{"id":417292,"date":"2019-03-15T15:24:48","date_gmt":"2019-03-15T19:24:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=417292"},"modified":"2019-03-15T11:32:14","modified_gmt":"2019-03-15T15:32:14","slug":"ergo-by-jakov-lind-excerpt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2019\/03\/15\/ergo-by-jakov-lind-excerpt\/","title":{"rendered":"“Ergo” by Jakov Lind [Excerpt]"},"content":{"rendered":"

S<\/span>lowly and heavily, a hippopotamus rising from the Nile, he rose from the paper mountain, beat the nightmare of virginal lewdness out of his clothes and stood there, a squat man of sixty with short gray hair and swollen lips, crossing his hands over his forehead, and looked around him darkly. Have you been watching me again while I was asleep? Have you been spying on me, you scum? You\u2019re living by my sufferance, remember that. Tomorrow it will be all up with you. I\u2019ll throw you both out. Both of you.What time is it?<\/p>\n

Nine o\u2019clock, Father. Aslan called him Father because of the difference in their ages and in token of devotion and gratitude. Nine o\u2019clock, eh? Wacholder was now able to shout, so he shouted.<\/p>\n

Yes, nine o\u2019clock, Father.<\/p>\n

What about my tea?<\/p>\n

Leo jumped out of bed again (has he gone plumb crazy?) and picked at his molar with satisfaction as Aslan obediently brought down his own tea. Aslan can do what he likes, I\u2019m here to work.<\/p>\n

Wacholder warmed his hands on the lukewarm tea. They\u2019ve been here again, Aslan, the big black ones, do you hear. They\u2019ve visited me again, Aslan, as big as gothic letters, up and down the wall of my heart, Aslan, up and down, and the Latin letters too, as green and thick as creepers. A whole bellyful, Aslan, it turned my stomach, Aslan. And then the rats, as big as big steamships, back and forth, back and forth. What do you think, Aslan, should I call the doctor?<\/p>\n

Call the doctor, Father.<\/p>\n

No, I won\u2019t call the doctor. I\u2019ve changed my mind. Let them crawl, let them bob up and down, let them gnaw and creep and root about. Let them hollow me out. Man is a pipe.<\/p>\n

Yes, Father.<\/p>\n

Man is a connecting pipe between feed trough and garbage pail. Here\u2019s the trough and here\u2019s the pail, and across here is man and they send things through him. A hose. You see what I mean?<\/p>\n

Yes, Father.<\/p>\n

Do I get Wu\u0308rz or don\u2019t I?<\/p>\n

Not for the present, Father.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s half my mutilated soul, do you understand that at least?<\/p>\n

There\u2019s something between the two of you. Something. Something that cuts across the river and through all the walls. An umbilical cord.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s it, Aslan. An umbilical cord.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re twins. Still unborn.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s it, my dear poet.<\/p>\n

Nibbling in your sleep at the placenta of this world.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s right, Aslan, that\u2019s right.<\/p>\n

Floating in the dark, amniotic fluid . . .<\/p>\n

Yes, Aslan, we\u2019re both floating. I in my bleached wood fibers, in my glue, breathless, airless, and he over there on the other side in his mattress. Have you drafted the letter?<\/p>\n

Here it is, Father. The seventy-fourth.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s see.<\/p>\n

Wacholder stared at the large sheet of paper crowded with writing and turned it in all directions. My eyes hurt. Read it to me.<\/p>\n

Aslan read: Now, Wu\u0308rz, you\u2019ve got to go. And quick. The house is on fire. Your face is black with smoke and soot. Get down to the river. You\u2019re on fire. Into the sand with you. Put yourself out. Make it fast. Drop your brushes. Run. The beams are falling. Hurry. The housecleaning can wait. Out with you. The fire is consuming you. You\u2019re half charred. You eggshell. You sheet of wrapping paper. You tree-stump goblin. You tin can. Run for your life. I\u2019ll put you out in Greenland. Don\u2019t be afraid. Seventeen years is enough. Hurry up. Yours, Wacholder. [. . .]<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

Fire didn\u2019t worry him. Wacholder had used more effective threats. Cats, rats, ants, dynamite, floods. What worried him wasn\u2019t the substance or the curses. What bothered him was that people didn\u2019t take him and his work seriously. Ossias Wu\u0308rz was frantically busy making preparations for his seventeenth wedding anniversary. And now comes this letter, the seventy-fourth, and the preparations have to be postponed. As usual, he first put Wacholder\u2019s letter in an envelope. So as not to forget it, he wrote Wacholder\u2019s address on the outside (Alsterhof, City) and affixed a stamp. Only then did he start working on the answer.<\/p>\n

Good Lord, Wacholder, what\u2019s got into you again, what are you driving at with your fire? I\u2019m burning with eagerness to do my work, and you want to smoke me out of here. How often must I tell you that I want to be left in peace? I need peace to do my peaceful work. I wish to build, not to sit around, to preserve, not to destroy. I am a man of progress, a man of the future, I have values, yes, values. I am the future. The future is I. Don\u2019t you see that? Me, a sheet of wrapping paper, an eggshell, an empty tin can? And where do you get the tree-stump goblin? I\u2019m telling you for the last time: my home is not a cave. This is no womb, it doesn\u2019t smell of sweat and blood, of milk and urine, of afterbirth and yesterday. Don\u2019t make me think of those things, I\u2019m always thinking of them. And when I think of them, I feel as I did then. It was an uninterrupted movement of the lips, eating deeper and deeper into the flesh. It was hunger, lust. If you remember, stop remembering. Those were the lip-smacking years, but we didn\u2019t get fat. Not I. Did you? It took me a long time, but now I know. It\u2019s no good chasing after your daily bread, don\u2019t move from your four walls. Exertion is a waste of energy. I have all nature delivered to my back door. Here in my home it\u2019s chopped small and grated fine, crushed and salted, boiled and eaten. I\u2019ve got my domestic animals in jars and bottles. That\u2019s the way to do it. And the beauties of nature aren\u2019t lacking either. I have butterflies in tissue paper, a marten and a fox on top of the cupboard, two elks, a roe and a bear on the wall. A swallow and a sea gull under glass. And it\u2019s all fresh and clean. Here I can breathe. I don\u2019t need your Greenland or your river, and I can do without your caf.. What would I do in your caf.? What have you to offer me? A noise that\u2019s always in my ears? Faces that smack their lips and talk and stare at me, that I see the whole time as it is? What have you got out there that I haven\u2019t got in here?Neatness and order are freedom, that\u2019s why I stay here.<\/p>\n

Use\u00a0<\/em>LIND<\/a> at checkout to get 30% off. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Slowly and heavily, a hippopotamus rising from the Nile, he rose from the paper mountain, beat the nightmare of virginal lewdness out of his clothes and stood there, a squat man of sixty with short gray hair and swollen lips, crossing his hands over his forehead, and looked around him darkly. Have you been watching […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":417302,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[68252,16786],"class_list":["post-417292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","tag-author-of-the-month","tag-jakov-lind"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=417292"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417292\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":417332,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417292\/revisions\/417332"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/417302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}