R.L. Swihart's Blog, page 46

Durrenmatt: Barlach: Suspicion

Thus I, Edith Marlok, a thirty-four-year-old woman, commit the crimes that are demanded of me in exchange for a colorless liquid which, injected beneath my skin, gives me the courage of contempt during the day and the beauty of dreams at night, a fleeting illusion of being in possession of what no longer exists: this world as God created it. C’est ça.

Peregrine Juvies @ San Pedro CA

 

Durrenmatt: Barlach: Suspicion

“All it takes to hear this story is a little nerve; less nerve than it did to live through it,” continued the Jew in his old musty caftan in a singing tone. “It’s time to forget all these things, they say, and not just in Germany; there’s cruelty in Russia too, and there are sadists everywhere; but I don’t want to forget anything, and not just because I am a Jew—six million of my people the Germans killed, six million!—; no, it’s because I am still a human being, even though I live in basements and cellars with the rats! I refuse to make a distinction between peoples, I refuse to speak of good and bad nations; but I do have to make one distinction between human beings, this was beaten into me, and from the first blow that cut into my flesh I distinguished between the torturers and the tortured.

Durrenmatt: Barlach: Judge and His Hangman

The city lay there, a white shell, sucking up the light, swallowing it into her narrow streets in order to spew it out after nightfall as thousands of lights, a monster perpetually busy with spawning and poisoning and burying an ever-growing quantity of new human beings.

Peregrine Juvies @ Point Fermin

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The Kids are on the Cliffs in San Pedro, but not for long. Loving it.♥️

#rlswihart #sanpedro #pointfermin #falconsofinstagram #peregrinefalcon #kids #immature #theygrowupsofast #naturepics #nature #beauty #poetry #readmorepoetry2023 #ukraine🇺🇦🎈

From Durrenmatt's The Assignmennt

D. had listened to F.’s report and absently ordered a glass of wine, even though it was just eleven o’clock, gulped it down with an equally absent air, ordered a second glass, and remarked that he was still pondering the useless problem of whether the law of identity A = A was correct, since it posited two identical A’s, while actually there could only be one A identical with itself, and anyway, applied to reality it was quite meaningless, since there was no self-identical person anywhere, because everyone was subject to time and was therefore, strictly speaking, a different person at every moment, which was why he, D., sometimes had the impression that he was a different person each morning, as if a different self had replaced his previous self and were using his brain and consequently his memory, making him all the more glad that he was a logician, for logic was beyond all reality and removed from every sort of existential mishap, and so he would like to respond to the story she had told him but could only do so in very general terms:

The Pledge

“​‘You rightly wondered,’ he finally continued, ‘that I’m still living in a hotel. I didn’t want to confront the world. I wanted to deal with it skillfully, I’d almost say mechanically, but I didn’t want to suffer with it. I wanted to be superior to it, not lose my head, control it all like a technician. I looked at the murdered girl, and that was bearable; but when I stood in front of her parents, I suddenly couldn’t bear it any longer, I had to get away from that godforsaken house, and so I promised by my eternal soul that I would find the murderer—just to turn my back on those suffering people, and I never gave a moment’s thought to the fact that I couldn’t keep this promise because I was going to Jordan. And then I allowed the old indifference to rise up in me, Locher. That was so horrible. I didn’t fight for the peddler. I allowed everything to happen. I became my old impersonal self, “Nobody Home,” as some people call me. I slipped back into the calm, the superiority, the formality, the inhumanity, until I saw the children at the airport.’

Wild Turkeys @ Top of World

Turkeys @ Top of the World. Cambria CA. What could be more American, though I suppose you could argue they've got their holidays mixed up a bit.:) Happy Memorial Day!🎈

#rlswihart #topoftheworld #cambriacalifornia #wildturkeys #memorialday #redwhiteandblue #beachday #waveaflag #remembrance #nature #beauty #poetry #readmorepoetry2023 #ukraine 🇺🇦🎆

The Pledge

This case gave me a bad feeling; everything had somehow gone wrong; I didn’t know exactly how, but I felt it. I withdrew to my ‘boutique,’ as I called it, a smoke-filled little room next to my office. I ordered a bottle of Châteauneuf du Pape from a restaurant near the Sihl bridge, drank a few glasses. There was always an awful mess in that room, I won’t deny it, a jumble of books and files. I did that on principle, because in my opinion it’s everyone’s duty in this well-ordered land to maintain little islands of chaos, even if only in secret.

From Durrenmatt's The Pledge

“To be honest,” Dr. H. began later, as we were approaching the Kerenz Pass—the road was icy again, and beneath us lay Lake Walen, glittering, cold, forbidding; also, the leaden weariness from the Medomin had come back, the memory of the smoky taste of the whiskey, the feeling of gliding along in an endless, meaningless dream—“to be honest, I have never thought highly of crime novels, and I rather regret that you, too, write them. It’s a waste of time. Though what you said in your lecture yesterday was worth hearing; since the politicians have shown themselves to be so criminally inept—and it takes one to know one, I’m a member of Parliament, as I’m sure you’re aware . . .” (I had no idea, I was listening to his voice as if from a great distance, barricaded behind my tiredness, but attentive, like an animal in its lair) “. . . People hope the police at least will know how to put the world in order, which strikes me as the most miserable thing you could possibly hope for. But unfortunately, these mystery stories perpetrate a whole different sort of deception. I don’t even mean the fact that your criminals are always brought to justice. It’s a nice fairy tale and is probably morally necessary. It’s one of those lies that preserve the State, like that pious homily ‘crime doesn’t pay’—when all that’s required to test this particular piece of wisdom is to have a good look at human society; no, I’d let all that pass, on principles of commerce if nothing else, because every reader and every taxpayer has a right to his heroes and his happy ending, and it’s our job to deliver that—I mean ours as policemen, just as much as it’s your job as writers. No, what really bothers me about your novels is the story line, the plot. There the lying just takes over, it’s shameless. You set up your stories logically, like a chess game: here’s the criminal, there’s the victim, here’s an accomplice, there’s a beneficiary; and all the detective needs to know is the rules, he replays the moves of the game, and checkmate, the criminal is caught and justice has triumphed. This fantasy drives me crazy. You can’t come to grips with reality by logic alone.