary': the markings and manifestations of the everyday that consistently escape our attention as they compose the essence of our lives - 'what happens', as he puts it here, 'when nothing happens'.

Translator's afterword to Perec's An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris

[...]

As Kierkegaard writes, the size of one’s faith can be measured by one’s lack of faith. I agree. [...]

Once you have awakened to the question of faith, you cannot simply return to your everyday agenda like a committed atheist could. You cannot retreat to the comforts of atheism. Behind us are two thousand years that have been marked by questions about God. Today’s atheistic calm, even from intellectuals, is equal to the eradication of our intellectual history.

Why?
Walser: Because we would have to admit that we were crazy. You cannot spend two thousand years trying to understand God and then simply abandon the question and declare that we’re not interested in it anymore.

Skepticism, atheism, existentialism – all those intellectual traditions have their own long histories that have co-existed with theology.
Walser: I believe that the most important condition for faith is sensitivity to beauty. We have the capacity to find something beautiful. Take Bach or Schubert: Their music was dedicated to God but filled and shaped their worldly lives. If you are a committed atheist, you lean back and miss all the richness of that history. As an atheist, you cannot fully make sense of the music, you have no explanation for their perennial motion and rhythm. I have been touched by that history and I am still moved by it. So I cannot simply abandon questions about the existence of God. I am touched by the works of beauty that have been brought into the world through religion, and I cannot simply embrace the everyday experience of atheism.

What remains of [Nietzsche]?
Walser: In the end, Nietzsche almost calls to God. That is what I implied when I talked about the two millennia of Christian history that built up towards God. Shouldn’t we be allowed to rest at this point? I seek for my own imaginative world to be connected to those last years of Nietzsche. You cannot simply discard God like a box that has been emptied. It’s easy to say, but Nietzsche does it with an incredible linguistic passion. He is one incredible example, Karl Barth is another.

From an interview with Martin Walser

LOUISE: [...] So what 'appened? Were you bored in Manchester?

JOHNNY: Was I bored? No, I wasn't fuckin' bored. I'm never bored. That's the trouble with everybody - you are all so bored. You've 'ad nature explained to you and you're bored with it. You've 'ad the living body explained to you and you're bored with it. You've 'ad the universe explained to you and you're bored with it. So now you just want cheap thrills and like plenty of 'em, and it dun't matter 'ow tawdry or vacuous they are so long as it's new, as long as it's new, so long as it flashes and fuckin' beeps in forty fuckin' different colours. Well, whatever else you can say about me, I'm not fuckin' bored!

from Mike Leigh's film, Naked

Our brains are so powerful and so is language, but language is like the bricks, and religion and philosophy end up becoming like the mortar that hold those bricks together. There are so many gaps in the logic of this language and how it can explain our plight, our existence, our successes, and that's where religion seems to fit in. Language is too incomplete and religion fills in. Why do I feel bad when this happens? Well, religion comes in and says you don't have to think about it. You can go to work the next day or do whatever, you don't have to think about it. It fills in the cracks of what we can't speak about, what we can't say.

What is normally called religion is what I would tend to call music - participating in music, listening to music, making records and singing. I think records and music are more appropriate and more respectful of the human soul than the churches are. And more respectful of the needs of humans to communicate with the aspects of themselves that are neglected by language. I don't think people think about God so much as they think about themselves and how they're going to get through life.

Will Oldham, from Will Oldham on Bonnie 'Prince' Billy

This is what exists, the grass growing in the houses, the dandelions in the churches, and suddenly one can imagine how it might all continue to grow, how a forest might creep over our cities, slowly, inexorably, thriving unaided by human hands, a silence of thistles and moss, an earth without history, only the twittering of birds, spring, summer and autumn, the breathing of which there is no one to count any more.

Max Frisch, on the devastation of postwar Europe

There's a poignant moment in an interview with the terminally ill production designer Rashit Satiullin, who, when asked about the Zone, recalls the time he spent living, working and talking with Tarkovsky: 'Here you live being your inmost self ... it's somwhere where you can talk with somebody, something unfathomable'. The interviewer asks him to clarify. Does he mean ...? 'Yes speaking with god. When Andrei was no more I was bereaved of a person with whom I could talk about the most important things. That room vanished'. 'So he was the Room to you?', asks the interviewer. 'Yes'.

Geoff Dyer, Zona

Professor sums up Stalker's little sermon: so the Zone lets the good ones pass and the bad ones die? [...] Stalker doesn't know. It lets pass those who have lost all hope, the wretched, he says in an agony of wretchedness, never once realising that he might (by definition) be among their number. Does wretchedness ever have this capacity to transcend itself? Or is it simply a path to further wretchedness?

[...] Again the impossible paradox of Stalker's relationship to the Zone makes itself felt. The keynote of his life is hope, but the Zone will let through only those who have lost all hope. Stalkers, we learn later, are forbidden entry to the Room. Forbidden, perhaps, by virtue of their belief - their hope - in it.

from Geoff Dyer's Zona