by Nizon, Paul.
While I was applying the dubbin to my suitcases, the old dove man kicked up more of a racket than usual, probably to draw attention to himself. He doesn’t like it when I disappear out of his field of vision. Perhaps I’ve long since become part of the old man’s routine, perhaps keeping an eye on me is now part of his daily work.
The suitcases belong to my mobile household. I’ve carried manuscripts around in them for years, I feed, indeed line the cases with paper until they’re crammed full of it, and one day, if I’m lucky, everything goes into a book, the papers leave the suitcases, the book slips out of Bassano—just as I would like to imagine myself slipping out or going forth from this inner subterranean tomb, the writing of this book, as a different or a new person.
When I purchased the two cases, I lived in a small room not far from Zürich’s Bahnhofstraße, wall-to-wall with foreign workers from Italy, whose cooking late in the evening filled my room with a wonderful aroma, an aroma that mixed with the aroma from the cheese store on the main floor. At that time, I always wrote at night, because by day I was in pursuit of survival jobs at the newspaper. My window looked out on a renowned old beerhouse and restaurant, I could overhear the closing of the place, the bawling of the last drinkers, and early in the morning the awakening of the street under the footsteps of people who worked the early shift, from time to time the pleasant sounds of the city street-sweeper truck that sprayed water everywhere, and sounds of the café up the block being readied for business. Before I went to bed, I would take myself and my dog out for a walk. One of the foreign workers from Italy had lost the toes on one of his feet when someone drove over them, and since then he limped, but he didn’t complain when he told me about it, on the contrary, he seemed to be happy about it, because since the accident he had received a disability pension and easier work and, all in all, it was an improvement.
I’ve rented a lot of rooms or adjoining rooms like that, they enabled me to get around well in the city, and even in the world. They were always equipped with the same few things I needed for my work, and I never spoke about them to anyone because I wanted the ghosts that haunted them to stay put, or, to be precise, the working atmosphere. The rooms were also cases for my works in progress, and when the work was finally finished, the case was abandoned, its skin was shed. Once I had a henhouse overlooking Lake Zürich, an advertising agent had converted it into a studio, complete with shower and kitchenette, stylish, and the sleeping quarters were on a built-in second floor. The whole front wall was made up of windows looking out on the lake, but in spite of that, it was still obviously a henhouse, standing in the midst of other such coops, someone had previously run a poultry farm there. One time the water main broke in the studio-coop, the floor was under water, and the cat who always visited me during the day had jumped up onto my worktable to save herself; I didn’t know where the shut-off valve was located and ran over to the nearby factory, which was no longer in operation, instead it housed a commune, mainly women and children, the men went to work during the day, or to the university; by chance, one of them was home and came to my aid.
I’m no producer of books, not a book person at all, I complain to Beat. The books are only what I leave behind me, I creep through my books into the light or onto land, I say. When the book appears, I’ve already passed that stage, do you follow?
Just forget about it, says Beat, why not, no one is forcing you to write books, why don’t you just drop the whole thing?
All the same, I say to Beat, all the same, there’s always this sense of a mission, or better, an expedition that drives me on, and then there’s also the feeling of being underway once I start working on the book. But up to that point . . . Until I’ve reached that state . . . it’s . . .
Like carrying a child to full term, says Beat, go ahead and say it, if you have to allude to pregnancy.
It takes a damn long time, I think, before a bit of subject matter, something I’ve experienced, has been adequately shaken and fermented in the camel’s hump, that is, until it’s probably been digested, so that finally, maybe after ten years, it rises up as vivid material and becomes accessible. But until then, it stays in the dark, and it makes me really sick.
My problem is that I go along so knee-deep in a fog, so terribly in the dark, I say. What’s worse: I feel like I’m being buried alive, and I write to dig my way out. I try to pull myself out by the thread of my writing.
Now you’re going to have to explain yourself, says Beat. You mean, you can’t make up a story, or you don’t want to? Or do you have nothing to say, my friend? Why must you so absolutely have to see yourself as a hagiographer? If it’s an obsession, you know, a fixation, you could still be helped. You could go to a psychiatrist, damn it.
I say, Beat, I say, my only problem is that I don’t write about what I already know but rather to find something out; I get going on something unknown or subconscious, which is not to be confused with fantasy; I have to grope my way toward it, have to make contact. I have to sound out the terrain, if I knew what was going on, I wouldn’t have to write at all. My problem is scraping together the material, the preparatory process, not the packaging. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t think this can be explained to anyone who isn’t in the same line of work. And now I think, when it comes right down to it, I can only begin writing the book fermenting in me when I catch the scent of its most secret theme. When the thing reveals its identity, as it were, with its pulse, its body odor, its weight, its invisible life. When I smell it. Its most secret theme is not the essence of my own experience, it’s that part of it I can share with others, also with books, yes, it’s like a memory one can no longer place, something very old or ageless. There’s something legendary about my material that I can at most enshroud and wrap up, perhaps omit, but never express. It doesn’t appear in the plot or the action, it will swirl away or be silent on a lower level, and perhaps rise up from the whole like a mixture of scents.
It will be in the sentences. And I run after myself in my sentences in order to catch up with it. That’s when I feel as if I’m walking on the paper or on the water like a water strider. But what doesn’t find its way into a sentence in this sleepwalking fashion remains paper, mere paper, it’s a stillbirth and not worth mentioning.
A book, I thought recently, as I climbed the steps of Rue Becquerel to Sacré-Cœur, has to be as removed from its author, from the writer’s biography, his storehouse of ideas, as a soap bubble that frees itself from its wand and sails through the air, shimmering prismatically, intriguingly. A book has to smell like a memory. So much so that whenever the book, or some part of it, or even just its ambience comes to mind, the reader can no longer be certain where it came from; it’s become personal, become part of the reader, it moves you from within, stretches out its feelers. What was that, the reader wonders. What am I remembering now? It has become a part of your past. That’s how it has to be, I shout at Beat, dissolved in the stomach of memory.
Why are you yelling at me, are you out of your mind? asks Beat, who is stretched out on my sofa, leafing through a newspaper. He has an unlit cigar between his teeth, one of those long, thin things, which he, a nonsmoker out of principle, permits himself to enjoy only after his cognac.
Or might it be possible that my writing touches upon life only glancingly, at best, that it remains on its surface. And is it that I hope to be able to get along some day without it, without these aids, without crutches like this, by which I mean, without writing?
Are you still meditating on writing, asks Beat. Why not simply regard it as a business, he says. Look at it as a business or a skilled trade.
A business, I think, that’s well put. But what am I to do with my business during those horribly long incubation periods? When my income dwindles and then runs out, simply ends, just as a fire goes out; but the bills don’t stop, they arrive with their own peculiar regularity, they pile up on the table or in a drawer, and then come the reminders, the threatening letters; and still no prospect of money, where
is it going to come from? And I see nothing but bills, I start calculating how much I owe to everyone and how long I can possibly hope to defer payment. People who have no money should go out and work, not study. They should work, said my Uncle Alois, even if they have to sweep up horse dung (as he said back then).
And now I’m starting to see everything in the light of those bills, those unpaid bills that are floating to the surface of my consciousness like corpses in a lake; I sum up my life and arrive at the most discouraging result—a deficit that can never be made up, it seems to me that my whole life has been spent in the red; I think of the effort, despair, illusions that my books have cost me, I see my life as a failure, but then also as a presumptive fraud; if you’re never in the money, you’re not worth much, says the Robber in Robert Walser’s novel, and: a person who has no money is a wretch. They’re right, the people who think that way, I tell myself at such moments; I feel guilty when I think of them, also of the Arabs and other minorities in my quarter. Even as a child, I felt ashamed of my contemplative nature.
All the fears and doubts I’ve ever had about living as a writer come creeping out and destroy my confidence.
Beat is of the opinion that the business of writing is basically no better and no worse than any other business, a skilled trade like every other one; like that of the cabinet-maker next door, he thinks, or pretends that’s what he thinks; and as with the cabinet-maker, the only thing that matters is the quality of the work produced, as far as he’s concerned: the degree of quality, of perfection, nothing more; it’s simply ridiculous to claim that society ranks writers higher and has some sort of special sympathy for them.
If I went along with Beat, I’d say that books are the products of a craftsman, meant to be used; if I should say to myself, books are devoured or deciphered with difficulty, they entertain, educate, denounce, enlighten, amuse, please; they blossom for a season and retreat back into the bookcase, along the wall of books, where they become just another furnishing, like the chest of drawers made by the cabinet-maker, like the wall-hanging; or else they become cultural possessions; that’s all well and good, I guess . . . but how do I reconcile this view with the irrational, sometimes dreadful conditions in which the books were written, with these other costs? And what about the less-visible aspects of the question, the vitality of certain books, how they captivate, take one’s breath away; the depth, the explosive, life-bringing force, the life, that distinguishes a book, if it’s a genuine book, from others, and which it continues to deliver, to radiate, even when it’s gone back on the shelf? That’s a question that can be left to the reader; certainly you don’t need to bother yourself about it, I told myself. Just do your work, do it as well as you can.
I say, Beat, I say, it’s clear that one is inclined to overrate this wretched business, above all because it’s such lonely one; and one would like to consider a life lived in service of this particular function as unique, one would like to see one’s own person as standing apart, and why not. Furthermore, I am in no way accountable to you, I am the organizer and owner of this enterprise, I bear the risk, although I by no means despise cabinet-makers and office workers as a result.
And someone like you chose freedom, sneers Beat. You’re oversensitive! he says. My God, writers!
And now I think about how I sometimes lean over the counter in the noise of a bustling bar, people talking and playing pinball, and I become lost in thought, it’s beautiful standing there like that, at a bar, surrounded by the city, and how I suddenly start to see, to feel, to murmur, and the fish are jumping; and now I know that by virtue of this waiting and walking and dreaming, this journey, I will be able to preserve some of what I experience—but when these functions fail, and everything seems dead in me, and I have really nothing more to show than this freedom, which now looks as if it’s the freedom to throw everything away, or to fall by the wayside; and I get scared, and I picture myself appealing to a foundation for the arts for assistance; I would direct my request to the administrator, and with reference to my business I would ask for support, for immediate aid, if possible, urgently, it is urgent, most honored sir, I might add; and I would receive the answer: very well, we will examine your case, but we request that you in the meantime exercise some patience, you must understand that we have to think of everyone, even of the cabinet-makers, florists, Trappists, of everyone who is creating culture, not just you . . . Stop it, I say to myself, books are a gift, even if they have to be made and above all lived.
Life is getting ever more virtuosic, and a person is like a cello; it doesn’t play if it isn’t touched by the artist’s bow. I read something like that in Maxim Gorky, I think.
I still hadn’t reached the point where I could start working on my book, but I kept on as before, making notes as a warm-up exercise, to keep in practice, and I let the fish jump when I went for my walks, and when I was back home again, I tried to remember the jumping of the fish in my thoughts, sometimes I ran right back outside again IN SEARCH OF A LOST FISH, but then I sat down at my typewriter and let the carriage run back and forth as I ran after the sentences, letting it flow until the spring tide had passed.
I’m really not chasing after life here; if anything, I’m chasing after words, at present I’m a seeker of words, but where is life, I ask myself
and then I dreamed that I was riding on a train, I found myself in the same compartment as other writers and said to the man sitting next to me, I have recently discovered that when tying my shoelaces I can hear what’s being said somewhere far away, I’ve found that I can listen to my shoelaces as I would listen to a tape recorder, and while I’m staring into the face of the man next to me, which at first shows disbelief, then an indulgent smile, I hear myself continuing, it’s unbelievable, totally unbelievable, isn’t it, but it’s true. This supernatural ability fell right into my lap, I could hardly fail to notice it; I was doing something as ordinary as tying my shoes, after all. And right after that, I dreamed that I could swing and fly through the air with the help of a piece of paper. I no longer know exactly how I managed from a standing position to swing myself up into the air with the piece of paper in my hands, but, in any case, I could do it in my dream and tried it again and again, every time with success, and then I was flying, hanging down from my piece of paper, I held on to it as if I was hanging from a dragon, at a height of two thousand meters above a landscape large enough to contain three whole countries, it was a gigantic territory, my territory, and the landscape was a hilly, early spring greenish brown or brownish green, a lonely region, an abandoned and more likely Swiss than French landscape, I could see it effortlessly, from my bird’s-eye view, I had the overview, and at the same time not even the slightest sign of life down below escaped me; and then later on, after I had landed and was walking normally again, on my two feet, I happened to meet up with a crowd of people who must have been journalists, reporters, who had gathered here for an important occasion, and now I recognized my dear friend Beat in one of the groups, he too was a reporter, I went up to him, although he waved me away, annoyed, he had no time, so I quickly jotted down the miracle that had happened to me on a notepad, writing down the news, I’m not sure why, probably because I was in high spirits, in the form of an uneven quatrain, tore the page from my notepad, and slipped it to him, I had to tell someone about it, and later, when Beat finally had time for me, he said this quatrain really wasn’t anything surprising, it wasn’t well written, and thematically of little interest, he didn’t even comprehend my message, he had taken it for a poem, unable to think of anything except as a reporter, or so he appeared in my dream.
So I dreamed of miracles or of wonderful talents, and when I asked myself about the meaning of these dreams, I had to think of writing right away. I thought, the only thing this can mean is that the trick with the paper and the feat with the shoelaces have something to do with writing. But why do my shoelaces, of all things, let me hear what is being said somewhere else, and probably not just at some local, spatial r
emove, but also in a different time, in the past? Well, I said to myself, with your shoes you’ve already wandered and walked and now roamed a considerable way through life, they’ve probably stored these voices, they haven’t forgotten, to some extent they’re carrying them along after you; if you’re humble enough, they’ll share it with you. You have to bend down, you have to bend down to yourself, then you’ll be able to hear it.
And as far as the flying is concerned, that can probably only mean that by virtue of this piece of paper and what you undertake or manage to do with the paper, you can gain not only insights, but also overviews and outlooks that you wouldn’t otherwise have, you let your eyes wander over a vast terrain by holding fast to the paper, you’re like the hawk circling over a gray landscape, and when something moves, it swoops down and grabs that thing with its talons, you can grasp what’s alive by virtue of this sailing circling, you just have to want to do so, at least that’s what the dream means, I tell myself.
I was certainly no interpreter of dreams, at least I hadn’t seriously attempted it until then, but recently, in fact ever since I’ve been here in Paris, alone in my boxroom, and waiting for my book, but also for the girl to reappear, my dream life has been extraordinarily rich and eventful, it’s even seemed to me that my dreams were speaking to me very directly, as if they wanted to help me, yes, I had slept a lot and dreamed a lot, and maybe it was because of my dreams that I had gone to bed so often in the middle of the day or the afternoon
and now another dream occurred to me: I found myself high up on a very wobbly scaffolding, it was a scaffolding made up of several makeshift racks piled on top of each other, and besides that, it was on wheels, a high, fragile scaffolding, and I was on top of it, which meant I had made a mistake climbing up this thing, exactly how I’d done it was unclear to me, but it was very clear that I’d never get back down again without risking my neck, I was in mortal danger; I was afraid, and was thinking, as I cautiously peered over the edge and down into the depths: I’ll plunge to my death from this wobbly tower; I’m not going to get out of this alive, I thought, already starting to panic, and at the same moment I recognized that not far away, within arm’s reach, was a window ledge, I reached out and managed to pull the whole wobbly tower, with me on top of it, over to this white window ledge; I’ll hold fast to it, I thought, and then suddenly a big window opened inward, nearby, and in the window stood one of my oldest friends; it’ll be easier this way, he said, climb in, and I climbed into the BUILDING.