How do they experience this fleeting, flickering, monotonous chaos in their wishful notions, their daydreams, their deceptions, their obsessions? How do they rationalize it in their figments, lies, solaces, euphemisms, distortions?

Ultimately as a meaningful order? As a dramatic, dynamic course of events that always correspond to some idea, always pursue, or at least bring about, a specific purpose? Thus are always effortlessly identifiable as a series of causes and effects?

—as if the events that charged down upon us chaotically could be broken down into individual components from which we need only select those that can be threaded in a narratable chronicle and strung on the guideline of a learned notion of life—threaded and strung according to a completely arbitrary event-value that we have established—

whereby we would experience our lives as (hi)story: a florilegium of episodes that, containing literary elements, are culled from the wealth of occurrences and carefully cleaned of all the weeds of anything casual, undramatic, or dramatically inconsistent or superfluous:

so that the episodes are ultimately threaded into a novel-like garland of anecdotes, stories, epics, rhapsodies, comedies, tragedies, woven into compellingly thickened peripeteias and rhythmical arses and theses, to be boaed around the person of the SELF and form his myth—

Even the maggots use the literary in order to overcome the chaos. Even they live literarily—

and I’m supposed to make the devising of tales a matter of conscience?!

So, carefree, I attack the keys of my typewriter: my piglets want a story that reads both simply and grippingly, an adventurous, entertaining, and yet meaningful reality, so that even the distributors will be carried away and actually understand what it’s all about

(a story, then, that can be told in three sentences)

at your service:

Till the Last Woman

Berlin, April 1945:

The roomers in a boardinghouse, which is actually a front for a whorehouse under the experienced direction of the owner (Kitty Schmidt), look forward to the arrival of the Russians and the expected surplus of vodka, cigarettes, money, and food period end of the first sentence

In the basement, however, honest people have also hidden, and the girls, seeking protection from the shelling, witness the rape of a mother-to-be by drunken soldiers, whereby the mother-to-be kicks the bucket period end of the second sentence

This affects them so profoundly that they resolve to give themselves freely wherever a decent woman is threatened semicolon they thus sacrifice themselves each in turn M-dash till the last woman colon Kitty Schmidt herself, who at first opposed this sacrificial effort by her girls third and last period end of story

•

This I can write. With virtuoso life-interpreting fingers, I hammer away at the keyboard of the little Olivetti Lettera. Nothing inhibits me.

This stuff won’t get in front of the camera anyway. It is merely spirited out of thin air and laid into thinner air—as a cornerstone for the cloud-cuckoo-home that is known in the piglets’ lingo as a “project” or even “our next film project”—