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Happy Together Wong Kar-Wai Hong Kong - Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1997

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Tan Mu — Torus (oil on linen, 2021)

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Wine drunk on a work night. If I had one more glass of wine, I'd probably start going on about women being beautiful. Instead, I'm going to take a nap and have dreams about Tramfrau #1 strangling me to death.

[Try to have a great Tuesday. Please, do it for me. I want all you weird boogers to be happy.]

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"And yet it seems very important to me," she said, "that there's something impossible in every one of us. It explains so many thins. While I was listening to you both, it seemed to me that if we could be cut open our entire life might look like a ring, just something that goes around something." She had already, earlier on, pulled off her wedding ring, and now she peered through it at the lamplit wall. "There's nothing inside, and yet it looks as though that were precisely what matters most. Ulrich can't be expected to express this perfectly the first time he tries."

The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, Vol.1, pg. 401 trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike

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Walter could not make himself look at her. Her capacity for refusal was, after all, a major factor in their life together; Clarisse, looking like a little angel in the long nightgown that covered her feet, had stood on her bed declaring Nietzchean sentiments, with her teeth flashing: "I toss my question like a plumb line into your soul! You want a child and marriage, but I ask you: Are you the man to have a child? Are you the victorious master of his own powers? Or is it merely the voice of the animal in you, the slave of nature, speaking?" In the twilight of the bedroom this had made a rather gruesome spectacle, while Walter had tried in vain to coax her back down under the bedclothes. And now here she was, armed for the future with a new slogan: active passivism, of which a person had to be capable if need be---a phrase that clearly smacked of a man without qualities. Had she been confiding in Ulrich? Was he encouraging her in her eccentricities? These questions were writhing like worms in Walter's heart, so that he almost felt sick to his stomach. His face turned ashen and all the tension went out of it, leaving a mass of helpless wrinkles.

The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, Vol.1, pg. 400 trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike

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"Then he would have to refuse to do anything," Clarisse answered in Ulrich's stead. "This is the active passivism of which a person must be capable in some circumstances."

The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, Vol.1, pg. 400 trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike

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Walter had turned pale to the lips. He hated this view of art as a negation of life, or art against life. He regarded it as offensively bohemian, the dregs of an outdated impulse to shock the conventional mind. He caught the irony of the self-evident fact that in a perfect world there would be no more beauty because it would be superfluous, but he did not hear his friend's unspoken question. For Ulrich was aware of having oversimplified his case. He could just as easily have said the opposite, that art is subversive because art is love; it beautifies its object by loving it, and there may be no other way in this world to beautify a thing or a creature than by loving it. And it is only because our love consists of mere fragments that beauty works by intensification and contrast. And it is only in the sea of love that the concept of perfection, beyond all intensification, fuses with the concept of beauty, which depends on intensification.

The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, Vol.1, pg. 399 trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike

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Ulrich went on: "Every great book breathes this spirit of love for the fate of individuals at odds with the forms the community tries to impose on them. It leads to decisions that cannot be decided; there is nothing to be done but to give a true account of their lives. Extract the meaning out of all literature, and what you will get is a denial, however incomplete, but nonetheless an endless series of individual examples all based on experience, which refute all the accepted rules, principles, and prescriptions underpinning the very society that loves these works of art! In the end, a poem, with its mystery, cuts through to the point where the meaning of the world is tied to thousands of words in constant use, severs all these strings, and turns it into a balloon floating off into space. If this is what we call beauty, as we usually do then beauty is an indescribably more ruthless and cruel upheaval than any political revolution ever was."

The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, Vol.1, pg. 398-399 trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike

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"I know exactly what Ulrich means," Clarisse chimed in again. "I can't remember ever getting a special pleasure out of something because it was happening to me. It was happening, that was the thing! Like music, for instance," she said, turning to her husband. "You don't want to own it; the joy of it is that it's there! We absorb our experiences and expand them into something beyond ourselves in a single movement; we seek to realize ourselves, yes, but not the way shopkeeper realizes a profit!"

The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, Vol.1, pg. 398 trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike

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She had stood up and entered the little circle formed by the chairs. She held herself with a certain awkwardness, as though about to demonstrate her idea by going into a dance. Ulrich, who found such displays of naked emotion distasteful, remembered at this point that most people or, bluntly speaking, the average sort, whose minds are stimulated without their being able to create, long to act out their own selves. These are of course the same people who are so likely to find, going on inside them, something "unutterable"---truly a word that says it all for them and that is the clouded screen upon which whatever they say appears vaguely magnified, so that they can never tell its real value. To put a stop to this, he said: "This was not what I meant, but Clarisse is right; the theater proves that intense personal feelings may serve an impersonal purpose, a complex of meaning and metaphor that makes them more or less transcend the merely personal."

The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, Vol.1, pg. 396-397 trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike

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Now Walter said that Ulrich was being impossible. "You paint a charming picture," he said, "as though we had any choice between living our ideas or living our lives. But you may remember the lines

I am no syllogism nor a fiction--- I am a man, with all his contradiction!

Why not go a step further? Why not demand we get rid of the belly to make space for the mind? But I say to you: A man is made of common clay! That we stretch out an arm and draw it back again, that we have to decide whether to turn right or left, that we are made of habits, prejudices, and earth, and nevertheless make our way as best we can---that is what makes us fully human. What you are saying, tested even slightly against reality, shows it up as being, at best, mere literature."

The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, Vol.1, pg. 396-397 trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike

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Seen in this light, history arises out of routine ideas, out of indifference to ideas, so that reality comes primarily of nothing being done for ideas. This might be briefly summed up, he claimed, by saying that we care too little about what is happening and too much about to whom, when, and where it is happening, so that it is not the essence of what happens that matters to us but only the plot; not the opening up of some new experience of life but only the pattern of what we already know, corresponding precisely to the difference between good plays and merely successful plays. Which means that we must do the opposite of what we do, and first of all give up being possessive about our experiences. We should look upon our experiences less as something personal and real and more as something general and abstract, or with the detachment with which we look at a painting or listen to a song. They should not be turned in upon ourselves but upward and outward. And if this was true on the personal plane, something more would have to be done on the collective plane, something that Ulrich could not quite pin down and that he called a pressing of the grapes, cellaring the wine, concentrating the spiritual juices, and without all of which the individual could not feel other than helpless, of course, abandoned to his own resources. As he talked on in this vein, he remembered the moment when he had told Diotima that reality ought to be done away with.

The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, Vol.1, pg.396 trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike

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Ulrich presented them with his scheme for living the history of ideas instead of the history of the world. The difference, he said to begin with, would have less to do with what was happening than with the interpretation one gave it, with the purpose it was meant to serve, with the system of which the individual events were a part. The prevailing system was that of reality, and it was just like a bad play. It's not for nothing that we speak of a "theater of world events"---the same roles, complications, and plots keep turning up in life. People make love because there is love to be made, and they do it in the prevailing mode; people are proud as the Noble Savage, or as a Spaniard, a virgin, or a lion; in ninety out of hundred cases even murder is committed only because it is perceived as tragic or grandiose. Apart from the truly notable exceptions, the successful political molders of the world in particular have a lot in common with the hacks who write for the commercial theater; the lively scenes they create bore us by their lack of ideas and novelty, but by the same token they lull us into that sleepy state of lowered resistance in which we acquiesce in everything put before us.

The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, Vol.1, pg. 395-396 trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike

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Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii, 1971.

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The luminous, swaying box in which he was riding seemed to be a machine in which several hundred kilos of people were being rattled around, by way of being processed into "the future." A hundred years earlier they had sat in a mail coach with the same look on their faces, and a hundred years hence, whatever was going on, they would be sitting as new people in exactly the same way in their updated transport machines---he was revolted by this lethargic acceptance of changes and conditions, this helpless contemporaneity, this mindlessly submissive, truly demeaning stringing along with the centuries, just as if he were suddenly rebelling against the hat, curious enough in shape, that was sitting on his head.

The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, Vol.1, pg. 391 trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike

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What a strange business history was! We could safely say of this or that event that it had already found its place in history, or certainly would find it; but whether this event had actually taken place was not so sure! Because for anything to happen, it has to happen at a certain date and not at some other date or even not at all; also, the thing itself has to happen and not by chance something merely approximating it or something related. But this is precisely what no one can say of history, unless he happens to have written it down at the time, as the newspapers do, or it's a matter of one's professional or financial affairs, since it is of course important to know how many years one has to go till retirement or when one will come into a certain sum of money or when one will have spent it, and in such a context even wars can become memorable occurrences. Examined close up, our history looks rather vague and messy, like a morass only partially made safe for pedestrian traffic, though oddly enough in the end there does seem to be a path across it, that very "path of history" of which nobody knows the starting point. This business of serving as "the stuff of history" infuriated Ulrich.

The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, Vol.1, pg. 390-391 trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike

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There was a time when people talked of their thoughts taking wing; in Schiller's time such intellectual highfliers would have been widely esteemed, but in our own day such a person seems to have something the matter with him, unless it happens to be his profession and source of income. There has obviously been a shift in our priorities. Certain concerns have been taken out of people's hearts. For high-flown thoughts a kind of poultry farm has been set up, called philosophy, theology, or literature, where they proliferate in their own way beyond anyone's ability to keep track of them, which is just as well because in the face of such expansion no one need feel guilty about not bothering with them personally. With his respect for professionalism and expertise, Ulrich was basically determined to go along with any such division of labor. Nevertheless, he still indulged in thinking for himself, even though he was no professional philosopher, and at the moment he could see that to do otherwise was to take the road leading to the beehive state. The queen would lay her eggs, the drones would devote themselves to lust and the life of the mind, and the specialists would toil. It was quite possible to imagine the world so organized; total productivity might even go up as a result. For the present, every human being is still a microcosm of all humanity, as it were, but this has clearly become too much to bear and it no longer works, so that the humane element has become a transparent fraud. For the new division of labor to succeed, it might be necessary to arrange for at least one set of workers to evolve an intellectual synthesis. After all, without mind... What Ulrich meant was that it would give him nothing to look forward to. But this was of course a prejudice. No one really knows what life depends on.

The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, Vol.1, pg. 389 trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike