Innere Dialoge an den Rändern 2016-2021
Inner Dialogues at the Peripheries
27 May 2022
Up at 6:30. While coffee brews, I open the new collection from Handke’s notebooks: fragments of thought, aphorisms, reading notes, reflections. I begin the day as a reader reading the notes of a reader: “Before I began to read, about midday, when ‘the day was almost old,’ the silent exclamation: ‘So, and now to what is decisive!’” [from the back cover]
My bookmark (a noble word) takes me to page 24.
“A shocking ‘Suddenly’: Suddenly I have nothing more to read (Tolstoy’s breakdown [Versagen] in the epilogue to ‘War and Peace,’ utterly: nothing more to read)”
“On some mornings, even now, as if newborn. —Newborn? — Born anew [Umgeboren]”
“Intensification: ‘I ask.’ —–> ‘It asks itself’”
I’m sitting in front of the Hotel Moscow in Belgrade, writing in my notebook. Peter approaches and asks: “Was denkt in dir?” What is thinking in you?
I pour coffee, return to my study, set the cup down and take up the book again. Before I open it, aspen leaves outside quake in a breeze and I watch through the window. I haven’t even tasted the coffee, I think, nor did I note its fragrance when I poured it. I pick up the cup and sip the welcome bitterness. I sit and sip and watch the aspen in the early light. I open Handke’s book again and am greeted (coincidence!) by a corresponding thought:
“Devotional eating, dining: Return!—But have I ever experienced that?—Yes: at the time of Slow Return Home”
“And once again: Tolstoy awakens the silent organ in me? Or only the ancestral jew’s harp? — Why ‘only’?”
I remember the scene from The Moravian Night when the former writer happens on a gathering of jew’s-harp players whose simple music with limited means reminds him of his own craft. Imagined performances of national anthems raise his ire: “abusing the jew’s-harp to play mendacious harmonies: that was impermissible.” Each note should emanate from reflections, he thinks, should avoid “any kind of melodic demagoguery.”
“’He savored his slowness like a melody’ (Robert Walser)”
“Someone mocks me—but I continue to write, shivered by the gentleness of the cold (not an oxymoron)”
“The prayer of thanks most fitting for me: ‘Thank you, phenomena, appearances, manifestations [Erscheinungen]”
“The death of a reader, of a single reader, was always a severe loss—uniquely difficult (for Luc Bondy)” [Bondy died in November 2015]
THE GOALIE'S ANXIETY 