Dog Years (85 page)

Brauxel, however, who is carrying not the usual plain walking stick but an ebony cane with an ivory crutch, which only a few hours before belonged to an immoderate smoker calling himself Goldmouth, never smokes below ground but says: "If this, our plant, absolutely has to be called an inferno by a stranger to the mine, it only goes to show that the company needs a hellhound of its own; just see how our light teaches the animal to cast a hellish shadow that devours the gallery: already the gangway is sucking him in. We must follow."

Here narrow-eyed hate, never oxidizing rage, cold and hot revenge keep school. In wind-inflated and consequently voluminous battle dress, which repeated caustic degradation has injected with the traces of seven boiler battles. Scarecrows which sackcloth-clad operated a tear pump that persistently said no, scarecrows which in bright checks and loud polka dots let their built-in humor-developer unwind, are standing in the empty stall, each scarecrow by himself. So this is the homework imposed on rage, hate, revenge: full-grown crowbars must be bent into question marks and suchlike gewgaws. Patched countless times, rage must burst and blow itself up again with its own lungs. Hate has to burn holes in its own knee with its narrow-set eyes. But cold and hot revenge must go round -- Don't turn around, revenge is around -- and grind whole spoonfuls of quartz pebbles between their teeth.

So that's what the meal sounds like that Matern, the stranger, had a foretaste of. School fare. Scarecrow fare. For not satisfied with bursting and with burning holes, not finding expression enough in the bending of crowbars, rage, the great valve burster, and hate, the blowtorch, spoon themselves full from feed troughs into which two employees of Brauxel & Co. hourly shovel a supply of the pebbles -- food for grinding teeth -- which are plentiful on the green surface of the earth.

Thereupon, Matern, who from earliest childhood has ground his teeth whenever rage rode him, hate compelled him to stare at a fixed point, and revenge commanded him to make rounds, turns away from these scarecrows who have raised his particularity to the level of a universal discipline.

And to the foreman, who with upraised lamp is leading them from the ninth stall to the gallery, he says: "I should think that these immoderately expressive scarecrows would sell well. Man loves to see his mirror image in a blind rage."

But Wernicke, the foreman, counters: "It is true that formerly, in the early fifties, our odonto-acoustical models were in great demand both on the domestic and on the foreign market, but now that the decade has come of age, collections based on the third cardinal emotion find takers only in the young African states."

Whereupon Brauxel smiles subtly and pats Pluto on the neck: "Don't worry about the marketing problems of Brauxel & Co. Hate, rage, and roving revenge will be back in style one of these days. A cardinal emotion that promotes the grinding of teeth can't be a passing fad. To abolish revenge is to take revenge on revenge."

These words mount the electric trolley with them and demand to be mulled over during the long ride through two trap doors, past barred blind shafts and waste-filled stalls. Only at their destination, where the foreman promises a visit to the tenth to twenty-second stalls, is Brauxel's proposition about unabolishable revenge forgotten, though without loss to it succinctness.

For even in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth stalls, where athletic, religious, and military exercises, in other words, relay races, skipping processions, and changes of the guard, are being performed, rage, hate, the revenge which, because it is always roving, cannot be rooted out, the futile tear pump, and the built-in humor-developer, in short, the cardinal emotions weeping, laughter, and the grinding of teeth provide the deep-seated foundation on which athletic scarecrows are able to break records at pole vaulting, penitent scarecrows at split-pea racing, and newly recruited scarecrows at close combat. How scarecrow outdoes scarecrow by a scarecrow head, how scarecrows keep bettering their time at elevating scarecrow crosses, how they overcome barbed-wire entanglements, not with old-fashioned wire cutters but by eating them up, barbs and all, then evacuate them barbless in scarecrow fashion, deserves to be recorded on charts, and recorded it is. Employees of Brauxel & Co. measure and enter: Scarecrow records and rosary lengths. Three stalls that were blasted in potash-mining days until they attained gymnasium length, church height, and the width of broad-shouldered antiaircraft dugouts, provide over four hundred team-spirited scarecrows, halleluia scarecrows, holdouttothelastgasp scarecrows per shift with room in which to develop their electron ically guided energies. Remote-controlled for the present -- the control room is where the windlass platform used to be -- indoor sport festivals, pontifical offices, and autumn maneuvers, or the other way around, athletic events for recruits, divine services in the front lines, and the blessing of scrap-iron scarecrow weapons fill schedules in order that later on, when, as they say, an emergency arises, every record can be broken, every heretic unmasked, and every hero find his victory.

The director with his dog and the visitor with Wernicke, the mine-wise foreman, leave the caustic-degraded athletes, the moth-degraded monks' habits, and the scoop-degraded fatigue uniforms, which have to creep and crawl toward the enemy while the scarecrow enemy likewise creeps and crawls, for in the schedule it is written: Creeping and crawling. Creeping and crawling toward. Mutual creeping and crawling up to.

But when, as the visit continues, the thirteenth and fourteenth stalls are inspected, the scarecrow collections in training are no longer dressed in athletic costumes, altar-boy red, and camouflage fatigues; the goings-on in these two stalls are strictly civilian. For in a family stall and an administrative stall the democratic virtues of the scarecrow state, whose form of government is determined by the needs of its citizens, are inculcated, developed, and put into daily practice. Harmoniously scarecrows sit at the table, at the television screen, and in moth-degraded camp tents. Scarecrow families -- for the family is the germ cell of the state -- are instructed concerning every article of the provisional constitution. Loud speakers proclaim what polyphonic families repeat, the scarecrow preamble: "Conscious of its responsibility before God and men, inspired by the will to preserve our national and political scarecrow unity. . ." Then Article 1, dealing with the dignity of scarecrows, which is inviolable. Then the right, guaranteed in Article 2, of the scarecrow personality to develop freely. Then one thing and another, and finally Article 8, which guarantees to all scarecrows the right to assemble peacefully and unarmed, without notice and permission. And nodding their heads, scarecrow families acquiesce in Article 27: "All German-blooded scarecrows are uniformly stamped with the trade mark of the firm of Brauxel & Co."; nor is there any opposition to Article 16, Paragraph 2: "Victims of persecution will enjoy the right of asylum below ground." And all this political science, from the "universal right to grouse" to "forced expatriation," is practiced in the fourteenth pit: scarecrow voters step into polling booths; discussion-welcoming scarecrows discuss the dangers of the welfare state; scarecrows whose journalistic talent condenses in a daily newspaper invoke the freedom of the press, Article 5; the parliament convenes; the Scarecrow Supreme Court rejects a last appeal; in questions of foreign policy, the opposition supports the government party; party discipline is exerted; the tax collector holds out his hand; freedom of coalition connects stalls that do not border on the same gallery; in accordance with Article 1 B, 3 a, scarecrow analysis with the help of the lie detector developed by Brauxel & Co. is declared unconstitutional; political life flourishes; nothing hampers communication; the self-government of scarecrows, guaranteed by Article 28 A 3, begins below ground and extends, on the flat and hilly surface, to the Canadian wheatfields, to the rice paddies of India, to the endless cornfields of the Ukraine, to every corner of the earth where the products of Brauxel & Co., namely, scarecrows of one variety or another, do their duty and put a stop to the depredations of birds.

But Walter Matern, the stranger below, says once again after the thirteenth and fourteenth stalls have shown themselves to be civilian and civic: "Heavens above, this is hell. It is hell itself!"

And so, in order to refute the stranger, Wernicke, the foreman, raising his lamp, leads Walter Matern and the director with compliant dog to the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth stalls, which house Eros unleashed, Eros inhibited, and phallic narcissism.

For here all uniformed discipline and civic dignity are defied, because hate, rage, and roving revenge, which only a short time before seemed to be checked by the administrative apparatus, bloom afresh, covered with degraded yet flesh-pink skin. Because all unleashed, inhibited, and narcissistic scarecrows nibble on the same cookie, the recipe for which makes dough of all lusts but satisfies no one regardless of how strenuously and in what positions the bare-assed mob fucks and squirts. Such results, to be sure, are registered only in the fifteenth stall, where the unleashed Eros permits none of the rutting scarecrows to ring the knell of an erection which has been at it for innumerable shifts. No stopper can withstand the flood. No intermission bell rings for this permanent orgasm. Unchecked flows the scarecrow snot, a sylvinite-containing product, as foreman Wer nicke explains, which has been developed in the laboratories of Brauxel & Co. and injected with gonococcuslike agents, so that the unleashed, steady-flowing scarecrows enjoy the benefit of irritation and itching similar to those observed in cases of common gonorrhea. But this pestilence is allowed to spread only in the fifteenth and not in the sixteenth and seventeenth stalls. For in these two there is no ejaculation and in the inhibited stall not even the indispensable erection. In the narcissistically phallic stall the solo scarecrows struggle in vain, despite the sultry music with prurient words which tries to help them, despite the sexy movie excerpts that occupy the screens which have been hung on the far walls of the repressed and narcissistic stalls. No sap may rise. Every snake lies dormant. All satisfaction has remained above ground; for Matern, the stranger below, says: "That's unnatural. Those are the torments of hell. Life, real life, has more to offer. I know. I've lived it!"

Suspecting at this point that the stranger is troubled by a lack of cultural life here below, Wernicke, the foreman, leads him and the director, who is smiling subtly to himself and holding Pluto loosely by the collar, to the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth stalls, which are all situated on the next lower, the twenty-five-hundred-foot level, and provide room respectively for philosophical, sociological, and ideological knowledge, achievements, and antinomies.

No sooner has he arrived on this level than Matern turns away: the stranger doesn't want to go on; hell fatigues him; he would like to breathe in the daylight again; but sternly tapping his ebony cane, which only a few hours before belonged to a certain Goldmouth, Brauxel refers to something that Matern is supposed to have done up above: "Has the stranger forgotten under what circumstances he, in the early morning of this very day, threw a pocketknife into the Landwehr Canal, which flows through Berlin, a city situated on the sunlit surface?"

And so Matern, the stranger, is not allowed to turn away; he is obliged to pass through the gangway and face up to the philosophical insights that dwell loquaciously in the eighteenth stall.

But not Aristotle, not Descartes or Spinoza, from Kant to Hegel not a soul. From Hegel to Nietzsche: a vacuum! Nor any sign of a neo-Kantian or neo-Hegelian, no Rickert of the lion's mane, no Max Scheler, nor does the phenomenology of any goateed Husserl fill the stall with eloquence, permitting the stranger to forget what hellish torments the vulgarian Eros had to offer; no below-ground Socrates contemplates the world above ground; but He, the pre-Socratic, he multiplied a hundredfold. He capped with a hundred caustic-degraded, once Alemannic stockingcaps, He in buckled shoes, in a linen smock: a hundred times He, coming and going. And thinks. And speaks. Has a thousand words for Being, for tune, for essence, for world and ground, for the with and the now, for the Nothing, and for the scarecrow as existential frame. Accordingly: Scareness, being-scared, scare-structure, scare-view, primeval scare, scaring-away, counter-scare, scare-vulnerable, scare-principle, scare-situation, unscared, final scare, scare-born time, scare-totality, foundation-scare, the law of scare. "For the essence of the scarecrow is the transcendental threefold dispersal of scarecrow suchness in the world project. Projecting itself into the Nothing, the scarecrow
physis,
or burgeoning, is at all times beyond the scarecrow such and the scarecrow at-hand. . ."

Transcendence drips from stockingcaps in the eighteenth stall. A hundred caustic-degraded philosophers are of one and the same opinion: "Scarecrow Being means: to be held-out-into Nothing." And the anxious question of Matern, the stranger below, who casts his voice into the stall: "But what of man, in whose image the scarecrow was created?" is answered by one and a hundred philosophers: "The scarecrow question calls ourselves -- the askers -- into question." At this Matern withdraws his voice. A hundred matching philosophers come and go on the salt floor, greeting each other essentially: "The scarecrow exists self-grounded."

With oldtime buckled shoes they have even trampled down paths. Now and then they fall silent, then Matern hears their mechanisms. The principle of sufficient scare is starting up again.

But before the hundred-times present, moth-scoop-and-caustic-degraded philosopher can run off his built-in sound tape again, Matern escapes to the gallery. He would gladly run for it, but can't, for he is still a stranger to the mine and would certainly go astray: "The scarecrow comes-to-be in errancy, where, erring in circles, it fosters error."