The Union Jack Read Free Page B

questionable. Here I must remind you that professionally I was—or ought to have been—pursuing a formulation of life as a journalist. Granted that for a journalist to demand a formulation of life was a falsehood in its very essence: but then, anyone who lies is ipso facto thinking about the truth, and I would only have been able to lie about life if I had been acquainted, at least in part, with its truth, yet I was not acquainted, either in whole or in part, with the truth, this truth, the truth of this life, the life that I too was living. Little by little, I was therefore recategorised in the editorial office from
talented
journalist to
untalented
journalist. From the moment that I slipped,for a while at least, out of the world of formulability, and thus the sustainability of my way of life, the events going on around me—and hence I myself as an event—disintegrated into fragmentary images and impressions. But the camera lens that captured the jumbled images, sounds and even thoughts was still, agonisingly and irreducibly,
me
, only a me that was growing ever more alienated from myself. The diabolical wooden spoon had once again scraped the very bottom of the human soup in the cauldron of
so-called world history
in which we all stew. I see myself there, in depressed listlessness, at meetings that stretch out to dawn, where the hounds of hell yap, the whip of
criticism
and
self-criticism
cracks on my back, and increasingly I just wait, wait for when and where the door will open through which I shall be ejected who could know where. Before too long I was to be stumbling around in rust-tinted dust beneath the interminable labyrinth of pipes of a murderous factory barrack-complex; bleak dawns smelling of iron castings would await, hazed daytimes when the dull cognitions of the mind would swell and burst like heavy bubbles on the tin-grey surface of a steaming, swirling mass of molten metal. I became a factory worker, but at least it was possible, bit by bit, to formulate thatafresh, albeit only with the vocabulary of adventure, absurdity, mockery and fear; that is, with a vocabulary congruent with the world around me, and in that way I more or less regained my life once more. That I might have a chance of regaining life
fully
, indeed that
a full life might be possible at all
—but now that I have already lived this life, now that what still remains of this life (my life) may also be considered as already lived, I must formulate it more precisely, indeed absolutely precisely: that a full life
might have been
possible—that is something I only began to suspect when all at once, after the formulations of adventure, I unexpectedly found myself, dumbfounded and fascinated, face to face with the
adventure of formulation
. This adventure to surpass all my adventures, however, I have to broach, as I remarked in my preamble, with Richard Wagner, but before broaching Richard Wagner, as I have likewise already signalled, I had to start at the editorial office. When they first “took me on” at that editorial office; when I started to go in, day after day, to that editorial office; when, day after day, I telephoned in to that editorial office from the city hall (having been assigned to that column, the “City Hall” column) the latest city hall news, indeed reports, I formulated this aggregation of facts, and not yet entirelywithout reason, as “I’m a journalist,” since appearances, and the activity that engendered those appearances, truly did permit me, by and large, to so formulate it. That was my period of naive formulations, of unbiased formulations, when my way of life and its formulation did not yet stand irreducibly opposed to one another, or in an opposition that was reducible solely by radical means. What had carried me into that career, and therefore into that editorial office, was a formulation, a book I had read, that—above and beyond the necessity of my making a “career choice,” so to say, and, yes,