Till Kingdom Come. Andrej Nikolaidis
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My time seemed to shrink and then to scatter in all directions, forwards and backwards, up and down, into yesterday and tomorrow, exploding into thousands of droplets – fragments I tried again and again to unite, in vain. It was like a ball of wool that rolls down the hill into a stream and ends up all tangled in the waterweed, or like a piece of Czech porcelain from grandmother’s chest of drawers that falls to the terracotta floor. It demanded an exceptional effort to re-sort the findings about my own existence and assemble an even slightly convincing narrative about myself. Social contacts were becoming ever harder for me. I was terrified of questions and prop-phrases like ‘remember the time we...’ or ‘you know how...’ because I had no answers to them. Actually I did, but they weren’t socially acceptable. A short, honest ‘no’ was out of the question. No, I don’t remember. No, I don’t know you. No, I really don’t know who you are. Lots of little ‘noes’, which each individually and all together meant one thing: no, I don’t know who I am.
In turn, finding consolation in solitude now ceased being a matter of choice and became a necessity. If I wanted to stay outside of institutions I could be put into for my own good by people I knew nothing about, but who claimed to be well-intentioned and even friends, I had to reduce my contacts with the outside world. In that way I created the time I needed to tell myself about myself.
I built myself of water. I tried to give the water shape and hold it back, at least for long enough to glance at myself briefly in the mirror. All that I touched and all that I owned ran between my fingers, trickled away from me, met weirs and then changed course and shape, flowing, falling, gushing away and sinking into the ground, only to well up again, elusive and completely unable to retain any shape.
It was no easy task, but I managed to put my life in order so that I could function in spite of my ‘condition’, which was constantly worsening. There is only one recipe for happiness, and that is to desire as little as possible. A simple life, even if spent in privation, is the closest you’ll get to happiness. When you accept that you have little, most of the problems that have dogged you will vanish – because those problems were fuelled by all the futile efforts to gain more. It’s a simple matter: to have a lot takes a lot. Everything I had gained cost me dearly. It wasn’t worth it.
4
I only went out at night, when I could stroll through the deserted town to my heart’s content. No one was out in the streets after one in the morning except the schizophrenics hurriedly walking in the squeaky flip-flops they wore summer and winter alike, looking straight ahead. They were my brothers. Their families kept them under lock and key during the day because people in small towns try to hide what is considered shameful. They would let them out at night to get their fill of fresh air and wear themselves out on their sometimes long and always frenzied walks. Before dawn, they would be rounded up, like animals that have strayed from the flock, and returned to their rooms, where they would sleep all day on sedatives.
Drugged-up kids would squeeze into unmanageable cars and race to discos in the suburbs. They didn’t notice me. Young couples had fast sex in the woods and on the beaches. They had enough problems of their own even without me turning up – difficulties and embarrassments that, when the night’s amorous experiences were recounted the next day, would morph into anatomically impracticable acrobatics and fireworks of passion. Teenage sex is proof that Karl Kraus was right when he maintained that intercourse is a poor substitute for masturbation. Out of consideration for the ordeal they were going through, I always gave the young people a wide berth and tried not to disturb them.
But most of all I liked the dawns. In nature, I have to admit, there is no kitsch. That is also the nicest thing that can be said about nature. It is people’s perspective that fouls everything up. When dawn comes like the writing on the wall and the day that arrives in its wake is unwelcome, like all it can possibly bring, there can be no kitsch even in the scene of a person standing at the shore and watching the morning rear up, slowly and terrifying like Godzilla – that gleaming monster one should flee before, to find a refuge and try to survive until the following night. Yes, the dawns were beautiful.
Beauty is difficult.
5
I wrote for the newspapers and that’s how I made ends meet. For a while, I used the money my grandmother had left to me, but I soon learned to save, and what I earned from six articles would last until the end of the month.
I wrote quickly and with ease, and what I wrote had an audience. They were commentary pieces at first, fiery and provocative. People liked to read them, especially those who didn’t agree with me – and there were quite a lot of them. If you tell people what they don’t want to hear in the way they least want to hear it, you’ll have their undivided attention and they will become your most loyal readers. I owed every single ‘success’ of my journalistic career, if we can call it that, to people who would curse and swear when reading my pieces, who would screw up the newspaper and trample on it, only then to wait impatiently for my next article that would drive them around them bend all over again.
Over time, I developed a special style of my own – a kind of hybrid – mixing investigative journalism, cultural criticism and conspiracy theories. The ‘investigative’ bit shouldn’t be taken literally. Naturally I didn’t have any ‘insider’ sources, access to classified information or anything like that. I examined information that had already been published and drafted my articles in the margins. But I dissected these texts like a forensic scientist, and a whole host of things came to light. I discovered logical lapses, discrepancies and incongruities in the statements of the players. If you knew where to look and what to search for, an author’s style provided ample information about masked intentions, hush-ups, and the toxic influence of editors and media barons. The lies of politicians melded with the lies of tycoons, who used their media to expose the former’s skulduggery. I studied the ownership structures of the media and the ownership structures of firms. I learned to link what I read in the crime columns with the movements of stock-market indices, and I became skilled at recognizing the jargon of party spokespeople in the words of academicians. In my articles, stories about crimes in village schools rubbed shoulders with the theory of the Frankfurt School, the names of bankers stood next to Brecht’s, and the tragic fates of Bosnian refugees bore so many similarities to Walter Benjamin’s final days. My speculations were no less truthful than supposedly objective information, and were far more interesting.
From the first day on, I felt the deepest disgust for the job I was doing. Journalism is not for the respectable. Which is to say, it should have been the ideal job for me. But there was too much lying and falsity even for my taste.
Today journalists not only play the role of committed thinkers, who communicate important realizations about human existence and work hard to unmask society’s hypocrisy. Journalists today are also detectives, exposing what is hidden. It is they who visit criminals in their troubled dreams, where they dread what will be discovered and what dirty work the reporter’s X-ray vision will alert the public about, and with the sensitivity about injustice being so great the public prosecutor and police are bound to react. It is a story about bold journalists who uproot society’s weeds, a yarn intended for brains readily narcoticized with fairy tales. Journalists are like the animals in the story who band together, holding each other by the tail, and tug and tug until they finally pull a turnip out of the ground.
There is nothing noble in public activism, nothing enlightened or heroic. All that talk about incorruptible public intellectuals and their virtues is a naive fantasy. It’s a simple, even trivial matter – a question of the market and the stock exchange, but not of the spirit.
Everyone who participates in ‘public life’ possesses a certain symbolic capital. The media are just a market for symbolic capital that can be enlarged by the action of the media: Or diminished. Like information, symbolic capital can be transformed into money in one way or another. And just like the dollar, the global currency, symbolic capital has no firm foundation.
The idea of free media flows from the idea of a free market. Both one and the other are pure ideological constructs. Neither one nor the other exists.
The media are a tool for achieving the interests of their owners. Those interests