Cosmopolis (Don Delillo)

Bibliotheek / Cosmopolis (Don Delillo)

De verfilming (2) werkt niet ; het boek (1) zelf des te meer. De zoektocht van een nihilist naar z’n onsterfelijkheid. “Let it express itself”. Enkele extracts:

IN THE YEAR 2000 - A Day in April

PART ONE - 1

p.12

The phenomenon of reputation is a delicate thing. A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable.

p.16

• "I like taxis. I was never good at geography and I learn things by asking the drivers where they come from."
• "They come from horror and despair."
• "Yes, exactly. One learns about the countries where unrest is occurring by riding the taxis here.”

p.23

Eric Packer: "Put a stick of gum in your mouth and try not to chew it. For someone your age, with your gifts, there's only one thing in the world worth pursuing professionally and intellectually. What is it, Michael? The interaction between technology and capital. The inseparability." "High school was the last true challenge," Chin said.

p.24

He looked past Chin toward streams of numbers running in opposite directions. He understood how much it meant to him, the roll and flip of data on a screen. He studied the figural diagrams that brought organic patterns into play, birdwing and chambered shell. It was shallow thinking to maintain that numbers and charts were the cold compression of unruly human energies, every sort of yearning and midnight sweat reduced to lucid units in the financial markets. In fact data itself was soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process. This was the eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realized in electronic form, in the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet's living billions. Here was the heave of the biosphere. Our bodies and oceans were here, knowable and whole.

p.30

Didi Fancher: "Don't you see yourself in every picture you love? You feel a radiance wash through you. It's something you can't analyze or speak about clearly. What are you doing at that moment? You're looking at a picture on a wall. That's all. But it makes you feel alive in the world. It tells you yes, you're here. And yes, you have a range of being that's deeper and sweeter than you knew.

p.31 Eric: "I remember what you told me once: Talent is more erotic when it's wasted... You meant I was ruthlessly efficient. Talented, yes. In business, in personal acquisitions. Organizing my life in general." "But that's not true anymore," she said. "You're beginning to think it's more interesting to doubt than to act. It takes more courage to doubt."

p.38 He saw Jane Melman on the other side of the avenue, his chief of finance, dressed in jogging shorts and a tank top, moving in a wolverine lope. She looked in Eric's direction, squinting, trying to determine whether the limousine was his or someone else's. He liked knowing what was coming. It confirmed the presence of some hereditary script available to those who could decode it. "All these limos, my god, that you can't tell one from another.We could be kids on prom night," she said, "or some dumb wedding wherever. What's the charm of identical?" "That I'm a powerful person who chooses not to demarcate his territory with singular driblets of piss is what? Is something I need to apologize for?"

p.39 There was a noise beating down that made people cover up when they walked past, rumbling gutturals from the granite tower being raised on the south side of the street, named for a huge investment firm.

p.41 Buses rumbled up the avenue in pairs, hacking and panting, buses abreast or single file, sending people to the sidewalk in sprints, live prey, nothing new, and that's where construction workers were eating lunch, seated against bank walls, legs stretched, rusty boots, appraising eyes, all trained on the streaming people, the march-past, checking looks and pace and style, women in brisk skirts, half running, sandaled women wearing headsets, women in floppy shorts, tourists, others high and slick with fingernails from vampire movies, long, fanged and frescoed, and the workers were alert for freakishness of any kind, people whose hair or clothing or manner of stride mock what the workers do, forty stories up, or schmucks with cell phones, who rankled them in general. These were scenes that normally roused him, the great rapacious flow, where the physical will of the city, the ego fevers, the assertions of industry, commerce and crowds shape every anecdotal moment.

p.42 It is possible for the mind to go blank in a tactic of evasion or suppression, the reaction to a menace so impending, a tailored man with a suitcase bomb, that there is no blessing to be found in the most resourceful thought, no time for an eddy of sensation, the natural rush that might accompany danger.

p.44 He felt the passion of the body, its adaptive drive over geologic time, the poetry and chemistry of its origins in the dust of old exploding stars.

p.45

• "What do we do about this?"
• "Let it express itself." "
• What. Do nothing."
• "Let it express itself," Ingram said.

p.52 He liked to track answers to hard questions. This was his method, to attain mastery over ideas and people. But there was something about the idea of 'asymmetry'. It was intriguing in the world outside the body, a counterforce to balance and calm, the riddling little twist, subatomic, that made creation happen. There was the serpentine word itself, slightly off kilter, with the single additional letter that changes everything. But when he removed the word from its cosmological register and applied it to the body of a male mammal, his body, he began to feel pale and spooked. He felt a certain perverse reverence toward the word. A fear of, a distance from.

p.54 Jane Melman: "Pull back. I am advising you in this matter not only as your chief of finance but as a woman who would still be married to her husbands if they had looked at her the way you have looked at me here today.

"The Confessions of Benno Levin (after killing Eric Packer) - NIGHT

p.56 My obsessions are mind things, not geared to action. I make mind speeches all the time. So do you, only not always. I do it all the time, long speeches to someone I can never identify. p.58 I don't live an unreal life. I live a practical life of starting over, with middle-class values intact. I'm knocking down walls because I don't want to live in a set of little quads. I want to live an open life of the mind where my Confessions can thrive. p.60 World is supposed to mean something that's selfcontained. But nothing is self-contained. Everything enters something else. I thought I would spend whatever number of years it takes to write ten thousand pages and then you would have the record, the literature of a life awake and asleep, because dreams too, and little stabs of memory, and all the pitiful habits and concealments, and all the things around me would be included, noises in the street, but I understand for the first time, now, this minute, that all the thinking and writing in the world will not describe what I felt in the awful moment when I fired the gun and saw him fall. So what is left that's worth the telling?

PART ONE/ 2

p.66 (Eric in the Hasidim souk/shtetl district of the city:) Eric was looking past him at a large shop window, one of the few on the street not showing rows of precious metal set with gems. He felt the street around him, unremitting, people moving past each other in coded moments of gesture and dance. They tried to walk without breaking stride because breaking stride is well-meaning and weak but they were forced sometimes to sidestep and even pause and they almost always averted their eyes. Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational. Who steps aside for whom, who looks or does not look at whom, what level of umbrage does a brush or a touch constitute? No one wanted to be touched. There was a pact of untouchability. Even here, in the huddle of old cultures, tactile and close-woven, with passersby mixed in, and security guards, and shoppers pressed to windows, and wandering fools, people did not touch each other.He stood in the poetry alcove at the Gotham Book Mart, leafing through chapbooks. He browsed lean books always, half a fingerbreadth or less, choosing poems to read based on length and width. He looked for poems of four, five, six lines. He scrutinized such poems, thinking into every intimation, and his feelings seemed to float in the white space around the lines. There were marks on the page and there was the page. The white was vital to the soul of the poem.

p.72 He looked at her (Élise Shifrin, his wife since x weeks) closely, expecting to admire the arched nostrils and the fine slight veer along the ridge of the nose. But he found himself thinking that maybe she wasn't beautiful after all. Maybe she missed. It was a stab of awareness. Maybe she was middling, desperately unexceptional. She was better-looking back in the bookstore when he'd thought she was someone else. He began to understand that they'd invented her beauty together, conspiring to assemble a fiction that worked to their mutual maneuverability and delight. They'd married in the shroud of this unspoken accord. This was the core of their understanding, the thing they needed to believe before they could be a couple. Eric: "There's a certain kind of sex that has an element of cleansing. It's the antidote to disillusion. The counterpoison." Elise: "You need to be inflamed, don't you? This is your element." Eric: "I need all the meanings of inflamed. There's a hotel just across the avenue. We can start over. Or finish with intense feeling. That's one of the meanings. To arouse to passionate feeling. We can finish what we barely started."

p.77 Vija Kinski, his chief of theory: "We want to think about the art of money-making," she said. "The Greeks have a word for it. Chrimatistikos. But we have to give the word a little leeway. Adapt it to the current situation. Because money has taken a turn. All wealth has become wealth for its own sake. There's no other kind of enormous wealth. Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself. And property follows of course. The concept of property is changing by the day, by the hour. The enormous expenditures that people make for land and houses and boats and planes. This has nothing to do with traditional self-assurances, okay. Property is no longer about power, personality and command. It's not about vulgar display or tasteful display. Because it no longer has weight or shape. The only thing that matters is the price you pay. But you know how shameless I am in the presence of anything that calls itself an idea. The idea is time. Living in the future. Look at those numbers running. Money makes time. It used to be the other way around. Clock time accelerated the rise of capitalism. People stopped thinking about eternity. They began to concentrate on hours, measurable hours, man-hours, using labor more efficiently. It's cyber-capital that creates the future."

p.80 He led her out of the car and onto the sidewalk, where they were able to get a partial view of the electronic display of market information, the moving message units that streaked across the face of an office tower on the other side of Broadway. Kinski was transfixed. This was very different from the relaxed news reports that wrapped around the old Times Tower a few blocks south of here. These were three tiers of data running concurrently and swiftly about a hundred feet above the street. Financial news, stock prices, currency markets. The action was unflagging. The hellbent sprint of numbers and symbols, the fractions, decimals, stylized dollar signs, the streaming release of words, of multinational news, all too fleet to be absorbed. But he knew that Kinski was absorbing it. He stood behind her, pointing over her shoulder. Beneath the data strips, or tickers, there were fixed digits marking the time in the major cities of the world. He knew what she was thinking. Never mind the speed that makes it hard to follow what passes before the eye. The speed is the point. Never mind the urgent and endless replenishment, the way data dissolves at one end of the series just as it takes shape at the other. This is the point, the thrust, the future. We are not witnessing the flow of information so much as pure spectacle, or information made sacred, ritually unreadable. The small monitors of the office, home and car become a kind of idolatry here, where crowds might gather in astonishment.

p.85 "There is a piece of Chinese wisdom," she said. "'To know and not to act is not to know. But in the end you're dealing with a system that's out of control. Hysteria at high speeds, day to day, minute to minute. People in free societies don't have to fear the pathology of the state. We create our own frenzy, our own mass convulsions, driven by thinking machines that we have no final authority over. The frenzy is barely noticeable most of the time. It's simply how we live." "Of course you know this," she said. He did and did not. Not to this nihilistic degree. Not to the point where all judgments are baseless. "There's an order at some deep level," he said. "A pattern that wants to be seen." "Then see it." He heard voices in the distance. "I always have. But it's been elusive in this instance. There's a common surface, an affinity between market movements and the natural world." "An aesthetics of interaction." "Yes. But in this case I'm beginning to doubt I'll ever find it." "Doubt. What is doubt? You don't believe in doubt. You've told me this. Computer power eliminates doubt. All doubt rises from past experience. But the past is disappearing. We used to know the past but not the future. This is changing," she said. "We need a new theory of time."

p.90 (while riot ongoing outside the car) "You know what capitalism produces. According to Marx and Engels." "Its own grave-diggers," he said. "But these are not the grave-diggers. This is the free market itself. These people are a fantasy generated by the market. They don't exist outside the market. There is nowhere they can go to be on the outside. There is no outside. The market culture is total. It breeds these men and women. They are necessary to the system they despise. They give it energy and definition. They are marketdriven. They are traded on the markets of the world. This is why they exist, to invigorate and perpetuate the system. You have to understand. The more visionary the idea, the more people it leaves behind. This is what the protest is all about. Visions of technology and wealth. The force of cyber-capital that will send people into the gutter to retch and die. What is the flaw of human rationality? It pretends not to see the horror and death at the end of the schemes it builds. This is a protest against the future. They want to hold off the future. They want to normalize it, keep it from overwhelming the present. The future is always a wholeness, a sameness. We're all tall and happy there," she said. "This is why the future fails. It always fails. It can never be the cruel happy place we want to make it." "How will we know when the global era officially ends?" He waited. "When stretch limousines begin to disappear from the streets of Manhattan." Men were urinating on the car. Women pitched sandfilled soda bottles. "This is controlled anger, I would say. But what would happen if they knew that the head of Packer Capital was in the car?" She said this evilly, eyes alight. "They are working with you, these people. They are acting on your terms," she said. "And if they kill you, it's only because you permit it, in your sweet sufferance, as a way to re-emphasize the idea we all live under." "What idea?" "Destruction," she said. "You know what anarchists have always believed." "Yes." "Tell me," she said. "The urge to destroy is a creative urge." "This is also the hallmark of capitalist thought. Enforced destruction. Old industries have to be harshly eliminated. New markets have to be forcibly claimed. Old markets have to be re-exploited. Destroy the past, make the future."

p.95 "This is the thing about genius," she said. "Genius alters the terms of its habitat." He liked that but wanted more. "Think of it this way. There are rare minds operating, a few, here and there, the polymath, the true futurist. A consciousness such as yours, hypermaniacal, may have contact points beyond the general perception." He waited. "Technology is crucial to civilization why? Because it helps us make our fate. We don't need God or miracles or the flight of the bumblebee. But it is also crouched and undecidable. It can go either way." "People will not die. Isn't this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information. I know nothing about this. Computers will die. They're dying in their present form. They're just about dead as distinct units. A box, a screen, a keyboard. They're melting into the texture of everyday life. Even the word computer sounds backward and dumb." "Men think about immortality. Great men historically expected to live forever even as they supervised construction of their monumental tombs on the far bank of the river, the west bank, where the sun goes down. There you sit, of large visions and prideful acts. Why die when you can live on disk? A disk, not a tomb. An idea beyond the body. A mind that's everything you ever were and will be, but never weary or confused or impaired.

PART TWO/ 3

p.113

"The logical extension of business is murder."

p.115

He felt even freer than usual, attuned to the registers of his lower brain and gaining distance from the need to take inspired action, make original judgments, maintain independent principles and convictions, all the reasons why people are fucked up and birds and rats are not.

p.117

"You smoke since when." She answered without turning to face him, speaking from a seeming distance. "I took it up when I was fifteen. It's one of those things a girl takes up. It tells her she's more than a skinny body no one looks at. There's a certain drama in her life." "She notices herself. Then other people notice her. Then she marries one of them. Then they go to dinner," he said.

p.119

Elise Shifrin : “I'll tell you what the problem is. I don't know how to be indifferent. I can't master this. And it makes me susceptible to pain. In other words it hurts."

p.125

“They are kids. Exactly. What pain do they feel that they need to take pill? Music, okay, too loud, so what. It is beautiful how they dance. But what pain do they feel too young to buy beer?" "There's pain enough for everybody now," Eric told him.

p.132

• Kozmo: "What happened to your stretch? Letting a fine machine degrade in public. That's a scandal, man."
• Eric:"Everything's a scandal. Dying's a scandal. But we all do it."
• Kozmo: "I'm hearing voices in the night. Because I know it can't be you that's saying this."

p.136

The (rapping) voice (played during funeral procession) fell into silence finally. People thought the event was over now. They were shaking and drained. Eric's delight in going broke seemed blessed and authenticated here. He'd been emptied of everything but a sense of surpassing stillness, a fatedness that felt disinterested and free.

The Confessions of Benno Levin (before killing Eric Packer) - MORNING

p.152

But whatever the sundry facts, I'm not so different from you in your inner life in the sense that we're all uncontrollable.

p.155

People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life.

PART TWO/ 4

p.189

I have become an enigma to myself. So said Saint Augustine. And herein lies my sickness.

--

(1) BOOK: http://shadowsgovernment.com/shadows-library/Don%20DeLillo/Cosmopolis%20(22298)/Cosmopolis%20-%20Don%20DeLillo.pdf

(2) MOVIE: https://movie4k.tv/Cosmopolis-watch-movie-1531036.html

(3) Recensie: http://recensies.infonu.nl/kunst-en-cultuur/109212-don-delillos-cosmopolis-teloorgang-van-een-multimiljonair.html