As though unscathed

We find it difficult to imagine an art completely without beauty, even when we see it. Art, and all things and the dead, such as they are. As difficult as the notion of a person, in whose heart every spark of goodness has been extinguished.

As if it violates a principle of logic, a natural law, an ethical postulate. No beauty? End? Is this emptiness thinkable? Should one rage against it? Or at least archive it? Show it? Doesn’t one glowing coal still stir in the ashes on the ground? “Thorough searching, feeling, grasping, it comes once more to light” “not right!” The language defends itself by offering seductive conjunctions, reflective howevers and despites. Looking at has difficulties here. As does looking away. An old man believes that fear and horror purify the people – one even older perhaps no longer. And this one esteemed the artists less and took their pictures all the more seriously. He described ideal reality in this way: The public, not in a bad mood, a well filled room, head on straight, everything dark, a concentrated gaze, eyes fixed firmly on the event, black white light from behind, no right or left, up or down, so firm. So concentrated, so abandoned, that one doesn’t even notice any more. Film, as though reality. Being shown is a film from the brothers Grimm. In it, a young girl promises not to speak, not a single word, until she has finished sewing six shirts for her enchanted brothers, and when she is already tied to the stake because the king will wait no longer and the first bundle of wood has already been lit, there finally comes a rushing from the heavens and six swans fly down and put down the fire with their wings, and the young girl throws the shirts over them and has her brothers again unscathed. As though unscathed.