Richard Weiner - The Game for Real

The supernumeraries — that is, the guests of this sanctuary, which is both a tavern and a knightly hall — won’t let us out of their sight for a moment, though they’re careful not to make a show of it. I don’t know how it was for the other three, but as far as I was concerned that circumstance contributed decisively to the impression that we were acting before what one calls fate, which also likes to pretend that it’s a disinterested observer.

Once I had assumed the place indicated by the invisible director, Mutig — as if issuing an initial rejoinder — grabbed something from the table and tossed it lightly; it fell like a heavy object, let’s call it a Browning; I looked: it was the rubber girl from the Folies-Bergère; it was as if all holes, patches, and stitches.

Mutig:. . were we then to eliminate duration. .

Fuld: Pardon! Let’s be precise: eliminate, or refute it?

Mutig: Eliminate it. As a concept. Naturally, as a concept. By refuting it we would pose the question of its reality, and the question of its reality doesn’t enter into it, for what matters to us, let’s say, is ethics. After all, you understand what negating the concept of duration would mean in an ethical system! Don’t you?

Fuld: Perhaps an effort to furnish responsibility with an alibi?

Mutig: Responsibility! A nasty word, and less than a word: the utilitarian formula of moralists. A hindrance to emancipation.

Fuld: But a concept that does not rule emancipation out.

Mutig: Naturally, for we are opportunists. How does that strike you? To exclude the notion of emancipation from the ethics that is its foundation? Which is therefore the ethics of the strong. Who then take precedence. . Are you laughing?

Fuld: Pardon. On the contrary. That’s just how I look. .

Mutig (tossing his head carelessly): But someone here is laughing. (Which is to say, I had smiled.) Not only is emancipation my right; it is my duty. It is my duty to come into being. (Pause.) Our adversaries don’t understand a whit of our ethics. To them it’s irresponsibility, self-will, the unleashing of a fundamental evil! But we are not evil, we’re just simple. . — Giggles, am I evil?

Giggles: Oh, you and your evil! You’re merely awful.

Mutig: We’ve eliminated duration. First implication: the act has no genealogy. The act is independent of what precedes it; it is free, alone; thus it does not know; it does not diminish. Only he who pays duration no mind can submit to what he encounters unreservedly, can serve it unreservedly. .

Fuld: Serve at this moment. .

Mutig: Naturally, at this moment. (His beautiful hands flickered over his head like white flames.) At this moment, naturally. How then, I ask you, to submit unreservedly, if not to what things there are in this moment, and nowhere else? Where else, if not in this moment, would you seek that which is? — Giggles, aren’t you happy?

Giggles: Oh!

Fuld: Are you really happy, Giggles? Despite. .

Giggles: Oh! Why ask if I am happy? The verb to be is not an auxiliary verb. I say: I am. Simply: I am. I endure.

Mutig: What are you, Giggles?

Giggles: Oh! What does it matter, when I am through you?

Mutig: Which is to say, Giggles is heroic, Fuld, you see? Giggles knows and doesn’t doubt that at every moment I am really entirely what I appear to be at the moment. What more could she ask for?

Fuld: And if at that moment you are really entirely unfaithfulness, repulsion, contempt, hatred?

Mutig: As if it would come to that!

Giggles: Oh, it won’t come to that!

Fuld: Giggles, if he were to loathe you, he would leave you.

Giggles: Oh Fuld, of course. But I am Mrs. Mutig. I cannot and do not wish to be anything but a Mutig. So then why should I gripe if at a given moment Mutig is an unfaithful Mutig — repulsed by me, contemptuous of me, hating me?

Mutig: In short, entirely Mutig. Unspoiled. Giggles has caught on to something that you haven’t. Giggles gets that those who have died away within us will not be resurrected by our sorrow, nor by our pity. Giggles gets that the sole honor we can pay the dead is not to drag them behind us. To bury them quickly. (A loving glance at Giggles.) You see what it means to apply our ethics practically? Giggles, where is the happiness in being loved by me?

Giggles (like a schoolgirl): The happiness in being loved by you is in the certainty that I make allowances for you, and that I fade away.

Mutig (like a teacher testing a good student): What allowances do you make, Giggles?

Giggles: I allow, and in doing so lighten your burden, that you are not omnipotent.

Mutig: Good, Giggles. And if in one moment , if in one moment the only way to ease my burden were — a mere supposition, you understand — to ease it, that is, to deceive it, were only (his words collapsed with a mournful violence) if you, because it’s what I wanted, were to slit your own throat?

Fuld: Let’s say, “If you were to take your own life.”

Mutig (curtly): If you were to slit your own throat. .

Giggles (with a happy laugh, into which there crept a timid horror): Oh!

Fuld (repentantly): A supposition that. . (Faster and faster.) Your suppositions are bloody. Mutig, my dear, too gory for a supposition, too figurative, my friend (and suddenly, as if he’d signed and, under some kind of unfamiliar pressure, automatically appended his initials): my dear friend .

Mutig (professorially, but with a touching, youthful awkwardness): To abstract from duration — and why else would we exclude the concept of duration, if not to proceed practically, as though everything in the given moment were always complete? For you, Fuld, and for a great many others, to abstract from duration would mean to turn irresponsibility toward your maximum life potential.

Fuld: That objection. .

Mutig: You wanted to say that that objection is no objection at all, my dear friend, true? We do not refuse responsibility for our deeds, of course, naturally. We refuse responsibility merely for what we will be in the next moment. Next time.

Fuld: Only that the thing you do next will be a function of what you will be in the next moment. And in that next moment you might be someone who denies responsibility for the consequences of what you just did, when you were different. Therein lies the catch, in my opinion (he said “in my opinion”): for whatever responsibility is, isn’t it responsibility for consequences?

Mutig: My fine friend, we have settled, have we not, that our ethics and our current morality are two separate things. How, then, even in our dreams, could people such as ourselves, living upright, arrive at the thought that we were answerable to someone other than ourselves? Ethics is not the Napoleonic Code. You are perhaps haunted by the idea — allow me to put it like a “man on the street”—that our ethics would not prevent us from leading — as they say — our fellow man unto misfortune, and to leave him lying peacefully on the roadway like a motorist gone mad? It doesn’t stop it. Naturally. — Our interlocutor, for example, is now surely thinking of Giggles. (He turned sharply toward me and was very beautiful.)

Fuld: Naturally.

Mutig: If I say that we do not refuse responsibility for the things we do, this means simply that in the given moment we would consider it a shame to undertake anything so as to evade the natural repercussions of our action.

Fuld: Naturally.

Mutig: At last, then we are agreed! — The only people who can eliminate their regard for duration are those for whom catching fire and living are synonyms, and such people cannot help but eliminate duration. The raison d’être of flame is the verb: to burn; nay, a substantive: that which burns. Is that clear, sir?