Old Rendering Plant

by Wolfgang Hilbig

ordinary citizens strode, sure and insensate…whereas these men seemed unable to control their own feet, shambling and stumbling through the petty bourgeois sphere that was accustomed to the light, reeling, circling rather than pressing forward, an inarticulate roaming, as if through tides of indecision, on ground without solidity through which the burden of their gaze dripped downward, and the weight of their knowledge dug into the pavement where their shoes stuck fast in decay, in burning dirt…dug still deeper, down past the echo of their shuffling in sand, down past the sigh of their shambling in slime, while up above their brains expired amid the vagrant clouds…their pupils were dark tears, like eyes of polished ebony, as they descended forever downward after their dull thoughts, as, drinking continuously at their table, they tried to write one of their letters, perhaps intending to quit work at last, scratching awkwardly for hours to form the lines of their antiquated script, nodding ponderously in the wake of their incomprehensible constructions, and ants chased each other on the grubby paper amid the baffled blue words that were nothing but curses. And I saw them give up, chaotic in their retreat, quickly spinning out of control again, confused in their gestures, constantly jolted by desperate horror like dreamers waking to shadowbox, forced to go on flailing at swarms of panic-insects, or to wipe out their names, hands slapping the tabletop. Or I saw them make forlo...