by Peter Handke
I, too, was so overwhelmed at some moments by the thought that twosomeness among friends rested on complicity and was sheer illusion that I had to pull myself together so as not to see grounds for a squabble or even a schism in every comment made by the person I happened to be with. One time I let something of the sort slip out, and a friendship ended on the spot. If it had been love, the end would at least have been drawn out. Here there was not the slightest hesitation. We immediately burned all bridges. It was as if we had both been waiting for a sign before putting an end to our game of lies. Enmity broke out between us like that between two leviathans, even more powerfully from his side than from mine.
But wasn’t it more than simply our loneliness that had previously attracted us to each other? And why did this kind of falling-out never threaten us when we were in a group? Why, when it detoured through other people, did our friendship cease to be something flimsy, proving instead heartwarming, cheering, for instance in a glance exchanged over the shoulder of a third party, in our simultaneous noticing of the same detail, in a common determination to overlook or overhear something unpleasant? Also, when in the midst of hustle and bustle one merely sensed the presence of the other person, an exchange would take place between us friends, by roundabout ways, past the heads and bodies of the others, of events, sights, sounds. Such experiences helped me grasp Epicurus’ epigram, “Friendship dances rings around the human world.”
In this connection a little parable (which does not quite fit, and is not meant to): In the forest that extends westward from Paris over the hills of the Seine to Versailles, there used to stand, in the clearing of the Fontaine Ste.-Marie, an old dance hall from the turn of the century, where, in cages stacked one on top of the other, the proprietor of the inn next door raised birds for participation in international competitions. While their singing and their colors were of great importance, it was primarily the bearing of these altogether tiny creatures, particularly that of neck, head, and beak, that counted. The most showy color, the finest voice was not enough; what made the difference was the way the bird turned its head. A bird could be considered for a prize only if its body, neck, and beak did not form a straight line, and also only if it did not suddenly break into song. Singing to another bird could not be done directly; a crook, a bend, a curve, was required, and one that aimed slightly past the other, out into space. Deviation, along with this slight oblique turn, was right, and also beautiful. As he showed me through the shed and explained the rules of competition, the breeder pointed out to me the many incorrigible birds who burst out in song, and their directness actually did strike me as crude and inappropriate. It was unacceptable. Then my patron removed the cloth from his champion’s cage. The bird was no larger, more colorful, or more elegant than his fellows. But when his master positioned himself in front of him, he stood up straighter, and his neck and head formed a bent arrow, with the beak as its point. The arrow was aimed a few degrees away from the man, and at the same time slightly upward. Although the bird, unlike those around him, remained silent, he seemed to be singing. Or is it only my imagination that now makes it so?
The older I became and the farther I moved from my native region, the more it meant to me to be among friends now and then. The clan from which I come has almost completely died out, and my own small family, which the dreams of my youth conceived or conjured up for me, has fallen apart; at the same time I cannot even muster the certainty that I have failed.
To be united with my friends, not merely with one of them, but with several at the same time, preferably with all those who have been scattered to the winds, has meanwhile become my highest goal, aside from reading and writing. But I must not be the focal point; none of us should be that, and this also entails meeting in a place equally familiar or strange to each.
In poem after poem, Friedrich Hölderlin, in an era that was probably not much rosier than mine, could as a rule call as many as three things “holy.” In my story that adjective would have a place at least once: for our rare celebrations of friendship. Each time—and often years intervene—I feel more moved by such gatherings, most of which have a prosaic purpose. Earlier, when I still felt attention directed at me, I would acknowledge it with an abnegating gesture, breaking the existing harmony by employing a counterspell. Now, when none of us any longer is at the center of attention, I gaze into the circle and would like to lift up my voice when the moment comes.
I would probably have less to say explicitly than any of the others. I would begin humming, would fall silent in the middle, and, like one of the singers from that flamenco family on a street corner in the mountains of Andalusia, gaze about wordlessly. And like that time in Baeza, someone else would take up the arabesque and carry on the sound, narrating more thoroughly than I, and more sonorously, for the continuation would issue from the throat and thorax of my friend who is a real singer (at the moment on his way through the wintry darkness of Scotland, by the bay of Inverness, where the buoys bobbing up and down are the heads of a herd of seals, he is trying out the lyrics of what he calls his “last song”).
Yet as of today the proper moment for me to lift up my voice has not come; or I have missed it every time. And later the sense of being deeply moved left me. Things between us could even become dangerous again?
The earth has long since been discovered. But I still keep sensing what I call in my own mind the New World. It is the most splendid experience I can imagine. Usually it comes only for the flash of a second and then perhaps continues to glow dimly for a while. I never see visions or phenomena with it. (Inside me is distrust toward all those vouchsafed illumination without its being a necessity.) What I see as the New World is everyday reality. It remains what it was, merely radiating calmness, a runway or launchpad from the old world, marking a fresh beginning.
“The swamps of mysticism must be drained!” someone said in a dream. “And what will we do without the swamps?” someone else replied. That new world may have appeared to me earlier as a revelation, as a second world, the other world. Meanwhile, now that I am waiting for that moment, it brushes me almost daily, as a particle of my perception, and its space flight, followed by stocktaking and reflection, merely indicates that for the moment I am in a good frame of mind. Birds flying in a triangular formation can thus become two airy balls in my armpits.
Often the New World reveals itself in an optical illusion, which makes me perceive this mast not as an object but rather as the space formed by it and the other mast. And the New World wafts toward me less from nature than from a place with human traces. No-man’s-land, yes: yet as I pass by, a brush fire is burning there, the branches freshly shoved together. A plank on a garbage heap. A ladder leaning against an embankment. A spanking new house number on a shanty. A stack of abandoned beehives on the edge of a forest in winter.
The special thing about such a New World is that it presents itself as completely, unmistakably there, and at the same time as not yet entered by anyone. But it can and will be entered! The New World has simply not been penetrated yet, made known, has not become general property. And one person alone with it does not count. And at all events access to it must be created, and is sorely needed. The New World can be discovered. Why else did I see those who would bring it to light neither as dreamers nor as fantasts but as craftsmen and engineers? What was keeping them?
Sometimes I am on the verge of saying that this pioneer world that reveals itself to me, more and more as I get older, glimpsed in passing and even more often in a glance over my shoulder, ready for my, and our, breakthrough, is not new, but rather the eternal world.
If indeed eternity, however, it would not be something that is always the same. It would have changed over the course of history, would have become more inconspicuous, would no longer form a consistent whole, would instead be taking place somewhere off to one side, more distinct in its remoteness—though not too much so—than in the middle of things. It seems to me as if the New or the Eternal World has its history as well.
I do want to stick with “new” after all. I had my New World experiences in the last few years not only with pieces of equipment and no-man’s -landscapes but also with people. But there they occurred less often and also took a different course. They began splendidly like the other kind, yes, even more splendidly, and in the end they made me miserable. I learned that it was both natural and right to be with certain other people. I had already had this thought earlier: with my wife, with my son. (The former has disappeared, the latter has become a distant friend, just now on the road between Yugoslavia and Greece.)
In every case it had been a single person, or a twosome. It was true that mankind had always counted for me, yet never as a belief, rather as a source of powerful emotion that could not be eliminated by any rational measures. In the meantime it has ceased to be a question of any sort of belief in mankind. It is that rational New World of which I become aware in glancing over my shoulder.
From an exchange of glances a couple of weeks ago with a cashier at the shopping center up on the plateau I learned how extraordinary it was to be fond of someone else, an unknown person—and how natural it seemed at the same time. In harmony with oneself, with a thing, with a space, with an absent person: that’s fine with me. But nothing could surpass the harmony I was feeling now with the person across from me. The difference was that, in contrast to perceiving the New World in a landscape, I now went on without air in my armpits. To be sure, I viewed permanence with one person and another as the ne plus ultra, and that no longer merely moved me. It was overwhelming. But the experience tore me apart. For one side of me felt excluded from something at which quite a few apparently succeeded. I shied away from happiness in a communal setting, out of a sort of fear of annihilation. Hence also the rareness of such New World moments with my contemporaries and the lack of consequences, because they occurred not with my friends but almost exclusively with unknown passersby? I began to wonder whether this meant that my end was near.
Didn’t I decide to be a marginal figure in this story?
The heroes were supposed to be the others, the architect, who, searching in Morioka in northern Japan for an unbuilt-up piece of land, slithers over the hummocks of ice; the singer, just now caught in a winter storm that keeps flipping over the map in his hands as he makes his way to the prehistoric stone monument in a meadow behind a farm up in the hills to the south of Inverness; my son, who just came of age, and, after his year as a volunteer with the Austrian mountain troops and after soon-interrupted university studies in history and geography, is working at odd jobs, the day before yesterday as a builder’s helper, yesterday morning as a language instructor, last night as a tile layer in a Viennese café, this morning, on his first journey undertaken alone, sitting on one of the limestone blocks that line the harbor basin in Piran, Slovenia; the woman I consider my special friend, who set out a week ago, unaccompanied as usual, on an excursion that will take her on foot and by boat from bay to bay along the southern coast of Turkey; the priest from the far-off village where I was born, who still makes his rounds in that same area, a traveler only in my eyes; my friend the painter, about to shoot his first film on the meseta, in Spain; and that is not quite all of them.
In the books I have written since giving up the legal profession, the hero is more or less me myself. If I reached people that way, I was successful only because I was a character in a book.
Whenever I have wanted to be a protagonist in life as well, I have not managed to sustain the role. Time and again I have thought I could pull it off and made the attempt: as captain of my school team, as a speaker in the student senate, as a defense attorney in criminal court, then as the only diplomat who publicly spoke out, abroad, against his highest superior, the federal president; and likewise as a lover, at times even as a womanizer, then husband, father, builder, gardener, vineyard owner. In every case, after a more or less promising beginning, I fairly soon fell out of character. As a hero or man of action, after the first surge of activity I became a charlatan. I stopped the play, which I had initiated with the best intentions of living life completely. I am too impulsive to be a protagonist in society. As a hero in everyday life I am a public menace. When I confront my past as an activist I see over here a house in ruins, over there a neglected plot of land, perhaps also a betrayed soul, maybe even a dead victim. In my writing, where I could shut myself off from the others, and as the hero of my books, I could act differently, above all more reliably, and there I was primarily and ultimately a danger only to myself. Interestingly enough, I often received the most positive reaction for my equanimity.
Yet I now think I am finished with myself, at least as far as stories are concerned. I have hardly anything left to tell about myself, and that I consider progress. So I note the following: if you are looking for a person to assume a major role in the community, I am out of the question, and I am out of the running for the time being as the central character in my narratives. In life, the proper place for me is that of an observer, and in my writing I want to posit myself less as an actor than before and function first and foremost as a chronicler, chronicling both the year in this region here and my friends far and wide beyond the hills, and I want to preserve the chronicler’s distance and tone in regard to myself as well. My decades of working with legal texts, especially the most ancient ones, like those of Roman law, will guide me and trace the line I must follow.
But who knows? I really want to be decisive, yet already questions are cropping up. Wasn’t it possible for observation to be a form of action as well? Something that affected what happened and even transformed it? Wasn’t a certain observer also a possible hero? Hadn’t I learned, either through directing my gaze at someone, or experiencing someone’s gaze on me, that looking could avert an act of violence, could let the air out of a scream, bring a toy to life, turn a joke into something serious, blow away a delusion, eliminate a reason for depression? I once saw such a gaze captured in faces painted by Giotto: narrowed, very elongated eyes, as if they were merely glancing at what was happening and at the same time intimately participating in it. Such observation would impose shape, impart rhythm, cast light.
And hadn’t it been known to happen that observation led to something’s being created, an object, an other, a connection, even a natural law? And how far did I get recording such a thing in a reportorial style? How adequate was the language of the chronicler to capturing his own involvement or his possible initiating role? No matter how comprehensive the Latin network of codicils appeared to me, airtight and yet applicable with the lightness of air to all the vicissitudes of life: could the precepts of an imperial legal system also provide a model for my present plan of writing?
I have already touched on this: when I glance behind me, I see a thing differently than if I were looking at it head-on. For a long time in my life this looking behind me always occurred abruptly. I hardly ever took in more than a distorted image.
It was different when women turned their heads sometimes, on a street. Women glanced over their shoulder so naturally; it seemed to suit them. Their beauty became accessible as a result. What emanated from their glance was not so much a provocation as serenity, or a line traced in the air.
Twice a story resulted. The first one came about on the great drawbridge in Maribor, with the woman who in the meantime is my special friend from afar; the other during my time in America on a windy street in El Paso with the woman who then became my wife, whom our son calls “your woman from Catalonia,” and whom I, wherever she may be at the moment, consider (under certain circumstances) my enemy. The woman from Catalonia continued to glance behind her long after we had ceased to be strangers—on many streets, bridges, landings, wood roads. And when her glance fell on me, I always swore anew to take it as the measure of all things, not to let myself be dissuaded from considering it the only one that counted in all our other moments. This woman’s glance behind her seemed so joyful to me, so kind, so innocent, so original, so refreshing.
In th
e meantime I myself am the only one looking over his shoulder. Starting with the period when I renounced a life of action, I even cultivated this habit, and I now practice it purposefully. A glance to the side glides into a turn to the rear hemisphere. From a certain degree on, my head-turning is feigned, but so unobtrusively that if bystanders happen to be looking they miss it.
With moments like this I hope to achieve something, and when my excessive consciousness does not spoil the game for me, I do succeed. First of all, so long as it is peacetime, objects light up as they never would if viewed frontally. It is an inner light that provides shape and focus. In this way I impose a pattern on clutter, whether of underbrush or buildings. And the pattern is set in motion. Along with the pattern I derive a theatrical spectacle from this behind-the-back world.
Time and again I find myself surprised by the richness that exists in places where there is very little to see, or nothing but air. The spectacle fills me with amazement; “Oh!” is often my only thought about something seemingly not worth mentioning in the countryside behind me. Or I think, as I become aware of a group of trees, a cluster of roofs—these things seem to have gathered in as close as if they had crept up on me and were waiting to take me by surprise—like an athletic coach: “So: you’re all here. Come on, guys, let’s move it!”
Since I began to deny myself any social life, this has become a feature of my activity, a part of my day.