HENRY PARLAND
FROM SOCKS
IV.
Locked doors
two drunk men
and a girl
groping
by the heartless wallpaper pattern.
VII.
Now I know –
it's on socks it all depends!
All sexuality, aesthetics, religion,
human worth
(what would
Beelzebub himself be
in a pair of home-knitted socks
with the big toes sticking out?)
XI.
The Big Dayafter:
when stars hick-up
and all archangels drink mineral water
we will gather at the café
listen
to the melodies of women's legs.
XVI.
The train
hammers its hard rhythm
in the blood.
Its song is not
about humans
or God or love.
It's about steel
and of steel.
THE REVOLUTION OF THINGS
Revolution is a rewarding subject matter to write about. Revolutions have always existed and will always exist. However it is curious that more or less all authors and historians have classified revolutions as a human concern. That non-living entities can "rise up against the existing order" – I have to express myself this way because I can't think of any other way – few of them have ever imagined.
In our age the thinking continues to center around humans, only humans humans humans. Like a cat tip-toeing around a hot bowl of porridge, our thoughts focus on the human being; they lick their noses, thinking how good some human soul would taste in their hungry jaws. Is it then so strange that they are blind to the revolution of the things, the things' protest against the ridiculous humanist attitude we first assumed a couple of thousand years ago and in which we've slumbered ever since.
For we alone don't have a monopoly on life. Of course we've never had a monopoly and, fortunately, we never will. But just as the Ptolemaic worldview has on Lord knows for what grounds remained intact for thousands of years, the lie of the human being as central to existence has persisted up through these days. Our value is ultimately outside of us, in the life we contain.
But things are also part of this context: they live! Their souls (sharply banal?) vibrate to the rhythm of life. The faster the rhythm, the more violent the things' expressions become.
They leap up, rush storming toward us: locomotives, car tires, vacuum cleaners. "Life!" howls the spotlight, while the engines whirr our whines into pieces. "Life!" sing the telephone wires, winding along angsty roads. "Life! Life! Life!"
But we go on snoring behind the curtains (beautiful curtains!) of aesthetics, humanism, mumbling in our sleep that we've defeated life, happily ignorant of the raging onslaught of the things.
Truthfully, anyone who wanders the streets without hearing the posters' clamorous lifesong is both deaf and blind. And anyone who can't see the feminine smiles of the shopping windows is not a man!
The things protest against the perception that they exist only for our needs. They demand a position in life – I have learned the following word from the Democrats, so it should be treated with skepticism – Materialism, but not the way we understand the term because that's a misunderstanding.
That
we are going under in mechanization, superficiality, degeneration? Hell no! We are going under while we're sleeping! While we're trying to use the old, worn-out human measure for everything. While the stars are indifferent to us because they don't want to serve us. While we see only the use of things, not their connection to life.
I'm not talking about Americanism. Americanism is a totally different thing, and it has been just as unable to solve the problem as all the other isms. You won't get anywhere by denying all souls, both those of humans and of things. That just makes matters worse.
This is about idealism. The idealism of things. The idealism of car tires, stockings, cough drops. They love life, their surface-hymn moves toward deeper connections. Immediate as a necktie – the saxophone of life's jazz band!
Translated
by Johannes Göransson.