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
[...] The solitude of the photographic subject in space and time is correlative with the solitude of the object and its temperamental silence. What photographs well is what has found its temperamental identity, that is, no longer has need of the desire of the other.
The only deep desire is not for what I lack, nor even for the person who lacks me (though that is, itself, more subtle), but for the person who does not lack me, for what is perfectly capable of existing without me. Someone who does not lack me — that is radical otherness. Desire is awlays the desire for that alien perfection, at the same time as it is the desire perhaps to shatter it, to break it down. You get aroused only for things whose pefection and impunity you want both to share and to shatter.
Where does the objective magic of photography come from? The answer is that it is the object which does all the work. Photographers will never admit it, and always argue that all the originality lies in their vision of the world. This is how they take photos which are too good, confusing their subjective vision with the reflex miracle of the photographic act.
That has nothing to do with writing, the seductive power of which is far superior. But photography’s power to stupefy is far greater than that of writing. It is rare for a text to be able to offer itself up with the same instantaneity, the same manifestness as a shadow, a light, a texture, a photographic detail. Just sometimes in Gombrowicz or in Nabokov, when their writing recaptures the trace of the original disorder, the material, objectal vehemence of things without qualities, the erotic potency of a senseless world.
—Jean Baudrillard. The Perfect Crime (Le crime parfait). Trans. Chris Turner. London & New York: Verso, 2008. p. 88-89.
