“I spoke to him. He was still a man. Suddenly, beneath my very eyes, I saw his skin get hard and thicken in a terrifying way. His gloves, his shoes, became hoofs; his hands became paws, a horn began to grow out of his forehead, he became ferocious, he attacked furiously. He was no longer intelligent, he could no longer talk. He had become a rhinoceros. I would like very much to follow his example. But I can’t.”
– Ionesco, in his diary.
“From Gregor Samsa’s Metamorphosis, which was a weird exception, to Ionesco’s collective poly-metamorphosis, that became a rule (with the single exception of Berenger) a radical evolution has occurred, namely the abnormal has become normal.”
“Look at the crowds, they’re depersonalized, people don’t have ‘faces’ in a crowd. People become faceless when they form groups that are too large; or if they have a face, it’s a collective face, and monstrous. It is the face of anger, of destruction, the face of hell.”
“It is dark and silent. But the town has pulled closer
tonight. With quenched windows. The houses have approached.
They stand close up in a throng, waiting,
a crowd whose faces have no expressions.”
– Tranströmer
There is no God. We are all copies without an original. Or, as Tranströmer would say, “A helmet worn by no one has taken power.”
Beyond Six Rivers 