The Antichrist (12 page)

So those people who have to live in such buildings are like animals and, at the same time, like homeless people. They spend the night in the street. And, still worse, the street spends the night with them. So it is as if each individual were spending the night with his neighbour.

The tenderness of two lovers in bed is as visible as the caressing of caged birds.

One could say that the sun, which has been let in, has brought everything into the daylight.

Those men whose job it is to build such houses say that they are practical and healthful. And, besides, people belong together. And, further, nothing human should be alien to people.

To these homebuilders, however, everything human is foreign. Solitude, silence and secrecy are just as critical to us as health, sun and fresh air. It is certainly inherent in our nature that we should live in a community with our own kind. However, we can only endure this community if we can also spend time alone. For this is human nature – we wish to be alone and also together with other people. It is written that it is not good for people to remain alone.

But man, the image of God, possesses one of the divine qualities – the ability to be both alone and with others at the same time. Yes, he has nostalgia for solitude, just as he has nostalgia for Heaven, because he was created in the image, that is to say, according to the characteristics, of God.

He cannot live in a community if he cannot satisfy his nostalgia. He disturbs the community instead of helping it.

It is only in the hour of danger – during times of war, for example – that people can stand the constant company of their own kind; and this is only because death is in the neighbourhood and death makes everyone lonely because it carries everyone off individually, even when it takes thousands in a single moment.

In the houses of which I am speaking, however, the people do not live in the face of imminent death. And they yearn for solitude.

But the designers and builders of these houses say: ‘We have to give the poor shelter, not luxury. And solitude is luxury.'

Yet it is exactly when the houses are intended for the poor that one should remember one of the worst curses of poverty – that the poor man is unable to be alone. And it is better that he should occasionally go hungry than that he should never be able to break his bread alone.

Often he would rather be alone under the wide sky at night than with others under a roof. For, although it is not good for man to live alone, it is equally bad if he is forced to be together with others.

This, however, the architects and constructors of the new houses do not know.

So people today live like birds.

They can fly, and still they live in cages.

I came to one of the regions where oil wells are found. And I wrote from there to the mighty Master of a Thousand Tongues:

Mighty Master of a Thousand Tongues

I am in one of the most interesting of countries, where the famous oil wells are located. It lies at the base of a mountain range, and its activities are centred in a quite remarkable town. Oil has been found here since the mid nineteenth century. The dark wooden derricks rise from an area about fifty square kilometres in size.

They seem to me less cruel and, in a way, less dangerous to the earth's surface when I compare them with derricks in other countries – countries that bear upon their face that curse of barrenness that is like a counterpart to the fruitfulness that lies within them. Here in this town, the sun is moderate, and there are still forests that yield only reluctantly to the towers and seem to encompass them peacefully rather than flee from them in hostility. The eye can sweep from the covered wells to the green hills.

But there is dust, white and exceptionally thick. It is as though it were not the accidental product of waste and separated matter but an independent element like water, like fire or earth, and as though it were less like the latter than the wind by which it is swirled around in a thick haze. It lies in the street like flour,
powder or chalk and envelops every vehicle and pedestrian, seeming to act according to its own impulse or instinct. It has a quite special relationship with the rays of the burning sun, as though it were its duty to complete the sun's task. And when it rains the dust transforms to an ash-grey, damp, sticky mass that coagulates in every tiny hollow into a greenish puddle.

So here is where oil is obtained. This city was just a village a couple of decades ago. Now about thirty thousand people live here. A single street – about six kilometres long – connects three towns, and it is impossible to tell where one ends and the next begins. Adjacent to the houses there stretches a wooden footpath made of short, sturdy stakes. It is not possible to build a pavement because the oil is carried to the rail station by pipes under the street. The difference between the level of the footpath and the carriageway, but also the little houses, is great, so that the pedestrian is as high as or even above the level of the rooftops and one can look down at an angle into the windows. All the little houses are made of wood. Only once in a while does a large house of brick, whitewashed and stony-faced, interrupt the sad rows of crooked, decaying and broken-down dwellings. They all sprang up overnight at a time when the stream of oil-seekers began to flow into this place. It is as though these planks had not been hastily pieced together by human hands but, rather, that the breath of human greed had accidentally piled up chance materials; not a single one of these temporary homes seems to have been meant to accommodate sleeping people but, rather, for the purpose of preserving and increasing the restlessness of insomnia. The rancid odour of oil, a stinking wonder, was what brought them here.

The incalculable illogicality, even from a geological perspective, of the laws of the underground, heightened the diggers' excitement to the point of lust, and the constantly acute possibility
of being separated by scarcely three hundred metres from a fortune worth countless millions was bound to cause an intoxication stronger than that of possession. And, although they were all exposed to the unpredictability of a lottery or a game of roulette, none of them gave in to the fatalism of waiting that would gradually prepare them for disappointment. Here, at petroleum's source, each person indulged in the illusion that destiny could be dominated through work, and his passion in the search aggravated the dismal result into a disaster that he could bear no longer.

The small well-owners were only freed from the unbearable alternation between hope and discouragement by the powerful intervention of the large ones and of the ‘corporations'. These could purchase several properties at the same time and wait on the whims of the subterranean element with the relative calm that is one of the manly virtues of wealth. Besides these powerful interests, for whom patience cost nothing and who could quickly sow millions in order to reap an eventual harvest of billions, there came speculators on a smaller scale, whose lower credit was balanced by smaller risk, and these diminished even further the chances of the working-class adventurers. These gradually gave up their dreams. They kept to their shacks.

Many wrote their names over their doors and began to trade – in soap, in bootlaces, in onions, in leather. They withdrew from the stormy and tragic domain of the fortune-seeker to the pathetic modesty of the small shopkeeper. The shacks that had been built to last a couple of months stood for years, and their provisional frailty became stabilized into a characteristic of local colour. They resemble the flimsy constructions of a film studio or the primitive book-cover illustrations of Californian stories or hallucinations. It seems to me, having seen many great industrial areas, that
nowhere else does such a sober business undertaking take on such a fantastic physiognomy. Here, capitalism wandered into the territory of expressionism.

And it seems that this place will hold on to its fantastic nature. For the town moves – and not only in a metaphorical sense. As the old wells stagnate, new ones are opened, and the dusty street wanders towards the oil.

It shoves its little houses ahead, winds into a curve and extends itself zealously in the wake of the capricious oil.

So I can hardly give up the idea that this street will one day be endless, a long, white, dusty ribbon going over hills and into valleys, crooked and straight, temporary and yet permanent, short lived as human happiness and long lived as human desire.

I will admit to you that the appearance of this large town, consisting principally of a single great street, caused me to forget the actual conditions of its social order. For a time, speculation and the passion of money-making seemed to me elemental and almost mysterious. The grotesque faces of greed here, the persistently tense atmosphere, where frightening catastrophes could suddenly occur each day, at any time, awakened my interest more for the destinies that were suited to literary treatment than for those of the everyday. The fact that even here there must be workers and clerks, wage rates and unemployed, was often surpassed by the seemingly fictional quality of the individuals. Fantasy was more alive than conscience.

At any rate, the oil workers are incomparably better off than, for example, coal miners. They are skilled workers even here. The working conditions are relatively favourable. The men work in places that, while not airy, are at least not closed off from air, and the smell of the oil is by no means unpleasant and is even said to be healthful for the lungs.

To the layman, all the instruments that are used for boring appear to be disappointingly primitive. Motors drive the drills. A man circles continuously around a type of basin, holding an iron rod horizontally in his hand. As simple as his motions and activities look, they are in reality equally difficult. The experts say that the skill of a workman consists of his ability to feel by hand the degree and type of difficulty with which the drill meets, the low or high level of resistance offered by the rock. The worker's hand must therefore have a highly refined sense of touch and, in part, provide a substitute for the function of the eye, which in well-drilling is completely useless. If the bore hole is accidentally blocked by some object falling into it – for example, a large screw – ingenious and crafty methods are used to extract the blockage with the aid of instruments that grope around in the darkness before they grasp and remove it. Their endeavours remind one of attempts to bring to the light a cork that has fallen into a dark and narrow-necked bottle. Hours, months and money are lost on it.

Money, money, so very much money! Remember that boring to a depth of fifteen hundred metres costs about ninety thousand dollars. It is a lottery game for people who don't need one, for bankers, consortiums, and American multi-millionaires. The men for whom a fortune may erupt out of the ground here have already lost the ability to become happy through material gain. There is a distinct contrast between the fabulous way in which the earth offers its treasures and the stoical calm with which the shareholders of oil stock can await the coming of the miraculous event. These poor treasure hunters live somewhat removed from the scene of Nature's wonders, in the great cities of the West, and the fact that they are far away, invisible and practically impersonal, bestows upon them the brilliance of gods who direct engineers and workers through mysterious transmissions. Foreign
financial titans own the great majority of the oilfields. The employees are paid from a kind of magically replenished chest. Somewhere in the distance, on the great international stock exchanges, shares are traded and transactions take place according to unfathomable laws. Astronomers are more familiar with the genesis and fading of heavenly bodies in space than are the managers and directors of oilfields with the changes in ownership of the wells at which they work. The minor officials can only sit and tremble as their ears perceive the reverberations of larger storms in the world markets. For example, three large enterprises were recently sold to a Western consortium. A small conference was held at one of the world's markets. Three or four gentlemen took out their fountain pens and scrawled their signatures on contracts. And here in this oil town five hundred officials were put out of work; starvation peered through their windows and was already raising the door latch, all because the Master of a Thousand Oil Wells had spoken a brief sentence: ‘We are going to centralize!'

Sceptics claim that the new owners were only planning a stock-exchange manoeuvre, their purpose being simply to sell the shares at a higher price and not actually operate the wells.

The workmen head home with the same certainty that is only seen in peasants returning from work in the fields, and it is as though they carry the same scythes upon their shoulders that their grandfathers had carried before them. A few poor people stand at muddy pools of water and collect stray oil in cans. They are the lesser colleagues of the great Parisian Dreyfuss. They have no shares, only buckets. They sell their findings of oil in very small quantities and light with it their provisional wooden cabins. This is the entire share that they receive from bountiful Nature. Their shacks stand crooked, brown and resigned in the
golden rays of the sun. They appear to be huddling ever closer to one another, trying to become smaller and eventually to vanish altogether. And tomorrow, perhaps, they will no longer exist.

I hope that I have given you an idea of the atmosphere of this eastern California. I have described it to you to demonstrate that it is not my intention to send only idyllic reports from this country.

Meanwhile, I remain

Your obedient servant

J.R.

I then came to a region where they manufacture poisons. These poisons can kill. But since everything on earth contains within it two sides, it is true that the poisons can also nourish. One of the poisons is called ammonia. Using this, they fertilize the earth and kill the enemies of the fatherland.

One of the others is called potash.