Where are they going?

Back in November I read Satantango, by László Krasznahorkai, and I'll even write about it someday. My challenge these days is to find an 8-hour block of time so that I can watch Bela Tarr's film adaptation of it, uninterrupted.

While trying to find my way into novel, I found some clips of the film. Nothing much happens, in any of them. Yet the clips are oddly compelling. I need to see how the nothingness resolves. I need to watch the full movie.



Where are they going? They look like they're going somewhere. That's quite the wind. Do they have far to go? They look like they're in a hurry. They must be in a hurry to get to wherever they're going. But the street's not passing fast enough beneath their feet. Where is everybody anyway? Maybe they're just leaving this place. But, no, they're going somewhere. Will they get there? Is that where everybody is?



So where is she going? And why is she carrying a dead cat? (Is it a real dead cat?) Will the rain ever let up? Oh, thank gawd, the rain is letting up. And it's daylight too. That's a lot of walking. The landscape has changed; she's making progress. But what's wrong with her? Why is the cat dead? Does she even know where she's going? Will she ever get there? She must be tired. Doesn't anybody care that she's been out all night? Where is everybody? Is she going someplace, or just leaving someplace behind? Where?

It's so much nothing. But something's going to happen, isn't it?

Where are they going?

A series of seemingly meaningless human movements

He understood, just in time, that the best he could do was to use his memory to fend off the sinister, underhanded process of decay, trusting in the fact that since all that mason might build, carpenter might construct, woman might stitch, indeed all that men and women had brought forth with bitter tears was bound to turn to an undifferentiated, runny, underground, mysteriously ordained mush, his memory would remain lively and clear, right until his organs surrendered and "conformed to the contract whereby their business affairs were wound up," that is to say until his bones and flesh fell prey to the vultures hovering over death and decay. He decided to watch everything very carefully and to record it constantly, all with the aim of not missing the smallest detail, because he realized with a shock that to ignore the apparently insignificant was to admit that one was condemned to sit defenceless on the parapet connecting the rising and falling members of the bridge between chaos event and comprehensible order. However apparently insignificant the event, whether it be the ring of tobacco ash surrounding the table, the direction from which the wild geese first appeared, or a series of seemingly meaningless human movements, he couldn't afford to take his eyes off it and must note it all down, since only by doing so could he hope not to vanish one day and fall a silent captive to the infernal arrangement whereby the world decomposes but is at the same time constantly in the process of self-construction. It was not, however, enough to remember things conscientiously: that "was insufficient in itself," not up to the task: one had to compile and comprehend such signs as still remained in order to discover the means whereby the perfectly maintained memory's sphere of influence might be extended and sustained over a period. The best course then, thought the doctor during his visit to the mill, would be "to reduce to a minimum such events as would tend to increase the number of things I have to keep an eye on," and that very night, having told the useless Horgos girl to clear off home, informing her he longer required her services, he set up his observation post by the window and began planning the elements of a system that some people might consider insane.

— from Satantango, by László Krasznahorkai.

I'm having a difficult time with this book, not least because it doesn't have paragraph breaks and so does not lend itself to being read on one's daily commute, and I find I read the same page several times over, which contributes to the overall effect, I suppose, quite possibly just as intended. I don't entirely dislike the experience. And there are bits of this book that are strangely compelling.

Like this doctor character here. I assume these are quotes from his notebook. Very formal. He's pretty insane, just sitting there amid decay (the old estate), taking notes, indirectly recording the decay.

The eternal reality of the exploited

The taller of the two men assures his companion, saying, "The two clocks say different times, but it could be that neither of them is right. Our clock here," he continues, pointing to the one above them with his long, slender and refined index finger, "is very late, while that one there measures not so much time as, well, the eternal reality of the exploited, and we to it are as the bough of a tree to the rain that falls upon it: in other words we are helpless."

— from Satantango, by László Krasznahorkai.