The lost ones

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The ladders. These are the only objects. They are single without exception and vary greatly in size. The shortest measure not less than six metres. Some are fitted with a sliding extension. They are propped against the wall without regard to harmony. Bolt upright on the top rung of the tallest the tallest climbers can touch the ceiling with their fingertips.”

Au cœur des ténèbres by Joël Jouanneau, adaptation of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, Théâtre de l'Athénée-Louis-Jouvet I first encountered The Lost Ones as a young teen. Along with Finnegans Wake, it was the text that began my lifelong love affair with modernist literature. At that point, I’d been been immersed in fantasy literature for a while, and thus was transfixed by literary worldbuilding. Fiction writers often talk about worldbuilding. However, for reasons that escape me, readers of mainstream fiction often roll their eyes at the creation of imaginary worlds. Of course, mainstream works create imaginary places often enough. Usually, though, they situate them in actual locations and times familiar from the world around us: an imaginary courthouse in the New York of today, an imaginary county in Mississippi, or an imaginary street in Victorian London. The narrator is scatter-minded – he chews his words, relishing the strange and new and intriguing. “One body per square meter, or two hundred bodies in all” he breathes tenderly as he roams through this story, his feet padding across the length and width of the floor. He’s spread out a painter’s cloth, stained with color and grime, which ripples and bunches at the edges. It is this bleak, almost lunar landscape which the tiny figures call home, and it creates a deeply unsettling apprehension, as if you were out at a restaurant and had a waiter standing next to you at all times, one hand on the tablecloth, ready to yank it all away. How suddenly mortal we all are, indeed, if our universe can so easily be scooped up and rolled aside!The two zones form a roughly circular whole. As though outlined by a trembling hand. Diameter. Careful. Say one furlong. Yes, that’s Life, stripped of our endless media feed; Life that has a simple moral, as Freud had also found at the end:

Freud was dying of cancer of the mouth, and sternly refused any painkillers other than aspirin. The progress of the disease was so advanced and deforming that his beloved pet dog wouldn’t go near him. In 2008, Sarah Kenderdine and Jeffrey Shaw created an art installation based on The Lost Ones, which they called Unmakeablelove. They used motion capture technology to animate the characters in the short story. The audience are able to see the characters only through the use of virtual torches, which interact with the animations creating a mixed reality. Unmakeablelove has been exhibited at Le Volcan in Le Havre, the Shanghai Museum of Science and Technology, and the Hong Kong International Art Fair. Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done. There is no hard and fast answer in life for us. But once we see that and really accept it, our lives may find rest in the midst of Ceaseless Flux.This story was begun in 1966, completed in 1970 – written in French, of course, then translated by the author into English. It’s essentially a prose exploration of a section of The Inferno: one of the particular torments of Hell. (Is it an actual story from the Inferno? I don’t know.) But it’s very mechanical – it sounds almost like a Sears catalog: From here, the narrator describes the norms and social groupings that structure the lives of these figures. Some are 'searchers' who wander the interior, constantly examining one another in search of their 'lost one'. Some are 'climbers', who use the fifteen ladders available to climb and descend from the niches in the wall. And, since the possibility of actually finding their 'lost one' isn't so much as broached, some are 'vanquished' - those who have simply given up their search to sit on the ground with their heads bowed. The actions and interactions of these various groups are shaped by unwritten and unstated rules that are nevertheless studiously obeyed. However, we are told, everything they do is headed toward one inevitable end: eventually all these bodies will become vanquished. When the very last wanderer sits down and bows their head for good, the light will dim for the last time, the air will freeze, and all will remain forever more in a state of total entropy. No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead yet, yes, dead good, imagination dead imagine. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2014-07-28 18:05:27.590174 Bookplateleaf 0010 Boxid IA1137422 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Containerid S0022 Donor

Die Frage nach der Individuation scheint sich unter den Gegebenheiten des Zylinders nicht einmal mehr zu stellen. Analog zu Endspiel, wo Hamm das Diktum der überflüssigen Schwachen/Alten buchstäblich nimmt und seine Eltern in Mülleimern entsorgt - während er und sein Diener ebenfalls keine richtig funktionierenden Körper mehr besitzen - gilt auch in The Lost Ones der Einzelne als ‚expendabel‘ und ist dem Apparatus der Gesellschaft/des Zylinders untergeordnet. Lccn 72084341 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL15026399M Openlibrary_edition In the beginning he always spoke walking. So it seems to me now. Then sometimes walking and sometimes still. In the end still only. And the voice getting fainter all the time. For in The Lost Ones there is compassion for our human condition - real, hard-won, heartfelt compassion. In many cases, a successful work of art will "erase" the viewer in some way or another. Hence, we talk about a person being "lost" in a painting or "wrapped up" in a novel. But not all artworks operate in this way. Quite the contrary, some strive to accentuate the relationship between art and audience. And when succesful, these creations constitute an "experience" in the truest sense of the word. Here, I'm thinking of works like Koyaanisqatsi (which tests the limits of the watcher's visual perception) or Catherine Christer Hennix's " The Electric Harpsichord" (in which the avant-garde composer explores the cognitive effects of sound).

People: it's clearly a documentary/ cinema de Mornay of life in a cylindrical hellgatory in which blind, violent, naked people into 'no-strings' screwing just rawk when the annual semihard strikes the distaff. Yeah, and a bunch of ladders and shit. Quit trying to hang your paper on another fella's wall, guys. He was more intensely human than so many of us current readers can understand. You have to look at the late works of his great mentor Flaubert to guess at the raw emotion that went into this wonderful simple prose. Book Genre: Cultural, Fiction, France, Ireland, Literature, Novels, Philosophy, Plays, Short Stories, Theatre