Peter Handke - The Jukebox And Other Essays On Storytelling

So, to judge by what you say about the successful moment, the successful life, whether eternal or individual, you regard the idea of the successful day as a kind of fourth power. And that leads you to endow this successful day with a fragrance that will never evaporate but, regardless of what may happen to you tomorrow, will somehow linger on. Thus it is time to ask once again: “How precisely do you envision a successful day?” I can give you no precise picture of a successful day. I have only the idea, and I almost despair of showing you a recognizable contour, bringing out the design, or tracing the original light trail of my day, or disclosing it in simple purity, as I longed to do at the start. Since there is nothing but the idea, the idea is all I can tell you about. “I’d like to tell you an idea.” But how can an idea be told? There came a jolt (the “ugliness” of this word has often been held up to me, but once again there is no other way of saying it). It grew light? It widened? It took hold of me? It vibrated? It blew warm? It cleared? It was day again at the end of the day? No, the idea resists my narrative urge. It provides me with no picture to serve as an excuse. And yet it was corporeal, more corporeal than any image or representation has ever been; it synthesized all the body’s dispersed senses into energy. Idea means this: It provided no picture, only light. This idea was not recollection of well-spent childhood days; it cast its beam exclusively forward, on the future. If it can be told, then only in the future form, a future story, such as “On a successful day, day will dawn again at noon. It will give me a jolt, two jolts: one pressing me onward, the other reaching deep inside me. At the end of the successful day, I shall have the effrontery to say that for once I had lived as one should live — with an effrontery corresponding to my innate reserve.” No, the idea was not about childhood days, the days of yore; it was about a grownup day, a future day, and the idea was in reality an action, it acted, intervened beyond the simple future, as a hortative form, with the help of which, for example, Van Morrison’s song might be rendered more or less as follows: “On the successful day, the Catskill Mountains should be the Catskills, the turn-off to the rest area should be the turn-off to the rest area, the Sunday paper should be the Sunday paper, nightfall should be nightfall, your radiance beside me should …” Of course, but how is that sort of thing to be brought about? Will my own dance be enough? Or should it be “Anmut” or “Grazia” or “Gnade” instead of “Grace”? And what does it signify that the time when the idea of the successful day first crossed my mind was not a long period of near-despair? The monster of speechlessness has given way to silence. In broad daylight his dream about the bird’s nest made of hay, flat on the ground, with the naked, cheeping chicks in it, recurred. The particles of mica in the stone sidewalk glittered close to my eyes. His memory of his mother’s warmth that day when she gave him all the money she had for a new watch strap, and his memory of the maxim: “God loveth a cheerful giver.” The flying blackbird’s wing that grazed the hedge far down the road grazed him at the same time. On the asphalt platform of the Issy — Plaine station the overlapping marks of a thousand different shoe soles imprinted by yesterday’s rain have now dried into a lighter color. As he passed the unknown child, the child’s cowlick repeated itself in his mind. The steeple of Saint-Germain-des-Près, across from the cafés, the bookshop, the salon de coiffure, and the pharmacy, was simultaneously translated to another day, removed from the “current date” and its moods. Last night’s deadly fear was what it was. The splintered shop window was what it was. The disorders beyond the Caucasus were what they were. My hand and her hip — they were. It was the warmth of earth colors from the path along the railroad to Versailles. A dream of the all-encompassing, all-absorbing book, long gone from the world, long dreamed to an end — was back again all of a sudden; or renewed? here in the daytime world, and needed only to be written down. A Mongoloid woman, or perhaps a saint, with a knapsack on her back ran across the pedestrian crossing in an ecstasy of terror. And that night there was only one customer in the bar of another small-town station; while the patron was drying glasses, the house cat was playing with a billiard ball between the tables, the jagged shadows of the plane-tree leaves were dancing over the dusty windowpane, and the urgent need arose to find a different word from “blinking” for the lights of a moving train seen through a curtain of foliage — as though the discovery of a single appropriate word could make this entire day successful in the sense that “all phenomena (or, in contemporary, secular terms: all forms) are light.”

Then at last, in disregard of logic or timeliness, a third voice, obscure, dim of outline, stuttering-stammering, a storytelling voice that seemed to come from below, from the underbrush, from far away, butted into our essay on the successful day. — At last? Or unfortunately? To its detriment?

Fortunately or not, an “unfortunately” is in order, for a while at least; for in the following a relapse into hairsplitting cannot be avoided. Does Van Morrison’s song tell of a successful day, or only of a happy one? Because in the present context a “successful day” was dangerous, fraught with obstacles, narrow escapes, ambushes, perils, tempests, comparable to the days of Odysseus on his homeward wanderings, a story of days that can end only in eating, drinking, reveling, and the “godlike bedding of a woman.” But the dangers of my present day are neither the boulder from the giant’s sling nor any of the other well-known perils; the dangerous part of my day is the day itself. Most likely this has always been the case, especially in epochs and parts of the world where wars and other catastrophes seemed far behind (how many diaries from how many so-called Golden Ages begin in the morning with resolutions for that one day and in the evening record their failure) — but when was such a day, yours or mine, ever seen before? And in an even more golden future mightn’t its problem be even more timely and acute? At least for people like you and me, here and now in our halfway peaceful regions, the “specific demands of the day,” quite apart from its duties, struggles, distractions — days as such, available days, each moment of which offers possibilities to be grasped at — have become a challenge, a potential friend, a potential enemy, a game of chance. But if such an adventure, or duel, or mere contest between you and the day, is to be withstood, conquered, made to bear fruit, it is essential that you receive no decisive help from any third factor, neither a piece of work nor the most delightful pastime, nor even from Van Morrison’s bumpy ride; indeed, even such a distraction as “a short walk” would seem to be incompatible with a successful day — as though the day itself were the undertaking to be accomplished and brought home folded and packaged by me, preferably right here on the spot, while lying, sitting, standing, or at the most taking a few steps back and forth, doing nothing but looking and listening, or perhaps just breathing, but that involuntarily — with no effort on my part, as in every other segment of life on such a day — as though total involuntariness were prerequisite to this success. And would it thus give rise to a dance?

And now two fundamentally different versions of the individual’s adventure with this day can be plotted. In the first he succeeds, the moment he wakes up, in casting off those dreams that are mere ballast that would encumber him on his course, and taking with him those that will form a counterweight to world events and the happenings of his day; in the morning air the earth’s continents merge; at the same time a crackling is heard in the leaves of a bush in Tierra del Fuego; the alien light of the afternoon, unbewitched from one moment to the next through knowledge of a fata morgana emanating from yourself; and from then on what’s needed for success is just to let night fall without losing your eyes for the dusk. And then, though nothing has happened, you must have it in you to go on interminably about your day. Ah, the moment when at last there was nothing but the old man in the blue apron in the front garden! And the opposite version? It must be short — preferably something like this: Paralyzed by the gray of dawn, a bundle of misery is cast adrift; his ship, named The Adventure of the Day, capsizes in the waters of the forenoon, so he never gets to know the silence of midday, let alone the hours after that — and ends up deep in the night at the exact same place from which our hero should have started out at the crack of dawn. To tell the truth, the words and images with which to relate the failure of his day do not exist, except for such worn-out allegories as we have just been using.