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i remember in Mike Hodges’ Croupier there were lines like these on the voice over, “gambling is not about money,” the croupier who dyed his hair black for his work coldly, and almost wearily explains, (to his unconvinced fiancée, who was killed later in the film, and to his audience, very probably including he himself) “…it’s about the outright denial of the odds of life…” The croupier in the film, is also a writer striving for his first publication, he contemplates and takes on the tone of the subjects he is writing about, the gamblers themselves, “He wants to fuck over the whole world – to ruin himself and everyone else…” Strictly observing his professionalism throughout the whole film we, of course, never did once see him gamble… with money; instead he, should i say, rather accidentally, puts every thing other than money at stake.
The croupier, played (methodologically) by Clive Owen, is named Jack. At one point he muses, “In life there is a choice: be a gambler or a croupier.” The haunting voice goes on, “…I was hooked on watching punters lose.” Oh Jack, how does it feel when you call “Black Jack,” or a “Zero,” winningly devoid of affection in your voice? But Jack! Whose life? And, which life?
The croupier Jack wrote about in his book, is simply named Jake.
It is not altogether difficult to expect reluctance on the part of Jack’s fiancée, to condone that Jake in the book, she was almost nauseating on the spot, horrified and heatedly she told Jack that she doesn’t like the book. On demand of an explanation, she says, “…there is no hope in it.”
And yes, there should be a young woman like Kate Hardie, who appears as Bela in the film… or a Sonya Marmeladov, or Anna Snitkina; they share that some thing i simply envy, and adore.
–Porcelain. Ed. D Alexandrovna. Exist Random, 1999. p4-6
They spent their days singing psalms and making knives. They made blades better than anyone in the whole of Silesia and fitted them with carefully polished handles made of ash wood, which every human hand fell in love with instantly. They sold them once a year in early autumn when the apples were ripening on the trees. They held a sort of fair, which attracted people from all over the district; they each bought several knives, sometimes as many as a dozen, in order to sell them on at a profit. During these fairs people forget that the Cutlers were of a different faith and believed in a different God, and that it would have been easy to produce evidence and drive them away. For who would make such good knives then?
Whenever they bore a child they mourned instead of rejoicing. Whenever someone died, they undressed him, laid his naked corpse in a hole in the ground and danced around the open grave.
Their settlement was at one end of a line of hills that divided two mountain chains. There was a stone building in the middle of a few small, windowless mud huts that looked like dog kennels. These huts were full of knives. They stored them the ways cheeses are hung up for smoking, with the blades hanging downwards from the wooden ceilings. They swung in the draught, clanging against each other like bells. People walked fearlessly beneath this sky full of blades, the steel tips touching their heads.
They had a very curious belief about how the world began – they believed that all matter is the ‘affect’ of the spirit: the spirit grew forgetful, stopped concentrating and experienced something that it is not supposed to – an affect, that is, an overpowering emotion. (The theologians later puzzled on what sort of an emotion it might have been – terror perhaps, or maybe despair at the idea of existing and having no escape from existence? But there is no clear explanation.)
The Cutlers believed that the soul is a knife stabbed into the body, which forces it to undergo the incessant pain that we call life. It animates the body, while at the same time killing it, for every day of life takes us further away from God. If man did not have a soul he would not suffer. He would live like a plant in the sunlight, like an animal that grazes in sunny pastures, but because he has a soul, which at the very start of its existence once looked upon God’s inexpressible radiance, everything seems dark to him. To be a small piece chipped off the whole, but to remember that whole, to be made for death, but have to live, to have been killed but to remain alive – that’s what it means to have a soul.
Morning and evening they chanted their mournful psalms -as they cut ash wood for handles, as they melted steel and shape the blades, as they shook wild apples from the trees in autumn, and as they cared for their few children – those unfortunate creatures who had unwittingly come into the world.
They had eccentric customs, and their whole way of life was eccentric. Whenever they had intercourse, they took care to prevent the semen from reaching the womb. They spilled it on the ground as an offering to their God, imagining that divine radiance lay hidden in human semen, and that by making an offering this way, they were releasing it from matter and returning it to God. This is why they rarely bore children.
Their only form of prayer was the lamentatons they called psalms, while their only ritual was this spilling of their semen as an offering. Otherwise they did not pray; they thought of God as a superhuman being who had nothing in common with man and did not even understand human prayers.
– Olga Tokarczuk. House of Day, House of Night. Trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2003. p.207-209
L：羅伯特•布列松（Robert Bresson）這麼說的，「Words should say everything an image can’t」文字該道出影象所不能道出的一切。對應這說法，影象該拍下文字不能表述、令人無語的一切。在於我，兩者是互不排除的，我倒是發覺拍照片比較像是種發現自己的過程，照片洗出來的時候我才看到自己拍的時候看不到的東西，才比較意覺自己的「視角」，支撐那「凝視──凝視之物」的欲望經濟和距離。寫作於我是沒有那麼強的距離感，它比較親密，無論是跟自己裡面的聲音，或是想接近的、想描劃的事物或情境；我和我的寫作也比較糾結，我需要它而它其實不需要我，像一種不能滿足的欲望，往往是寫作把作為寫者的「我」首先消弭掉。但我想強調，這個區分並不是很清楚瞭然的，創作是一種運動（movement）的話，用攝影，繪畫或是雕刻，都是同一種運動與擺盪。
L：我常常記起的倒是我沒有拍到的照片。有些時候我覺得拍照或所謂要找題材是很殘忍、也讓人羞愧的，例如睡在街上的人，拾破爛的老人和乞丐，衣衫襤褸的小孩，流離失所的人，這些我近年都沒有再拍，如果要拍他們我希望拍到他們的生活裡有尊嚴，溫暖的一面，哪怕只是一道微光；類似的例子是衝突和暴力場面，因為顯露的暴力常常讓人忘記日復日的、不流血的暴力，我比較關注後者發生在我們身邊的人身上所顯出的勞累，不為人注視的記痕．．．另一種我永遠拍不到的是親密的人和發生在他們中間的事，好像心疼不想把它定格，也因為我不想照片記下我與他們或是太遠或是太近的距離，我覺得私生活是應該被保護的，或許因為這樣，我常常會拍正在工作的人、街上的人，那是公開的，但每個個體有他們的獨特的，近乎私人的意態，就像Montaigne所說，「We are revealed in our gestures」，所以攝影始終是關於「可見」的世界，外在的，物質性的事物本身就是它所關注的。
There is more proud savagery in the person whom no pleasure can satisfy than in one who feels frustrated by everything and barks at the fun others have. The energy needed for supersession is to be found in the first, whereas the anger of the second perpetuates the impotence of a world where nothing changes. Instead of contenting ourselves with compensatory sprees, which is the suicide’s homage to what is killing him, we will destroy the world and offer nothing in its place. No barrier can stand up to the centred violence of irrepressible gratuity. Instead of taking advantages of laws framed to exploit us, we gradually substitute a practical innocence in which all legality is null and void. The time is near when no one will be presumed to know what the laws are at all.
i) The Book of Pleasure (Le Livre des plaisirs). Trans. John Fullerton. London: Pending Press, 1983. p.65
ii) “Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.” (The world is all that is the case). Ludwig Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.1961 Pears-McGuinness translation. Cited from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein
iii) “So long as an illusion is not recognized as an error, it has a value precisely equivalent to reality. But once the illusion has been recognized as such, it is no longer an illusion. It is, therefore, the very concept of illusion, and that concept alone, which is an illusion.”
“We are faced, ultimately, with two irreconcilable hypotheses: that of the extermination of all the world’s illusion by technology and the virtual, or that of an ironic destiny of all science and all knowledge in which the world – and the illusion of the world – would survive. The hypothesis of a ‘transcendental’ irony of technology being by definition unverifiable, we have to hold to these two irreconcilable and simultaneously ‘true’ perspectives. There is nothing which allows us to decide between them. As Wittgenstein says: ‘The world is everything which is the case’.”
Jean Baudrillard. The Perfect Crime (Le crime parfait). Trans. Chris Turner. London & New York: Verso, 2008. p53, 76.
A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch.
