The tight-rope, like the limbo bar, the parallel bars, are set in absurdly variable proportions of relativistic distantiation. Kafka describes it however typically as tragi-comic. In Kafka's world it seems clear that many strivings are doomed from the outset as Promethean (the problem of the Titans, as the paleo-Luciferians, is vast and the tragedy of this class struggle is well expressed in Pavese's Dialoghi con Leuco ), as the result of Babelic over-reaching. In these few passages I merely draw attention to the dynamic of stumbling. We must not forget that superhomo is an arch-Christian word in which the high Middle Ages uttered its most intense concern - it was first used for the French king St Louis IX in the late thirteenth century! The exhaustion of such an otherworldly pole becomes most apparent in the fact that ever fewer people strive to walk the tightrope Ordinary existence came into contact with this pull from above through the ubiquitous example of the saints, who, owing to efforts that people liked to term superhuman, were occasionally permitted to approach the impossible. As long as the rope's tension was produced with metaphysical intentions, one had to suppose the existence of a pull from the world above to explain its particular form of intensity. The rope can only function as a metaphor for acrobatism if one imagines it stretched out one must therefore pay attention to the sources of tension, its anchors and its modalities of power transfer. It seems more like a tripwire than a tightrope. The true path is along a rope, not a rope suspended way up in the air, but rather only just over the ground. In the collection of statements he excerpted from his octavo notebooks and arranged in a numbered list (later edited and published by Max Brod under the title Betrachtungen uher Sunde, Leid, Hoffnung und den wahren Weg ), the first entry reads: There is no need to explain in detail here that Kafka was an advocate of gymnastic exercises, vegetarian diets and ideologies of hygiene that were typical of the time. "In his case, the dawn of the acrobats is already several degrees brighter and clearer, which is why one can make out the scenery in something close to daylight.
Here are some passages from Slojterdijk's magnum opus in the translations I have from Wieland Hoban (mentioned in this blog as the live acrobatic translator of Helmut Lachenmann) The line we all walk or simulate in order to get the job. He sought to explain our obsession with sports, training, coaches, capitalism and competion, dieting, excersise, fitness by the concept of ANTHROPOTECHNICS. And yet it was a feat of acrobatic depth and concern, fitting with the themes which the German philosopher with the Dutch name, Peter Sloterdijk, speaks about at some length - 600 or more pages - I believe - in his tome with the title ripped from Rilke's Archaic Torso poem, YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE. Somewhere the African survivors became Carribeans and memorialized their endurance feat in a dance, this dance of the inverted yogi, a lean behind the center of ventral gravity, into horizontal catabasis, and far below the average norms of those supermen who aimed for the verticality of stars and vagrant heavens. Many did bend over backwards and survived to tell their tales. Life must have seemed sweet and worth the effort. This was the challenge, the death-trip, the no-bullshit ritual passage to another life, a chance to escape. While others took the chance, ducked under, into the holds, cramped, bleeding, waiting to get to the other side. This was long before I learned that the limbo dance was something carried over from the slave-ships where the African had to get into tight places for transport or become defunct, although doubtless some decided that it might be just as well to fall and splinter into salty sea or hummus right there. This word "limbo" also being very Catholic = the interzone on the margins of hell, a holding cell where defunct unbapitized children wound-up on the outskirts of Dante's Inferno, waiting until the end times - this word also caused strange feelings, despair, anxiety of birthright. I may have wondered back then why the limbo bar was not featured in the Olympics because I tried it and it was no mean feat. And the limbo seemed an athletic dance where unlike the pole-vault, the high-bar jump, the aim was to go to the other extreme, to get down, go backwards. Singing the classic crossover carribean rock and roll tune I heard on the scribbled over 45 rpm record one of my parents bought probably when they themselves were teenagers.
0 kommentar(er)
