A Token Derangement of Senses preview

A Token Derangement of the Senses
Inquietação Simbólica dos Sentidos
Damian Murphy

Followed by “Wittgenstein”
Seguido de “Wittgenstein”
Alcebiades Diniz Miguel
São Paulo, 2024

Something must happen — and that explains most human
commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery,
even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!
(The Fall, Albert Camus)

Alguma coisa precisa acontecer — e essa necessidade é
explicação para boa parte dos compromissos humanos. Algo
precisa sempre acontecer, que seja a impiedosa escravidão, a
guerra ou a morte. Assim, demos vivas aos funerais!
(A Queda, Albert Camus)

A Token Derangement of the Senses
Damian Murphy

My first thought, upon stepping inside, was that this
was hardly the house of a man of the cloth. The
décor was so exquisite that it was difficult to see.
It tended, very subtly, to evade the light, suggesting a high
degree of refinement while leaving no impression on the
senses. The furnishings seemed hidden, though there was
nothing to conceal them. One tended to mistrust the
doorways. Even the dark-paneled walls and sparselyplaced
lamps felt pregnant with ulterior motives.
Our scout troop had been detailed to Liéramont
and put under the command of the division intelligence
officer, Captain Spiegelmann. Along with myself and three
troop leaders, a couple of observation officers, and his
personal adjutant, the captain occupied a spacious priest’s
house, whose rooms we divided among ourselves. I’d
claimed a small office on the upper floor which had been
left untouched by my predecessors. Its humble dimensions
fit me like a well-tailored suit.
Every night we had to go to the front, or at least
what was referred to as the front. Of course, we’d long
since come to understand that it was nothing of the kind.
There was no shelling, no crossfire, no spilling of blood—
was there even any war? It seemed increasingly doubtful.
Something had erupted, yet we didn’t know what, perhaps
a new kind of conflict that eluded definition. I’d initially
suspected it was little more than a series of oversights in
the chains of command, a series of bureaucratic errors that
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“Wittgenstein”
Alcebiades Diniz Miguel
If my name survives it will only be as the terminus ad quem of the
great Western philosophy. The same, so to speak, as the name of
the one who burned down the Library of Alexandria.
(Ludwig Wittgenstein’s diaries, 7-2-1931)

A
flower of hatred blossomed in the guts of Klaus
Manz, gunnery sergeant. An unsubtle flower — its
colors were so intense that some could say they
were like intense, luminous beams sprouted from the
petals without any recognizable source, as if they were not
mere reflections of an internal light. Its perfume — a
sweetness scent, acrid and cloying, like the putrefaction
stench —, on the other hand, was so intense that it could
be smelled from meters away. And, like all of us,
accustomed to savoring our sensations to the limits of
intoxication, Manz took considerable pleasure from the
notes present in the aroma of his hideous flower, distilling
from it an even purer essence, materialized in a kind of
fury that could lead him to murder a man with his bare
hands, in cold blood. Such a cultivated feeling, however,
had an indirect cause: the presence of young recruits from
the Austro-Hungarian imperial army. The sergeant could
literally smell some of them — the smell of wealth,
idealism, patriotism — these last two probably instigated
by pompous teachers. He, Manz, who worked his whole
life in tanneries, relishing and holding up different forms
of violence and abuse to survive since childhood, knew
how to recognize from afar the soft, delicate and pleasant
smell of the perfume that the richness exuded.