If its eyes are on my uniform it will have more faith in me
If its eyes are on my uniform, it will have more faith in me.That gave Grandfather more time to come up with sentences. And what bit of me? Well, he said, my mouth, of course, my teeth But that's not what I want I want it to look at my uniform. He pointed into the empty cinema and said: There in the darkness sits the audience, that's the place for it It's staring at me out of that darkness. What times! Which I suppose I must have lived through and how! - though not much of them remains.And down there, you must imagine it, said Grandfather, stick in hand He used it to point at the world First he stamped his foot on the floor to gain my attention. The minute he was in his little tailcoat, the sentences started to come. He took more risks: more forceful expressions, more subclauses, outlandish comparisons, more surprising turns of phrase and imagery Also, "in uniform" his sentences were longer. Only difference was that he now held a bamboo cane in his hand instead of a whip.
It was part of the uniform he had to wear, his explainer's uniform, just as there was an infantry uniform for the infantryman, and a cavalry uniform for the cavalryman.So you had ...My explainer's uniform, said Grandfather.It's possible - to the memory, all things are possible! - that Grandfather explained a film better in that get-up than he would have done in an ordinary jacket and trousers According to him, he did. I took it all in.That's right, said Grandfather, I used to be a lion tamer, when he told us occasionally about his "previous existence". Others would wear smoking jackets.Watch out, don't nod off, here comes a wonderful sequence, maybe the most wonderful in the whole film, cried Grandfather, reaching for his pointer He liked to wave that around a lot. Straightaway, the handful of people in the audience were silent You could, said Grandfather, have heard a mouse .. well, whatever it is a mouse does The sighing and snoring all but stopped I was tiny I leaned back in my seat. In the cinema they wore red or blue tailcoats with gold or silver buttons, a white bow tie, white trousers, sometimes top-boots. A lot of them came from the fairgrounds, from the "apish origins of art" (Grandfather) You could see that from the way they dressed. He had trouble with his teeth and used to say: These gnashers will be the death of me one day, if I ever die.
In the end, though, it was something quite different, not that at all.My grandfather was the film explainer and piano player in Limbach They still had those, back then. The glorious south, where the sun always shines, is always out of reach.My grandfather Karl Hofmann (1873-1944) worked for many years in the Apollo cinema on the Helenenstrasse in Limbach/Saxony. I knew him towards the end of his life, with his artist's hat, his walking stick, his broad gold wedding ring that from time to time would go into pawn in Chemnitz but always came back safely. It was he who gave me the idea - long after he was dead - of walking with a stick. "And the light was switched off." The novel ends in despair, as the author wonders what it amounts to, this attempt to trawl back an old, spent life: "the depression of the summer months, the autumn months, the winter months, the hopelessly congested southbound motorway." The motorway gag is a deliberate joke, a resolute attempt to undermine the solemnity of the previous all-encompassing sulk But even this has a serious edge. "In the beginning was the light," Grandfather says of his cinema. "One of my father's prevailing themes," says Hofmann, "was art and the artist, and this is the lowest form of artist".