H. Adler - Panorama

It’s curious that Launceston had indeed recently taken in strangers for a long while, though they were not there of their own free will, they were German prisoners of war who were placed here in a camp, where they walked around in British or more often German army uniforms, POW painted on the backs of the jackets, mostly in white letters, the outfits often spotted with color here and there and with patches of other material sewn on. Many of the prisoners of war were put to work in agriculture, Josef thinking about the men with curious interest and mild lament, and how they must have felt adrift here and sometimes bitter as they marched through the streets and byways of the old town, filing into the plazas in groups and astonished by the offerings in the shops, their dull gaze drifting across the unfamiliar surroundings. What kind of memories and what kind of hopes and what kind of apprehensions did the men who were allowed to freely walk around experience? They must certainly have thought their fortunes unjust, feeling conflicted about their lot, not knowing why they were granted all this and what for. Often they were practically homeless, just as Josef has been, or at least since then. Many prisoners were also displaced persons, having come from Romania and the Baltic countries, a good number also coming from Bohemia, and some of them had lost all of their loved ones or didn’t know what had happened to them. This causes Josef to think quickly and longingly and sadly about where his relatives and friends are, his relatives having been crushed and killed, there being only a few friends left and all of them scattered, the others ground up and killed. The prisoners didn’t know what was going on elsewhere, their heads were lowered out of shyness, rubbing their hands in embarrassment as they stood in front of the noble church dedicated to the penitent Mary Magdalene, a lovely Gothic building, rich with ornamentation from top to bottom and covered with figurative reliefs, the prisoners slipping through the heavy Gothic gates to the town, some also not too shy to make the easy climb to the castle park, where they lay down on the grass where Josef rests today. How comfortable the prisoners must have felt in the commissioned boots in which they had trod through the fighting fields of Europe and North Africa, while with such frightening glee the murderous places had once been called battlefields, these men having been on just such battlefields, traveling there in armored vehicles through the fields and sowing death and destruction in the countryside, the Conqueror having ordered it, they obeying, whether they wanted to or not. But they didn’t know what they were doing, even when they thought they did, they really didn’t know, nor did they know what to do in Launceston, why their fortunes had led them to this Cornish backwater and to such a remote land of plenty, as they forged plans for the future and thought about their families, gathering provisions that were sent back to their devastated homeland.

Then the prisoners of war disappeared from Launceston, they being released, though Josef still sees them, having visited the barracks where their camp was, seeing them in the fields and in town, hearing the soldiers talk, their coarse language still in his ears, but now they are gone, having headed back home, even if in many places they had been hounded from house and home, somewhere still serving as a home for them, somewhere a place where they are taken care of. Josef knows the prisoners of war are no less strange to him than the people of Launceston, since for him all people are remote, he unable to approach them, even though he would like to talk to them and even exchange pleasantries, but he is not a part of them and remains distant, there being no tie between them, neither joy nor sorrow. For who really knows another, even if one suffers under him? Each person is beyond the border of those closest to him. Any kind of closeness, brotherhood, or camaraderie lasts only up to a point in dreams, it being imagined as a wish or a demand, and yet it should come about. There should be something that binds one person to another, something that requires no dictate to set it in place or force it to happen, for that would be bad, because the urge should come from inside, though it must also be something that is not simply asserted by one’s ego but which instills something into this ego in order that it also exist in the other without killing itself. This, however, is inconceivable, even in feeling, it being the human equivalent of the panorama that no amount of will can allow one to escape this situation, the panorama therefore a great danger in itself, perhaps just another name for the root of all evil, it perhaps being best not to let oneself look or let oneself be seen. For then the panorama is the defeat of one’s humanity, it being inhuman, an addiction, a curiosity that can’t be satisfied, but also a sacrifice of all sanctity, since each is unmasked within his neighbor’s panorama as well.

In the history of humankind there has never been a time in which this circumstance was any different, even when one imagines some cultures or earlier times having had a different consciousness that was more collective and potent. Even then the individual was separate from all others. He felt it perhaps more easily, for though some conflicts were spared him, the basic conflict has existed ever since each person became self-conscious. How can one sink beneath oneself or climb above oneself in order to overcome the insularity of the observer and the observed? For this there were no sacred teachings, the lessons ignored this conflict, since no one yet dared ponder that which, when falsely pondered, led to madness, namely that which was self-evident, but which, when properly pondered, leads to the most solitary duress. Instead it was best left untouched, though perhaps this given was not consciously known, the self too powerful to acknowledge it, even when it realized its own powerlessness, yet the understanding of one’s powerlessness related only to the transitoriness of the one who realized it, perhaps also to his own imperfection, but never to the irreconcilability of being one being among many others.

Despite this Josef presses on, wanting to guard against such thoughts and instead to dip into the satisfaction of not knowing, though this will never be allowed him. He smiles at his limited education and knowledge, for he can find nothing that will help him, he recognizing that he must resign himself to it all, scaring himself, as he knows he must wipe out his own nature in order to change it, he realizing that Johannes’s tower mysticism has nothing to offer him. For Johannes never faced the kind of difficult question that plagues Josef in the midst of the panorama from which he cannot turn away, he drinking in with his gaze and his heart what the images offer up, though he cannot penetrate them, either, he being able only to take them in and complete the magic trick through which he heedlessly identifies reality with what happens, on which his own existence seems to depend, he projecting himself into the panorama and finding himself pleasantly surprised to see that he exists. Then some sort of oneness seems to have been attained, but it is a oneness founded on loneliness, there being no one else but Johannes at one time, and now the panorama. Thus this path offers no solution, so long as the conception itself doesn’t provide a solution to this ancient dilemma.

There may be a timely advantage to being spared this conflict, because then everything is much easier and schematically simplified, which lends one a certain contentment, such a person hunkering down in his booth, the cabinet satisfactory for observing the panorama in front of him, as he remains inside and sees only a few things that he absorbs, such that a harmonious connection with the universe appears to be maintained. Much more frequently encountered than the followers of Johannes are the frenzied, such as the Frau Director or Professor Rumpler, who are constantly on the move, though they don’t feel bothered by the fact that they are just observers in the panorama, even observers with closed eyes or eyes that shift away, fidgety guests sitting on their stools in the observation room full of restless visitors who cause so much trouble that they disrupt the attention of the other onlookers, for although the fools manage to keep all eyes on them, they have no more to say than do the others, though they hardly know that.