In The Lap Of The Big Bang - The Conspiracy Of Football
Witold Gombrowicz: "Our admiration for painting results from a long process of adaptation that has taken place over centuries and for reasons that often have nothing to do with art or the mind. Painting created its receiver. It is basically a conventional relationship"
The illusion of excitement has been lost in the ambient corruption, and contemporary football has mislaid the excitement of illusion. In corruption, nothing is left to excite. After the systemic matchfixing and the liberation of all desires, we have moved onto the distortion of football, contorted games, with insider trading and fake media erasing all its joy and unexpectedness. Football is distorted in the sense that it now has nothing to do with the illusion of excitement, only with the hyperreality of the projected image, a hologram of insider trading.
Corrupted sport inflates everything to a level of aesthetic banality, becoming sport as an arranged entertainment. For football, corruption based on the broadcasting of events exists as an intoxicating deconstruction of the game and its portrayal. At the onset of the Premier League, the aesthetic illusion remained powerful, just as the illusion of excitement was for other sports that were magnified onto global screens. Increasingly, the energy of the events (which exhibited all of the tensions of desire) incorporated the energy of a disassociation from the game's original reality. The institutional will aimed to crack the secret of the fan excitement in the new tainted sport. Once fans forgot what it was that they were supporting and the institutions forgot what it was that they were promoting (in favour of a distortion of the integrity of football), the arranged entertainment became obscene - the obscenity of doctored images and the relentless transparency of the fake.
In reality, there is no longer any corruption, since it is virtually everywhere.
The essence of corruption discolours all of our visual and televisual outputs.
Maybe we are just witnessing the comedy of football, just as other sports e.g. the Olympics act out the comedy of ideology, just as Maltese society (though it is not alone) keeps performing the comedy of mafia power, just as we keep acting out the comedy of corruption in the obscene distortions of the beauty of sport. Perpetual matchfixing, the fantasies of diseased agents, professional coercion to underperform: if all this were true, it would be unbearable. Unfortunately, it is too obvious not to be true. But football is already too superficial to be truly null and void. There is still an underlying mystery underpinning the systemic corruption. Like with money laundering: there must be an angle from which all of this useless excess of corruption and cover-ups becomes meaningful, but, for the time being, we can only experience it with ironic indifference. In this unreality of corruption, in this insignificance of football, is there a negative enigma, a mysterious angle or, perhaps, an ironic form of football's destiny?
Once corruption becomes omnipresent, maybe there is still a chance of joy in the illusion? What lies behind this falsely transparent sport? Mafia and state intelligence or a terminal conclusion? Modern football has evolved into a dramatic alternative to real sport, by displaying the excitement of unreality onto a template of reality. But what will football ever represent in the future of fake reality, opaque transparency, a marketable product served up for the offshore accounts of insiders?
What can corruption mean in a world where corruption is a core competency? All corruption can do is smirk - the smirk of reality mocking itself in its most exhibitionist form, of football laughing at itself and at its own disappearance in its most artificial and ironic form. At the very least, the fascism of fake football is an ironic fascism. Yet this irony itself is no longer a part of the drama of fake football. It now belongs to insider trading, the shameful and (attempted to be) hidden complicity binding the footballer who, handled by Machiavellian mafia agents, uses his aura of ability against the bewildered and doubtful fan. Irony is part of the conspiracy of football.
So long as football was making use of its lack of validity, it was still a major enterprise. But football trying to recycle itself indefinitely in its corrupted form whilst claiming to be real? Modern football attempts precisely this trick by conveying banality, fake and mediocrity as ideological values. These countless matches and performances are a compromise on the current state of play fused with all the past forms of football history. Football raises fake originality, banality and nullity in an attempt to convince the spectator of its value while yielding only a perverse unaesthetic displeasure. Of course, all of this corruption claims to transcend itself by moving to further levels of superfluous irony. But all these inflated strata are empty and null. The output of Sky Sports and BT Sport salvages nothing; on the contrary, it is corruption squared. It claims to be real - "It is real! It is real!" - but, in truth, it is null.
Here exists the duplicity of football in 20:20 vision: asserting reality, but yielding nullity, meaninglessness, insignificance; striving for reality when already null and void. Claiming reality in superficial forms as Project Restart produced fake football disguising systemic insider trading and corruption. Reality, however, is a rare quality that cannot be claimed by any agent, owner, bookmaker or manager. Insignificance - real insignificance, the victorious undermining of authenticity, the shredding of evidence of this less-than-perfect crime, the disappearance from football of any meaning - is the rare achievement of unexceptional mafiosi who never cease striving for it. This is the creation of nothing, an initiation of crime. And then there are the insider traders, the counterfeiters of reality, the snobs of a smirking and secret corruption, of all those who prostitute nothingness to value, who prostitute crime to useful ends. These insider traders must not be allowed regulatory freedom to destroy integrity. When corruption surfaces on the field of play, when corruption emerges at the very heart of the sport, that is the foundation of a Premier League football match. The mafia operation is to make corruption rise from the authentic but-now-fake power of the sport - not irrelevance or indifference towards matches but a radical illusion of the event. The Liverpool 2019/20 Premier League title triumph is truly null in the sense that the club hierarchy reintroduced corruption into the heart of the national sport (they had previously introduced this corruption, unsuccessfully, a year earlier). Liverpool have turned the null and void and sporting insignificance into a reality that morphs into a fatal and fake collection of media collage.
Other teams in the Premier League only have a commercial strategy of corruption, one to which they give a financial form, the sentimental form of commodity, as Baudelaire said. They hide behind their own corruptions (particular, general and systemic) and the carcinogenic discourses on football, which promotes and inflates these corruptions as a value (pseudo-promotion of matches with compromised outcomes or inflated transfers of third party owned players via media advertorials). In a way, the Premier League is worth less than nothing (the close season is more exciting), because it means nothing but nonetheless exists, providing itself and the spectator with a collection of all of the reasons that it can contort its essence regarding the relevance of this alleged existence. These criminalities in collusion with football means that there is no longer any sporting judgment, just a fake yet friendly media of talking heads genially sharing observations of the fake surface of the corruption. Therein lies the conspiracy of football and its primal scream, transmitted by all of the seasons, matches, competitions, transfers, cartels, ownerships and trades, and that cannot be undone anywhere in the multiverse, since it has secreted itself from perception via the mystification of the tarnished image.
The inverse of this duplicity of reality is, through the bluff on corruption, to force spectators to be contrarian and give football some credence and credit under the misinformed pretext that there is no way it could be so corrupt, that this corruption must be hiding something. Crooked football makes use of this uncertainty, of the impossibility of grounding sporting beauty assessments, and speculates on the gullibility of those who do not understand it or who have not realised that there is nothing left to understand. Just another case of insider trading. In the end, one might postulate that these spectators, who are held in mock respect by those corrupting the sport, really get it since their very bewilderment betrays an intuitive intelligence and gut feel for the sport. They realise that they have been made victims of an array of abuses of power, that they have been denied access to the new secret rules of the game and manipulated behind their backs. In other words. football has become entwined (not only from the financial point of view of the betting markets, but in the very management of the fake aesthetic) in the general process of insider trading. Football is not alone: politics, economics, media all benefit from the same complicity and ironic resignation from their fan-boy (and girl) consumers of the product.
As Jean Baudrillard stated regarding the uncertainty principle of economics which "signifies that one can never define both the thing and its price."
The only question remaining to be asked is this: How can such a corrupt sport continue to operate in the midst of spectator disillusion and commercial frenzy? And if it can continue into a future, how long will this broadcaster-disguised conjuring act last via media sleight of hand? One season, two seasons, twenty seasons? Will football find the right to a second, interminable existence like horseracing or like the secret services that, as we know, haven't had any secrets to steal or exchange for fifty years now but who still continue to flourish in the utter superstition (and state corruption performativity) of their usefulness, perpetuating their own myths as we hack the spies through the maze of their corrupted espionage.
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LiVARpool LiVARpool LiVARpool LiVARpool LiVARpool LiVARpoo-ool
Michael Owen during the December 2013 English Matchfixing Crisis: "It's strong words, matchfixing. When someone says matchfixing to me I automatically think of 22 players fixing the result of a match, when as far as I know there's been a couple of people that have tried to get booked or sent off or something. I don't think that constitutes a huge rigging of the game, even though it's wrong. The headlines have probably inflamed what was something that was wrong but is not necessarily people colluding at the highest levels to rig games"
Jurgen Klopp's management profile at his three clubs - Mainz, Borussia Dortmund and Liverpool - have exhibited an identical underlying flow of performance.
Both of Klopp's posts in Germany lasted for seven seasons.
Football is Fixed wrote on October 11th 2015 of the messiah's arrival at Liverpool FC:
"As the Hun Hipster rode into Merseyside, the increasingly luvvie English football mainstream media humbled themselves in awe at his hair implants, his outsized glasses, the designer stubble and the colossal intellect of bilingualism.
The saviour is here despite his "I am the Normal One" motif.
No more the idiocy of Hodgson or Rodgers, Hicks or Gillett but the acceleration of the Fenway Hipster Express.
But Klopp is, in reality, the Odd One - a man whose management style creates repetitive cycles of almost.
He is a master of nearly, not quite, the runner-up."
"At Mainz, Klopp twice finished 4th (just missing out on promotion from Bundesliga 2) before scraping up in third place in 2003/04. After two seasons of low mid-table performance, Mainz were relegated in 2006/07 before Klopp managed to finish 4th in Bundesliga 2 once again in 2007/08, missing promotion for the third time in four Bundesliga 2 seasons by just one position.
The cycle was replicated in his time at Dortmund. It took Klopp three seasons to win the title in 10/11 which he repeated the following season before falling away into a sea of seconditis (Klopp finished runner up in 5 competitions between 2012/13 and 2014/15). But the runners up spot in last season's DFB Pokal was the final straw as Dortmund could only finish 7th in the League."
"Liverpool should win something under Klopp. But his brinksmanship in management style more often means that he falls just outside his targets - he missed promotion by one place on three occasions and was relegated just one place from safety at Mainz. He finished runner-up five times at Dortmund."
"Klopp, like Jose Mourinho, is a narcissist. Their respective management profiles are similar too. Whereas Mourinho lasts 2/3 seasons and brings massive success followed by a fall-off in performance and moving on, Klopp fails for a few years, succeeds for two before failing and moving on. Neither can create a dynasty."
The nearly man would, of course, still be the nearly man if it weren't for the existence of the Liverpool Cartel of accommodating teams, the top-down distortions of the fixture list, the utilisation of performance enhancing substances by the club, the illegal 'hacking' of Manchester City Analytics and coercion of the club's players to perform to insider trading templates (the reason that Mane left) plus the extreme bias in favour of Liverpool bestowed by an inner group of match officials at the PGMOB.
As explained earlier in this book, Liverpool achieved 39 points extra over xG projections in seasons 2018/19 and 2019/20.
Without these illicit bonuses, Klopp's Liverpool would have finished second in both seasons...
... as we said, he suffers from seconditis.
Prior to Klopp arriving on Merseyside, Liverpool had been the least fit major team in Europe throughout season 2014/15 and at the beginning of the following season, leading to the sacking of the overrated and relatively incompetent Brendan Rodgers.
Now Liverpool are by no means the only club who hover around illegalities regarding performance enhancing substances (PESs) but PESs usage was systemic when Klopp was organising the gegenpress at Dortmund and analytics show that the Froome-like improvement at Liverpool is simply unattainable without resorting to a little extra help here and there.
We are not willing in this place to expose our full evidences about illegal doping at Liverpool apart from in the holistic - the club utilises PESs for extended windows around key parts of the season and, analytically, the same flows of usage and recovery are replicated season after season i.e. the doping regime is robust and evidential.
But even on the fringes, there are public issues relating to integrity. Following Team Sky cycling team (now known as INEOS - "I Never Ever Object to Substances"), Liverpool have managed to decree that 22 top players at the club are asthma sufferers and are consequently allowed therapeutic use exemption (TUEs) of drugs for performance improvement.
Who gave permission for these TUEs?
It probably helps that the Liverpool owner sits on the board of a private Boston hospital in the US and has donated $1 million to the entity...
... in return for nothing, of course.
The yardage covered, the speed over five metres from a standing start, the lack of injuries in a paper-thin squad, the rate of recovery from injury, the elongation of career for donkey players, the reaction time, the ability to press opponents etc etc have all been markedly enhanced under Fenwick and Klopp and, as Bradley Wiggins, David Brailsford and Chris Froome have shown at Team Sky / INEOS, doping leads to prizes and a destruction of the competition.
We will return to the analytics of doping in later chapters.
The second arena where Liverpool generate unfair non-competitive advantage is via their malicious interference in the internal affairs of their primary competitor, Manchester City.
In September 2019, Liverpool were exposed as having paid £1 million to Manchester City in 2013 after scouting 'hacking' allegations. Despite paying the money to the Manchester club "without admitting to any responsibility" (like any sane entity hands over such an amount when not guilty), Liverpool FC refused to publicly comment on the scandal.
The mainstream media reciprocated with virtually no coverage.
Imagine the din that would have been raised by the corrupted Guardian and Telegraph, for example, if the inverse had occurred and Man City had 'hacked' Liverpool.
The illicit access to Manchester City's Scout 7 databases was undertaken under the stewardship of Brendan Rodgers when two former Manchester City scouts (Dave Fallows and Julian Ward) moved to Liverpool and continued accessing the database via a third party on behalf of their new paymasters.
Fallows remains head of recruitment at Liverpool while Ward is now monikered with the title Loan Pathways and Football Partnerships Manager at the club.
Crime pays.
On February 5th 2020, Dick Masters, the EPL chief executive puppet, announced that the Premier League would not be investigating the 'hacking' of Manchester City by Liverpool FC.
And why would that be, sir?
The internal clique-driven structure at Manchester City is a structural weakness that allows malicious intent to surface against the club's interests both from without and within the club.
Take Manchester City Analytics, whose lack of cybersecurity allowed Liverpool's indiscretions to occur.
There have been three individuals from this arena aside from Fallows and Ward who do not have the best interests of City at heart.
Why do Man City believe that it is sensible to employ the likes of Rick Parry's son when Parry pater is a former Liverpool FC chief executive in addition to being a very moderate accountant who sails so close to the wind that he blows hot and cold on corruption and malfeasance (we will discuss his relationship with Britain's former top policeman John (now Lord) Stevens and the burying of the Quest report into English transfer market bung culture at a later point)?
Why do Manchester City think that Gavin Fleig (who enjoyed very privileged access to Glasgow Celtic ex-chief executive Peter 'Lie-well' Lawwell, hence leading to all the transfers and loans to the Scottish club) should be Director of Talent Management and Development Pathways at City Football Group?
We have evidence that Fleig's loyalties are split and he frequently enjoyed half day sessions with Lawwell to mutual benefit.
And, of course, it was Fleig who got Lawwell's son, Mark, involved in Manchester City Analytics in a further lack of meritocracy in such a key area of the club. And it was the Lawwell's and Fleig who orchestrated the move of Daniel Arzani from City to Celtic without the then Celtic manager Brendan Rodgers even being aware of the transfer (as stated in The Times on July 27th 2018).
Worse still, Lawwell enjoys inappropriately close linkages with matchfixing Scottish football agent John Colquhoun - indeed, Colly Boy was club agent at Glasgow Celtic under Lawwell before recently distancing himself and allowing a more cartelised input to transfers (see below).
These individuals - Fallows, Ward, Fleig, Parry and Lawwell seem to operate above the law for proprietary and familial benefit.
Perhaps this is how Peter Lawwell raised the £1.5 million necessary for his mansion with heated driveway in Kilmarnock?
Or perhaps not.
The four primary internal cliques at Manchester City are United Arab Emirates, Catalunya, the corrupted entities within the analytical section plus an influential cartel of rogue agents representing players of questionable resolve and loyalty.
The club is fractured internally with different areas pulling in different directions and meritocracy is always trumped by careerist self-interest.
The owners and management deserve better.
As a third input to Liverpool targeting Manchester City, let's look at the impact of a rogue cartel of agents.
The fragmented cartel of four agencies that orchestrate much individual and systemic matchfixing in English football at the higher levels have been coalesced into the Premier League club cartel that includes Manchester United, Leicester City (under Brendan Rodgers) and the ever-expanding collection of teams who operate in allegiance to Liverpool FC.
These agents have been targeting Manchester City's defence via a mix of coercion and creative underperformance of their clients in key games or, when exposed, in key windows.
John Colquhoun is always in the vicinity of these machinations. The wee man once boasted to me (in 2008) how coercion was used to engender underperformance. He believed that such mafia manipulations were funny.
The Manchester club should simply avoid buying players from Colly Boy and this cartel of agents.
Problem solved.
So Nathan Ake, the highly over-rated defender signed from AFC Bournemouth, is represented by Wasserman / Key Sports / John Colquhoun extended entity.
He is a potential issue for Guardiola and already the mainstream media were gushing over his inclusion and performance in the first match of the 2020/21 season at Wolverhampton Wanderers.
Jamie Jackson in the Guardian under an image of a beaming Ake repeatedly pointed out the importance of Ake to Manchester City, while the duplicitous Mike McGrath in the Telegraph gushed: "Nathan Ake makes comfortable Manchester City debut... As opening halves go, Nathan Ake could not have asked for more from his Manchester City debut... Ake will be happy enough with keeping one of the most potent attacks in the Premier League quiet for long periods of the game."
And the Telegraph managed to include two action pictures of Nathan Ake in their version of journalism.
The only problem with this agent-led advertorial fake was that the reputable data firm WhoScored? rated Ake the joint worst Manchester City outfield player in the starting eleven.
But captured journalists don't allow reality to get in the way of media lies.
Only Ederson Moraes was rated lower in this match at Molyneux and he has become very problematical to City since the arrival of fellow goalkeeper Scott Carson (owned by Wasserman / Key Sports / John Colquhoun) at the beginning of the 2019/20 season.
On March 8th 2020, we published analytics demonstrating that Ederson had cost the Blues 14 points in the first 28 games of the 2019/20 season.
All of these inputs help to place Liverpool FC at inappropriately lofty heights.
As do fixture list manipulations, our fourth issue with the lack of integrity when it comes to the Merseyside Red Socks.
Every single window since 2018/19 have exhibited fixture flow biases in favour of Liverpool - more time to recover from Champions League exertions, suitable templates in the title run-in following Project Restart, greater separation of events over the winter festive window, more amenable opponent flow (particularly when taking account of the Liverpool Cartel of teams in the EPL) and several other tilts that we will cover at a later point when we address the Stalinist entity that is Football DataCo.
As we wrote in 2009:
"So, who is correct? Rafa BenÃtez or Arsene Wenger, Alex Ferguson, and virtually every market analyst on planet Earth? Does the Premier League (EPL) allow for the Fixture List to be manipulated in favour of certain entities? You might as well ask whether the Pope is a Catholic? Football is Fixed say the Fixture List is Fixed! Football DataCo are the faceless ScudamoreWorld quango that controls the template fondly known as the Premier League Fixture List.
This secretive organisation are on a bit of an earner. Through enforcing a licensing arrangement on all media, Football DataCo earn a tidy sum when any newspaper, television channel, pools company or website wishes to print the Premier League Fixture List. For a newspaper to print the full Premier League schedule currently costs several grand, for example. Woe betide any transgressors!! The legal threats are immediate and heavy-handed - you should expect a lawsuit to be filed as Organismos Prognostikon Agonon Pododfairou found out in Greece. Football DataCo are wholly owned by the EPL and the Football League, although they provide services to the Scottish Premier League and the Scottish League also. The monies raised are returned to the clubs from the participant leagues. But, the most important point here is that the EPL, in effect, arrange the Premier League Fixture List."
Furthermore, Liverpool were presented with 5 home matches following their Champions League Group Phase exertions in season 2019/20 title-winning season - a number that has only ever been exceeded anywhere in any league on two occasions (when Leicester City purchased six home EPL matches following their 'fairy tale' corruption of 2015/16 and Liverpool FC in 2018/19).
By way of comparison, in seasons 2018/19 and 2019/20. Manchester City had 6 home games and 6 away ones following Champions League Group Phase exertions which is what one should expect if the fixture list isn't doctored.
But wait!
The twelve Man City games featured Liverpool (away) on two occasions, Arsenal (away) and Tottenham Hotspur (away) plus a Manchester derby at the Etihad.
All analysts understand the impact of the post-European match window with travel inputs, days of rest variation and the advantages of staying at home post any European event.
Football DataCo i.e. the Premier League biases the fixture list in favour of certain clubs to the detriment of others.
Although some teams dope more systemically than others, doping is a bog standard marginal gain in the EPL as the UK Anti Doping(UKAD) agency is not fit for purpose.
Illicit 'hacking' campaigns against competitor clubs is a once-in-a-lifetime marginal gain unless your club employs Lauri Love or Jeremy Hammond.
Control of opposition players via agent coercion and control is also a short-term marginal gain advantage as the target clubs will eventually sell the players and sideline the agents who offer sub-standard products.
Even the fixture list manipulations are short-termist - for how many years will Liverpool be provided with such marked advantage in the flow of games before one member of the captured mainstream media breaks the ranks on their vow of silence over corruption in the sport?
The other three areas where Liverpool (and other clubs linked by association) are provided with illicit anti-competitive advantage are different.
For these structures are both robust and systemic:
a) the control of the selection and biases of a pool of pgMOB match officials,
b) the cartelisation of results (and player transfers) between approximately half of the Premier League sides to the advantage primarily of Liverpool, Manchester United and Leicester City (but also to the benefit of cartel teams as shown by Aston Villa's referee-induced survival in 2019/20) and,
c) the insider trading of pre-arranged outcomes in the underground betting markets both pre-match and in-running.
These three areas are the foundation of a long-term systemic corruption in the Premier League.
When John Henry walked out of Slaughter and May solicitors in Liverpool on October 15th 2010, he uttered: "We are here to win, and we'll do whatever is necessary" - the problems arise when "whatever is necessary" turns out to be illegal, anti-competitive, corrupt and entirely lacking in any semblance of sporting integrity.
In the next chapter we will be discussing the referee bias, agreed result templates and insider trading that make the Premier League the most corrupt league on the planet and Liverpool FC the most overrated and advantaged team.
Lucien Hardy: "In the end we are driven to search for what we hope will turn out to be the correct ontology of the world. After all, it is the desire to understand what reality is like that burns deepest in the soul of any true physicist."
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Six Characters In Search Of An Author
Albert Einstein: "Reality is the business of physics"
2020
I'll tell you about another encounter that's even more strange...
Soaking, the fucker is walking, I'm behind him, ragged trousered, no philanthropy, shifting sand, we're plodding on, plodding on, mud, clods of filth, discarded coins flashing, the water, the rain splashing, refracting, everything black in the storm, stands, advertising hoardings, the pitch, the absence of crowds, the stadium, these seasons, from where, for what, much could be disclosed, actually I was worn out by my father, by my mafia family in general, I wanted to prepare for at least one of my contracts and also to breath in change, break loose, spend time someplace offshore. I went to Glasgow, I'm walking along Buchanan Street, thinking about finding a cheap little whore, when I run into the fucker, his faded-permed, idiot mug, bug-eyed, his gaze smeared with apathy, but he's glad, and I'm glad, how are you, what are you doing here, I'm looking for a whore, me too, I have an address - he says - in a small country place where it's cheaper because it's far away, out in the sticks at Peebles.
2006
I looked around and saw whatever there was to see, and it was precisely what I didn't want to see because I had seen it so many times before... or so I thought in my distraction... and as I let go of the money to concentrate on the face, a tiresome game of tennis evolved, for the money sent me to the face, and the face to the money, and I found myself between the money and the face, one hiding behind the other, and, as soon as I caught up with the face, eagerly, as if I had lost it, I already knew that on this side of the table was the other side, that beyond the face was the money in a briefcase, wrapped in individual brown paper envelopes. Who would ever think of putting money in envelopes in a briefcase? It's like flavouring borscht with two mushrooms instead of one - it's too much!"
2019
He suggested that we should see if the evidence pointed to anything - "what's the harm in checking, if we're satisfied it doesn't point to anything, it will give us blessed peace, then it will be clear that this is not evidence that anyone has proved but merely an illusion - there's no other way to establish whether it's evidence or not." I listened silently, I wondered how to refuse him, he insisted insipidly, but I felt weak too, weakness pervaded everything. I suggested he check it himself if he was so keen on it - he began to insist that I would be indispensable to him in establishing the exact incident because someone has to go out, mark the direction on the dual carriageway - finally he said, "Two heads are better than one." Even if something were to be hiding there, there would be an overwhelming abundance of connections, associations... How many realities can one create out of the evidence? How many meanings can one glean from hundreds of bits of grit, twisted metal fragments, and other trifles? The minute I saw him... the problem with the face seemed... but... it could be either way... this way or that... What do you think?
2019
... it mounted as the evening wore on, and the deepening darkness of those places, beyond the road, at the far end of the street, penetrated the brightness of our torches. Now another possibility occurred to us. Who could guarantee that, in addition to the evidence he had discovered, there weren't other signs hidden at the crime scene or elsewhere, in the combination of mobile phone records and the value of sousveillance, for example, or in the scratches on the vehicle... For every piece of evidence deciphered by the accident, how many might go unnoticed, buried in the natural chaos of things?... like the breath that generates a tornado!
He remained briefly on the scene, he saw the car parked up on the verge of the dual carriageway. This presence was just in case - if anyone had indeed been amusing himself by arousing interest with signs, let him know that we had read them... that we're awaiting further developments... Perhaps the place is swarming with signs... And, oh, an obscuring action, in the dead of night, leading into a chimera.
2019
... and that's exactly what was so difficult, awful, misleading, I could never know to what degree I was the perpetrator, configuring the configurations around me, oh, the criminal keeps returning to the scene of the crime! When one considers what a great number of sounds, forms reach us at every moment of our existence... the crash, the roar, the scream... nothing is easier than to configure! Configure! It was obvious that his head was totally empty, nothing there, nothing, nothing, like someone who realises that he has lost everything he was hiding, and yet continues on his way.
In the sky all was rush and speed, entire galaxies sped on, disheveled, the whiteness of their luminous edges, the blackness of their black hole nuclei, everything sped on above the moon that also raced, swam out, glided, dimmed, then emerged immaculate, the heavens were embraced by two contradictory motions, speeding and calm - and I, walking on, wondered whether to throw in the towel, throw it out of the window.
2020
But the trouble was that there was so much of everything, the labyrinth was expanding, lots of things, lots of places, lots of events, isn't it so that every pulsation of our life is composed of billions of trifles, what is one to do? I had absolutely nothing to do. I was retired... In the last few days some kind or torpidity had settled in, no one felt like doing anything, corruptions, one after the other, as regular as the nightly moon, unchanging, while constellations, arrangements, configurations suffered a certain wear and tear and paled... I had begun to worry that everything would slow to a snail's pace, like a chronic pandemic, a chronic entanglement. Various things - various things - strange distances, bewildering twists and turns, a tight, imprisoned space, changing or receding, twisting and turning, striking up or down, self-harming. Movement, immense, immobile.
2021
Everything was happening at a distance. Hey mafia brothers, give me vigour and brawn. I was drinking the white tea. I stopped drinking, my throat tightened, with my mouth drenched I watched.., the... the... what would you call it? Turning to within oneself, one's own horror, one's own filth, one's own crimes, closing oneself off, condemned to oneself, oh, egoism! One's very own! The more trivial and nonsensical, the more intrusive and powerful! What a trap, what a hellishly malicious arrangement! What a snare!
2020
"Niczewo, old friend of mine, that's two Jews talking... a joke... I'll tell you some other time..." It was fitting for me to say something again, but before I spoke I glanced in his direction, ever so quickly, and in this barely perceptible moment I see that he is not looking at me either, his gaze, like mine, directed elsewhere - and this mutual non-looking, mine and his, had the air of an unpleasant debility.
"I am amused by 'nothing', mark you, sir, my venerable companion and merry-maker because 'nothing' is exactly what we do all our lives. A fellow stands, sits, talks, writes and... nothing. A fellow buys, sells, coerces, bets and - nothing. A fellow reads Sun Tzu on a stump and - nothing. A line of coke."
"Years disintegrate into months, months into days, days into hours, minutes into seconds, seconds run past. You won't catch them. Everything runs past. Flies away. Who am I? I am a certain number of seconds - that have run past. The result: nothing. Nothing."
Granted I have in my system a corrupting tension, it's festive, delightfully celebratory, festively delightful, hey-ho, it's a festivity, a festivity! A festivity! The tranquility of nature.
Anyway, if I had insulted him, it was an insult out there, in the distance... almost through a telescope. "You're scraping a turnip just for yourself," I remarked.
"Indeed, do accuse me, this makes it easier. I'm playing a madman in order to make it easier. If I didn't make it easier, this whole thing would become too difficult. Do you love corruption?
I stared at the ground - staring at the stadium again, with its grasses... clods of dirt... So many billions!
"Go now, go sir, I must be alone to prepare myself for this holy shabbat of mine with pious concentration, in solemn recollection and re-creation, a solemn day, a solemn day, hey, the highest solemn day, leave me so I can purify and prepare myself, by fasting and prayer, for the divine service of my eschatology, for the holy corruption of my life on that memorable day... go,sir! proshchay!"
On a clear day you rest among ordinary, everyday things that have been familiar to you since childhood, cards, balls, a goal (or a save), grass, but that changes when you realise that every object is an enormous army, an inexhaustible swarm. I sat on the briefcase, waiting for the helicopter.
2021
Am I fighting demons?... What is this? What is this? And then, in this immobility, my immobility became identified with the immobility of the money, there, offshore, with the immobility of the arrangement back there, which was motionlessly made motionless by the money - crime - bet, with that lifeless, unceasing arrangement, where immobility was mounting, just as I was mounting here, on the pitch, in my growing immobility, unable to move. Indeed I was... too far... over hills, over dales... I was... I was somewhere else. And (I thought), it is insurmountable because any defence against it, any escape, entangles one all the more, just as if one were to fall into one of those traps where every movement ensnares you further. Disappearance, disintegration, finality - even though there was still some light - but one was affected by the malicious depravity of corruption itself. How many themes could be taking shape at the same time as my own, how many meanings maturing independently of mine - barely emerging, larval, or deformed, or disguised? And, for instance, what's with the rabbi? What about the rabbi, was there something forming in that quarter? I was eating well enough, although with disgust, but it was I who was disgusting. What a pity that by spoiling I spoiled things, I spoiled everything for myself... yet I wasn't too worried, what could have worried me, being so distant?
2020
It will be difficult to continue this story of mine. I don't even know if it is a story. It is difficult to call this a story, this constant... clustering and falling apart... of elements... Never to return, never to return, I would most willingly never return, leave forever... Well, no... A splendid night. In spite of it all, I'm having fun. A magnificent night. Yet it was impossible to prolong it, I really am sick. A magnificent night. I'm sick, sick, but not all that sick.
Who could have constructed a net of such evanescent signs?
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Chuang Tzu:
When the Tao was lost, virtue appeared;
When virtue was lost, benevolence appeared;
When benevolence was lost, righteousness appeared;
When righteousness was lost, ritual appeared.
Rituals are just the frills on the hem of the Tao,
and are signs of impending disorder.
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