She is dirty.
Even clean she is dirty. She is
covered in gold and excrement, in children and saucepans. She is omnipotent. She is like a greasy, dirty queen who has
nothing left to govern, as she has already invaded everywhere, has already
contaminated everything with her intrinsic filth. No one can resist her. She reigns by virtue of an eternal yearning
for the depths, for the black hole of time.
In prison she is like a tranquillizer.
In certain psychiatric hospital wards she is always on duty. It is in such places that she is most in her
element: no one looks at her, no one
listens to her, they let her waffle on in her corner, they place before her
those they no longer know what to do with.
A day in a hospital or a prison is longer than a day. You have to get through them. They have her look after the mental patients,
the prisoners and the old men in retirement homes. She has infinitely less dignity than those
people, knocked senseless by age, wounded by Law or by nature. She could not care less about this so-called
dignity she lacks. She does her work and
that is enough. Her work is to soil the
pain with which she has been entrusted, and to amass everything—childhood and
misfortune, beauty and laughter, intelligence and money—into a single slimy
glazed block. Commonly
referred to as a window on the world.
But, more than a window, it’s the entire world crammed
into that block, the world bathed in that light of hers, lousy with
people, with the world’s rubbish spilled, every second of the day, onto the
living room carpet. Of course you can
always rummage around. Sometimes,
particularly in the early hours of the morning, you happen upon new words,
fresh faces. You might discover a
treasure in the trash dump. But there's
no point in sorting through it, the garbage cans come too quickly, the handlers
too fast on their feet. You feel sorry
for those people. You feel sorry for television reporters, with their perfect
lack of intelligence and heart—that affliction with
time they have, inherited from the business world: tell me about God and about your mother, you
have one minute and twenty-seven seconds to answer my question. A friend of yours, a philosopher, spends a
day there, inside that window soiled with images. They ask him to come to speak about love, and
because they are afraid of a word that might take its time, afraid something
might happen, because whatever the cost nothing ambiguous or depressing must be
allowed to happen—that is, less than
nothing—because of this fear of theirs, they invite twenty other people,
specialists in this, experts in that, twenty people;
in other words, three minutes per person.
Children are told that vulgarity is found in words. True vulgarity in this world is found in
time, in the inability to spend it in any other way than as if it were money,
hurry, hurry from a catastrophe to the horse racing results, hurry to glide
across tons of money and a deep lack of
intelligence about life, what life is in its suffering magic, hurry on to the
next hour and above all don't let anything happen, any true word, any pure
astonishment. And your friend, after the
program, he’s a bit concerned all the same, why such a hatred
of thought, such a mania for
chopping everything up, and the producer gives him this magnificent reply: I agree with you, but it’s better that I’m
here, if others were in my place, it would be
even worse. Her answer makes you think
of certain officials of the French state during World War II, of the legitimacy
that these virtuous civil servants of evil conferred upon themselves: it was necessary to take charge of deporting
France’s Jews, that allowed us to save a few of them. The same abject behavior, the same collaboration
with the forces in the world that ruin the world, the same utter lack of common
sense: there are seats one must leave
empty. There are acts one cannot commit
without immediately being undone by them.
Television, despite its claims to the contrary, gives no news of the
world. Television is the world
collapsing onto the world, a whining drunken brute, incapable of offering a
single clear, comprehensible piece of news.
Television is the world working full time, filled to the brim with
suffering, it's impossible to watch it under such conditions, impossible to
hear. You sit there in your armchair or
in front of your plate, and they toss a corpse at you followed by a soccer
goal, and they leave you there together, the three of
you, the dead man’s nakedness, the soccer player's laughter,
and your own life, already dark enough, they leave each of you at opposite ends
of the earth, far apart because you were so brutally brought together—a dead
man still dying, a soccer player still raising his arms, and you still
struggling to make sense of it all, but they are off to something else, low
pressure zone over Brittany, calm weather in Corsica. And so.
And so what are you supposed to do with the old queen, stuffed full of
images, dead drunk with money?
Nothing. You mustn't do
anything. There she is, crazier and
crazier, sick at the idea that one day she may no longer be able to
seduce. There she is and she won't
budge. A world without images has become
unthinkable. There will always be
enterprising young people to serve her, to do her dirty work in your place, in
the place of all, in the name of all.
You have to let such baseness continue to abase itself, let the organic
decomposition of the world proceed. It's
near the end already, the end is nigh, one mustn’t interrupt the death watch,
or above all attempt to repair what has gone wrong—you might as well try to put
foundation make-up onto the waxy cheeks of a dead woman. Let the blind images proliferate: something is coming up from
below, something is coming to greet us.
In pain there is an inexhaustible purity, the same that’s
found in joy, and this purity is making its way beneath the tons
of the frozen imaginary. In the meanwhile, the true images, the pure
images of truth take refuge in writing, in the solitary compassion of those who
write, Velibor Colic, for example. A Yugoslav
writer, his images are not beautiful, he tells what he sees, it's as simple as
that. He tells the story of something
that happens in Modrica, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, on May 17, 1992. He tells this story as if it were an eternal
thing. In the singularity of a place and
an act he sees what has been eternal about the world since its worldly beginnings: and so
you can read without losing courage, without
saying to yourself, what's the use; and so you can give to
the sentence the time to be written, and to the pain of the world the time to
enter your mind and deliver its meaning there. You read: The
gypsy Ibro earned his living by re-selling old newspapers and empty
bottles. He was the owner of a
tumble-down cart, and several generations of the
inhabitants of Modrica had heard his famous cry, early in the morning: "Transportation of every kind!
Dead or alive, same price!" He lived in a strange cottage, on a street near the Medical Clinic. He had
a wife who was a deaf-mute and a son who was fifteen or so, a mental
retard. On May 17, when the Serb army
thrust its way into Modrica, the gypsy Ibro refused to flee, even though he was
a Muslim. There was no pity for
him. The Serb soldiers slit his throat,
and that of his wife and son and, as in the "time of the Turks," they
impaled their heads on the stakes of the fence around the house. According to eyewitnesses, on the table in
the courtyard there stood a bottle of raki and some freshly-made coffee. To greet the soldiers if they came. You read this and you see Ibro and his wife
and son, and the child-like cheerfulness of the murderers, the heads on the
stakes and the fresh coffee. The
television might have shown you the coffee but it would have insisted on the heads,
muttering something like, "We hesitate to show you this," and on with
the rest of the news, we haven't got all day, low pressure zone over Corsica,
calm weather in Brittany. And you would
have sat on in your dining room, stupid, three heads on the table. There you have all of it—and
the tragic purity of all of it: the hospitality granted to assassins. The evil of television is not in television
itself, it is in the world, and if we confuse the two, it is because television
and the world now comprise one lost and suffering mass. The evil in the world has always been there,
in the refusal of hospitality—the first sacred fire of human history, before
even God emerged. It is the world’s evil,
and it is what both the world and the image-sated
monster suffer from: failure to welcome
the weak images of pain, to recognize the basic
laws of hospitality, which state that one gives
water to anyone who comes from so far away.
I entertain, says the television, yet it has been a long time since it
has made us laugh. One
can’t provide culture for everyone, says the television, and
we don’t dare reply that it is not a problem of culture
but of intelligence, which is not in the same category at all. Intelligence has nothing to do with
diplomas. They can go together but diplomas
are not the main ingredient. Intelligence is the solitary strength of
finding, in the chaos of one's life, a gleam of light powerful enough to light
the way a little beyond oneself—toward that
next person, over there, lost like us in the dark.
I have a soft spot for feelings, says television, and no one has the courage to
point out the abyss between feelings and sentimentality. At the end of its tether, television says, it's
not me, it's people, I just do what people want—and what response other than
silence can you give when you’re confronted with the grave illiteracy of
television and of those who make it. The
word people is one of the finest words in the language. In French it speaks of want and
stubbornness, the nobility of the beggars beneath
the careless heel of the nobles. It says the very
opposite of what television says. And
for the time being that's the way things stand:
pain arrives famished in television's arms, only to be shunted into your
own arms still unfed, only seen and heard.
Then it sets off
again, to seek asylum in ink, until the day comes when it can return to the
temple of images—because one thing is absolutely certain: one day there will
be someone intelligent enough to film a bottle of raki and freshly-made
coffee, and they will take their time, they will say
what they think is right, or keep silent, because sometimes it is necessary to
keep silent in order to say what is right—and to show,
however long it takes, simply show, with great calm show,
a bottle of raki and freshly-made coffee.