Spurious - Lars Iyer [15]
It’s no wonder I don’t do any work, W. says. He couldn’t work if he lived like me. Out all the time, reading nothing and living in squalor. It really is disgusting, he says. And the damp! He’s never seen anything like it, W. says. It hits you as soon as you come in. No wonder I’m always ill.
‘What would Béla Tarr would think of your damp?’, W. says. ‘What would he make of it?’ W. has become obsessed with Béla Tarr. He’s a genius, says W. He says he only makes films about poor, ugly people. The ugly and poor are his people, that’s what he says, says W.
Béla Tarr was going to be a philosopher. But when he started making films … No abstraction for him, says W. He’s completely devoted to the concrete, says W. To what he sees in front of him. He’s not like us, W. says. He doesn’t float nebulously into the most general and most confused of ideas, into our clouds of unknowing.
‘Béla Tarr doesn’t believe in God’, says W. ‘He’s seen too much to believe in God’. A little later, ‘He takes years over each film’, says W. ‘Years! Every kind of obstacle is placed in his way. His producers die of despair. His cinematographers leave in disgust. He runs out of money’. And then, ‘His films are full of drunks. Full of drunk, aggressive people like you’, says W. ‘And mud. His films are full of mud. That’s where you belong’, says W., ‘in the mud’.
Béla Tarr made his first film when he was sixteen, W. says. Sixteen! Sixteen! That’s when he started, says W.—‘When did you know’, says W., ‘when did you know you’d never amount to anything?’ When did I take refuge in vague and cloudy ideas that have nothing to do with the world?
There’s something absolute about my yard, W. says. You can’t get beyond it. Some great process has completed itself there.—‘What did you do to those plants? Desecrate them?’ and then, ‘What’s hung over your washing line? What was it, before it started rotting?’, and then, ‘Were those once bin bags? My God, what have they become?’
Béla Tarr would discern what is absolute about my yard, W. says. He’d register its every detail in a twenty minute tracking shot. The sewage, the concrete, the bin bags and rotting plants … the yard would mean more to Béla Tarr than all our nonsense.
Béla Tarr said that the walls, the rain and the dogs in his films have their own stories, which are much more important than so-called human stories. He said that the scenery, the weather, the locations and time itself have their own faces. Their own faces! Yes, we’re agreed, the yard, the horror of the yard, is the only thing around here in which Béla Tarr would be interested.
W. sends me a quotation to mull over in my stupidity, he says.
Forms of behaviour such as opportunism and cynicism derive from this infinite process in which the world becomes no more than a supermarket of opportunities empty of all inherent value, yet marked by the fear that any false move may set in motion a vortex of impotence.
W. finds the phrase, vortex of impotence, particularly thought-provoking, he says. It describes my entire life: action and powerlessness, movement and paralysis; that strange combination of despair and frenzy.
I want to escape, that’s my primary impulse, W. observes. I know something’s wrong, fundamentally wrong, and I want to be elsewhere. Of course, he’s not like me, says W., the rat who leaves the sinking ship. But I’m not escaping, says W. I’m going to drown with everyone else, he’ll make sure of it. I’m going down, says W.
We’re at the Mill on the Exe, right on the river, the sun shining warmly on our faces.
The South West! W. exclaims. He feels fortunate to live here. The South West is the graveyard of ambition, a colleague warned him upon his arrival from the east, but W. is not ambitious.
He just wants a little time and space to work, to think. To try to think, W. says. He reads in