The Liquid Land
Page 27
‘[…] past times are just as real as the present time. Thus they believe that just as you are sitting in the present reading this paper, so — for example — Nero is sitting in the past watching a gladiator bout. And just as you think to yourself, “I am sitting here at the present time”, so Nero thinks to himself, “I am sitting here at the present time.”’
(Trenton Merricks, Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, vol. 2)
The illusion of the present disguises the fact that every person just swims at any arbitrary point in the landscape of all possibilities and, in his egocentrism, imagines himself at the Archimedean point. You think you have a view on things from your own plateau, while it’s your position on the plateau that prevents you from having an overview. And yet it is inevitable to look into the landscape — together with everyone who comes after you and was before you — together with everyone who is this landscape.
Only now, desperate on the steep slope, did I reflect on the fact that I was actually about to leave Greater Einland. Yes, this was also an act of resistance, I thought, that right now, down below, Philipp would be announcing me, and that I wouldn’t emerge from the audience to take account of his announcement. The soil seemed to want to counteract my plans one last time and, covered by the early autumn leaves, spilled towards me. From down in the valley, the commissioned composition was already beginning to reach me. This meant that my disappearance had been noticed and things had carried on — it amused me to imagine the Countess wondering why I wasn’t there, and especially how she would later realise that I would never return. Silence, the refusal to speak, I thought again, taking the first switchback, was the highest and most far-reaching act of rebellion. I would simply withdraw from Greater Einland, turn my back on my so-called home, and then nothing would remain of me — that is, except the tonnes of filler that were currently being pumped into the ground. If one didn’t approve of the actions of a group, then one simply had to find a new group in order to eliminate this problem — yes: problems didn’t demand a solution, but a complete volitisation, an obliteration.
The sun had gone down by the time I reached the top of the hill, and the liquid land suddenly became firmer. The filler, I thought in awe, and even though it was not at all possible, I thought I felt a solidification. I imagined that in this moment, the forest so intimately familiar to me had been killed through a weakening of its nerve function, without anyone noticing. The network of roots would be gripped by this substance, right now, as I drove the final few metres of this slope, over which I had crashed into the valley basin three years previously. I felt against my tyres, as if they were my own skin, that granular solids were already floating in the dank, liquid surface of the moss floor. The crawling motion of my car gripped better and better as the atoms seemed to unite, and the crust of the world, which had been drifting since the Hadean, hardened.
The wave motion of the Alps smoothed out, my engine did its job and propelled me onwards without any impediment. Everything that had swirled in the ground, this never-ending process of creation and decay, was stopped in a single blow. I had almost penetrated the protected area of forest, left the castle far behind me, and had to already be near a country road. The hardening filler gripped the grasses, the microorganisms, the delicate and the coarse joints of the world from below, and screwed them tightly into an eternal present, a display case in which Greater Einland and all its inhabitants would be banished forevermore. I thought that if I looked back, everything would be killed and the grass would be nothing more than a tangle of yellow lines, weathered threads.
But as I drove over the last ridge that had kept me from the concrete road, I turned around and saw: nothing. The festival was a long way off in the distance — too far to be able to still hear the Kirtag music floating on the layers of air. The treetops in the evening light looked as if they had been painted on canvas, right at that moment, as I climbed out of the car. I searched for a reason to look back and to look further again, to turn one last time in the direction of the town that had given me a home, but there wasn’t one. The landscape had become like any other; there was nothing to find in it other than another postcard design. On top of that, my tremors had stopped: I felt, for the first time in years, complete clarity. I climbed back into my car, which was less damaged than I had feared, and, still wary, shifted into third gear. You’d have thought I was driving down a highway for the first time in my life. Turning on the radio was so unfamiliar to me — I did so clumsily like a child — and as soon as I had finally done it, amazed that it still worked, a gravelly voiced Schlager musician blared unbearably from the speakers.
I sing a song for you, and then you ask me, will you go dancing with me, I think I like you — I turned it off again on the spot. I took the road where I had it left years ago, and an irrepressible desire for the city overwhelmed me. I would, that same evening, I thought, sit on the Danube Canal, on this dead straight concrete border of the river, and people from all nations would walk past me with loudspeakers and cans of beer in their hands. Greater Einland would be nothing more than a strange dream, if I seized the thread where I had lost it.
While I gently accelerated my car to a hundred km/h, I sensed the immovable asphalt. The earth on which I was moving was no longer a barrier to my progress. Everything proffered stability.
As if to make sure that no one was approaching from behind, I looked one last time in my rear-view mirror: nothing fluctuated, everything in its place, and me finally in mine. The forest, behind which I had lived for so long, parted either side, thinned out, and made way for a large, clearly cultivated area of arable land, behind which I could see Vienna.
Nothing that would remain unclear.