Tiresias' advice to Ulysses

In Horace's Satire 2-5 the poet reflects on the section of The Odyssey in which Ulysses descends into the underworld and there meets, amongst others, Tiresias, the blind prophet of Thebes. Tiresias can prophesy the future even in the underworld. He paints a picture of what awaits Ulysses: it is not a smooth, sweet journey home. Instead ship destroyed, men destroyed, he will find a world of pain at home- arrogant men devouring his goods. When Horace revisits this scene only the last prophecy interests Ulysses-money and goods. How can I regain my lost wealth he asks the Prophet who, surprised, remarks it ought to be enough to make it back to Ithaca and set eyes on his ancestral home. However if Ulysses is only interested in money then here are some lfrom the blind seer: he is to identify in Rome wealthy, childless and preferably witless landowners and ingratiate himself with them and thereby inherit their will-ie become a legacy hunter with all the self abasement that is required. Ulysses examines his soul and concludes that in former days (at Troy) he endured greater trials so he can surely endure this. Tiresias then provides a lengthy list of ideas of how this is to achieved: use flattery, creep up unobtrusively, don't overdo it; prostitute Penelope if required and so on. Fraenkel, the great German scholar, considered this satire to be acid, cynical and lurid. Not Horace's true nature. What about epode 8 (the one about his ex girlfriend's black teeth and decrepit age)?
Returning to the underworld imagine now Horace and Fraenkel (he is there- still groping his Oxford female seminar students) together  with Ulysses. Imagine further standing before these lost souls Tiresias now as Grayson Perry's The Father in pilgrim attire decked out with rags, tools, weapons and dangling behind the little, ursine talisman/god Alan Measles. No more lengthy descriptions of the future underworld careers of the assembled; instead the ragged figure raises his pilgrim stick aloft and Alan Measles appears aloft, long arms hovering over the company proclaiming HOLD YOUR BELIEFS LIGHTLY
The Father: a wise, enduring and resourceful figure-Alan Measles dangling behind him; compare to Israeli soldiers shambling back from the destruction of Gaza (handy being able to walk to work), the city reduced to rubble and flames, calling forth drones, rockets, jet bombers, missiles and tanks. The Sky TV channel Eurosport, during cycling races, carries an Israeli tourist board ad-Israel; land of creation; better is land of death and  destruction.

more on Odradek

W Benjamin sees Odradek as the 'the commodity that survives to no purpose' and through whom 'surrealism may come to an end' mutating into kitsch which sustains itself on an outlived world of things. Surely the point about Odradek is that it does survive and persist-in attics, doorways and at the bottom of stairs in various houses. For Odradek to be a kitsch object it would have to had a earlier purpose or immediacy since lost or outlived. Kafka says: 'anything that dies has had some kind of aim in life, some kind of activity, which has worn out; but that does not apply to Odradek'. Odradek has not lost shape or broken down having once been new and complete; 'nowhere is there an unfinished or unbroken surface' to suggest it is a 'remnant'.It is eternally complete and unchanging. That is what makes the Householder anxious when he bumps into it leaning against the banisters. Odradek endures yet he and his family will not. What if Kafka's householder had bumped into one of Orozco's yellow scooters while wandering round Prague in that period? More fun that meeting Odradek again. According to Benjamin when Orozco places his yellow scooters around cities his hand is catching hold of these objects (as if in a dream) at their most threadbare and timeworn point. But if someone walks past one of the yellow scooters surely he/she is able to see it as a use of kitsch itself. What would Benjamin have made of Svankmajer's A Week in the House?  Svankmajer is a fully paid up surrealist who hardly deals in the 'decrepit' aspect of objects-he may even be inspired by the 'threadbare and the timeworn': they have eloquence and a latent sensibility through being touched and heard- 'these objects are not dead artefacts to me. I lovingly give them starring roles in my films'. Svankmajer is an alchemist animating and reanimating the secret life of objects.

Odradek's proverbs

There are not many proverbs in Kafka although many of his shorter pieces are like fairy tales. However in The Next Village the Grandfather says 'even the span of normal happy life may fall short of the time needed for such a journey'; if not a proverb it can, spoken by a Grandfather, be cast in the form of a sententious remark intended to say a something meaningful about collective experience. But this is not quite like the familiar proverbial form like Chaucer's 'I haste and evere I am behinde'.
So what can we learn from the Next Village proverb? Certainly it does not convey a common sense truth like Chaucer's. Kafka's Odradek only speaks twice: to provide his name and address (no fixed abode). But if he did speak further he would probably speak only in proverbs ie worn out phrases and cliches. For Walter Benjamin, Odradek is the commodity that survives to no purpose or an image of an outlived world of things-a kitsch entity and peddler of proverbs. But most proverbs are transparent like Chaucer's. Virginia Woolf remarked on the difficulty of presenting the lives of ostlers and rat catchers etc in fiction; they rapidly become curiosities or stereotypes. In Chaucer, she adds, they are simply themselves so the above proverb would have meant something to the Canterbury travellers. Can the same be said for householders in the Prague of 1917? What could 1917 Prague Householders learn from Odradek? Perhaps that, no longer able to be themselves, condemned to rely on worn out and used-up proverbs, they are like Odradek.

nearly normal objects

Imagining the future need not be an extreme activity. Klebnikov's visions of the future include 'radio clubs' and 'radio auditoriums': not bad for 1920. Wodehouse observes that imagining a remote past is no different to preserving the world of Edwardian England. Consider Orozco's pool table or sliced Citroen or Munoz' lift in Double Bind. These objects are similar but at the same time extremely different.
Orozco claims to have no interest in the engineering used to make the sliced car; this is the irony of the artist; this is serious engineering but for unfathomable purposes; dedicated engineering effort to produce objects that are nearly normal yet occupy a remote parallel universe. What if these lifts, cars and tables proliferated and outnumbered so called utility objects?

klebnikov discovers the equation...

...while sitting on the back benches at the Prolekult conference in Armavir on September 25 1920 Klebnikov, during all the inflammatory business speeches, discovers the equation for the inner zone of heavenly bodies. Who was making these inflammatory speeches that he was so easily able to ignore? Possibly Tretyakov. The key to the equation is the number 3; history and the future can be grasped through multiples of 3.For Klebnikov the Triplex principle is true, prophetic and verifiable; it is not an aspiration. If Tretyakov had been able to break off from the Prolekult business and look over Klebnikov's shoulder he could have used the Triplex approach to calculate his own death in 1937-killed by Stalin. He could also have cheered Klebnikov up by calculating for him that he (Klebnikov) would die 3 years later of natural causes and not share the same completely predictable fate as himself 15 years later. The Triplex principle is still alive and well and can be applied to Geoffrey Farmer's Zappa-centred chronology: for example the role of the number 3 within the algorithm within Farmers's computer program that controls the music within the installation reflecting Zappa's idiosyncratic compositional forms.