… You can only relatively establish relative interrelations. And not even that. Psychiatrists and examining magistrates are, at bottom, ticketsellers manqué (wandering circuses), as every (oh well!) – psychological judgment is an exercise directed by the one who is judged, the results of which so seldom please merely for the reason that the exercise is inaccurately commissioned owing to the deficient self-knowledge of the one who is judged. As has been proven, the best judgments are posed in the worst way, the worst ones in the best way. (The seedless fruits are the sweetest. oh the dear idle physogs!) As has been proven: the quite terrific variety of judgments about (ha!) – bad people. (The ones about good people are always right.) Sub-proof: judgments only interest the lads, when they hear them; but the toffs already care even before anything’s been – (down boy!) given in … Every piece of advice is a downright lethal affair; but just in passing: administering bad judgments about yourself is nonetheless the most honest way of avoiding good judgments that are also false. Tant de bruit pour une – occasion perdue? … But sometimes nothing helps: neither grinning for nor grinning against. They trust you anyway. Oh, where is the audience for really heavy fellows? I have become so narrow and sprattish…

2 The ultimate disappointment? When the illusion that one is free of illusion reveals itself as such. (The most oppressive manoeuver of vanity: making oneself out to be more stupid and bad than one would like to be in order to indulge the vanity of not being vain. Fails miserably.) … The height of naivete? When someone wants all at once to find out the (ogodogodo) – truth. (A clout on the ear is after all only a desperate approximation. Also, false tears often seem more genuine than – false ones.) … Two joke questions? Not at all. Two bracelets.

9 In the final track … one becomes malicious out of boredom. Then it becomes boring to be malicious. And finally one begins collecting little pictures made of chocolate. Idealism still is criminal realism. A braggart who has remained gentle is a little less gruesome (as he is an Idealist) than an Imagist gone wild (as he is a Realist). Whoever invented the ampulla ‘soul’! Perhaps the somewhat disappointing sight of the naked man … But this disappointment: one should take oneself by the ear, build up one’s courage and admit to oneself, that one has, as opportunities no longer earn, what others used to get off danger – a secret admiration for one’s own legs … Yes, one goes so far as ALMOST to feign one’s tabula rasta to the totality, in order to deliver one’s most devastating blow with the apparently unapparent remains of the ‘almost’. A blow which admittedly strikes one’s own flesh: … last little pleasure … last little rage…

11 There are days when everyone makes a stupid face. And nights when the most stupid still looks too significant. And there are weeks and months and years and … The most blown-through vocabulary, the slackest pauses, the tongue stuck out, the long nose, etc. are therefore communicative gestures that afford great relief; the more so, the more every situation is actually intolerable in every respect. One should let these dear gestures become tenderly tinged with madness (THIS the high idiom!), and one will be amazed how excellently everything turns out … And as one can, by merely passionately (so to speak) talking away, demolish ALL relations between people (they are ALWAYS constructions!), it offers moreover a healthy palliative. Speaking of which: one lives together, as is known (as long as one doesn’t) … always in a mostly self-spun and often very finely spun net (conjugal paranoia: Juan Suvarin and his Marva); only in a yet far more finely (as long as one doesn’t) … One should begin at long last to speak out against oneself! One should begin!! One!! (For a long time now I have, in quiet hours, been spitting on myh own head … Oh, I don’t give a damn about … Yes, about what? …)

12 The swig about the axis: not giving a damn about anything.

Der Zeltweg (Zurich), November 1919

translated by Caitriona Ni Dhubhgaill