by Suah Bae
1. Friederike Mayröcker, “What I Call You When I Think of You and You Aren’t Here.”
2. Albert Ehrenstein: “Everything exists; only this world does not.”
The Non-Being of the Owl
December 2nd, 2008, Bielefeld: there’s been nothing much to report today. All I wanted to tell you is that the two large firs that stood near the house have been cut down. I suppose you realize what that means? It means that now when I go out onto the balcony, no longer the pleasantly shady spot it once was, the absence of those close, companionable trees, which had shielded me from the wind and any prying eyes, leaves me completely exposed, defenseless, open to the road. And that isn’t even the worst of it—the house opposite, which had always been concealed by the firs, now assaults the eye with its unsightliness. I never realized before how ugly it is. One of those typical ’50s monstrosities, glaringly white all over, its exterior gaunt and desolate. Now, when I sit at my desk and let my attention drift from my work over to the balcony, you can imagine what a hideous sight I’m confronted with! It seems whoever owns that house had the trees cut down so that his living room could get more light. Naturally, that kind of decision is up to the homeowners, and since I’m only renting I couldn’t protest. And after all, I’m the only one who’s being put out. How can a drab rectangular wall not set one’s nerves on edge? Forcing a human being to stare at that sort of heinous architecture every day is practically a form of punishment! It really is a shame that those firs are gone. Remember, it was only last summer when the owls would come to roost there every evening. They would quietly watch me for hours on end, absolutely still, and I took a photograph of them with that old-fashioned film camera I have. I was pleased with how the picture turned out, especially as you yourself really liked it. But the owls won’t come back here now that the trees are gone. Well, aside from that there’s nothing else of note. I wrote a review of a new work by my old friend Ludwig Harig; the days are still as bitingly cold as ever; tomorrow I’m off to spend another couple of days in Berlin and then Munich; nothing aside from that. I’ll probably be quite busy while I’m traveling, but all the same I’ll email you again if there’s anything I particularly want to tell you. So, goodbye for now. Yours sincerely.
After the funeral was over, Werner asked me if I wanted to take a walk into town. A good long walk, he added, all the way to the center. I looked up once more at the sky. Although the snowstorm hadn’t set in, the sky remained a pale ashen color, clustered with low smoke-like clouds. However, everyone else had already begun to make their way to a restaurant, where a simple meal had been arranged. This scene was slightly in contrast to how it had been before the various formalities were over. Earlier, everyone had formed an orderly queue, thrown his flowers down onto the casket and sprinkled a handful of earth from a jar, then made way for the next person, who would then repeat the procedure in exactly the same way. Now that the ceremony was over, people turned away from the covered grave and headed straight to the restaurant. The cemetery attendants in their epauletted uniforms watched us with an exceedingly patient air. Their expressions amply demonstrated their understanding of and consideration for our situation, stemming from a combination of businesslike familiarity and a necessary sense of detachment. The hole was very deep; even if you reached in you probably couldn’t touch the casket. The casket was a light brown color, the grain of the wood running in wide, distinct striations along the sides. Of course, this is the same for all caskets, but it gave such a strong impression of solidity, of substance. And that hole. That unforgettable hole. I have never seen another so deep in all my life. So deep, perhaps, that I could be buried in it standing up on the casket. Perhaps I had already been buried. Early morning on Thursday, March 12th, the interior of the damp red hole strewn with flowers, clumped together like the day-old snow piled up here and there in the corners of the cemetery, but soon to be filled in with earth. As I stood by the grave, hesitating, the others urged me to come to the restaurant now that we’d said our goodbyes, tempting me with promises of weisswurst from Bayern. I’m not fond of weisswurst. I never have been.
Early this year, when you sent me Kafka’s Dream, I was pretty excited. Not only because it was a book that in form very closely resembled one that I myself had been thinking about writing—not just recently but for a long time now, as long as I can remember—but also because I had a hunch that it would end up having a big influence on what I wrote in the future. Of course, the book you sent me wasn’t an individual work of Kafka’s entitled “Dream,” but rather a compilation of the passages from his various jottings and memos, letters and essays, etc., which were related to dreams. On opening the book, I found the following sentence had been used to begin the preface: One morning, when Gregor Samsa awoke from an unsettling dream, he discovered he had turned into a cockroach. The first sentence of The Metamorphosis. It affects the reader in the manner of a strong hint. A hint that the story this novel recounts is actually a nightmare the protagonist is having, or else a nightmare that Kafka himself had recalled after awaking from a troubled sleep.
After that, the very first thought that came to mind was, of course, connected to hints. Hints bubbling hot as lava inside the cold red hole, the thought that wordly relationships are in actual fact almost all formed through fragmented, anonymous hints. Hints that self-generate from someone’s offhand remarks, or from metaphors that coalesce entirely at random; hints from which all sense of genuine premonition has been removed. It seems that, perhaps, the point at which the two differ is that the former seem ignorant of their own import. And so today, too, we can write, quite casually, in a letter: I am hurting. And so I hope you’re not too surprised that I haven’t contacted you for a while . . . “But it isn’t a dream,” the preface continued. “It isn’t a dream. Kafka makes this point clear to his readers. Thus, from the very first he denies the possibility of a straightforward interpretation for an outlandish phenomenon that it is difficult to make readers accept as being realistic. And so, we are forced to accept the fact of a man having turned into a cockroach as precisely that, a fact, or at least as something that has truly taken place in reality.”
People hurt, and after experiencing the sudden death of a friend are riven with an anxiety and loneliness difficult to express in words, and thus fall deeper and deeper into depression, a depression that is incurable because you fear to examine its cause too closely; and you work, after all, you have spent your whole life working, except that now you are working like someone possessed, of course you are, and one day the realization comes that the work you have thrown yourself into is utterly meaningless, will never amount to anything more than a mountain of paper covered in your own poor scrawl, and that everyone passes away at some time or other, and that one day there will be no one left to recognize this handwriting as your own; then, though privately in the grip of a breakdown, a fiercely personal and somewhat obscure breakdown that you cannot explain to anyone else, nevertheless in spite of this you find yourself drawn back to the desk, ready to devote yourself to work once more; but then one day you open the paper and another friend has died, died suddenly and incomprehensibly; as if, drinking tea together, you turn to find that the friend who was there is there no more, they have parted from you forever without leaving even a single word behind, their mind was sliced through with a blade but no cry of pain issued from their mouth; you torment yourself with unanswerable questions, and you travel as though you have spent your whole life wandering, taking planes and trains, sometimes crossing oceans and continents and, turning to look out of the airplane window, your vacant stare is arrested by the view; a sequence you often repeat, causing melancholy to silt up inside you; and on one of those rare days when the sun is shining, you carry flowerpots out to the balcony and arrange them there; at times you crack a joke, and sometimes even smile; you write an email to someone in a foreign country, and go down to the post office to send a postcard; there is even the odd occasion when you are invited to some bright, cheerful place, and
sometimes you even go; and you also write, of course, and think of friends, both the dead and the living, meaning the dead and those who have not died yet but will; you fill your time with various appointments and engagements, attending exhibitions and recitals, going to the theater and, more than anything else, reading books; and on returning home, before settling down to work you stare once more out of the window, and think of the snowstorm, of faraway things, and of things that cannot think of themselves—and then you think of that thought; and you work all day; and before going to bed you stand holding the receiver in your suddenly trembling hand, but the long-distance call won’t connect; and eventually, one day, you hurt, again.
“I’m sorry this is rushed, but I just wanted to let you know why I haven’t been in touch for a little while”—that was how your email of October 9th, 2007 began. “At first it was simply a quick, work-related trip—to Leverkusen, in fact, in the Rhine area. It’s just a run-of-the-mill industrial town, but there was some kind of literary event going on, and there were these two writers who were to be awarded prizes, you see. The atmosphere was very good, and the food at the event was fantastic, so I was thoroughly enjoying myself. And just then I heard the news that a close friend of mine, the poet Walter Kempowski, had died. And so I had to go up to Lottenburg in north Germany straight away, via Bremen, in order to attend his funeral. Walter had had cancer for over a year, it had been no great secret, and now at last he had gone to his eternal rest, amid the grievous mourning of his friends. The funeral ceremony was conducted by one male priest and one female (since Walter was Protestant, just as I used to be). And by god’s grace we even had a day of fine weather. Well, it didn’t rain, anyway. After the burial, we left our places and went to drink coffee and eat butter cake. And it was only the night before that I’d left Frankfurt. The express train rattled through the night, speeding monotonously over the tracks, and I spent the whole time engrossed in a book. I’m staying at my sister’s here in Frankfurt; you met her that one time, if you remember. The Frankfurt Book Fair is just getting started, and no doubt I’ll keep myself well occupied wandering about between all the parties and other events, just like every other year. All the same, I hope you won’t infer from this that I won’t have time to think about anything else. I sincerely hope that you are well, and that your writing is going smoothly! Just now in the Süddeutsche I read a review of those diaries of Walser’s that were published this year. It was really very positive. I will bring the book for you when I visit Korea this November. With my greetings.”
Kafka’s dream world evoked exactly the same thoughts and feelings for me, almost as though we were twins; and at the same time it was so unusual, unique and neurotic, unbearably empty and beautiful. Our views on the subject of dreams had originally been so completely divergent that we had even gone so far as to quarrel over it. In contrast to my deeply-held belief that dreams are the stuff of literature and the imagination, for you they could be comprehensively and conclusively analyzed as a kind of seepage or inadvertent betrayal of one’s innermost self. And so, when I revealed to you that I wanted to write a book that would be entirely the product of my own dreams, you enumerated your misgivings one by one, first expressing your skepticism regarding the formation of such a literary work, and secondly, your belief in the rashness of a writer exposing their own personal psychology, then, after thus wounding me, you sent a much gentler email in order to qualify those previous criticisms.
Last night I walked past Munich’s university and art academy—beautiful, stately buildings that had at one time been capable of seizing hold of my very soul, and yet I passed them by entirely unmoved, like some barbarian. I was looking up at the black rainclouds, straining my eyes as if searching for something in the dark-drenched sky, but I’d come out without a hat and before I knew it water was trickling down through my hair. It was then that I discovered that those viscous raindrops, clearly outlined as they streaked down through the black void, were not in fact black themselves. I was on my way to meet Werner, and as I went down into the subway station to shelter for a moment or so, a woman who was coming up the stairs clutching some flowers in a paper bag asked me if it was raining outside. The Münchner Freiheit station was under construction. Sitting perfectly still on the platform bench and listening to the low buzzing of a power saw, which hummed like a swarm of bees, I watched as several trains in turn pulled into the platform then departed. The trains came at regular intervals, and the passengers boarded them with the same unvarying repertoire of movements; reflected in the carriage windows, and leached of color, their faces slid by like ghosts, and like ghosts they were distorted; the forces holding particles in their arrangements broke down as light and speed were pushed beyond the everyday, the web of veins surrounding the heart became clotted with sadness, and all disappeared into the deep tunnel.
One cold, dark night, Werner and I wandered here and there along Leopoldstrasse. We didn’t have any particular destination in mind. The first place we happened to drop in at was a sports bar, where they were showing a soccer game on a large wall-mounted television. After we sat down, by horrible chance some soccer fans began to pile into the seats behind our table, meaning we ended up sandwiched between them and the screen, which was directly above us. While we talked and talked, the fans kept their eyes riveted to the screen. The waitress was kind and friendly, and we ordered two glasses of wine. “It was as though a big lump of lead was suspended from my heart, weighing me down,” Werner said. “Until now, whenever I wrote something, I always imagined him reading it at some point in the future. He read the composition I had to write for my Abitur, and even quoted from it in one of his own books. Afterward, we remained friends for twenty-nine years. That was the kind of friend he was—the kind you don’t meet twice in a lifetime. And now a black hole has opened up inside of me. I suppose it will feel like this forever. We—both of us, now—have one other kind of sadness to contend with, unique among all the many sadnesses that exist in this world—that incomparable loss: ‘Jörg’s non-being.’” Leaving the sports bar, we wandered here and there around unfamiliar corners until we went in through the open door of another tavern and ordered another two glasses of wine. Werner kept up his monologue. “I’ve already watched my father die, and my older sister, too. She suffered for two years beforehand: breast cancer. And as for my grandparents, one morning in May 1945, right after the war ended, they were attacked out of the blue by the inmates who had been liberated from a nearby concentration camp (they had come to rob them, you see), murdered in their bed. My grandfather’s farm was a tumbledown place in an out-of-the-way village; my eight-year-old father saw the bullets pierce his parents’ chests. The bed became a kind of black mire, fouled with their blood and chunks of their flesh. My young father had to witness all that. And so believe me when I say you mustn’t be sad that you couldn’t see him at the end. On the contrary, it will turn out to be a blessing for you. I decided a long time ago, that every human should try and bring something into being from out of this loss, which wounds our hearts and afflicts our lives, and which we must nevertheless embrace. Something even more beautiful precisely because of its stemming from such loss, something that can touch us even more deeply because of it.” The waitress approached to tell us that she was sorry, but it was already closing time. Though it had stopped sleeting, outside was as cold and dreary as ever, and now the wind had picked up. The entire street fluttered like a black flag. Once more, we began to drift along Leopoldstrasse, which appeared larger and wider now that it was completely deserted.
Perhaps for you, dreams are themselves the fearful language that Werner and I poured out to each other that night, but for me they are the darkness that shrouded Leopoldstrasse, and the rain that came down in that darkness. Considering that, unlike Werner, I only write in Korean, I could never expect that you would read any of my works. Wasn’t that a matter of course? Werner and I, who can in a certain sense be considered as the children of your literature, connected you to our own writin
gs in that kind of contradictory fashion. We constantly wrote in relation to you, yet I was certain that you would never read what I wrote, which was somewhat ironic. And I had no doubt that in the future, too, we would continue to write in this way. I didn’t tell you, but I had already revealed my dream, our hidden dream, to the general public. Had already been thinking of revealing it. I knew it would be like this. This is how it is, already.
When I stepped inside, the restaurant near the cemetery was already warm with the bustle of the funeral-goers. People were taking off their black scarves and black coats to hang them up. On the dining table were wicker baskets filled with pretzels, and as soon as we sat down warm china plates of weisswurst were passed round. Someone put on that stirring Ernst Busch song, “The Ballad of the Old Pirate.” Several men even sang along with the refrain in their booming bass voices. The conversation was on anything and everything. For example, Mr. and Mrs. Rusch, from Frankfurt, who were sitting next to me, announced that in a few days they would be taking a vacation in America. Obama’s America, that is, Mrs. Rusch added brightly. And there was a whispering in my ear. In France this Ernst Busch song would perhaps be called a “chanson,” it said, as it sets Brecht’s poetry to music, but here in Germany it’s less certain as to which particular genre it should be included in. And take a look over there, why, it’s only Alexander Kruggerand, the famous writer and film director, and eminent intellectual, and lawyer to boot. Even you must have heard the name once or twice, no? A man recited the memorial address and a woman read out a letter. Mrs. Rusch showed me her personal method for neatly removing the casing of the weisswurst. Karin went straight up to the restaurant owner to tell them how pleased she was with the food and table settings. Turning to me, she asked if I had been to see the Kandinsky exhibition while it had been on in Munich, and which had closed the weekend before. Apparently one of her friends had waited outside in the cold for two hours in order to get to see that exhibition. When I told her that I had barely been out of the house, never mind Kandinsky, she tossed her hair, her expression plainly saying that I had been foolish to miss such a precious opportunity. They looked like truly experienced mourners. They were crying, of course, but in a seemly fashion, so as not to stain their collars. Just say goodbye now, Rusch had said to me as I stood by the grave, before promptly leaving the cemetery.