W. looks through my notebook. Notes on Robert Walser's confinement, he says. Names and dates. Ah, very interesting, W. says. Didn't Walser volunteer to be taken into Herisau asylum? Didn't he want to go there for the peace and quiet? Hadn’t he had enough of the world? Enough of having to make a living. He’d had enough of crowded streets and noisy neighbours. Enough of writing! Of trying to write! Of his will to write! He wanted to give up writing.
At the sanitarium I have the quiet that I need. Noise is for the young. It seems suitable for me to fade away as inconspicuously as possible.
One lies like a felled tree, and needs no limbs to stir about. Desires all fall asleep, like children exhausted from their play.
To fade away; to lie like a felled tree; to be blown around the world like a leaf. What Zen master has ever wanted to achieve more?
Walser wanted to disappear, W. says. He wanted to dissolve into the everyday like some kind of mystic of the ordinary. It’s what I’ve wanted, he knows that, W. says: it’s what I’ve sought in my years of unemployment. Haven’t I wanted to become a man without qualities?, W. says. Haven’t I said I wanted the everyday to smooth away my distinctness like a river does a pebble?
It’s what gives me a strange kind of wisdom, W. says. A strange kind of religiosity! Sometimes, he’s even thought of me as a kind of saint, W. says. As a holy man of the banal; a hermit of the empty hours.
Haven't I been a kind of suburban Saint Anthony: a man who ventured into the deepest of suburban deserts? Haven't I wrestled with the most banal of demons, and passed obscure trials which have left others made or drunk or dead?
What vacancies I have known! What boredoms! What diffuse despairs! The everyday still clings to me like bits of shell to a hatching chick, W. says. It's why, in the end, he has a kind of respect for me. For isn't the everyday the contemporary equivalent of the Biblical desert?
Lars Iyer's Blog 