It is friendship and enmity, enthusiasm and disenchantment, peristalsis and ideology. Thinking has, among other functions, to establish an intellectual order in life. As well as to destroy that order. Every concept combines many disparate phenomena in life, and just as frequently, a single phenomenon will give rise to many new concepts. It is common knowledge that our poets have stopped wanting to think ever since they thought they heard the philosophers say that thought is no longer supposed to be a matter of thinking, but rather of living.
Life is to blame for everything.
But in God’s name: What is living?
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Two syllogisms emerge from these assertions.
Art peels kitsch off of life.
Kitsch peels life off of language.
And: The more abstract art becomes, the more it becomes art.
Also: The more abstract kitsch becomes, the more it becomes kitsch.
These are two splendid syllogisms. If only we could resolve them!
According to the second, it appears that kitsch equals art. According to the first, however, kitsch equals language minus life. Art equals life minus kitsch equals life minus language plus life equals two lives minus language. But according to the second, life equals three times kitsch and, therefore, art equals six times kitsch minus language.
So what is art?
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A black hussar has it so good. The black hussars swore an oath of victory or death and meanwhile stroll around in this uniform to the delight of all the ladies. That is not art! That’s life!
But why then do we maintain that it’s just a tableau vivant?
Doors are a thing of the past, even if back doors are still said to crop up at architectural competitions.
A door consists of a rectangular wooden frame set in the wall, on which a moveable board is fastened. This board at least is still barely comprehensible. For it is supposed to be light enough to be easily pivoted, and it fits within the oak and walnut paneling that until recently adorned every proper living room. Yet even this board has already lost most of its significance. Up until the middle of the last century you could listen in with your ear pressed against it, and what secrets you could sometimes hear! The count had disowned his stepdaughter, and the hero, who was supposed to marry her, heard just in time that they planned to poison him. Let anybody try such a feat in a contemporary house! Before he even got to listen in at the door, he’d have long since heard everything through the walls. And what’s more: not even the faintest thought would have escaped his ear. Why has no radio-poet yet taken advantage of the possibilities of the modern concrete structure?! It is undoubtedly the predestined stage for the radio play!
Still far more outdated than the door itself is the doorframe. If you cast a glance past open doors, through a suite of rooms, you’d think you were experiencing the nightmare vision of a soccer forward faced by an infinite succession of goal posts. There is also a kind of gallows of which it reminds us. Why do they do it this way? Technically, a snug closure could be achieved without these doorposts; in fact, they are only there to please the eye. It is assumed that the eye would find it too bare if the door were fastened to the wall or to an invisible metal band. To the studied eye this would be no different than the absence of a cuff peering forth between the hand and the arm. Indeed, these door frames have a similar history to that of the detachable cuffs. When rooms were still vaulted, such a feature was unknown; the door turned on two lovely cast-iron hinges. Later they learned to build flat roofs that were supported by heavy wooden beams; proud of this innovation, they left the beams visible and likewise covered the spaces between them with wood, and the result was those beautiful wainscoted ceilings. Later still, they covered the beams beneath a stuccoed ceiling, but around the doors a narrow wooden rim was preserved.
And finally, today, they build walls of reinforced concrete instead of brick. But the narrow wooden rim, lonesome, senseless, that seems to come out of nowhere and is related only to the window frame, is left as a remnant of the custom. Isn’t that exactly the same as the history of the shirt, which first began as a wide, visible garment with neck and hand frills? Later it disappeared beneath the frock coat, but collar and cuff still peaked forth beneath the neck and sleeves of the suit. Then the collar and cuff were separated from the shirt, and finally, prior to any further improvement, the removable collar and cuff became solitary symbols of culture, which, in order to demonstrate proper manners, were buttoned onto a hidden undergarment.
This discovery – that wooden doors are removable cuffs – must be credited to the famous architect who realized that since man is born in a clinic and dies in a hospital, he likewise requires aseptic restraint in the design of his living space.
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