Category: Handke

Does it matter what story Handke tells? Crossing the Sierra des Gredos has familiar elements – a walk to an airport (Across), the protagonist’s enemies (Repetition, and all the others), the salvific power of the image (No-Man’s Bay) … but does it matter? There are books you read for the power of telling, rather than what is told, as though this power were a wave that gathered everything up and brought it back to you; as though that wave was already gathering itself there behind you, there years ago, in the German original (published in 2002), in the other books by Handke it recalls (the first published in 1966) – as that wave that began as the universe began and that retakes it all now, giving everything again.

That voice, that power of narrative: how is it that Handke sets his stories into the order of things, into the movement of stars or the arms of galaxies, in the great wheeling of the milky way as it trails stars through our night sky? There’s a kind of patience to his telling. The strength of patience, the strength of time as it turns the seasons. As though the book had found Eliot’s ‘still point of the turning world’ – that pole around which everything revolves.

How hard it is to explain! And what’s the point! Read! Be read! The still point of time is looking for you. The power of telling wants to install itself at the still point of your life. What does it mean to read thus? To be read? To be the black hole at the centre of a galaxy, and around which it turns in its entirety?

I’m familiar with everything in Handke’s book; he’s told it before. A character almost at the same as the others. A traveller, a contemplator, a searcher for images. With enemies like his other characters. Who converses with a narrator like the chemist of One Dark Night … who breaks from an old life like The Left-Handed Woman (the photograph above, at the top of this page bears this title). The same, the same and that is where Handke waits for us, at the still point from which the same is turning. In the kingdom of reccurrence.

A writer develops a ‘metaphysic’, a system of recognisable motifs, of themes, of relations. A development insinuated in creative work, that permeates what is written, and in a manner at first unnoticeable. The writer does not ask, who have I become? but accepts the changes that cross his writing like light across ice; this is the bounty of writing, it is how writing, like our handwriting, is complexified with age, with experience.

Old rhythms set themselves in motion as they are touched by new ones, and the whole is changed each time, with each book. The whole is changed: motifs, themes, relations retaken freshly: this is the life of an oeuvre, of the climate of a writing. A climate that deepens, becomes richer and greater – that has travelled a greater internal distance, that rises into itself like a stormcloud, and generating internal potencies that must discharge themselves in lightning.

Sometimes it can seem to break away from easy readibility, so that a newcomer may remain disorientated and unseduced: style encountered as mannerism, as pretension. But that style was earned – it sought itself; it came to itself through an immense distance; it enfolds such greatness, such vastness that whatever its disappointments – the bloatedness of No Man’s Bay, the whimsy of One Night  – these are still complexly folded works of middle age, of the middle of life.

What must it have been to have written every day? Every day – and with Handke to have known, each day, the measure of time, its gift – the steady brightness beneath which he formed his books. Across already exhibits a ‘late style’, I’ve decided this morning. Repetition still looks like a novel, but Across? A plot without tension, without resolution. This book occupies a plateau, a great threshold. At every moment, open. What must it have been to have risen each morning to keep that opening open, and to have been kept by that opening as between two hands in prayer? (The Afternoon of the Writer is one answer).

It is as though every novel he would write begins at that place where the plateau opens, a point that normally closes, rather than begins a work of art – think, for example, of the last thirty pages of Lawrence’s St. Mawr, and the long denouement (is that the word?) of Herzog’s Heart of Glass. It’s true, plot seems to lose itself – or it is gathered, at each moment, to the threshold where anything at all could happen. At once, open – but also fated, living the measure according to a kind of justice.

No Man’s Bay would be an epic; the chemist of One Night reads tales of knights and chivalry, which the narrative parodies; Loser, of Across, reads Virgil. Don Juan, still untranslated, will presumably renew the story of the old seducer: each time, an older European form is brought to our new Europe. Or is it that the older form is brought to exhaustion by this worn out Europe, this Europe at the edge of its disappearance into economism? Disappears – and what is left but what Handke allows a narrator to call ‘the evil of the every day’ which must be retraversed in order to recover its hidden bounty.

I think of Handke as a pagan writer, as a Greek, as a Latin: I think he has that resource, a kind of pressure, that reaches him from ancient books. A pagan, whose pages turn in the wind and are read by the sky, as though they were abandoned books, similar to the haiku the travelling poets of Japan used to leave at stages on their journeys. Abandoned, because there are no other poets to read them. Lost in the expanses of Old Europe – lost as Old Europe is lost in this worn out continent, that capital buys and sells to itself.

A pagan – and then as one who is not lost, despite everything; whose narrators have behind them the wind from old Europe, the Greeks, the Latins – but I would not say the prophets, I would not say Judaism belongs to his writing. I’m not sure what I mean by this, but I remember Levinas’s anti-mystical Judaism, that allowed his to celebrate Gagarin’s ascent as the beginning of the disappearance of sacred places, of the pagan.

But then, for Levinas, Greek is the language of Europe into which the septaugint must be continually translated. Greek is rationality and order; Greek is philosophy, Europe’s language. But with Handke, there is another Greek, and a Latin linked to that Greek. Isn’t there something of Heidegger in this novelist? But let me brush these ill-formed thoughts away, except to note that there is a way of living the end of Europe that is no longer Greek, or Latin – no longer pagan, perhaps, and yet that still does not accede to the triumph of capital.

Listening to ‘Great Waves’ by the Dirty Three featuring Chan Marshall is like bathing my face in fresh water. I wake up, my attention returns from the thickets where it’s caught, and the room seems to open out around me. There are a few songs that are like this, callers to attention, and I use them sparingly. They come to my aid, and I know they watch over me, waiting in reserve.

And yet I also know they watch from me, out of me, that it is also my eyes with which they see. It is as though they needed me, these waiting songs, in order to happen to themselves. Do horses like being ridden? Pointless question. One day, the horse cannot distinguish its freedom from its rider’s. When, otherwise, might it go out for a gallop? And does a song like being heard? ‘Gentle Waves’, I tell myself, is nothing without me. It lies on my hard disk like a leaf.

Callers to order: Handke’s phrase, or the phrase he allows his narrator, in Across, the book I would like to say is his purest. What happens? Read critical works, and they’ll tell you there was a murder. It’s true, of course: the narrator happens on a man scrawling a swastika into a tree. He kills him with one blow and throws him over a cliff.

But that murder is like the one Handke allows his narrator to imagine in On a Dark Night, who longs to topple cyclists from their mountain bikes: it is part of an order of things, an order of walking, of the natural world, of meditative noticing.

Gloriously Handkean; he needs, one presumes, to revive this sense of order every time he writes. He needs to be called to order. But then Loser, of Across, is called away from his work by those callers (what are they? certain objects – archeological remnants).

I still await the first daddy long legs of the summer, remembering how Loser calls them creatures of the threshold. And Across, the whole book, which I have not reread and do not have near me, but that lives on in me, inhabiting me, is all threshold, all plateau: the book between, the book steered gently by the same wind that ruffles the pages of all Handke’s fiction. The wind at the back of the walker, the wanderer, who has as his enemy the cyclist and the fascist.

There are moments that do not pass, that lose their bearings. Lost moments that ask to be abandoned to the past, to fall back into time, and the streaming of time. The inconsequential: why should I remember walking from Holborn to the London Review Bookshop? Why do I remember crossing that road by the scooter shop?

I was on the way to the bookshop, true, but I can locate that moment only by way of the bookshop; in truth, the moment was indifferent to my destination, and to my point of origin. It detached itself; it was lifted from the course of time. How was I to live what would not settle? The moment passed – how could it do otherwise? – but it did not pass.

How is it that when I remember it, it is only by way of what occludes it? In truth, I am unequal to the moment; I who always know what to do next am unfit for a moment that admits no ‘next’. Now I understand why Peter Handke’s books are growing larger and larger: he would write of the moment without succession, not to catch it, but to allow it to fall back into time.

But what time? The epic – a new kind of epic, the great recounting of the insignificant everyday, which fills our lives, even by vacating our lives of content. The insignificant? No: the infinitely significant, the moment which promises everything, that clothes itself in every event in the world. Handke, writing of the day to day, steers the moment into a succession of diaphonous moments.

It is not continuity he seeks (his novels have purged themselves of plot, of character, of incident), or suspense – unless it is to suspend one course of time in favour of another. The epic of moments, of the momentary everyday: how is it I know he has no words of his own, and not even a name? How is it I think of him as the translator, as the one who lets speak the moment without fixing it in any particular language?

Why is it I have come to read more and more slowly? Why, having passed through spring, summer and autumn of the book, do I pass so slowly through winter? Because when we part ways I will part from myself; because the end of the book is the end of the steering of the book, the stars it placed in the sky above me. I would rather have them, the stars, than nothing. By your strong prose was I borne. By the turning of full pages was I carried. I will read more slowly, as I come to the end.

Why did it only occur to me yesterday to check the date of publication? 1993. The book was written in 1993, and not in the 1999 in which it was set. 1993, and not the time of civil war and the breakdown of Europe of its 1999. As in his last book, the writer had written a fantasy; he felt it necessary to remove the book from the present and set it elsewhere. And 1999 is not any time; it is the turning of the millennium, the brink of the old and the beginning of the new. The beginning, perhaps, of the transformation of which the narrator tells us on the first extraordinary pages of the book he will relate.

Doesn’t he always promise to narrate transformation, this author? And isn’t it always that the book is perpetually held at that moment, at the threshold of transformation? This is why the blurb on the back of his books is always inaccurate. No one of his pages is more important than any other; the story always hovers at the turning point; it is held in transformation, the world is perpetually carried to the brink of itself.

I admit it, there were many boring pages. How difficult it was, around page 300, when, after the stories of the 7 wanderers, we were made to return to the narrator’s own daily recounting, the chronicle of the minutiae of the ‘no man’s bay’! At that moment, I thought: the book is definitely not The Book; the author has slipped up – these are too many pages, and the narrative is like the river that runs into a swamp and is lost there.

How unbearable dull, these pages! And yet how many passages I marked with my pencil! How these passages grow in the memory! The bee’s nest in the cliff face; the stagnant old pond; the narrator’s noisy neighbours and the troops who pass everywhere; the paths that he names and the immigrant workers whom he greets; and finally, at the end, the restaurant of ladders where the narrator meets his son: I will return to them, these passages, and that will be how I will know the book, only in retrospect – only as it streams behind me, like the tail of a comet. Pain that I will only be carried backward by my memory, and not forward, in the forward sweep of reading! Pain that I will not know the innocence of going forward!

How many pages are there left? It is cold today and I am holed up in the flat, curtains drawn, gas fire on. How cold it is! The book is on the floor, with me. I sit at my desk, and the book is open, with a pencil along its centre, resting on the floor. And it is though, as it waits, that it projects a heaven above my small room and that it is the room’s hearth.

My Year in No Man’s Bay: by revealing the title, have I not betrayed the book? The Book, perhaps, but not this, its substitute. I can name it now, as I can name its author: Peter Handke and I am betraying nothing. When will it be 1999? When will it come, the turning of the millennium, the Book on whose pages I will read of the new world? ‘How long did it take you to finish the book?’ – ‘A few weeks’. – ‘How long did it take you?’ – ‘I read with my life, with the whole of my life’.

The book is not the book. How could it be? At first, in the morning of reading, I read carefully, impassionedly. And when morning became noon? I thought: the book is strong as I too am strong. At page 90, I can leave it for a while. Page 90, and the book is the book and I am I, and we can be apart.

That was noon. And now? Many more pages have turned. I reached page 250 today. It’s the afternoon of reading. But isn’t it in the afternoon that reading loses itself? A sign of loss is to read more, to read intensely. Reading becomes voracious. But voracity is anxious, as if the hold of the book has loosened. I read quickly, intensively, but that is a sign of the failure of reading.

The book is not the book; that much is sure. When did it fail me – or did I fail it? Or was it another book I failed – the book behind this book? Yes, that book – the one my reading always sought and which I’d thought, this time, I’d found. I’d lost it, that book, and this book, the one I was reading, became a book on the way to the book, a book among others.

Have I failed the book? Did it fail me? Or have we both turned aside, disappointed in one another? It is there on my bed now. I am halfway through. Page 250. Halfway through, its spine cracked open, generous, my place in the close printed pages kept by a pencil. It is there, a book like other books, readable, finishable and in which I will not approach the book all books are hiding.

How, I ask myself, did its author let himself be carried away so! Why did he think he could write an epic, why a book of this length! Perhaps, I tell myself, the book will heal itself; perhaps it will come together. But I have read enough of this author to know no turn will occur. This is the way it will be.

The book runs on, but it does not bear me. It runs on, and I am not borne. Am I reader? No; I am a watcher; the book is a spectacle. It was the book of life, and now it is a book like any other. I am a spectator; it is not essential to me; I read to see how it will turn out; I read because I want to have finished the oeuvre of this particular author.

Now the book is attached to a name – failure. Now it is part of an oeuvre – failure. And who am I, the reader? The one thrown back on himself, refused – but called anew by a book beyond this book. What name will it take, the next time it is born? What name will it bear, this book, in its next incarnation?

Reading, Not-Reading

It is true I do not want to disappoint the book; I am reading it slowly, and even reading other books when I think I am not quite able to attend to the first book. Yes, on my trip down to London, I took other books with me, in part because the first book was too large for my rucksack, and would weigh me down on my cycle trips through the parks of London, but also because I knew that a long train ride would give me too much time with the book.

Too much time: I would read too greedily; I would not pause when the book paused and rest when the book rested. I would not, in short, allow the book to bear me according to its own rhythm, which is to say, its own wisdom, in the time it allotted me for reading and for non-reading. I took another book to read on the train; I finished it quickly. It was done in four hours, in the four hours of my journey and I knew I had read it too quickly.

Fortunate that I didn’t bring the first book! For that, too, would have been finished too quickly. Then, leaving London, I bought another book in a secondhand shop; it was by an author I had long wanted to read: Gombrowicz. Sarraute on the way down to London, and Gombrowicz on the way back up. I read half of Pornografia on the train. I was tired; sometimes I dozed. I coughed and sucked Tunes for my cough. I spilt tea across the table and on my jumper, but Gombrowicz was with me, and when I awoke from dozing, I read on.

This, too, was not reading. There must be a kind of strength for reading, a preparedness, and I knew, even though I was not rushing Gombrowicz, I was failing it by my tiredness. Was I reading closely enough? Was I sufficiently alert to remember what happened in early chapters to follow what was happening in later ones? My worry was that I would later have to read a summary of the book in order to understand what had happened. Betrayal: I would have missed the book I was reading. And what of the first book, which I was not reading? What of the book open in my flat, open, still at page 80?

Constellations

This morning, stuffy with cold, I began to read it in the early hours. What use was getting up? What use was writing? I would read instead, although Gombrowicz was only half read. I would return to the ur-book, to the first book whose coming was an advent I had awaited in the late summer and the autumn. It had come; I would not read too quickly, I said to myself, but let the reading guide me just as sailors once were guided by the constellations.

Book beneath which I would pass! Book by which I would know my passage! I read, this morning, as workmen hammered next door. I read; the day was mild. I read a few pages; I passed from page 80 to page 90. And that is where I am now, page 90. The book is open on the mattress on the floor of my bedroom (the bed is still dismantled from when the floor was sanded and varnished; so too the wardrobe). I read, but was I borne by reading? Had I not let too much time elapse from when I last read this book? Yes, I was a little lost; I was disoriented, for what, after all, was happening? Who were these characters? And the narrator, who was he?

I read, and annotated in pencil passages to which I thought I might return. I read, and put little marks in the margins to pages to which I thought it necessary to return. By these marks I will have known my passage through the book, I thought. Yes, I will have known I passed once through this book, and by way of this book. But by what mark would I know how this book steered me through the world? I’d waited for this book by this author for I knew his work would steer me through the world. I would be steered; the book, covers closed, would nevertheless be the constellations by which I navigated; my wandering would find orientation; where I drifted, the book was firm and clear above me. Yes, the book would watch over me. The book was the night, above me.

But it was not a stifling intimacy I sought; the book, I thought, should give me freedom. I would be oriented, yes, but the path I made was a wandering. There would be guidance, but only that which would allow my wandering to be propitious. I would pass through the parks of London; I would cycle through the roads of London, but still there was the book as there was the sky, distant from me, but present. Still the sky and the hard, clear stars, just as we saw them on Saturday night, when we left London for the country.

The stars! I steered by them even as I wandered. Chance was propitious; what happened was not blind, but fateful. The random was itself fateful; by chance I let myself be led towards my future. The book watched. This morning, returning to it, I thought: but is this the book I was reading? Is this the book for which I waited? Or is it a proxy, a substitute for another book and another reading? I thought: there are those for whom Heraclitus or John, Thucydides or Dante wrote the book that surrounded them. And who was I, who wanted such a book, who wanted to be surrounded?

In the Meantime

This book, an attempt, perhaps, at an epic, was not the book I sought – how could it be? For the age of trust has passed and the age of suspicion is here. Yes, trust has passed, and this is a suspicious age, and age without belief. How I distrust permanency and enrootedness! How I dislike the bookshelf and the CD shelf! I took the CDs from their cases and put them in big folders. I moved the books, the tools of my trade, to the office, and dispersed the others. Now the flat is bare. The bed and the wardrobe are still dismantled, but this is appropriate. All must be transitory.

And the stars, what are they? The firm, clear stars, which I can barely see for the orange street lights, what are they, in their permanence? I am reading my book in the mild day. Yesterday, rain, and today, mildness. Sunlight rests on the walls of the houses opposite. Above the little yard, the blue sky. And above that? Darkness and the stars which were once icons of order. I read. The book book speaks of voyages and movement. This is appropriate. The book speaks of relationships made and broken; this, too, is appropriate. Movement is all. Migrancy is all. And I know that this epic is the opposite of an epic, that what it gathers it does so only in order to disperse.

Then what do I seek from it, the book in the flat, the book that is now open on the mattress? To be watched? But only as I passed from one place to another. To be steered? But only as I wandered. Sometimes philosophers dream of the ones to come, those who will live with the new god or with the new earth. That will be life: to come, to come, nor here, not today, but at another time. And today? And today, in the meantime? A mild day; I read ten pages of the book cross-legged on the mattress on the floor of my bedroom. Curtains closed, and I read a few of the big, close-lined pages. Of what do I read? Of the meantime, of the stretch of time before the gods return and before the return of the earth. Meantime, between times, after the gods and before them.

Second Innocence

Why do I read you, book? Because you, like me, are stranded. How many days did I spend unemployed? A million. And how is it that I am still borne by that same unemployment? It is as though I’ve waited for something, but for what? The day is coming, but for what? As I read, I know this mild day is the way the coming day hides itself. Reading, I know of the day behind the day, of the coming around which all days are turning. Non-event, incompletion, these words, like the word unemployment, allow me to speak only by way of privation. How to speak without the ‘non-‘, the ‘in-‘ and the ‘un-‘? How to affirm what will not let itself be affirmed?

Read, and by this book affirm what has happened. Read this book, in which nothing happens, and affirm the non-happening of your life. Who is going to live? Who are the ones to come, that will live for us? But perhaps the meantime is all time, perhaps every day will be today, mild day that turns in the greater day, mild day that wears itself away to reveal the night without consolation. Perhaps it is that the stars have fallen, and there is only darkness. Perhaps it is that the array of stars are scattered without meaning, and offer no guidance. But isn’t this ‘no guidance’ already enough?

The three metamorphoses: there is the one who works and who passes in the desert to work. There is the one who falls outside of work, and says ‘no’ to work. And then there is the child who knows nothing, and knows nothing of work. Second innocence: the reading-child I would like to be. Second innocence: the child who reads beneath the sky and stars.

Given Time

I’ve read it, but when? I’ve read it before, but when did I read it? I can’t remember, but it is as though I’ve always read it and always spoken as it speaks. Essential book, which gave me my own past! Essential reading which gave me my past!

I read. The reading bears me. I read, and it is as though everything I live is borne by that reading. The book is open in my office. My life is lived against that book, its backdrop. The book, a heavy hardback, is open in my office, and what I live it gives me again. The power of living is mine, but that power now reveals itself against the backdrop of non-power, of what I cannot do, but what the book gives me. Now, with the book, I see the world anew.

Now, because of the book, my eyes rest on the world in a new way. What do I see? What do I hear? Or is it that the book sees and hears for me? Is it that the book gives me what I cannot give myself: a second sight, a second hearing, a second way to know the world.

Book, I prop you up beside my monitor. Prodigal book that cradles my life! Prodigious book that opens my life as I open your spine! By your pages will I know what I’ve lived. By your sentences will I have known what I am. You, book, give me the future. You give me the future in which I can know what I’ve lived.

After the Book, Before the Book

What was my life before I read this book? But there was no ‘before’; it is as though this book ran back upstream to the source of my life, and what I lived was always lived within this book. What I lived was already enclosed by the book. Wise book who knows what I have known! Wisdom of a book that lived in advance of me, waiting for me! How did you know I was coming, book? How was it you waited for me at the moment of my conception?

After I read you, there was no before. After I read you, there was no before the book. You were there at the beginning, watching over me. You made the appointment I would keep by reading you. And as soon as I began to read, I knew. By reading I knew another knew me, benign deity!

It is there on my office desk, although I am at home. It is there, just begun and waiting for me, and I am here, at home. I did not bring it with me, because I know it is with me. I did not bring it back to read last night, because I knew it would be with me less time by my reading: knew that to read will have been to have spent less time with it than I could have spent. Knew that by spending time, I was given time, and that to be given time was to be given a future in which to read the book.

Rather than read greedily, finishing it in a single, breathless day, I will read slowly and slowly will the future come to me. Slowly will it come, the future and the dreams the future allows. Slowly, then, comes the open space for dreaming in which the book dreams beside me. I will rest my head on this book, and it will dream with me. I will sleep alongside its sleep and the dreams will come.

I will not name you, book, I will not give your title. And your author, book, I will not speak of your author. Just that it is a late book, a rarefied book, which speaks by way of its author’s early work, which speaks as though that early work had gathered the single wave that bore it. Speaks as though by the pressure of the forward-movement of those early books. Reward for the reader who has traced the course of an oeuvre! Reward of the reader who waited for the late books by reading the early books, and now receives his reading again!

The 11th Page

500 page book, you wait for me at the office. Hardbacked, 500 page book, freshly arrived from America, I have propped you by my monitor. I am 11 pages in. 11 pages, and the book opens its great doors. 11 pages, and already the book is opening great doors to me. Let me pause for a while at the threshold. I want to pause, knowing that the books which follow this one have not yet been translated. Will pause and look around me, at the world behind me and the darkness of the book. The great doors have opened, doors of a new earth and sky, doors of a whole world, which will soon shut and enclose me.

Soon, the 12th page, and then the 13th. And when will I reach the 250th? I know when I read it that it will have been I had read it long before. Know when I reach page 500, I will have known that page since my most distant childhood. You waited for me book, you were patient. You waited for me book, first, latent in the author who wrote the book, and then in a language I do not know how to read. You waited for me, in the translator who turned the book into English, and then in the foreign country from which you would reach me.

And then, one morning, you were in the package in my mail; there you were, imposingly thick, freshly arrived from overseas, in my office. You waited for me; you were there in my office, still waiting for me. As I read page 11, I knew the book was waiting for me, just ahead of me, as it will have always been waiting. Knew that by page 250, it will be waiting yet father ahead, and when one unimaginable day, I finish the book, it will be waiting further ahead than ever, waiting, now, to fill my dreams, to dream with me. To dream and give me the future by its dreaming, and then to give me my past, too – that life I will have lived in anticipation of the book.

1.

The freedom to tell is given, not taken. The same with the freedom to read.

Yesterday, Steve of This Space reflected on a claim by Jason Cowley in The Observer, who argues 9/11 was an event that should change literature. Fiction is no longer to be irrelevant; its aim must now be to offer a convincing representation of a changed world. As Steve objects, this is to assume the events of 9/11 are more significant than others when it comes to writing, to telling. According to what criteria can Cowley make his claim? One which foregoes the event to which literature is bound – which is to say each event, any event as it allowed to bear the pressure of the outside. But what does this mean?

2.

Doubtless we all have events which haunt our imagination in the same way 9/11s, to which we return and cannot help but return. Better to say those events have us and that we are as though magnetised by what happened once and seems to press forward to give itself again. As though they occurred not once, but several times over. Or at least, that when they occurred they were not felt to occur, and it was necessary, later, to feel one’s way back to them – to follow the winding course of associations to their inception.

But behind these events, there is another kind of freedom, that is no longer the correlate of that which would allow us to pick up a novel in idle interest. A freedom, a potency, which reveals itself only in the telling that belongs to literature (and in different ways, to film, to music, to art). I can only unfold this by telling of my encounter with telling in turn.

3.

Telling. This is how Across accounts for its existence. At its heart, the narrator says, is the vision he has of himself in the mirrored ceiling of a supermarket. Who does he see? Not the one his son resembles, he writes, but rather the one who resembles his son. But what does that mean? 

The narrator speaks of a kind of liberation – he has been given leave from the school where he works as a teacher to complete an academic article – but this does not account for the significance of the event in question. If the movement of narration is granted by the mysterious density of this event, it is not because it is a mystery to be solved. Indeed, the event is said to happen only towards the end of this volume and it comes unexpectedly, casually, not as an awaited climax. Is it, then, that the telling allowed the event to come forward? Did the event make itself known only because of that telling?

4.

Such events, measured against Cowley’s post 9/11 literature, disappoint because of their banality. What are they, after all, compared to the great events of our time? Literature’s voice is too quiet. But in that quietness something else occurs.

In an earlier post in the aftermath of the London bombings, Steve reflects on a novel called Incendiary about a terrorist attack on London written before the bombings of the 7th July. The major marketing campaign to promote was already distasteful, he says, appealing to a simple Schadenfreude on behalf of the credulous and sensation-seeking public who would believe themselves to be engaged in reading with contemporary life.

After the bombings, the marketing campaign for Incendiary was pulled, but the bombings on the underground, Steve notes, provided it with another kind of puff.

5.

A fortnight ago, I spent time in London just after the bombings. I had little to do; I was on holiday; I brought a few books with me, and one of them was Handke’s Across. In the tabloids there was the predictable celebration of British solidarity and the spirit of the Blitz. The Sun crowed when what they thought was one of the terrorists was shot. 1 down, 3 to go. But the wrong man was shot, and this was predictable, too.

Against these events, in tension with them, was the quietness of the novel which I read without knowing why. The story unfolded, and I found the level at which I could approach it. That is how I came to the event at the heart of its telling. This was not a revelation. It happened quietly – as, it would seem, one among other events in the book. I forgot the scene and the story continued. Then I turned away and closed the book.

But it returned to me, that event. I remembered it, or rather, it remembered itself within me. It turned to me and I turned back – not to the passage in question, but to the beginning of Across. The book asked to be reread not because I possessed its secret but because I sensed the event as it came to me had changed what I had read. The book had altered; I needed to read it again in order to experience what it meant that for its narrator to claim the encounter with the supermarket mirror was its centre. And hadn’t I, too, changed? Hadn’t I crossed and thereby remade a threshold, meaning stepping back was impossible and there was only stepping forward?

In a sense, the event in the supermarket became equivalent to the others the narrator recounts – that each of the events this novel tells exists at the same level, substitutable for it, and that Across is only an account of how any such an event might be a threshold. But I know this is not right and I will have to read it again, for a third time. There are minute movements to which I will have to attend; I have underlined passages to which I will need to return. Yes, yes, but that experience of each event existing on the same plane, dispersing the work, giving it multiple focii is everything and I will have to return to this, too.

On my second reading, I reread Across not in order to experience the reassurance of knowing what was to come. I knew that no event would solve the mystery of what was told. Each detail brought forward that unsolvability and made it tangible in the descriptions of the natural world and the streets of Salzburg. The narrator, I thought, tells of what cannot be told and he does so as he experiences its opacity and his own opacity.

Who is he? The one who resembles his son. Not the father, now, but his son’s son. Who is he? Cast adrift from his job, murderer and  outcast, he is one in whom the opacity of the world is concentrated. Opaque to himself, he discovers the opacity of the world. Opaque, he begins to write and writing brings up against what resists the measure of the capacities with which he once identified. Freed from his job, he is free to move. But also to experience the freedom of things as they press towards him. That potency born of the resistance of the world, its opacity. And it is the experience of this opacity that gives itself to be told and as the freedom to tell.

6.

There is much more to be written about Across. Here, I only want to say that the freedom to tell is given, not taken. The same with the freedom to read. I might think I exert freedom in picking up Incendiary, but in fact I have relinquished it. Only when freedom is engaged by the outside, by forces untrapped by my power, does reading happen.

1.

How long do you live with a book? How long does it live inside you, explicating you, opening the world to one who is no longer the same and for whom the world is not the same? It is easy to be reclaimed by the same habits from which the book separated you – the same perceptions bound to the same self – but what if a threshold really were crossed: what if the reading of the book had irrevocably changed the one you were?

Perhaps there is a practice of writing that is the correlate of this experience of reading. Perhaps there is a writing that allows the writer to cross one threshold after another – to pass, with writing – not through writing, not in writing, but with writing, accompanying it – into that remove where no words give themselves to describe your experience directly and univocally.

That withdrawal, I tell myself today, my last in London, is the first experience. The second would be to repeat the first, to recall it and make it speak. The inexhaustibility of telling – telling’s inadequacy – is the gift of the withdrawal of the work. Why is necessary to read another book, or to write another? Because of that withdrawal and the abandon with which it marks reading and writing.

In the wake of Across, a book about thresholds, I feel that the remove of reading is close to me. That the book let speak this remove and allowed its nullity to press forward. I think: I have been at the head of the waters, at the source from which all telling flows. At the head which is the potency that calls for telling, for that speech which is never satisfied with anecdote and personal memory but searches for a telling adequate in its inadequacy to the remove into which the book withdraws.

Adequate in its inadequacy – but what does this mean? Perhaps the old model of propositional truth – the declarative phrase that would represent what is happening in the world – breaks down with respect to the remove in question. It is what allows literature its life as a wandering without truth, a passage without release. Perhaps literature is the attempt to speak the remove, knowing it cannot be spoken, but knowing too that it is not ineffable. Knowing, then, that literature does not depend upon a kind of mysticism.

To write is not to perform a raid on the inarticulable if this is understood to refer to an experience on the hither side of language. It is to speak with language, to draw on what language makes possible even as language is just one of many systems of signs. There is no pre-lapsarian language in which the world was named just once and forever; likewise, language bears no absolute privilege with respect to being.

But writing is a struggle with language just as directing, acting, editing and the whole complex of activity associated with filmmaking is a struggle with the image. Telling names the struggle that is narrative literature just as sculpting in time is a name for the struggle of filmmaking (Tarkovsky) and painting – the bare to paint – is a name for the struggle with painting (Bacon).

Each time it is a question of an event embodied in the medium in question. An event that occurs as reading, seeing or hearing, when the work finds its addressee. Each time it is a question of being as it is given in a material event – in the struggle with the medium which happens as the work of art. Each time a threshold is crossed; what is given is given in a new sense which means there is a new way in which the work withdraws and maintains its mystery. In which the work, dividing itself, at once removes itself from its addressee and appears in this removal. The mystery of the work does not lie in its depths, but at its surface. The surface as the tearing-apart, as the torn threshold where the addressee is met and the addressee changed.

Slovenian, for the narrator of Repetition is not an Edenic language. To learn a few words of Slovenian, though, is enough for the narrator to learn his German again. To reach into that remove which calls for telling. Even then, I wonder whether there is not nostalgia in Repetition and in Across. I wonder if literature’s remove is linked too strongly to the speech of Slovenians or (in Across), Virgil. I wonder if Handke is not too willing to understand this remove in terms of the plenitude of nature, of the natural world.

But then it is not Handke who speaks in these novels, and that is everything. What is marvellous is that he is close to the remove in question – I know it, I experienced at once, as soon as I began to read Repetition and as I began to read Across, though in both cases, that experience revealed itself only when I finished each novel. Close to that remove which must be figured (it can only be figured) and told (it can only be told) over and again. Literature’s remove.

2.

It’s night, and I’m back in the North, correcting this post and amending it. Now I’m removed from that remove – from the experience of reading. The book changes in my memory. Even as I finished it, Across seemed to come together, to assemble itself into something which bore meaning in all its parts. Until I finished, I was lost; I read, it is true, and felt the pressure of reading, but I didn’t know where the book was going. But I felt, even early on in the book, close to a reserve of immense force.

‘Why Handke?’ I asked myself. ‘Why has it happened with this book and not others I’ve recently read?’ I picked up my hardbacked copy of Across at intervals. I didn’t always want to read it. My eyes passed over the sentences as over a complete opaque surface. I admit it: I was lost, alienated from the book. I had to reread parts of it, and could only give myself to reading when I was bored, when I’d gone out of the flat and come in several times, having run out of excuses. There was the book; bored, I sunk to its level. It came to me and spoke to me then. It spoke because I was living at the level of the book.

All week I’ve thought to myself: I would like to write a book where the words barely assemble themselves into a meaningless whole. I would like to inhabit a speech that surges on relentlessly. Often I remembered the cliches Paul Auster permits himself in writing. He writes, let us say (I don’t know the facts) quickly; rather than seek, later, to replace those cliches, he leaves them in to maintain the flow of writing or perhaps to attest to it. I have dreamed of an unlimited flow, of a speech without form, without contour, which spreads itself like a fine net across the whole world.

At the same time, this flow would be born from that same boredom which brought me to Across and opened its pages to me. Boredom would permit that free floating attention Freud commended to the psychoanalyst, where no detail counts for more than any other, where being comes forward without coercion. There it is: the world. There it is, the everyday world, spreading before you. But what of the writing that would go out to meet it? Where is that writing – or where in you does it await explication?

Night. I return to the office and then to my flat. I’ve read through the proofs; R.M. is now far away. I won’t be there tomorrow morning to swing her legs over the edge of the bed to send her on her way to the job she tells me she hates. Where am I? The television is on; my dial-up links me to my favourite websites; there are no books here. But I think to myself: in my isolation and my boredom, I feel literature’s remove to be my forebear. I am descended from an act of reading; literature explicated me and I was turned over to the One-All that continues to watch over me.

I finished Handke’s Across on the underground yesterday. I write yesterday because this post will go up on what is my tomorrow and your Saturday. It is still Friday for me, Friday afternoon, 3.10, which means all the sandwiches are discounted at Benjy’s. It’s Saturday (or after) for you – I should remember I too am included in this ‘you’, that I am also the addressee of these words, but forget that for the moment. The fact is, a day divides what is written from what is published and in that time span anything might happen.

I am in London; I write in an internet cafe on Charing Cross Road. I happily anticipate a trip around the bookshops; I have Across beside me on the desk. Will I find any more Handke in London today? R. M. reminds me I said with my chest puffed out and striding around her living room: ‘you’ve backed a winning horse’. Is that what I said, really? It’s been a few days, and what confidence I had has dispersed. Then, it is true, everything seemed possible. Writing was open to me, the end of the six papers I had to write was in sight and I was even letting the plan for a novel crystallise inside me. A novel, of course, which will never be written, but I had the sense of incubation; something was preparing itself inside me and in that pregnancy I was happy.

And now? There is no inside. I make no plans; when I return to my office on Monday – if I return, for anything might happen and what I have written now may only reach you posthumously – I will have to remind myself of those projects with respect to which I felt so confident a few days ago. Is this what London does to you? Is this what happens in the constant press of people, in the endless round of events? I have Across open beside me. I thought I had finished it, but it turns out there are a few more pages, an epilogue. How had I missed them? How was it they hid themselves from me, keeping their secret in the pages beyond that one I thought was the last?

Nevertheless, they tell me little. In what I took to be its final pages, the mysteries of Across started to form themselves into a greater mystery, which is to say, those plot strands which never seemed to come together – the murder, the wandering, the topic of thresholds, assembled themselves into a whole.

A few days later, I had a powerful little experience in the Oak Tree Colony supermarket. (It is the basis of the present tale.) No doubt as a precaution against shoplifters, a tiled mirror is fitted to the ceiling, and chancing to look up I saw my face in it.

What is the experience? He looks up and sees himself. What does he see? Not the one his son (whom we have not yet met in the novel) resembles, but the one who resembles his son.

Ordinarily resemblances between forebears and descendants strike me as distasteful, if not outrageous; but this resemblance was the opposite; and it would never be noticed by anyone but me. It had not to do with the features but with the eyes, not their shape or colour, but their gaze, their expression. Here, I said to myself, I see my innermost being, and for a moment I felt acquitted.

Acquitted of what? Of the murder he committed earlier in the novel? And why did he see his innermost being in the eyes of a face which resembled that of his son (a resemblance only the narrator declares himself able to have seen?) This by way of a response: earlier, as I read, I underlined this phrase: ‘this could all be said differently’. I underlined it thinking: what is it that could so be explained? What is the ‘this’ that is in question here? What is the event this book is recounting? I ask this question again after reading the brief passage in which ‘the basis of the present tale’ is supposed to be revealed. That passage continues:

In the far corner of the supermarket, in the meat department, two white-clad women were standing in total silence. A car rumbled over the planks of the canal bridge. Outside the display window, there was a great brightness; a vault of light spanned the bridge. But this gaze, I asked myself a little while later – what was it like? And the answer: Wounded.

He is speaking of the gaze he saw in his reflected image. The gaze in the mirrored ceiling of the supermarket. What was it he saw? Again, it is a question of what can only be told and retold, and in different ways each time. This novel is this retelling; retelling – but telling is only ever retelling – is its life. And I think to myself: perhaps this telling is the life of all novels, perhaps this is the life of which all novels speak. What does this mean?

Reading this passage I remember how once, when I liked to think I was writing, I would attempt to pare away what I took to be inessential details. So here I would have wanted to delete the passage about the white-clad women or about the rumbling passage of the car on the canal bridge. What have they go to do with the experience in question?, I would have said to myself if I, as their author, were able to delete them. With what would I have been left? With a few lines describing an intensity, a strong affect. A few lines and many blank pages and with vagueness. Everything, I know now, depends on telling.

It is only recently that I have come to understand what ‘this could all have been said differently’ might mean. Happening on this underlined phrase in Across as I sat outside the Lloyds building waiting for R.M., I thought: Handke is teaching me what a novel is. I thought: I am learning by the details he includes in his novel – no, not ‘includes’, that is the wrong word, the details that his novel comprises; the events which allow it to come to itself – what a novel is. I am learning about telling. That was earlier today (your yesterday). Now I’m going back out into the afternoon and I know the final pages of Across will bear me up Charing Cross Road towards the bookshops.

Weak coffee, weak tea, barely any caffeine to sustain me. As I left the flat, I thought: I should have read a little Handke to keep me going, to allow some sentences to form in order as I passed through the world. To give some continuity to my experience, even if that continuity is borrowed. Why don’t they serve coffee at the internet cafe? But I think to myself: no coffee. You’ll not take the easy way out. Today you will have to let experiences accrete, to come together and not seek, through caffeine, to leap ahead of what happens.

Let happen, then, those events that gradually accrete into a narrative, a telling. Let purpose emerge from the immanence of those experiences. That, in some ways, is what I imagine happened to Handke as he wrote Across. He began to write without knowing where the book was headed. He just began, moving out, as a boat pushes away from the jetty and gives itself to the river-current. Handke wrote; the book was seized by the current. He wrote and discovered he had written of a murder. He wrote and learnt by writing that his book was a threshold, and that the one who writes in the first person in Across stands at the doorway. When I think of thresholds it is of that avatar of Vishnu of whom it was said he could not be killed inside or out, by day or by night. He was murdered at the threshold of his house at dusk – or was it dawn. He was murdered at the threshold, which was the only place he could die.

A couple of hours before I set off to meet R.M. for lunch. I told myself I would read Spinoza this morning, but I picked up the proofs of the book instead. I began to read the fifth chapter, the last one, and thought: this is a terrible mistake. How could I have let myself publish this? Really, the first book was bad enough, and now this? What overwrought prose! How self-conscious it is in its twists and convolutions! I thought: there really is no hope, if for all my complaining here I was unable to change in my second book what was so bad in the first.

Fortunately, it will be published in hardback and will be buried in hardback. Fortunately like a little coffin it will be lowered into the earth and forgotten. I would add, melodramatically, like the coffin that bears what’s left of my talent, but the coffin holds nothing, I know that. I finished the book from boredom. It just stops, without concluding. Out of boredom or out of disgust? It is true that while I was writing it, I felt little disgust. Disgust was what awaited me and it comes to me now like acid reflux. I can taste the stomach acid at the back of my throat.

I would like, as Beckett said once, to know how stupid I am. To know and then to be free to write with a new simplicity. But as W. would tell me, you have to read, you have to work. Of course he is right. I brought Spinoza and Leibniz to London with me to read. I’ve made a little bookshelf in the flat R.M. shares. Spinoza’s Ethics, then the Routledge Guide to the Ethics, Leibniz’s writings, then the Routledge Guide to the Monadology. And didn’t I mean to read the Critique of Practical Reason again? It is a warm day and a kind of boredom passes through me. It does not frustrate me. It is a boredom that asks for waiting, which says: you will not find the plot of today until later. Which says: wait and do nothing, seek nothing.

But I say in turn: I would like to mark this day somehow. Even to say that it seems to take no form. Imagine it, I say to myself: a prose whose prolixity hides what it wants to say: simply, here I am, here I am. A prose which is supposed only to mark a moment in time, to sign it as the graffiti artists tag the walls. But then, daydreaming, I think: it is as though the spraypainted tag wrote itself, that my tag spoke of what I was not, that it was not my sign but just the refusal of signs. As though the day had closed to me like the door before the man from the country in Kafka’s parable. I am before the law, and the law says: you will be unable to write a thing.

The law, I know it, is the everyday, but what does this mean? The sentences I usually string together when I write the word everyday come easily to me. Light falls everywhere etc. etc. But what I write of the everyday already protects me from the everyday. It is not that it is ineffable. It can be spoken of; indeed it speaks, it is very loquacious. I can hear it now. But how to I translate its incessant droning which takes the form of this voice and then that?

I admit it, what I’ve always wanted to be able to write is a free floating discourse which alights on this and then that, but in the end on nothing: a writing with no themes that do not dissolve almost at once, a writing in which nothing happens, but that drifts and disperses as a cloud disperses into the air. Yes, I would like to attach myself to that kind of discourse, to seize it and to be seized by it. To wander in writing as the narrator of Across seems to wander. I would like to begin what I write, I remember …, and then to write of a kind of forgetting that hides itself in memory, to set down what cannot be linked to my name but which, nevertheless, seemed to occur.

Last night, in the theatre bookshop before the performance, I flicked through a book called Dramatic Monologues. I did not find the wandering discourse I sought and why should I? These past couple of days belong to prose, and the prose of Across. This thought: prose is the language of the between, the language of passing. It is what is written when you expect nothing and hope for nothing. There are days when you can work, and days where the great task is to cross from minute to minute.

Usually, I pass the latter by eating – by going here and then there, gathering snacks as I go. I measure the day in snacks – and how delighted I am to find a new chain store, Benjy’s, here in London, which discounts its food products to £1 and below everyday from 3.00-5.00! I eat there as I eat in the Arab newsagents that sell falafels in pitta bread. My new habit, quite despicable: I want a sit down lunch – one, it is true, which will cost me no more than £5 – but that allows me to spend an hour or so set back from the street, looking at it through a pane of glass, and, by that pane, protected.

I have a bag of Marks and Spencers nuts beside me. You can’t eat in the internet cafe, and they don’t serve drinks (what kind of cafe is this?). The traffic roars past outside. I remembered I wanted to write a post about old men and the collapse of the world in which old men once felt at home. I wanted to write about the collapse of the distinction between high and low culture and of the despair of the old man of culture before the chattering of the everyday. Yes, that is what I was thinking about last night, reading that book of dramatic monologues in the National Theatre bookshop. But what is there to write today except of enduring the everyday? What but the task of joining sentence to sentence just as sentence is joined to sentence in Handke’s Across?

1.

London, three weeks after the first bombing, one week after the failed bombing. I was reading Handke’s Across in R.M.’s bedroom, thinking as I read: what’s this about?, what holds it together?, and reading the flyleaf to help me find myself with respect to the narrative. Then I thought: but this apparently plotlessness, this falling apart of narrative into what seem to be disconnected sentences is the mirror of my life. Only Across has an energy of narration I do not possess. It runs ahead of me; I follow, knowing the flyleaf will be no help.

Soon, Handke-like sentences began to form in my head and I thought: I have to write these down. I left the flat and went out onto the street, turning left onto the main road and passing Earl’s Court tube station and all the police. The sentences in my head were already breaking apart. I knew I’d be too tired by the time I reached the internet cafe, so I drank a third of a can of Irn-Bru. Sugar and caffeine would let the sentences come again, I thought.

As I walked, I thought of the proofs of the new book I had brought down to London with me to read and reread. The proof-readers had, as usual ‘corrected’ the typescript I had sent them. The phrase ‘self-identification’ became ‘self – identification’, rendering a sentence ungrammatical; a section break had been ommitted by the printer, running one topic into another and quotes within quotes had been changed and messed about with.

My helpless book! But it deserves its helplessness. My attempt to write long, sweeping chapters is a way to avoid explaining clearly and simply what I mean. Dream: write a series of short essays, mentioning no authors in particular, freeing my writing from association with any particular text, to subject myself to the test of clear writing. Dream: change my name and begin over. Begin writing completely anew. Everything I have written, everything I write here is a slug’s trail across the everyday.

2.

Every morning I read the proofs of the book. I spread the pages before me as I watch the O.C. which, joyfully has returned at 9.00 because the schoolchildren are on holiday. And as I read I find myself indifferent to all this empty verbiage and wonder how I can transform myself into someone like Flusser (whose book on photography had been reprinted and which I found to my delight in the university Waterstones near Goodge Street yesterday).

What is it I lack?, I wonder to myself, but I think I know the answer: soundness of knowledge. Philosophy is a quicksand into which I have half-sunk, but I have not found bottom and cannot move with real steps. What would it be to advance philosophically, to find the boots that would allow me to walk nine leagues with one stride? Or should I find a way of crossing philosophy at an angle, of finding another trajectory, another way of writing?

But chapter three of my new book is okay, I remember as I walk. W. said so, too. His verdict on my book: ‘not bad …’ What does it matter? I know that I haven’t written a line of philosophy, not one, and remember what W. said the other day: if our books were destroyed it would actually add something to the world. True, all true.

3.

I read Across in R.M.’s bedroom. I’ve reached page 100, and I don’t know what’s happening. There was the discussion of thresholds between the card players – a fine scene. But the book tells of the narrator’s wandering. He wanders through his city, Salzburg (salt city). He writes of tiny details as he remembers were linked in Virgil’s Georgics to the image of salt. He writes of small things, this unemployed teacher; he encounters the tiny details of the world – he writes of nature, but not only that – of drunks and cars and housing projects.

Sentence follows sentence; I am not sure how, or why. In fact, they lose me. Where are they going? Still, my attention is held. I am lost, but I follow and not because I want to solve their mystery but because their momentum, their sense of forward movement is something I lack today more than anything else. I want to follow each sentence as it follows another, to connect the disconnected incidents of today and every other day I pass in the everyday.

As I walk to the internet cafe, Handke-sentences form inside me – someone comments in me on the world as I pass through it. There is a limping pigeon, there a staggering drunk, there the police car parts traffic with its sirens. I have a witness; a writer-witness has be born in me, and what I exprerience is translated into a voice that is like Handke’s. Now, as I type, I feel myself to have been as though invaded. I do not want the echo of Handke’s voice to speak in my own. I push it away irritatedly.

I know what it obscures: that experience which is most my own, the everyday which draws me close and dissolves me as it does so: that same everyday which extended tendrils into me this afternoon in R.M.’s room. I had wanted to sleep; I thought: I’m tired, and I should sleep. The book was open on the book and I rested my head beside it. Then I thought: how is it I can be this tired? How is the everyday can find me every time? Why can’t I put up the least resistance?

4.

Across does not speak of the everyday, I decide. Does Afternoon of the Writer? I won’t consider Repetition, since it is concerned with the experiences of a young man, and the young do not know the everyday, I decide. Crossing R.M.’s flat, I think to myself: I can’t operate the DVD player, I don’t know how to open the door to the garden. What can I do? I can’t drive, but this is as it should be. As though I were nothing but the membrane the everyday could fill – the sail strewn across the afternoon that could catch its wind. But then there is no wind to the everyday. I am the ship without sails, adrft.

Perhaps there is a kind of consolation open to Handke, I think to myself, half-resentfully. Perhaps it lies in the natural world. Perhaps it lies in the expanses of nature. Perhaps it lies in the words that he supposes let speak that expanse. I thought: I don’t know what he means when he writes of thresholds. It’s too late for me, I thought. I pass through a world whose doors I cannot unlock. I pass across the surface of a world which does not admit me. No sentences join themselves together for me. Everything comes apart – that is always my experience, and it is why I can never write in continuous prose. Every tone is faked, every voice is inherited from one writer or another, and nothing is mine. Only the first emptiness is mine and that is the difficulty, for it is inextinguishable from the everyday whose essence it is to disperse me to the four winds. That first emptiness which invades me as soon as sugar and caffeine leave my bloodstream.

Then I wonder about the escaped terrorists of last thursday, the would-be suicide bombers whose detonators did not link to the explosives. They lay down on their rucksack-bombs which did not explode then rose, then fled. I thought of the passengers left alive. What would it be to appear in the little profiles of the casualites the Guardian have been running? The passengers escaped and the bombers are, for the most part, still at large. London has absorbed them; they are hiding in the everyday.

5.

I’ve written nothing of consequence today, only unfurling those sails filled with no wind – these paragraphs through which the everyday, perhaps, is allowed to shine. Is that the case? You can’t explain the everyday, I thought to myself the other day, it has to be experienced. It is a question of election. Laughter: but what a mediocre election! And then: is it the everyday that makes all my movements in philosophy so sluggish and heavy? Or is it that nourishing non-philosophy from which one day a writing adequate to its mysteries will come into definition?

http://www.readysteadybook.com/exphandke.html

You read a book with your whole life. Is that the sentence I wanted to write? I’m not sure it is true, for doesn’t a book widen the circle of your life, pushing its circumference outward? I bring my whole life to a book even as that book broadens that life, until it stretches all around me like a great plain. My life (but is it mine?) has become vast and undefined, a great wound that stretches as large as the world. That stretches thus beneath an open sky that is also like a wound.

I am not sure what this means even as I write it. But a book is turning its pages in my heart and asks to be written about. Writing is a response to this book, an inadequate one. I am reading Peter Handke’s Repetition and I don’t know how to respond. Just now I looked through its pages – its real pages now, and not the ones which turn inside me (those unreal pages that is the work of the book, its patient unfolding not as itself but as it draws out of me a wistful and wandering life that is my own version of that of the narrator of Handke’s book. Repetition repeated, if you like), yes the real pages of the hardbacked book I received through the post the other day, trying to find a passage to reproduce.

I knew what I was searching for: I wanted to find the pages on the young soldier whom the narrator travels with in a night bus. That young, composed solider who is the double of another figure of composure: the waiter the narrator sees in a cafe. Yes, here it is; read it with me:

He sat perfectly still, and his half-closed eyes with their rarely blinking lids suggested contemplative alertness. His thoughts could be far away, yet without a break in his fantasy he would calmly catch the parcel which, unnoticed by anyone else, had fallen from the baggage net just over his neighbour’s head; before anyone knew it, he would put it back in the net and, as if nothing had happened, carry on with his peculiar blinking, which may have been connected with a mountain in Anarctica. While registering every sound in the moving bus, they were equally aware of the glacier that was carving at the same time, of the blind feeling their way in the cities of every continent, or of the brook flowing now as always though his native village.

One vignette among so many others. In the final part of the book, which I am still reading, vignette follows vignette. Their cumulative force is obscure. A glacier moves, the blind feel their way through cities, a brook flows through a village: the book is aware of all of this. It listens; it watches and I am borne along by what is written out of this listening and this watching. The book is alert and I become alert. It remembers (its narrator remembers), and memory happens in me, too. Remembering happens: slowly memories are born like clouds which form over the plain (over the Karst scenery the novel describes). Yes clouds form out of the air and return into it.

What is important – and this is harder to describe – is the way those memories are given. I am remembering with a book. A book is allowing remembering to happen. I close its covers and the memories come. But as they unfurl something of them is held back. They are not completely given, once and for all. Something withholds themselves in their gift. Who gives? The book, you might say – but in truth it is only the occasion of the gift. Who gives? I would like to say: time, all of time. What is given is given thus by time and is given such that time withholds itself as it is given. I would like to say: time keeps itself secret even as it gives itself.

Repetition. In 1960, 19 year old Filip Kobal travels to Slovenia from Austria, to his ancestral home. His brother Gregor disappeared there during the war. What had happened to him? Filip carries with him two of Gregor’s books: some notes on fruit growing and a Slovenian-German dictionary. He muses on the relationship between words and things, remembering the ease his brother had felt in learning Slovenian comparatively later in life. Filip, too, experiences Slovenian, a language he does not know, as offering him something like a baptism. He writes as he travels in the Karst region, where, once upon a time his peasant ancestors had risen in revolt.

‘In my brother’s dictionary, the Karst was cited as the source of more words than any other part of Slovenia’. The narrator is writing in 1985; he is 45 years old. He remembers the Karst wind, which passes over the limestone scenery like a baptism (‘It baptised me then (as it repeatedly baptises me now) to the tips of my hair’). He learns from the wind how to name things and receives from it that gift that allows him, the walker without purpose, to experience himself as ‘a child of the world’.

A child of the world. It occurs to me that if it is time this novel gives me – if time gives itself as I read and after I read, it is akin to that same Karst wind that allows  Filip Kobal to name the world – that is, to rename it, experience the dance of words and things in another sense. Slovenian will permit this rebirth – that same language in which his brother had come to feel himself at ease before he disappeared.

And what of me, the reader? Words come to me with those memories that appear in the air above the stretched out earth and beneath the stretched out sky. With them, yes, and like them bearing in themselves a reserve they can indicate but cannot name. But how is this possible? The words become heavy, resonant and rhythmical. They fall out of themselves like rain and settle in pools on the earth. But what do they reflect? Nothing at all, or rather that nothing which is the reserve to which they are bound but which they cannot let speak.

I would like to reproduce another passage from the book. Read with me:

I looked at him, not at his rifle, but at his profile, I knew that something was going to happen. To us? To the solider? To me? All attention, I looked at the irregular crown of his head and in it saw myself from behind. Bristling close-cropped hair that yielded a double image of a young solider and of a No one the same age. At last this No one would find out who he was[….] At last I had before me that protagonist of my childhood, my double, who, somewhere in the world, of this I was quite certain, had grown up along with me, and would someday turn up and be my true friend, who, instread of seeing through me as even my own parents did, would understand me without a word and acquit me, just as I would acquit him with a look of recognition or a mere sigh of relief. At last I was looking in an infallible mirror!

Reading Repetition, I recognise myself from behind. Who do I see? The 19 year old Filip Kobal, the 45 year old Kobal from behind. That is to say, I do not see his face and dream it could be mine. Or rather, that’s what my heart dreams and knows as I read. And it is in that way the pages of Repetition continue to turn in my heart.

I am reading. I read with my whole life, with the child I was and the child I am as I read. I am reading, and discover in reading the No one I also am, the eternal child who arrives from what withholds itself from me in my memories and in remembering. I know now the child is a figure of time – not of the one, like the Fates who dispenses it, but who is given as and with and in time. The gift of time in time. That is the child, the No one without a face whom I dream is coming towards me from the other side of the universe. One day we will meet, but where? In the air, where the clouds come apart and come together.