Money belongs together with rain. The weather itself is an indicator of the condition of this world. Happiness is cloudless; it knows no weather. Furthermore, the future holds a cloudless realm of perfect commodities where no money falls.

  A descriptive analysis of banknotes needs to be made. A book whose boundless satirical power would be equalled only by the power of its objectivity. The fact is, nowhere more than on such vouchers does capitalism naively come across in all its deadly earnest. The young innocents at play among numbers here, the goddess figures holding tablets of the law, the elderly heroes sheathing their swords in the face of currency units – the whole thing is a world apart: the façade architecture of hell.

  Had Lichtenberg found paper money prevalent, the plan of this system would not have escaped him.

  LEGAL PROTECTION FOR THE INDIGENT

  Publisher: – My expectations have been most deeply disappointed. Your stuff leaves the public totally unmoved; it’s not in the least attractive. Nor have I stinted on presentation; I’ve spent liberally on advertising.

  You know how highly I still think of you. But you can scarcely blame me if my conscience as a businessman also baulks at this. If anyone does, I go out of my way for authors. But I do after all have to look after wife and kids as well. I am not of course saying I hold you responsible for the losses of recent years. However, this bitter sense of disappointment will not go away. At the moment, unfortunately, I positively cannot continue to support you.

  Author: – But sir! Why did you become a publisher? We’d better have this out immediately. First, though, grant me one thing: I appear in your records as no. 27. You have published five of my books; in other words, you’ve bet on no. 27 five times. I’m sorry no. 27 never came up. Actually, you only ever did place a ‘cheval’ bet on me. And that was only because I come just before your lucky number, 28.

  You know yourself why you became a publisher. You could equally well have taken up a good clean profession like your father. Typical youth, though – always living from day to day. Go on indulging your habits. But stop posing as an honest businessman. And wipe that innocent look off your face if you’ve blown it all; let’s hear no more of your eight-hour day and the nights, too, when you scarcely sleep. ‘This above all, my child: Be loyal and true!’21 And don’t throw a scene over your numbers. Otherwise you’ll be out on your ear!

  NIGHT BELL FOR DOCTOR

  Sexual fulfilment releases a man from his mystery, which does not consist in sexuality but is, in its fulfilment (and possibly there alone), not solved but at least severed. Think of it as the chain binding him to life. Woman severs it, freeing man for death since his life has lost its mystery. By this route he attains rebirth, and as the lover frees him from the mother’s spell, woman more literally releases him from Mother Earth, the midwife who cuts through the umbilical cord woven from nature’s mystery.

  MADAME ARIANE – SECOND COURT LEFT

  A person consulting wise women about the future unwittingly reveals an inner knowledge of what is to come that is a thousand times more accurate than all the things he will be told there. Such a person is guided more by lethargy than by curiosity, and nothing less resembles the resigned apathy with which he attends the disclosure of his fate than the swift, risky movement with which the bold man casts the future. For presence of mind constitutes its essence; noting precisely what happens in the blink of an eye is more crucial than knowing the most remote eventualities in advance. The fact is, omens, signs, and portents pass through our organisms day and night like wave impulses. Do they indicate, or do they serve – that is the question. The two things are incompatible. Cowardice and apathy say one thing, sobriety and freedom the other. Because before such a prophecy or warning becomes something communicable, in word or in image, the best of its strength is already gone, the strength with which it hits us dead centre and compels us, almost before we know it, to act accordingly. If we miss it, then (and only then) it appears in plain text. We read it. But too late. Hence, when fire unexpectedly breaks out or news of a death arrives out of the blue, that guilty feeling in the first moment of dumb alarm, that formless reproach: did you not, deep down, know that already? When you last spoke of the dead person, hadn’t the name rung differently in your mouth? Isn’t the memory of last night’s flames sending you a message you only now understand? And if an object you were fond of went missing, had there not (hours, even days beforehand) been a whiff about it, whether of scorn or mourning, that gave the game away? Like ultraviolet radiation memory shows all of us, in the Book of Life, writing that invisibly, prophetically, accompanies the text as a gloss. But not with impunity do we switch intentions, hand over unlived life to cards, spirits, stars – that then, on the instant, mis-live it, mis-use it, handing it back to us soiled; not with impunity do we cheat the body of its power to compete on its own terms with fate and emerge victorious. The present moment is the Caudian yoke beneath which destiny bows to it.22 Transforming the threat of the Future into the fulfilment of the Now (the only desirable telepathic miracle) is the work of actual, physical presence of mind. Primitive times, when such behaviour formed part of man’s daily routine, gave man in the naked body his most reliable instrument of divination. The Ancient World still knew the proper procedure, and Scipio, when he trips and falls as he treads Carthaginian soil, throws his arms wide and claims victory with the words: ‘Teneo te, Terra Africana!’ [‘I have you, Land of Africa!’]. What might have been a fearful omen, an image of bad luck, he links in his person to the instant, making himself the factotum of his body. Which is precisely how the ancient ascetic exercises of fasting, chastity, and vigil have always celebrated their greatest triumphs. Each morning, day lies like a clean shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably close-woven fabric of pure prophecy fits us like a second skin. How the next twenty-four hours will turn out for us depends on our deciding, as we wake, to grasp it.

  FANCY-DRESS WARDROBE

  Someone bringing news of a death sees himself as very important. The way he feels makes him (even in the face of all reason) a messenger from the realm of the dead. The fact is, the community of all the dead is so vast that even a person simply reporting a death is aware of it. Ad plures ire [‘Going to the many’] means, to Latin speakers, dying.

  At Bellinzona I noticed three priests in the station waiting room. They sat on a bench opposite, but at an angle from where I was seated myself. Absorbed, I watched the movements of the one sitting in the middle, whom a red skullcap marked out from his brethren. As he spoke to them, he held his hands folded in his lap, only occasionally (and very slightly) lifting and gesturing with one or other of them. I thought: the right hand must always know what the left hand is doing.

  Who has not had the experience of emerging from the Underground into the open air and being struck, back up top, by stepping into full sunlight. Yet only minutes ago, as he descended, the sun was shining just as brightly. How quickly he has forgotten the weather in the world above! That is how quickly the world above will itself forget him. For who can say more of his existence than that for two, maybe three others he moved through their lives with the same tenderness and immediacy as the weather?

  Over and over again, in Shakespeare, in Calderón, battles fill the last act and kings, princes, lords, and attendants ‘enter in flight’. The moment when they become visible to the audience stops them in their tracks. The stage calls a halt to the flight of the dramatis personae. Entering the sight of non-combatants and true superiors allows the victims to draw breath as fresh air takes them in its embrace. That is what gives the stage appearance of these ‘fleeing’ entrances their hidden significance. Implicit in the reading of this form of words is the expectation of a place, a light (daylight or footlights) in which our own flight through life might be safe in the presence of watching strangers.

  BETTING SHOP

  Bourgeois life is the government of private matters. The more important a mode of behaviour and the richer in consequences, the more that life relieves such matters of control. Political affiliation, financial circumstances, religion – all try to run away and hide, and the family is the crumbling, gloomy house in whose lean-tos and tucked-away corners the meanest instincts have taken hold. Philistines proclaim the complete privatization of love life. For them, courtship has become a grimly silent process conducted in total privacy, and such wholly private courtship, stripped of all responsibility, is what is truly new about ‘flirtation’.23 Whereas prole and peasant have this in common: that, when they are courting, it is not so much the woman as their rivals that they vanquish. However, this means having far more respect for a woman than in her ‘free state’; it means doing her bidding without consulting her. Feudal and proletarian equate to shifting the erotic accents into the public sphere. Being seen with a woman on such and such an occasion may signify more than sleeping with her. In marriage, too, value lies not in any barren ‘harmony’ between the spouses: what comes out as eccentric consequence of their fights and rivalries is not just offspring but also the spiritual force of marriage.

  STAND-UP BEER HALL

  Sailors seldom come ashore; what they do at sea is a Sunday off compared with work in port, where often loading and unloading need to proceed around the clock. If then shore leave for a gang amounts to a couple of hours, night will already have fallen. At best, the cathedral is a huge looming shape on the way to the pub. The beer hall is the key to a city; knowing where German beer can be had is all the geography and ethnology a man needs. The German seamen’s pub unfurls the nightly city street map: finding the way from there to the brothel and on to the other pubs is not a problem. Its name has been cropping up in mealtime banter for days. The fact is, when sailors leave a port behind, one by one the nicknames of pubs and dance halls, beautiful women and national dishes in the next are hoist like tiny pennants. But whether they will get ashore this time is anyone’s guess. So as soon as the ship has declared and put in, touts come aboard peddling souvenirs: chains and postcards, oil paintings, knives, and little marble figures. The city is not visited so much as purchased. In the seaman’s trunk the leather belt from Hong Kong lies alongside the panorama of Palermo and the photo of a girl from Stettin. That is their true home, right there. The seaman knows nothing of a misty remoteness in which, for the bourgeois, strange worlds lie. The first thing each city means for him is a spell of work on board followed by German beer, English shaving-soap, and Dutch tobacco. The international norm of the industry sits in his very bones, palm trees and icebergs do not fool the seaman. He is ‘fed up’ with proximity, only the most precise nuances speak to him. He can tell countries apart better by the way they prepare their fish than by their architecture and scenery. So much at home is he in detail that out on the open sea the routes where his ship passes others (and with a siren blast greets those of his own company) become noisy thoroughfares where there are rules about giving way. At sea, he inhabits a city where on Marseille’s Cannebière a Port Said pub can be found across the road from a Hamburg house of pleasure and the Castel del Ovo in Naples sits on Barcelona’s Plaza Cataluña. With officers, their home town still comes first. But for the ordinary seaman, or the stoker – the people whose transported labour, down in the hull of the ship, maintains contact with the commodity – ports called at are not even home any longer but birthplace. And listening to them you realize what mendacity lies in travel.

  NO BEGGARS, NO HAWKERS

  All religions have held the beggar in high esteem. For the beggar is proof that, in the matter of alms-giving (as down-to-earth and ordinary as it has always been sacred and life-giving), intelligence and fundamentals, consequences and principle are all miserably inadequate.

  We complain about beggars in southern countries while forgetting that their insistence beneath our noses has as much justification as the scholar’s persistent poring over difficult texts. There is no shadow of hesitation, no hint of intention or second thoughts that they fail to detect on our faces. The telepathy of the coachman, whose cry first alerts us to the fact that we are not averse to taking a drive, of the skinflint trader who extracts from his heap of junk the only chain or cameo that might conceivably catch our fancy – these are of the same ilk.

  TO THE PLANETARIUM

  If, as Hillel once did for Jewish doctrine, one had to articulate the teachings of classical antiquity in a nutshell (standing on one leg, so to speak), the sentence would need to run: ‘They alone will inherit the earth who live from the forces of the cosmos.’ Nothing so distinguishes ancient from modern man as the former’s submission to a cosmic experience of which the latter is scarcely aware. The decline of that experience begins with the flowering of astronomy at the start of the modern period. Kepler, Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe were certainly not driven by scholarly impulses alone. Nevertheless, in the exclusive stress on an optical link with space to which astronomy very soon led there lies an indication of what must inevitably come. Classical dealings with the cosmos took a different form: intoxication. Intoxication, of course, is the sole experience in which we grasp the utterly immediate and the utterly remote, and never the one without the other. That means, however, that communicating ecstatically with the cosmos is something man can only do communally. Modern man is in danger of mistakenly dismissing such an experience as trivial, dispensable, and leaving it to the individual – a rush of enthusiasm on fine, starry nights. No, it needs to be renewed over and over again, then nations and generations will escape it as little as became most dreadfully manifest in the last [1914–18] war, which was an attempt at a new and unprecedented marriage with the cosmic powers. Human hordes, gases, electrical forces were unleashed in a free-for-all, high-frequency shocks ripped through the landscape, new stars appeared in the sky, the airy heights and the ocean depths thrummed with propellers, and everywhere sacrificial shafts were sunk in the earth. This mighty struggle for the cosmos was for the first time fought out on a planetary scale, very much in the spirit of technology. However, since the ruling class’s greed for profit meant to atone for its intention thus, technology betrayed mankind and turned the marriage bed into a sea of blood. Control of nature, the imperialists teach us, is the purpose of all technology. But who would ever trust a thrasher who stated that control of children by grown-ups was the purpose of education? Education, surely, is the essential ordering of the relationship between the generations – in other words, if one wishes to speak of control, control of generational relations, not of children? So technology, too, is not about controlling nature: controlling the relationship between nature and humanity. Man as species reached the end of his development tens of millennia ago; but humanity as a species is at the start. For humanity, in technology, a physis is being organized in which its contact with the cosmos takes a new and different form than in nations and families. One need only recall the discovery of speeds by virtue of which humanity is now preparing to make unpredictable journeys into the interior of time to encounter, in that place, rhythms from which, as in the old days, the sick will draw strength high up in the mountains or beside southern seas. Lunaparks are an early form of sanatoria. The shiver of true cosmic experience is not bound to that tiny fragment of the natural world we are in the habit of calling ‘nature’. In the nights of annihilation of the last war the limb structure of humanity was shaken by a feeling that resembled the epileptic fit.24 And the uprisings that followed the war were humanity’s first attempt to make the new body obedient to its commands. The power of the proletariat is the measure of its recovery. If this discipline does not enter its very marrow, no pacifist argument will save it. The frenzy of destruction will be stilled by the living only in the intoxication of procreation.

  [1928]

  Hashish in Marseille

  Introductory note: One of the first signs that hashish is beginning to take effect ‘is a vague feeling of anticipation and unease; something strange and inescapable is approaching […] Images and sequences of images, long-buried memories loom up, whole scenes and situations enter the mind, generating interest at first, sometimes enjoyment, then in the end, when there is no escaping them, anguish and mental fatigue. Everything that happens, even what a person says and does, astonishes and overwhelms him. His laugh, his every remark – these come at him like events arriving from outside. He reaches realms of experience, too, that resemble inspiration, enlightenment […] Space may expand, the floor start to slope, atmospheric sensations occur: mist, opacity, a heaviness of the air; colours become brighter, more luminous; objects more beautiful or possibly bulkier, ominous […] All this takes place not as a smooth development; instead, typically there is a constant alternation of dreamlike and waking states, a continuous, ultimately exhausting sense of being tossed to and fro between quite different fields of consciousness; a person may be in mid-sentence when such a sinking or soaring feeling intrudes […] All this will be reported by the person who has taken the drug in a form that usually departs very substantially from the norm. Connections become difficult because of the often abrupt cessation of all memory of what has gone before, thinking refuses to take shape as speech, and things may become so compulsively hilarious that for minutes on end the hashish-eater is capable of nothing but laughter […] Recall of the intoxicated state is remarkably clear.’