was aboard the
Bahnhof Zoo
was reminiscent of Livy’s splendid description of the destruction of Alba Longa with its inhabitants roaming the streets, bidding farewell to the stones. The second surprise was seeing rainfall at the bottom of the sea and “a thick tear falling, deliberately overflowing itself, like a ghost of itself, making as though to extinguish itself with a vague gesture of forgetting, in a reasonable sea, where the rain was slow and slanting, and what was weeping was prose . . .”
As for the third surprise, it was considerable, and put to flight poor, powerless Death. Death decided to go into the Malabar Salon, and there discovered its puppet status. Death sat down and, before fleeing in terror, smoked some opium, sweating buckets, and, like any other spectator, impatiently awaited the end of the final scene to find out if there was any ever after.
* “The Shady Shandy,” a Spanish version of which appeared in the
Ocnos
anthology (Barcelona, 1967), translated by Jaime Gil de Biedma.
THE ART OF INSOLENCE
I don’t know why they disembarked from the
Bahnhof Zoo
. Most likely it was fatigue that forced them up to the surface again. Fatigue and also a certain anguish, which is what we can gather from a document found in a false-bottom trunk stored in a loft in the house Crowley would later own; the document was discovered by the house’s subsequent owner, the Singer sewing-machine magnate, Edward Clark (also an ardent student of the history of the portable conspiracy), who died in strange circumstances a few days after finding the document and writing a brief text,
A Shandy Draws the Map of His Life
. This text, it seems, was inspired by some images from his dream about the years that Walter Benjamin toyed with the idea of making a map of his life.
Benjamin imagined this map to be gray and portable; he even designed a system of colored signs clearly marking the homes of his Shandy friends, the cafés and bookshops where they met, the single-night hotels, the underwater light of European libraries, the paths leading to different schools, and the graves they saw filling up.
“To lose one’s way in a city,” wrote Walter Benjamin, “as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling. . . . This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks. No, not the first traces, for there was one earlier that outlasted the others: the way into this labyrinth.”
The Shandy conspirators’ way into the labyrinth, it seems to me, is the central theme in Edward Clark’s document, the ideal complement to that document Clark found in the false-bottom trunk in the loft of the house that once belonged to Crowley. This document was a lecture on the anguish of the portable writer, and had originally been written by Bruno Schulz, who intended to read it out loud on the
Bahnhof Zoo
. But all evidence points to the fact that it fell into the hands of Crowley, who subtly altered it and, passing himself off as the poetess Elsa Tirana (a pseudonym for Cléo de Mérode, mistress to King Leopold of Belgium), read it in consummate cross-dress at Seville’s Ateneo, during the Góngora tribute that was set up by the Spanish Generation of ’27 poets.
The lecture considered anguish—as I said, the original text was by Schulz—but Crowley injected some sentences disclosing to the world the existence of the secret Shandy society. A comprehensive betrayal. To that end, Crowley backed up his reading by showing a crude imitation of Benjamin’s dream map. Among those in attendance, mingled with a sizeable delegation of professors from Madrid, a large number of Shandies could be seen listening cheerfully to the revelation of their secret, even though this meant the certain dismantling of all that was portable. Each had on their persons a thermometer and was accompanied by a black man or woman from Port Actif.
It should
Bahnhof Zoo
was reminiscent of Livy’s splendid description of the destruction of Alba Longa with its inhabitants roaming the streets, bidding farewell to the stones. The second surprise was seeing rainfall at the bottom of the sea and “a thick tear falling, deliberately overflowing itself, like a ghost of itself, making as though to extinguish itself with a vague gesture of forgetting, in a reasonable sea, where the rain was slow and slanting, and what was weeping was prose . . .”
As for the third surprise, it was considerable, and put to flight poor, powerless Death. Death decided to go into the Malabar Salon, and there discovered its puppet status. Death sat down and, before fleeing in terror, smoked some opium, sweating buckets, and, like any other spectator, impatiently awaited the end of the final scene to find out if there was any ever after.
* “The Shady Shandy,” a Spanish version of which appeared in the
Ocnos
anthology (Barcelona, 1967), translated by Jaime Gil de Biedma.
THE ART OF INSOLENCE
I don’t know why they disembarked from the
Bahnhof Zoo
. Most likely it was fatigue that forced them up to the surface again. Fatigue and also a certain anguish, which is what we can gather from a document found in a false-bottom trunk stored in a loft in the house Crowley would later own; the document was discovered by the house’s subsequent owner, the Singer sewing-machine magnate, Edward Clark (also an ardent student of the history of the portable conspiracy), who died in strange circumstances a few days after finding the document and writing a brief text,
A Shandy Draws the Map of His Life
. This text, it seems, was inspired by some images from his dream about the years that Walter Benjamin toyed with the idea of making a map of his life.
Benjamin imagined this map to be gray and portable; he even designed a system of colored signs clearly marking the homes of his Shandy friends, the cafés and bookshops where they met, the single-night hotels, the underwater light of European libraries, the paths leading to different schools, and the graves they saw filling up.
“To lose one’s way in a city,” wrote Walter Benjamin, “as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling. . . . This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks. No, not the first traces, for there was one earlier that outlasted the others: the way into this labyrinth.”
The Shandy conspirators’ way into the labyrinth, it seems to me, is the central theme in Edward Clark’s document, the ideal complement to that document Clark found in the false-bottom trunk in the loft of the house that once belonged to Crowley. This document was a lecture on the anguish of the portable writer, and had originally been written by Bruno Schulz, who intended to read it out loud on the
Bahnhof Zoo
. But all evidence points to the fact that it fell into the hands of Crowley, who subtly altered it and, passing himself off as the poetess Elsa Tirana (a pseudonym for Cléo de Mérode, mistress to King Leopold of Belgium), read it in consummate cross-dress at Seville’s Ateneo, during the Góngora tribute that was set up by the Spanish Generation of ’27 poets.
The lecture considered anguish—as I said, the original text was by Schulz—but Crowley injected some sentences disclosing to the world the existence of the secret Shandy society. A comprehensive betrayal. To that end, Crowley backed up his reading by showing a crude imitation of Benjamin’s dream map. Among those in attendance, mingled with a sizeable delegation of professors from Madrid, a large number of Shandies could be seen listening cheerfully to the revelation of their secret, even though this meant the certain dismantling of all that was portable. Each had on their persons a thermometer and was accompanied by a black man or woman from Port Actif.
It should
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