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- On the Absolute, Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth
- Minnesota Declaration
On the Asolute, the Sublime and Ecstatic Truth

This text was first published at ARION 17.3 Winter 2010



ON THE ABOSLUTE, THE SUBLIME, AND ECSTATIC TRUTH

by WERNER HERZOG
(Translated by Moira Weigel)

[This text was originally delivered by Werner Herzog as a speech in Milano, Italy, following a screening of his film “Lessons of Darkness”on the fires in Kuwait. He was asked to speak about the Absolute, but he spontaneously changed the subject to the Sublime. Because of that, a good part of what follows was improvised in the moment.]

The collapse of the stellar universe will occur—like creation—in grandiose splendor.
—Blaise Pascal

The words attributed to Blaise Pascal which preface my film Lessons of Darkness are in fact by me. Pascal himself could not have said it better.

This falsified and yet, as I will later demonstrate, not falsified quotation should serve as a first hint of what I am trying to deal with in this discourse. Anyway, to acknowledge a fake as fake contributes only to the triumph of accountants.

Why am I doing this, you might ask? The reason is simple and comes not from theoretical, but rather from practical, considerations. With this quotation as a prefix I elevate [erheben] the spectator, before he has even seen the first frame, to a high level, from which to enter the film. And I, the author of the film, do not let him descend from this height until it is over. Only in this state of sublimity [Erhabenheit] does something deeper become possible, a kind of truth that is the enemy of the merely factual. Ecstatic truth, I call it.

After the first war in Iraq, as the oil fields burned in Kuwait, the media—and here I mean television in particular—was in no position to show what was,beyond being a war crime, an event of cosmic dimensions, a crime against creation itself. There is not a single frame in Lessons of Darkness in which youcan recognize our planet; for this reason the film is labeled “science fiction,” as if it could only have been shot in a distant galaxy, hostile to life. At its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, the film met with an orgy of hate. From theraging cries of the public I could make out only “aestheticization of horror.” And when I found myself being threatened and spat at on the podium, I hit upon only a single, banal response. “You cretins,” I said, “that’s what Dante did in his Inferno, it’s what Goya did, and Hieronymus Bosch too.” In my moment of need, without thinking about it, I had called upon the guardian angels who familiarize us with the Absolute and the Sublime.

The Absolute, the Sublime, the Truth . . . What do these words mean? This is, I must confess, the first time in my life that I have sought to settle such questions outside of my work, which I understand, first and foremost, in practical terms.

By way of qualification, I should add at once that I am not going to venture a definition of the Absolute, even if that concept casts its shadow over everything that I say here. The Absolute poses a never-ending quandary for philosophy, religion, and mathematics. Mathematics will probably come closest to getting it when someone finally proves Riemann’s hypothesis. That question concerns the distribution of prime numbers; unanswered since the nineteenth century, it reaches into the depths of mathematical thinking. A prize of a million
dollars has been set aside for whoever solves it, and a mathematical institute in Boston has allotted a thousand years for someone to come up with a proof. The money is waiting for you, as is your immortality. For two and a half thousand years, ever since Euclid, this question has preoccupied mathematicians; if it turned out Riemann and his brilliant hypothesis were not right, it would send unimaginable shockwaves through the disciplines of mathematics and natural science. I can only very vaguely begin to fathom the Absolute; I am in no position to define the concept.

THE TRUTH OF THE OCEAN

FOR NOW, I’ll stay on the trusted ground of praxis. Even if we cannot really grasp it, I would like to tell you about an unforgettable encounter I had with Truth while shooting Fitzcarraldo. We were shooting in the Peruvian jungles east of the Andes between the Camisea and Urubamba rivers, where I would later haul a huge steamship over a mountain. The indigenous people who lived there, the Machiguengas, made up a majority of the extras and had given us the permit to film on their land. In addition to being paid, the Machiguengas
wanted further benefits: they wanted training for their local doctor and a boat, so that they could bring their crops to market a few hundred kilometers downriver themselves, instead of having to sell them through middlemen. Finally, they wanted support in their fight for a legal title to the area between
the two rivers. One company after another had seized it in order to plunder local stocks of wood; recently, oil firms had also been casting a greedy eye on their land.

Every petition we entered for a deed vanished at once in the labyrinthine provincial bureaucracy. Our attempts at bribery failed, too. Finally, having traveled to the ministry responsible for such things, in the capital city of Lima, I was told that, even if we could argue for a legal title on historical and cultural grounds, there were two stumbling blocks. First, the title was not contained in any legally verifiable document, but supported only by hearsay, which was irrelevant. Second, no one had ever surveyed the land in order to provide a recognizable border.

To the latter end, I hired a surveyor, who furnished the Machiguengas with a precise map of their homeland. That was my part in their truth: it took the form of a delineation, a definition. I’ll admit, I quarreled with the surveyor. The
topographic map that he furnished was, he explained, in certain ways incorrect. It did not correspond to the truth because it did not take into account the curvature of the earth.
In such a little piece of land? I asked, losing patience. Of course, he said angrily, and pushed his water glass toward me. Even with a glass of water,you have to be clear about it, what we’re dealing with is not an even surface. You should see the curvature of the earth as you would see it on an ocean or a lake. If you were really able to perceive it exactly as it is—but you are too simple-minded—you would see the earth curve. I will never forget this harsh lesson.

The question of hearsay had a deeper dimension and required research of an entirely different kind. [Arguing for their title to the land] the Indians could only claim that they’d always been there; this they had learned from their grandparents. When, finally, the case appeared hopeless, I managed to get an audience with the President, [Fernando] Belaúnde. The Machiguengas of Shivankoreni elected two representatives to accompany me. [In the President’s office in Lima] when our conversation threatened to come to a standstill, I presented Belaúnde with the following argument: in Anglo-Saxon law, although hearsay is generally inadmissible as evidence, it is not absolutely inadmissible. As early as 1916, in the case of Angu vs. Atta, a colonial court in the Gold Coast (today Ghana) ruled that hearsay could serve as a valid form of evidence.

That case was completely different. It had to do with the use of a local governor’s palace; then, too, there were no documents, nothing official that would have been relevant. But, the court ruled, the overwhelming consensus in hearsay that countless tribesmen had repeated and repeated, had come to constitute so manifest a truth that the court could accept it without further restrictions. At this, Belaunde, who had lived for many years in the jungle, fell quiet. He asked for a glass of orange juice, then said only Good god, and I knew that we had won him over. Today the Machiguengas have a title to their land; even the consortium of oil firmsthat discovered one of the largest sources of natural gas [in the world] directly in their vicinity respects it.

The audience with the President granted yet another odd glimpse into the essence of truth. The inhabitants of the village of Shivakoreni were not sure whether it was true that on the other side of the Andes there was a monstrously large body of water, an ocean. In addition, there was the fact that
this monstrous water, the Pacific, was supposedly salty.

We drove to a restaurant on the beach a little south of Lima to eat. But our two Indian delegates didn’t order anything. They went silent and looked out over the breakers. They didn’t approach the water, just stared at it. Then one
asked for a bottle. I gave him my empty beer bottle. No, that wasn’t right, it had to be a bottle that you could seal well. So I bought a bottle of cheap Chilean red, had it uncorked, and poured the wine out into the sand. We sent the bottle to the kitchen to be cleaned as carefully as possible. Then the men
took the bottle and went, without a word, to the shoreline. Still wearing the new blue jeans, sneakers, and T-shirts that we had bought for them at the market, they waded in to the waves. They waded, looking over the expanse of the Pacific Ocean, until the water reached their underarms. Then, they took a taste of the water, filled the bottle and sealed it carefully with a cork.

This bottle filled with water was their proof for the village that there really was an ocean. I asked cautiously whether it wasn’t just a part of the truth. No, they said, if there is a bottle of seawater, then the whole ocean must be true as well.

THE ASSAULT OF VIRTUAL REALITY

FROM THEN on, what constitutes truth—or, to put it in much simpler form, what constitutes reality—became a greater mystery to me than it had been. The two intervening decades have posed unprecedented challenges to our concept of reality.

When I speak of assaults on our understanding of reality, I am referring to new technologies that, in the past twenty years, have become general articles of everyday use: the digital special effects that create new and imaginary realities in the cinema. It’s not that I want to demonize these technologies; they have allowed the human imagination to accomplish great things—for instance, reanimating dinosaurs convincingly on screen. But, when we consider all the possible forms of virtual reality that have become part of everyday life—in the Internet, in video games, and on reality TV; sometimes also in strange mixed forms—the question of what “real” reality is poses itself constantly afresh.

What is really going on in the reality TV show Survivor? Can we ever really trust a photograph, now that we know how easily everything can be faked with Photoshop? Will we ever be able to completely trust an email, when our twelveyear-old children can show us that what we’re seeing is probably an attempt to steal our identity, or perhaps a virus, a worm, or a “Trojan” that has wandered into our midst and adopted every one of our characteristics? Do I already exist somewhere, cloned, as many Doppelgänger, without knowing anything about it?

History offers one analogy to the extent of [change brought about by] the virtual, other world that we are now being confronted with. For centuries and centuries, warfare was essentially the same thing, clashing armies of knights, who fought with swords and shields. Then, one day, these warriors found
themselves staring at each other across canons and weapons. Warfare was never the same. We also know that innovations in the development of military technology are irreversible. Here’s some evidence that may be of interest: in parts of Japan in the early seventeenth century, there was an attempt to do
away with firearms, so that samurai could fight one another hand to hand, with swords again. This attempt was only very short-lived; it was impossible to sustain.

A couple of years ago, I came to grasp how confusing the concept of reality has become, in a strange way, through an incident that took place on Venice Beach in Los Angeles. A friend was having a little party in his backyard—barbecued steak—it was already dark, when, not far away, we heard a few gunshots that nobody took seriously until the police helicopters showed up with searchlights on and commanded us, over loudspeakers, to get inside the house. We sorted out the facts of the case only in retrospect: a boy, described by witnesses as around thirteen or fourteen years of age, had been loitering, hanging around a restaurant about a block away from us. As a couple exited, the boy yelled, This is for real, shot both with a semi-automatic, then fled on his skateboard. He was never caught. But the message [Botschaft] of the madman was clear: this here isn’t a videogame, these shots are for real, this is reality.

AXIOMS OF FEELING

WE MUST ask of reality: how important is it, really? And: how important, really, is the Factual? Of course, we can’t disregard the factual; it has normative power. But it can never give us the kind of illumination, the ecstatic flash, from which Truth emerges. If only the factual, upon which the so-called cinéma vérité fixates, were of significance, then one could argue that the vérité—the truth—at its most concentrated must reside in the telephone book—in its hundreds of thousands of entries that are all factually correct and, so, correspond to reality. If we were to call everyone listed in the phone book under the name “Schmidt,” hundreds of those we called would confirm that they are called Schmidt; yes, their name is Schmidt.

In my film Fitzcarraldo, there is an exchange that raises this question. Setting off into the unknown with his ship, Fitzcarraldo stops over at one of the last outposts of civilization, a missionary station:

Fitzcarraldo: And what do the older Indians say?

Missionary: We simply cannot cure them of their idea that ordinary life is only an illusion, behind which lies the reality of dreams.

The film is about an opera being staged in the rainforest; as you’ll know, I set about actually producing opera. As I did, one maxim was crucial for me: an entire world must undergo a transformation into music, must become music; only then would we have produced opera. What’s beautiful about opera is that reality doesn’t play any role in it at all; and that what takes place in opera is the overcoming of nature. When one looks at the libretti from operas (and here Verdi’s Force of Destiny is a good example), one sees very quickly that the story itself is so implausible, so removed from anything that we might actually experience that the mathematical laws of probability are suspended. What happens in the plot is impossible, but the power of music enables the spectator to experience it as true.

It’s the same thing with the emotional world [Gefühlswelt] of opera. The feelings are so abstracted; they cannot really be subordinated to everyday human nature any longer, because they have been concentrated and elevated to the most extreme degree and appear in their purest form; and despite all that we perceive them, in opera, as natural. Feelings in opera are, ultimately, like axioms in mathematics, which cannot be concentrated and cannot be explained any further. The axioms of feeling in the opera lead us, however, in the most secret ways, on a direct path to the sublime. Here we could cite
“Casta Diva” in Bellini’s opera Norma as an example.

You might ask: why do I say that the sublime becomes accessible to us [lit. “experience-able”; erfahrbar] in opera, of all forms, considering that opera did not innovate in any essential way in the twentieth century, as other forms took its place? This only seems to be a paradox: the direct experience of the sublime in opera is not dependent on further development or new developments. Its sublimity has enabled opera to survive.

ECSTATIC TRUTH

OUR ENTIRE sense of reality has been called into question.
But I do not want to dwell on this fact any longer, since what moves me has never been reality, but a question that lies behind it [beyond; dahinter]: the question of truth. Sometimes facts so exceed our expectations—have such an unusual, bizarre power—that they seem unbelievable.

But in the fine arts, in music, literature, and cinema, it is possible to reach a deeper stratum of truth—a poetic, ecstatic truth, which is mysterious and can only be grasped with effort; one attains it through vision, style, and craft. In this context I see the quotation from Blaise Bascal about the collapse of the stellar universe not as a fake [“counterfeit”; Fälschung], but as a means of making possible an ecstatic experience of inner, deeper truth. Just as it’s not fakery when Michelangelo’s Pietà portrays Jesus as a 33-year-old man, and his mother, the mother of God, as a 17-year-old.

However, we also gain our ability to have ecstatic experiences of truth through the Sublime, through which we are able to elevate ourselves over nature. Kant says: The irresistibility of the power of nature forces us to recognize our physical impotence as natural beings, but at the same time discloses our capacity to judge ourselves independent of nature as well as superior to nature . . . I am leaving out some things here, for simplicity’s sake. Kant continues: In this way nature is not estimated in our aesthetic judgment as sublime because it excites fear, but because it summons up our power (which is not of nature) . . .

I should treat Kant with the necessary caution, because his explanations concerning the sublime are so very abstract that they have always remained alien to me in my practical work. However, Dionysus Longinus, whom I first came to know while exploring these subjects, is much closer to my heart, because he always speaks in practical terms and uses examples. We don’t know anything about Longinus. Experts aren’t even sure that that’s really his name, and we can only guess that he lived in the first century after Christ. Unfortunately, his essay On the Sublime is also rather fragmentary. In the earliest writings that we have from the tenth century, the Codex Parisinus 2036, there are pages missing everywhere, sometimes entire bundles of pages. Longinus proceeds systematically; here, at this time, I cannot even start in on the structure of his text. But he always quotes very lively examples from literature. And here I will, again, without following a schematic order, seize upon what seems most important to me.

What’s fascinating is that, right at the beginning of his text, [Longinus] invokes the concept of Ecstasy, even if he does so in a different context than what I have identified as “ecstatic truth.” With reference to rhetoric, Longinus says: Whatever is sublime does not lead the listeners to persuasion but to a state of ecstasy; at every time and in every way imposing speech, with the spell it throws over us, prevails over that which aims at persuasion and gratification. Our persuasions we can usually control, but the influences of the sublime bring power and irresistible might to bear, and reign supreme over every hearer . . . Here he uses the concept of ekstasis, a person’s stepping out of himself into an elevated state—where we can raise ourselves over our own nature— which the sublime reveals “at once, like a thunder bolt.”1 No one before Longinus had spoken so clearly of the experience of illumination; here, I am taking the liberty to apply that notion to rare and fleeting moments in film.

He quotes Homer in order to demonstrate the sublimity of images and their illuminating effect. Here is his example from the battle of the gods:

Aidoneus, lord of the shades, in fear leapt he from his throne and cried aloud, lest above him the earth be cloven by Poseidon, the Shaker of Earth, and his abode be made plain to view for mortals and immortals—the dread and dank abode, wherefor the very gods have loathing: so great was the din that arose when the gods clashed in strife.

Longinus was an extraordinarily well-read man, one who quotes exactly. What is striking here is that he takes the liberty of welding together two different passages from the Iliad. It is impossible that this is a mistake. However,
Longinus is not faking but, rather, conceiving a new, deeper truth. He asserts that without truth [Wahrhaftigkeit] and greatness of soul the sublime cannot come into being. And he quotes a statement that researchers today ascribe either to Pythagoras or to Demosthenes:

For truly beautiful is the statement of the man who, in response to the question of what we have in common with the gods, answered: the ability to do good [Wohltun] and truth.

We should not translate his euergesia simply with “charity,” imprinted as that notion is by Christian culture. Nor is the Greek word for truth, alêtheia, simple to grasp. Etymologically speaking, it comes from the verb lanthanein,“to hide,” and the related word lêthos, “the hidden,” “the concealed.” A-lêtheia is, therefore, a form of negation, a negative definition: it is the “not-hidden,” the revealed, the truth. Thinking through language [im sprachlichen Denken], the Greeks meant, therefore, to define truth as an act of disclosure—a gesture related to the cinema, where an object is set into the light and then a latent, not yet visible image is conjured onto celluloid, where it first must be developed, then disclosed.

The soul of the listener or the spectator completes this act itself; the soul actualizes truth through the experience of sublimity: that is, it completes an independent act of creation. Longinus says: For our soul is raised out of nature
through the truly sublime, sways with high spirits, and is filled with proud joy, as it itself had created what it hears.

But I don’t want to lose myself in Longinus, whom I always think of as a good friend. I stand before you as someone who works with film. I would like to point out some scenes from another film of mine as evidence. A good example
would be The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner where the concept of ecstasy already shows up in the title.

Walter Steiner, a Swiss sculptor and repeat world champion in ski-flying, raises himself as if in religious ecstasy into the air. He flies so frightfully far, he enters the region of death itself: only a little farther, and he would not land on the steep slope, but rather crash beyond it. Steiner speaks at the end of a young raven, which he raised and which, in his loneliness as a child, was his only friend. The raven lost more and more feathers, which probably had to do with the feed that Steiner gave him. Other ravens attacked his raven and, in the end, tortured him so frightfully that young Steiner had only one choice: Unfortunately, I had to shoot him, says Steiner, because it was torture to watch how he was tortured by his own brothers because he could not fly any more. And then, in a fast cut, we see Steiner—in place of his raven—flying, in a terribly aesthetic frame, in extreme slow motion, slowed to eternity. This is the majestic flight of a man whose face is contorted by fear of death as if deranged
by religious ecstasy. And then, shortly before the death zone—beyond the slope, on the flat, where he would be crushed on impact, as if he had jumped from the Empire State Building to the pavement below—he lands softly, safely, and a written text is superimposed upon the image.
The text is drawn from the Swiss writer Robert Walser and
it reads:

I should be all alone in this world
Me, Steiner and no other living being.
No sun, no culture; I, naked on a high rock
No storm, no snow, no banks, no money
No time and no breath.
Then, finally, I would not be afraid any more.


NOTE

1. hupsos de pou kairiôs exenechthen ta te pragmata dikên skêptou panta dieforêsen . . . “Sublimity flashing forth at the right moment scatters everything before it like a thunderbolt” (1.4).
Minnesota Declaration

Truth and fact in documentary cinema "LESSONS OF DARKNESS".

1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.

2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. "For me," he says, "there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail."
Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.

3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.

6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.

7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.

8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You can´t legislate stupidity."

9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.

10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn´t call, doesn´t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don´t you listen to the Song of Life.

11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.

12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota April 30, 1999
Werner Herzog

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Citater om LSD. Udgangspunktet er selvfølgelig Bill Hicks og Hunters - de rammer rimelig spot on.

“That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling ‘consicousness expansion’ without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously . . . All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create . . . a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody—or at least some force—is tending the Light at the end of the tunnel.”



"Always that same LSD story, you've all seen it. 'Young man on acid, thought he could fly, jumped out of a building. What a tragedy.' What a dick! Fuck him, he’s an idiot. If he thought he could fly, why didn’t he take off on the ground first? Check it out. You don’t see ducks lined up to catch elevators to fly south—they fly from the ground, ya moron, quit ruining it for everybody. He’s a moron, he’s dead—good, we lost a moron, fuckin’ celebrate. Wow, I just felt the world get lighter. We lost a moron! I don’t mean to sound cold, or cruel, or vicious, but I am, so that’s the way it comes out. Professional help is being sought. How about a positive LSD story? Wouldn't that be news-worthy, just the once? To base your decision on information rather than scare tactics and superstition and lies? I think it would be news-worthy. 'Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. That we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we're the imagination of ourselves' . . . 'Here's Tom with the weather.'"


"I believe that with the advent of acid, we discovered a new way to think, and it has to do with piecing together new thoughts in your mind. Why is it that people think it's so evil? What is it about it that scares people so deeply, even the guy that invented it, what is it? Because they're afraid that there's more to reality than they have confronted. That there are doors that they're afraid to go in, and they don't want us to go in there either, because if we go in we might learn something that they don't know. And that makes us a little out of their control."



"'Turn on' meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. 'Tune in' meant interact harmoniously with the world around you—externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. Drop out suggested an elective, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. 'Drop Out' meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean 'Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity.'"
—Flashbacks, 1983


"Of greatest significance to me has been the insight that I attained as a fundamental understanding from all of my LSD experiments: what one commonly takes as 'the reality,' including the reality of one's own individual person, by no means signifies something fixed, but rather something that is ambiguous—that there is not only one, but that there are many realities, each comprising also a different consciousness of the ego. One can also arrive at this insight through scientific reflections. The problem of reality is and has been from time immemorial a central concern of philosophy. It is, however, a fundamental distinction, whether one approaches the problem of reality rationally, with the logical methods of philosophy, or if one obtrudes upon this problem emotionally, through an existential experience. The first planned LSD experiment was therefore so deeply moving and alarming, because everyday reality and the ego experiencing it, which I had until then considered to be the only reality, dissolved, and an unfamiliar ego experienced another, unfamiliar reality. The problem concerning the innermost self also appeared, which, itself unmoved, was able to record these external and internal transformations. Reality is inconceivable without an experiencing subject, without an ego. It is the product of the exterior world, of the sender and of a receiver, an ego in whose deepest self the emanations of the exterior world, registered by the antennae of the sense organs, become conscious. If one of the two is lacking, no reality happens, no radio music plays, the picture screen remains blank."
—LSD: My Problem Child, 1980


Hvad du lærer når du tager lsd... er rigtigt nok at der ikke er noget fikseret selv, at der er mange realiteter, men her betyder mange faktisk nogle konkret oplevede nogen. Måske er det mig, måske er det min mangel på fantasi, men det kunne også være omvendt. For mig var det sådan her - først var der en i sandhed ueendelighed. Derefter var der en, to, tre, fire og det er rigtig nok de ikke kan tales, men fucking pludselig var der en mængde og hvor jeg før ikke kunne eller overhoved tænkte på at vælge, så aner jeg ikke hvem jeg selv er nu. Engang var jeg en uendelighed, nu er jeg en endelighed, hvor mærkelig den så er. Er det godt eller dårligt? For mig er det dårligt... igen, jeg mangler fantasi, hvor jeg før ikke havde andet. For andre kan det være de ser konstruktive muligheder, at de startede med en mangel på fantasi og bygger den op derfra. For mig er der nu kun en vej og det er ned, ned, ned.

warren zevon - om hans mafia far.

Crystal Zevon
The Writing of Crystal Zevon
March 10, 2007
Stumpy and Mickey Cohen

Most people who know anything about Warren know that his father, William Zevon, was known as Stumpy. I’m not sure how much people know about his life… a gambler, a mobster, a rough and tumble little guy (5′4″ at most)… but also a proud father. Anyway, here are a few stories that didn’t make it into the book (the editors thought readers wouldn’t be that interested in Warren’s family history…) Another argument I lost. So… for those who ARE interested, this first quote is from Warren’s cousin, Dr. Sanford Zevon, who was considerably older than Warren and someone Warren and Stumpy always looked up to. Stumpy used to tell me, “If you’re ever in trouble, just call on the doctor, Sandy. He’s a big shot heart doctor, you know. He’ll help you out anytime you call. He’s a Zevon.” He was right.

This incident took place when Sandy was a boy, long before Warren was born.

SANDY ZEVON: There was one incident I remember where Willie visited us in Brooklyn when I was probably 12 or 13. He brought with him one of his good friends, the very famous Jewish gangster, Mickey Cohen. This I remember. It was just the two of them, and there was my mother and father, my sister and I. Cohen had a hankering for some ice cream. This was on a Sunday, so I knew of a little candy store around the corner. The guy who owned it was a miserable son-of-a-bitch. Very nasty to the kids in the neighborhood. “Don’t loiter. Don’t hang around.” So, we walked around the corner and he was just closing. Mickey Cohen said, “We want some ice cream,” and the owner of the candy store waved us off. Mickey Cohen wraps on the door again and says he wants ice cream. The owner says, “Can’t do it.” He says “I want a whole tub of ice cream.” So, he let us in and Mickey bought an entire tub. You know what a tub is? It’s like five gallons of ice cream. We walked home with that tub to my house and we all had ice cream. I don’t know what happened with the rest of it, but that was a very memorable occasion…

This next quote is actually from Mickey Cohen’s autobiography:

MICKEY COHEN: “…Then we went and got married in some marriage chapel. I’ll never forget this. I had come with Tuffy, who was my dog at the time. Now we gotta stand there to get married. So I got Stumpy Zevon as my best man. Now I look down at this preacher guy’s feet, and I says to Stumpy, “Take a hinge at this guy’s feet.” So Stumpy looked down, and I guess the preacher guy got blown up because I like made fun of him, and he said, “The dog can’t be in here while I put the ceremony on.” I said, “Let’s get outt of here, we ain’t gonna have no marriage”… Anyway, he finally said Tuffy could stay. So we did too. We got married.”

Another story from Sandy:

SANDY ZEVON: It was probably around 1956… before I got married, a friend and I went out West to check out an internship… I remember Willie, on a trip we made to Vegas. We were looking for them, Willie and Hymie. They were supposed to be staying at The Stardust, and someone at The Stardust said they were probably at a club in downtown Vegas at a card game. They’d been gone for days in this game. Believe it or not, we found the card game. The two of them were sitting behind piles of chips, obviously making a lot of money. Willie had his teeth out on the table, and he showed us his bank book which contained something like a million and a half dollars. As you probably know, he made it and he lost it, many times over.

* Filed by Crystal at 8:03 pm under Book, Book interview
2 Responses to “Stumpy and Mickey Cohen”

1.
Vicki007
March 10th, 2007 | 8:52 pm

It’s hard to imagine how the editors could claim that WZ’s family history is insignificant to the complete story. His family’s dysfunction was the foundation of his genius, for crying out loud!

Anyway, I deeply appreciate that you’ve shared this historical perspective with us. Thanks, Crystal!
2.
lzevon
March 14th, 2007 | 10:29 pm

I’m sorry to hear the editors didn’t feel readers would be interested in family history but now you have a great forum to share what was not published.

I enjoyed reading my father’s (Sandy) account of Stumpy, the ice cream story was told to us several times growing up. You are also right on about his always being there, he always is when I call :)

Glad I found the blog Crystal. Looking forward to reading more ‘outtakes’ and learning what you’re up to! You have a lot of irons in the fire but always have time for family.

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Et interview med Fassbinder.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/12729699/interview-with-fassbinder

Digt af bonnen der måske er skrevet forkert af.

Uden hjemmet, hvad er vi så,
flintrende begær, der forsvinder i kroppens dunkle rum, hidsige bevæ-
gelser bag øjnene. Streger af negle og lagnernes folder,
uden begæret, hvad er vi så,
fint forgrede programmer, den skabende kærligheds centre,
arbejdsmennesker, et nemt beskriveligt stykke arkitektur.
Alle disse dele, som samles i et hjem : hjemmet er rammen
for kærligheden. Hjemmet er det rum,
som du ikek blot skaber for familliens skyld, hjemmet er den skal,
som er endnu en del af dit jeg. Det er det sted hvor kærligheden
er sat til at vogte, og hjernen bog i et skab.
Kærligheden har huse på samvittigheden. Den bygger glade hjem
og huse til sine guder af frygt for, at vi skal miste hinanden.
Kærligheden skyder op mellem mennesker, resultatet er huse,
som vi må ofre til og til stadighed må udvikle sammen.

Begæret bygger mange sære kontruktioner,
begæret bygger flygtigere konstruktioner end husenes.
Begæret er sprækkerne i isen og tasterne på telefonen.
Det er flygtig arkitektur.