In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

BARS 39
into the sunlight and the heat" (109). There is no geographic or cultural
limit to this rule. In one of his sketches, the Munich humorist Karl
Valentin sits in a local beergarden waiting for the fireworks to begin,
while he is courting a nursery maid who drinks so rapidly that he and
the waitress can hardly keep up: "Just a sip-drink a little, until the next
one comes" (Valentin, 242).
Lightness is an attribute of drinking only so long as constant movement
prevents the drinkers from becoming addicted. Consequently, addiction
becomes associated with spaces that exclude movement. If a
sentence such as "He always went up to the edge of the abyss to look"
(Kessler, 447) stands as a metaphor for the addict's condition, traveling
is the one mode of life which always helps a person cross the abyss
without avoiding it. In jails (Valle-Inclan, 189), cellars (Becher, 61ff.), or
neighborhoods that they never leave (Borges, 30), drinkers become addicted
to alcohol-and even more frequently to "hard" drugs such as
morphine or cocaine. [see Immanence = Transcendence [Death]] The
opium smoker evoked in one of Brecht's sonnets "sleeps alone," forgets
the world around her, and allows her body to waste away, transforming
it into nothingness: "From one who smokes black smoke / one knows:
she is now avid for nothing" (161). In contrast, the drinker whom Brecht
describes in another sonnet prepares his body for a greater intensity of
enjoyment by eliminating all volition: "As one pounds meat to tenderize
it for eating, / So should one, in order to feast on one's own body, prepare
one's self for consumption / (Drink schnapps, which gently caresses the
palate) / ... For lack of volition is what makes life worthwhile" (162).
One aspect of such "de-capitation," as Brecht calls it, is a form of
forgetfulness resulting in relaxation. This is what the evil cook Mario in
Gerhart Hauptmann's Dorothea Angermann seeks in a bar before he
tries to blackmail his former employer's two sons: Hubert, himself a
drinker whose failing health confines him to his shabby apartment, and
Herbert, a morally correct university professor who wants to rescue
Mario's wife, Dorothea, from a life on the streets. Not incidentally, the
scene of the action is a town on the East Coast of the United States:
"Mario: . . . Forgive my talkativeness-in order to kill time I had a
whisky at the Union Bar. Hubert: This is the second time you've come.
Would you please tell me as precisely as possible why you're here? Mario:
It was in order to tell you why that I needed to fortify myself in the bar"
(Hauptmann, 104). Relaxation through drink, however, is not exclu-