On Thomas Bernhard and extinct dilemmas (2)

Photographs (continuation…)

-On the importance of exaggeration, to the point that we tend to give meaning to our lives by exaggerating our thoughts, actions and feelings:

Without the art of exaggeration, I told him, we’d be condemned to an awfully tedious life, a life not worth living (…) To explain anything properly we have to exaggerate. Only exaggeration can make things clear. Even the risk of being branded fools ceases to worry as we get older. In later years there’s nothing better than to be declared a fool. The greatest happiness I know, Gambetti, is that of the aging fool who is free to indulge his foolishness. Given the change, we should proclaim ourselves fools by age forty at the latest and capitalize on our foolishness. It’s foolishness that makes us happy. 

-But what is this art, what is it made of?

The art of exaggeration consists in understating everything, in which case we have to say that they exaggerate understatement, that exaggerated understatement is their particular version of the art of exaggeration (…) Exaggeration is the secret of great art, I said, and of great philosophy. The art of exaggeration is in fact the secret of all mental endeavour.

-About self-knowledge, the ultimate philosophical question −inaugurated by Socrates statement: ‘I only know that I know nothing’− and the vagueness of general knowledge (of which philosophy is the last custodian), unable to grasp anything clear or definite, only partial aspects of the world clouded by our reason:

The more I study myself, the farther I get from the truth about myself, the more obscure everything about me becomes, I told Gambetti, and it’s the same with these philosophers. When I think I’ve understood them I’ve actually understood nothing. This is probably true of everything I’ve studied (…) None of these men or their works can be understood, not Pascal, not Descartes, not Kant, not Schopenhauer, not Schleiermacher (…) I have to regard the mind as an enemy and go into philosophical action against it if I am actually to enjoy it. But I probably don’t have enough time, just as none of them had enough time. Man’s greatest misfortune is that he never has enough time, and that’s what’s always made knowledge impossible. So all we have ever achieved is an approximation, a near miss. Anything else is nonsense (…) Ah, Gambetti, I said, we want to set about everything and take hold of everything and appropriate everything, but it’s quite impossible. We spend a lifetime trying to understand ourselves and don’t succeed, so how can we pretend to understand something that isn’t ourselves?

-Continuing with knowledge and reason (its most "deadly" weapon)... Murau’s statements enunciate the final destination of all intellectual works such as philosophical essays, novels, short stories and even poems:

To think is to fail, I thought. But we naturally do not act with the intention of failing, nor do we think with the intention of failing. Nietzsche is a good example of a thinker who pursued his thinking so far into failure that ultimately it can only be described as demented.

-Murau spends hour’s criticizing his family through the photographs he has kept and concludes:

By keeping only these photos of my family and no others, I am documenting my own baseness, my own shamelessness, my own lack of character (…) We describe others as base and contemptible and adduce every possible argument in support of our case, yet the description applies even more alarmingly to ourselves (…) I keep only comic and ridiculous photos as I am fundamentally a weak person, a thoroughly weak character. 

-Paradoxically, Murau has a completely unfavourable opinion about photographs and his view is somehow pertinent to our image-governed times, dominated by Facebook and other social media stunts:

Photography is a vulgar addiction that is gradually taking hold of the whole of humanity, which is not only enamored of such distortion and perversion but completely sold on them, and will in due course, given the proliferation of photography, take the distorted and perverted world of the photograph to be the only real one.

-He even predicts:

Humanity has for decades been staring brainlessly at these deadly photographic images and become more or less paralyzed. Come the millennium, Gambetti, human beings will no longer be capable of thinking, and the process of stultification, inaugurated by the photograph and universalized by motion pictures, will have reached its apogee.

-About solitude, which tends to be viewed as our natural and final condition, motivated by the conflicts inherent in all human relations which makes us say constantly: ‘we’re better off alone’.

I long to be alone, but when I am alone I’m desperately unhappy. I can’t endure being alone, yet I constantly talk about it. I may preach solitude, but I hate it profoundly, because nothing makes for greater unhappiness (…) The highest condition is solitude, yet I know very well that solitude is the most fearful punishment of all. Only a madman propagates solitude, and total solitude ultimately means total madness. (Hence, we’re all a little demented in the end it seems).

-Arrogance is condemned by Catholicism and the majority of religions, who preach humbleness as an element in the pathway to salvation. However, Murau preaches the contrary, stating that arrogance is essential for our survival:

Arrogance is not an appropriate means to use against people around us whom we despise and therefore find unbearable. Yet without arrogance we’d be lost. It’s a weapon that has to be used against a world that would otherwise swallow us whole. If we had no arrogance it would give us no quarter (…) For let’s not deceive ourselves: the people we call stupid and consider beneath us are the most ruthless of all. They don’t care about our feelings, so long as they can discomfit and finally destroy us. Arrogance is an utterly appropriate weapon to use against a hostile world in which arrogance is feared and respected, even if, like mine, it’s only feigned, I thought. 

-The dilemma for religion, therefore, is that it deals with a non-existent world and has to struggle to fit its dogmas into the real world. In this sense, religions are made with the same substance as literature: fiction.

-And finally, about childhood and our foolishness in trying to recover it. (Behind this intent of recovery could lay one of the reasons about having children):

At first I had believed that if I had the Children’s Villa thoroughly restored –or renovated, as my sisters would say- I would be restoring or renovating my childhood. But my childhood is now as dilapidated as the Children’s Villa (…) We search everywhere for our childhood, I thought, and find only a gaping void. We go into a house where as children we spent such happy hours, such happy days, and we believe we’re revisiting our childhood, but all we find is a gaping void. You have to understand that you mustn’t look back, if only for reasons of self-protection.

 
 

Note:

The above pictures are taken from Wolfsegg, Murau's place of origin, as a tribute to the author's fascination with photographs, especially those who evoke his fiends...