Elfriede Jelinek - Greed

The man naturally never talks out loud about such things, he talks, as has been said, very little, but I believe that's what he thinks, quietly, that's the best way of thinking, only TV hasn't understood that yet and gives us sound as well, so that forever sweet toothed we can pile a glob of whipped cream and another and another on top of reality, before at last we get really stuck in. We're going to regret it at some point, when we're feeling sick. Well well, so he wants to get lost inside himself, Kurt Janisch, not in someone else, because something like that would make him afraid? But I don't see much of that yet. Perhaps in the end he even wants to digest himself? Perhaps that's how he likes to imagine it. Then he would have to part with the least of all, is perhaps what he thinks. Why then is he always falling on others for no fault of theirs? That's how cannibals always start. First they want to eat themselves, and then it's always others after all, whom they get a taste for. And when taste has got going, e.g., on an excursion into the TV or a video, then if need be they get to work on the bodies themselves and that as large as life. And already, often of necessity, shit and natural bubbly are flowing out of these bodies, sometimes out of fear that one day one might have to pay for it instead of being currency. I've got the exact figures here. The man says very long-windedly and nothing is said in reply: Think of me as the unhappiest and at the same time as the happiest person if you have to detain me here. And how else should I (yes, me!) express it, than with these few diffident sentences, out of which I might almost have built a conversation between us, but only almost. I would have made a little crib, if I hadn't run out of nails. The bank isn't giving me any credit at all anymore, quite the reverse, the bank wants me to pay back the old loans, and all of them at once as well. Later, like his thoughts, which can never sit still long enough for them to be properly thought through to the end, perhaps by chance, perhaps through planning, this man will avoid prison, because he won't be recognized for what he is. He's meanwhile, but sometimes by the quickest route, heading straight for personal bankruptcy. Or not. I alone know everything, because I have executed it specially in water-colors, is that not unbearably watered down?, so help me. Or is that exactly how it happened? So I'll help you, too, even though I don't know you at all, with my word, which like a go-cart I slide under your uncertainty, into which, after all, I've steered you, and already this man, through the music of his words, can make contact with me, with us, and you can complain all you like about boredom while you're reading this, but please not to me. With this problem I'm definitely not standing right behind you. Not behind myself either. I'm not standing anywhere. I, too, would prefer to be doing something else apart from always reading.

Other people are even blown up by a laugh. But here real dynamite is contained in the owner of an extensive muscle mass that is still to be climbed. Who can do it. Who wants to do it. No one knows much about him. I'm the only one at the moment who's saying he's explosive. And, for all his dangerousness, it's a plain rod that this extreme walker plants in the ground of womankind, yet this rod is a tough one. Basically the man wouldn't need the miracle stick, he always finds his way wherever he goes and a suitable pace as well. He can still walk well alone. The fuse can burn, there can be an explosion, rubble flying up, just ask the manmade lake here at the entrance to the village, which didn't make itself either, what that's like! One wants to be left in peace, is even perhaps a little ashamed, that waves several feet high foam up around one, the underwater embankments, the gently waving pubic hair of the lake drifts upwards like a furry shoe thrown down for a woolly cuddly toy-one has something between one's teeth, which one laboriously has to pull out again, one slurps the rich content of a mellow slime, which perhaps consists of nutrients, perhaps not, but basically one doesn't want to eat any of it, one would prefer to spit it out, let it nourish someone else! A sermon on the mount will be preached now. There are too many who want to eat, and they remove the basis of the man's existence, and one woman or another is supposed to give it back to him: If this man goes and doesn't come back, I'm going to die off inside like a whole region, which has absorbed too much nitrate and phosphate, thinks the woman. He can do anything with me, but he shouldn't do it. This flesh, for example, is so cold, brrr!, because for half an hour it had to lie naked on the steps down to the cellar and almost spend the winter there, you exaggerate. The sun can't yet properly penetrate the walls of the house, but no, it only seemed as long as winter to the woman, it wasn't longer than half an hour at the outside. Perhaps this Gabi girl also has a life's dream, it doesn't, however, consist in giving a country policeman valuable gifts, but in receiving these gifts herself. Will you buy me this, will you buy me that, that's what it's like with Gabi non-stop. What am I going to buy it with. It doesn't matter. The young ones at any rate are still supple, you've hardly pulled them out of the wrapper and they're already jumping into your mouth. Their bodies still deceive themselves all too often in their addressees, they don't read the sender's address and the small print, they don't have any experience and then the wailing and the weeping start up again. They're hardly more than children, who see us again and likewise want to go to the cafe in front of everyone! on Saturday afternoon! They all want to. How will mommy, how will both mommies, how will the cuddly toys who have stayed at home respond to that? If we only knew. Days go by. Weeks go by. His rare visits. Time passes differently for young people. The old save themselves all that, because it doesn't do any good. They learned how to save in harder times, and where do they find themselves now? Nowhere. In no-man's land. They don't know that the hardest times have just begun. This young woman must surely see that a different recipient is marked on this body, which at this moment falls on her, like a wolf, who has at last found the leg of lamb in the fridge. And the second body we see here is likewise mad about the man, and unfortunately about the same one, and unfortunately it had to stay outside, the body. Nothing to be done. At least the body out there wasn't tied to the banisters. All one can still look forward to is loneliness and isolation and illusions. And one can get self-doubt and submission for it, say our entertainment experts with their pouting lips, isn't that so, Mrs. famous sex adviser Senger, you too, in your little newspaper column, where you've been imprisoned for safety's sake, just in case you want to say it to us in person. No doubt someone is about to leave again, although he's only just come, and who will that be? Right, that'll be Kurt Janisch. How dreadful for these two women, each in her way matchless, that they have to experience something like that. And that's why unfortunately they can't set us an example. They don't give anything. They might perhaps have a lot to give us, but they don't do it, they prefer to give it to someone else. But they don't want to go either. The confusion that often prevails in very young people who look at one covetously, because basically they would much rather have the latest computer game or the latest pair of flared trousers bought for them, is that confusion at all, is it not single-mindedness? They are as ignorant as they are greedy, these young people, but mostly they look cheerful, in the hope that then they are more likely to get it. I can't say anything about that, I don't know what they do at which time. I don't know what they do at the same time. This confusion among young people, therefore, is often the result, as one can read here and everywhere else, of too many families having been destroyed, because the daddy, ever more frequently also the mommy, has cleared off, and that's what exactly the same newspaper tells me, in the shape of a quiet different figure, however, it's the authoritative figure of a priest called Paterno, whom I already listened to yesterday, but then his voice said something quite different and his hand wrote something quite different. But the most amusing and friendliest thing, just like the saddest and most frightful one, are often unfortunately the most terrible nonsense, even though this newspaper has already said it one way or another. At least the other way here has not done so. It gave away a guglhupf recipe, hmmm, that turned out well again! Oh, if only they had occurred to me sooner, these pieces of information for the information bulletin of the school of life, sooner than to Mrs. Gerti Senger and the priest August Paterno, before I was able to start a new page! Then I would have also been able to write them down here, these pieces of information. So they're still written down, but written down somewhere else.