by Peter Handke
Finally he took the room that turned up next, and it was good; whatever challenges came his way—he would accept them. “Who will win out—the noise or us?” He sharpened his bundle of pencils out the window, pencils he had bought in all different countries during his years of traveling, and then again often German brands: how small one of them had become since that January in Edinburgh—was it already that long ago? As the pencil curls swirled away in the wind, they mixed with ash from the smoke of a wood fire, as down below, in front of the building, by the kitchen door, which gave directly on the thistle-, rock-, and moss-steppe, an apprentice with a knife as long as his arm was cleaning a pile of even longer fish, the gleaming scales of the fish shooting sparkling into the air. “A good sign or not?”—But now, after all this, it was too late in the day to get started. Accustomed to postponing his form of play, he felt once again actually relieved and used the delay for a walk out onto the steppe, in order to check out a few possible paths for the quality of their soil—not too hard, not too soft—and for the atmospheric conditions: not too exposed to westerly storms, but also not too sheltered.
Meanwhile something was happening to him. When he first had the inspiration—that’s what it was—which at once made sense to him—of writing an “essay on the jukebox,” he had pictured it as a dialogue onstage: this object, and what it could mean to an individual, was for most people so bizarre that an idea presented itself: having one person, a sort of audience representative, assume the role of interrogator, and a second appear as an “expert” on the subject, in contrast to Platonic dialogues, where the one who asked the questions, Socrates, secretly knew more about the problem than the other, who, puffed up with preconceptions, at least at the beginning, claimed to know the answer; perhaps it would be most effective if the expert, too, discovered only when he had to field the other’s questions what the relative “place value” of these props had been in the drama of his life. In the course of time the stage dialogue faded from his mind, and the “essay” hovered before him as an unconnected composite of many different forms of writing, corresponding to the—what should he call it—uneven? arrhythmic? ways in which he had experienced a jukebox and remembered it: momentary images should alternate with blow-by-blow narratives, suddenly broken off; mere jottings would be followed by a detailed reportage about a single music box, together with a specific locale; from a pad of notes would come, without transition, a leap to one with quotations, which, again without transition, without harmonizing linkage, would make way perhaps to a litany-like recitation of the titles and singers listed on a particular find —he pictured, as the underlying form that would give the whole thing a sort of coherence, the question-and-answer play recurring periodically, though in fragmentary fashion, and receding again, joined by similarly fragmentary filmed scenes, each organized around a different jukebox, from which would emanate all sorts of happenings or a still life, in ever widening circles—which could extend as far as a different country, or only to the beech at the end of a railroad platform. He hoped he could have his “essay” fade out with a “Ballad of the Jukebox,” a singable, so to speak “rounded” song about this thing, though only if, after all the leaps in imagery, it emerged on its own.
It had seemed to him that such a writing process was appropriate not merely to the particular subject matter but also to the times themselves. Didn’t the narrative forms of previous eras—their consistency, their gestures of conjuring up and mastering (strangers’ destinies), their claim to totality, as amateurish as it was naïve—when employed in modern books strike him nowadays as mere bluster? Varied approximations, some minor, some major, and in permeable forms, instead of the standard imprisoning forms, were what he felt books should be now, precisely because of his most complete, intense, unifying experiences with objects: preserving distance; circumscribing; sketching in; flirting around—giving your subject a protective escort from the sidelines. And now, as he aimlessly checked out trails in the savanna, suddenly an entirely new rhythm sprang up in him, not an alternating, sporadic one, but a single, steady one, and, above all, one that, instead of circling and flirting around, went straight and with complete seriousness in medias res: the rhythm of narrative. At first he experienced everything he encountered as he went along as a component of the narrative; whatever he took in was promptly narrated inside him; moments in the present took place in the narrative past, and not as in dreams but, without any fuss, as mere assertions, short and sweet as the moment itself: “Thistles had blown into the wire fence. An older man with a plastic bag bent down for a mushroom. A dog hopped by on three legs and made one think of a deer; its coat was yellow, its face white; gray-blue smoke wafted over the scene from a stone cottage. The seedpods rustling in the only tree standing sounded like matchboxes being shaken. From the Duero leaped fish, the wind-blown waves upstream had caps of foam, and on the other bank the water lapped the foot of the cliffs. In the train from Zaragoza the lights were already lit, and a handful of people sat in the carriages …”
But then this quiet narration of the present also carried over into his impending “essay,” conceived as varied and playful; it became transformed, even before the first sentence was written, into a narrative so compelling and powerful that all other forms promptly faded to insignificance. That did not seem terrible to him, but overwhelmingly splendid; for in the rhythm of this narration he heard the voice of warmth-giving imagination, in which he had continued to believe, though it all too seldom touched his inner heart: he believed in it precisely because of the stillness it brought, even in the midst of deafening racket; the stillness of nature, however far outside, was then nothing by comparison. And the characteristic feature of imagination was that in conjunction with its images the place and the locale where he would write his narrative appeared. True, there had been times in the past when he had felt a similar urge, but at such times he had relocated a birch in Cologne to Indianapolis as a cypress, or a cow path in Salzburg to Yugoslavia, or the place where he was writing had been consigned to the background as something unimportant; but this time Soria was to appear as Soria (perhaps also with Burgos, and also with Vitoria, where an old native had greeted him before he said anything), and would be as much the subject matter of the narrative as the jukebox.
Until far into the night he continued his observations in narrative form, though by now it had become a form of torture—literally every petty detail (the passerby with a toothpick in his mouth, the name Benita Soria Verde on a gravestone, the poet’s elm, weighted with stones and concrete in honor of Antonio Machado, the missing letters in the HOTEL sign) imposed itself on him and wanted to be narrated. This was no longer the compelling, warming power of imagery carrying him along, but clearly a cold compulsion, ascending from his heart to his head, a senseless, repeated hurling of himself against a gate long since closed, and he wondered whether narration, which had first seemed divine, hadn’t been a snare and a delusion —an expression of his fear in the face of all the isolated, unconnected phenomena? An escape? The result of cowardice? —But was a man walking along with a toothpick between his lips, in the winter, on the meseta of Castile, his nodded response to a greeting, really so insignificant? —Be that as it might: he did not want to know in advance the first sentence with which he would begin on the morrow; in the past, whenever he had hammered out the first sentence, he had promptly found himself blocked when it came to the second.—On the other hand: away with all such patterns!—And so on …
The morning of the following day. The table at the window of the hotel room. Empty plastic bags blowing across the rock-strewn landscape, catching here and there on the thistles. On the horizon, an escarpment shaped like a ski jump, with a rain-bearing mushroom cloud over the approach ramp. Closing his eyes. Jamming a wad of paper into the cracks around the window through which the wind whistles its worst. Closing his eyes again. Pulling out the table drawer whose handle rattles as soon as he begins to write. Closing his eyes for the third time. Howls of distress. Openin
g the window: a small black dog right beneath it, hitched to the foundation, drenched with rain as only a dog can be drenched; its wails, which briefly fall silent now and then, accompanied by clouds of breath visibly puffed out into the steppe. Aullar was the Spanish word for “howl.” Closing his eyes for the fourth time.
On the ride from Logroño to Zaragoza he had seen the stone cubes of the vintners’ huts out in the winter-deserted vineyards of the Ebro Valley. In the region he came from, one could also see such huts along the paths that led through the grain fields, though built of wood, and the size of a plank shed. On the inside they also looked like a shed, with the light coming only through the chinks between the boards and the knotholes, clumps of grass on the floor, stinging nettles in the corners, growing luxuriantly between the harvest tools leaning there. And yet each of the huts on the few acres his grandfather tenant-farmed felt to him like a realm unto itself. As a rule, an elder grew nearby, its crown providing shade for this thing set out in the middle of the field, and its arching branches forcing their way into the interior of the hut. And there was just room enough for a small table and a bench, which could also be set outside by the elder. Wrapped in cloths to keep fresh and be protected from insects, the jug of cider and some cake for a snack. In the domain of these sheds he had felt more at home than ever in solidly built houses. (In such houses, a comparable sense of being in the right place had come over him at most when he glanced into a windowless storage room or stood on the threshold between inside and outside, where one was still safe indoors while snow and rain from outside blew lightly against one.) Yet he viewed the field huts less as refuges than as places of rest or peace. Later it was enough simply to glimpse in his region a light gray, weathered storage shed, blown crooked by the wind, off in the distance by a fallow field, in passing; he would feel his heart leap up and dash to it and be at home in the hut for a moment, along with the flies of summer, the wasps of autumn, and the coldness of rusting chains in winter.
The huts back home had been gone for a long time. Only the much larger barns, used exclusively for hay storage, still existed. But long ago, at a time when the huts were still there, the domestic or localized magic they held for him had been transferred to jukeboxes. Even as an adolescent, with his parents, he didn’t go to the inn or to have a soda, but to the “Wurlitzer” (“Wurlitzer is Jukebox” was the advertising slogan), to listen to records. What he had described as his sense of having arrived and feeling sheltered, each time only fleetingly, in the realm of the field huts was literally true of the music boxes as well. Yet the external form of the various devices and even the selections they offered meant at first less than the particular sound emanating from them. This sound did not come from above, as from the radio that stood at home in the corner with the shrine, but from underground, and also, although the volume might be the same, instead of from the usual tinny box, from an inner space whose vibrations filled the room. It was as if it were not an automatic device but rather an additional instrument that imbued the music—though only a certain kind of music, as he realized in retrospect—with its underlying sound, comparable perhaps to the rattling of a train, when it suddenly becomes, as the train passes over an iron bridge, a primeval thunder. Much later, a child was standing one time by such a jukebox (it was playing Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” his own selection), the child still so small that the entire force of the loudspeaker down below was directed at his body. The child was listening, all ears, all solemn, all absorbed, while his parents had already reached the door, were ready to leave, calling to the child again and again, in between smiling at his behavior, as if to apologize for their offspring to the other patrons, until the song had died away and the child, still solemn and reverent, walked past his father and mother onto the street. (Did this suggest that the obelisk-shaped jukeboxes’ lack of success had less to do with their unusual appearance than with the fact that the music was directed upward, toward the ceiling?)
Unlike with the field huts, he was not satisfied to have the jukeboxes simply stand there; they had to be ready to play, quietly humming—even better than having just been set in motion by a stranger’s hand—lit up as brightly as possible, as if from their inner depths; there was nothing more mournful than a dark, cold, obsolete metal box, possibly even shamefacedly hidden from view under a crocheted Alpine throw. Yet that did not quite correspond to the facts, for he now recalled a defective jukebox in the Japanese temple site of Nikko, the first one encountered in that country after a long journey between south and north, hidden under bundles of magazines, the coin slot covered over with a strip of tape and promptly uncovered by him—but at any rate there, at last. To celebrate this find he had drunk another sake and let the train to Tokyo out there in the darkness depart without him. Before that, at an abandoned temple site way up in the woods, he had passed a still smoldering peat fire, next to it a birch broom and a mound of snow, and farther along in the mountainous terrain a boulder had poked out of a brook, and as the water shot over it, it had sounded just like the water in a certain other rocky-mountain brook—as if one were receiving, if one’s ears were open to it, the broadcast of a half-sung, half-drummed speech before the plenary session of the united nations of a planet far off in the universe. Then, at night in Tokyo, people had stepped over others lying every which way on the railroad steps, and even later, again in a temple precinct, a drunk had stopped before the incense burner, had prayed, and then staggered off into the darkness.
It was not only the belly resonance: the “American hits” had also sounded entirely different to him back then on the jukeboxes of his native land than on the radio in his house. He always wanted the radio volume turned up when Paul Anka sang his “Diana,” Dion his “Sweet Little Sheila,” and Ricky Nelson his “Gypsy Woman,” but at the same time he felt guilty that such non-music appealed to him (later, when he was at the university and finally had a record player in his room, with the radio as an amplifier, for the first few years it was reserved for what was conventionally felt to deserve the name of music). But from the jukebox he boldly unleashed the trills, howls, shouts, rattling, and booming that not merely gave him pleasure but filled him with shudders of rapture, warmth, and fellowship. In the reverberating steel-guitar ride of “Apache,” the cold, stale, and belch-filled Espresso Bar on the highway from the “City of the Plebiscite of 1920” to the”City of the Popular Uprising of 1938” got plugged into an entirely different kind of electricity, with which one could choose, on the glowing scale at hip-level, numbers from “Memphis, Tennessee,” felt oneself turning into the mysterious “handsome stranger,” and heard the rumbling and squeaking of the trucks outside transformed into the steady roar of a convoy on “Route 66,” with the thought: No matter where to—just out of here!
Although back home the music boxes had also been a gathering point for Saturday-night dances—a large semicircle around them was usually left clear—he himself would never have thought of joining in. He did enjoy watching the dancers, who in the dimness of the cafés became mere outlines around the massive illuminated case whose rumble seemed to come out of the ground—but for him a jukebox, like the field huts earlier, was a source of peace, or something that made one feel peaceful, made one sit still, in relative motionlessness or breathlessness, interrupted only by the measured, positively ceremonial act of “going to push the buttons.” And in listening to a jukebox he was never beside himself, or feverish, or dreamy, as he otherwise was with music that affected him—even strictly classical music, and the seemingly rapturous music of earlier, preceding eras. The dangerous part about listening to music, someone had once told him, was the propensity it had to make one perceive something that remained to be done as already done. The jukebox sound of his early years, on the other hand, literally caused him to collect himself, and awakened, or activated, his images of what might be possible and encouraged him to contemplate them.
The places where one could mull things over as nowhere else sometimes became, during his years at the
university, places of evasion, comparable to movie theaters; yet, while he tended to sneak into the latter, he would enter his various jukebox cafés in a more carefree manner, telling himself that these proven places of self-reflection were also the right places for studying. This turned out to be a delusion, for once he was alone again, for instance before bedtime, and tried to review the material he had gone over in such a public setting, as a rule he had not retained much. What he owed to those niches or hideouts during the cold years of his university studies were experiences that he now, in the process of writing about them, could only characterize as “wonderful.” One evening in late winter he was sitting in one of his trusty jukebox cafés, underlining a text all the more heavily the less he was taking it in. This café was in a rather untypical location for such places, at the edge of the city park, and its glass display cases with pastries and its marble-topped tables were also incongruous. The box was playing, but he was waiting as usual for the songs he had selected; only then was it right. Suddenly, after the pause between records, which, along with those noises—clicking, a whirring sound of searching back and forth through the belly of the device, snapping, swinging into place, a crackle before the first measure—constituted the essence of the jukebox, as it were, a kind of music came swelling out of the depths that made him experience, for the first time in his life, as later only in moments of love, what is technically referred to as “levitation,” and which he himself, more than a quarter of a century later, would call—what? “epiphany”? “ecstasy”? “fusing with the world”? Or thus: “That—this song, this sound—is now me; with these voices; these harmonies, I have become, as never before in life, who I am: as this song is, so am I, complete!”? (As usual there was an expression for it, but as usual it was not quite the same thing: “He became one with the music.”)