Peter Handke - The Jukebox And Other Essays On Storytelling

And he made it start again. The day when the idea of the successful day had come to live in him on the tangent of the suburban train high above gigantic Paris — how had it been as a whole? What was before that flare-up? What came after it? (“Ausculta, o filii, listen, my son,” said the angel in the church on Lake Constance, where the chalky vein had copied Hogarth’s Line of Beauty and Grace for him on the black stone.) — What had gone before, he remembered, was a nightmarish night spent on a mattress in an otherwise totally deserted house in a southern suburb of Paris. This dream had consisted of nothing, or so it had seemed, but a night-long motionless image, in which, amid unchanging twilight and soundless air, he was exposed to the elements on a bare, towering cliff, alone for the rest of his life. And only one thing happened, but that happened perpetually, heartbeat after heartbeat, utter forlornness — the planet was congealed, but in his heart tempestuous fever. When he finally awoke, it was as though his night-long fever had consumed his forlornness — for a time at least. Over the half-parched garden the sky was blue, for the first time in a long while.

He helped himself out of his feeling of dizziness with a dance step, “the dizzy man’s dance.” The world went green before his eyes, that was the cypresses along the garden wall. Under the sign of grief and of this green he began his day. What would I be without a garden? he thought. I never want to be without a garden again. And still there was pain in his breast, a dragon devouring him. Sparrows landed in the bushes, once again the birds of the right moment. I saw a ladder and wanted to climb it. A mason’s straight edge was floating in the gutter, and farther down the street the young postwoman was pushing her bicycle with the yellow saddlebags. Instead of “propriete privée, défense d‘entrer,” he read “ … défense d’aimer.” It was late morning, and as he walked he let the quietness of the place blow through his parted fingers. Temples, inflated sails. He was supposed that day to finish an article on translation, and at last he had an image for that sort of activity: “The translator felt himself gently taken by the elbow.” Work or love? Get to work, that’s the way to rediscover love. The man behind the counter in the North African bar was just starting up: “0 rage! O désespoir …” and a woman on her way in remarked “It doesn’t smell of couscous here. It smells of ragout, that’s because the sun is back again — merci pour le soleil.” Give me the day, give me to the day. After a long bus ride through the southern and then the western suburbs and a hike through the forests of Clamart and Meudon, he sat down at a table in the open beside a pond, finished his piece about translation, an activity which he abjured in his last sentence: “Not the confident, lowered glance at the existing book, but an eye-level glance into the uncertain!” The wild strawberries at the edge of the path seemed to look on and blush. “The wind took him over.” He thought of the raven which bellowed “like a bazooka” into his dream of forlornness. By the pond of the next forest he ate a sandwich on the terrace of the fishermen’s bar. A fine rain was falling in spirals, as though enjoying itself. And then, in the middle of the afternoon, that train ride circling around above Paris, first eastward, then northward in an arc, then back in an eastward arc — so that in a single day he had almost circled the entire metropolis — during which the idea of the successful day recurred, no, “recurred” was not the right word, it should have been “was transformed”: during which the idea of the successful day was transformed from a “life idea” to a “writing idea.” His heart, which still ached from his nightmare, expanded when he saw the “Heights of the Seine” at his feet. (Suddenly he understood the name of the department, Les Hauts-de-Seine.) Illusion? No. The true element of life. And then what? Now, half a year later, in the late autumn, he remembered how after the excessively bright life of the “casting of the eye,” he had positively welcomed the dark, underground stretch near La Defense. Exhilarated, he let himself be jostled by the after-work crowd in the hall of the Gare Saint-Lazare, which in French is known as the Hall of the Lost Steps. At the American Express Company near the Opera he provided himself with as much cash as possible after waiting in a long line with rare, and in his own opinion rather alarming, patience. Amazed at the size and emptiness of the toilets, he stayed there longer than necessary, looking around, as though there were something to be discovered in such a place. One of a crowd, he stood watching television in a bar on the rue Saint-Denis; a World Cup soccer match was on, and to this day he remembers his annoyance at not having quite succeeded in repressing all side glances at the streetwalkers who were overflowing from every doorway and back court of that street — as though ability to overlook were a part of such a day. And then what? He seemed to have lost consciousness of everything else, except for a moment later in the evening when he sat with a child on his lap at a kind of school desk, putting the finishing touches to his sketch about translation — in his memory, a strange picture of juggling with two hands — and for some time late at night when in a garden café I found myself unintentionally exchanging stories with the man sitting across from you — which had the effect of the gentlest possible way of breaking you open and sharing you with myself. Then as now the day seemed marked by that gigantic S-curve of the railroad line, which can be seen only in bird’s-eye view, but can be felt deep down inside to be the most beautiful of all meanders, parallel to that of the Seine below but swinging much wider, rediscovered a month later in a quiet corner of the Tate Gallery in the furrow in Hogarth’s palette, and yet another month later in the white vein in the stone found on the shore of the stormy, autumnal Lake Constance, at the present moment running in the same direction as the pencils here on my table: that is the enduring outline of the day. And its color is chiaroscuro.

And its adjective, like that of the idea which it gave me, is, as it should be, “fantastic,” and its noun, after my solitary night of peril, the word “with.”

So your idea of writing an essay about a successful day was itself a successful day?

That was before the summer. Over the garden the swallows were flying “so high!” I shared a young woman’s pleasure in smoothing out the curved brim of a straw hat; the Pentecost fête was lively in the night wind of our village, the cherry tree stood fruit-red beside the railroad tracks, the workaday garden came to be called the Garden of the Step Taken — and now it was winter, as, for example, it revealed itself on the railroad curve repeated yesterday for my reassurance as I could see by the handrail and the gray flowering of the clumps of wild grapes against the misty network of the Eiffel Tower, the snowberries whishing past the distant towers of La Defense, the acacia thorn jerking past the barely discernible hazy whiteness of the domes of Sacré-Coeur.

Once again: In the light of all this, was that a successful day?

No answer.

I think no, thanks to my imagination, I know it was. How much more could be done with that day, with nothing but that day. And now its momentum is in my life, in your life, in our epoch. (“We lost our momentum,” said the captain of a baseball team, which had been about to win the game.) The day is in my power, for my time. If I don’t give the day a try now, then I’ve missed my chance of enduring; more and more often, I realize, all the while growing angrier at myself, how as time goes on more and more moments speak to me and how I understand, and above all appreciate, less and less of what they say. I must repeat, I am furious with myself, over my inability to maintain the morning light on the horizon, which just now made me look up and come to rest ( into rest, we read in the Pauline epistle), so that, when I start reading, the blue of the heather still occupies the middle ground, a few pages farther on it is a vague spot in the Nowhere, and by the onset of dusk the motionless form of the blackbird in the bush is still “the outline of Evening Island after a day on the open sea,” and a tick of the watch later is nothing more — meaningless, forgotten, betrayed. Yes, that’s how it is: more and more as the years go by — the richer the moments seem to me, the louder they denounce me to high heaven — I see myself as a traitor to my day, day after day, forgetful of the day, forgetful of the world. Again and again I resolve to remain faithful to the day, with the help, led “by the hand” (“maintenant,” hand-holding, that’s your word for “now”) of those moments. I would like to hold them, think about them, preserve them, and day after day, no sooner have I turned away from them than they literally “fall” from my hands, as though to punish me for my infidelity, for, it can’t be denied, I had turned away from them. Fewer and fewer of the increasingly frequent significant moments of the day ripe, yes, that’s the word, ripen anything for me. The moment of the children’s voices this morning in the lane ripened nothing; now in the afternoon, with clouds drifting eastward, it produces no aftereffect — though at the time they seemed to rejuvenate the wintry forest … Should that be taken to mean that the time for my essay on the successful day is past? Have I let the moment slip by? Should I have gotten up earlier? And rather than an essay, mightn’t the psalm form — a supplication presumed in advance to be in vain — have been more conducive to the idea of such a day? Day, let everything in you ripen something for me. Ripen the ticking of the lanceolate willow leaves as they fall through the air, the left-handed ticket agent deep in his book, who once again makes me wait for my ticket, the sun on the door handle. Ripen me. I’ve become my own enemy, I destroy the light of my day, destroy my love, destroy my book. The more often individual moments resound as pure vowels—“vowel” is another word for such a moment — the more seldom I find the consonant to go with it, to carry me through the day. The glow at the end of the sandy path to the nameless pond: Ah! but a moment later it has faded, as though it had never been. Divine Being, or “Thou, the more-than-I” that once spoke through the Prophets and later on “through the Son,” dost thou also speak in the present, purely through the day? And why am I unable to hold, grasp, pass on what thus speaks through the day, and, I believe, or rather, thanks to my imagination, know, starts speaking anew at every moment? “He who is and who was and who will be”: why can what once was said of “the god” not be said of my present day?