Peter Handke - Repetition

But wasn’t I taking the side of a foreign language against my own? Wasn’t I attributing this one-word magic exclusively to Slovene, at the expense of my native German? No, it was both languages together, the single words on the left and the circumlocutions on the right which — sign after sign — curved, inflected, measured, circumscribed, constructed space. How fortunate was the existence of different languages, how meaningful was the allegedly so destructive Babylonian confusion! Wasn’t the Tower of Babel actually built, though in secret, and didn’t it, after all, reach up into the heavens?

Day after day, I opened the book of wisdom more excitedly. Is there any word for the adventures I was experiencing? What can one say to express the simultaneous experience of childhood and landscape? There is a word, a German word, and that word is Kindschaft! [3] This brunch-word might be rendered as “childscape,” except that the word Kindschaft actually exists in the meaning of “filiation” or “adoption,” as in Romans 9:4, “the adoption, and the glory.” [Trans.] I clap my hands in amazement!

Time and again in my afternoons on the plateau I applauded the epic of words. And I laughed as well, not the laughter of ridicule, but the laughter of recognition and complicity. Yes, there is a word for the bright spot in a cloudy sky, a word for the way an ox runs back and forth on a hot day when he’s stung by a horsefly, for flame suddenly bursting from a stove, for the juice of stewed pears, for the star on a bull’s forehead, for a man on all fours extracting himself from the snow, for a woman stocking up on summer clothes, for the sloshing of liquid in a half-empty bucket, for the trickling of seeds out of seedpods, for the skipping of a flat stone over the surface of a pond, for icicles hanging from a tree, for the raw spot in a boiled potato, for a puddle in clayey ground. Yes, that’s the word!

But was my plan still valid? Wasn’t the word for “the sound of two alternating flails” obsolete, since the corresponding implements had for years been hanging inactive in the museums? Wasn’t “the sound of a falling body” the meaning that survived? Didn’t the term which in the past century designated only “emigration” lose its innocence when the events of the last war changed its meaning to forced “resettlement”? Didn’t the old book suffer from the absence of resistance fighters, of partisans, for whom the “partisan,” that obsolete, halberd-like weapon, was hardly a substitute? And even back at the time when the dictionary was compiled, were there not a striking number of designations for places where something had been but was no longer — for fallow land “where barley formerly grew,” for the place “where the barn used to be,” the stone surface “where bushes used to grow”? And even at that time, were footnotes not appended to certain particularly inventive designations, to the effect that they were no longer in use? And hadn’t the scholars included in their book any number of words which even their source, the oldest inhabitant in the most remote valley, had stopped using except in word games? So, instead of saying that words had fairy-tale magic, wouldn’t it be wiser to say that they performed the function of a questionnaire: What is my situation? What is our situation? What is the present situation?

Yet, at the same time, they were fairy tales; for in answer to every word that questioned me, even if I had never seen the thing it stood for and even if it had long departed this world, the thing invariably gave rise to an image, or more precisely, a radiance.

One afternoon on the plateau I came across the last word my brother had ticked. As in many other cases, the date and place were supplied: “At the front.” In the early stages of the war he always carried the book with him; it was only at the end that he left it home, along with his jacket, “as a baptismal present.” The rest of the dictionary, more than half of it, showed no further pencil marks and seemed never to have been opened; there were no prewar blades of grass or wartime flies pressed between the pages.

There I sat, contemplating the one word, leafing back to the others: was this a map of the areas of the earth or only of their memory — or perhaps even their obituary? Was it only the fault of the wars that human language in the time I was living in, in my time, was so inexpressive that we speakers always had to emphasize something? Why, at the age of twenty, did I feel tired at the mere thought that some interlocutor might open his mouth? Why did speech — even my own — often banish me to a muffled middle-class living room (where the windows might be “deaf” rather than “blind”)? Why had words lost all meaning? Why was it only the rare mot juste that made me feel that I had a soul?

In the village, on my way to this spot, I always passed a house, one wall of which merged seamlessly with a boulder. Similarly, when I now looked up from the old words, I saw the upper edge of the book merging directly with the air. The book formed a ramp guiding my gaze to the foot of the southern chain of mountains (one Slovene name for which, in literal translation, was “underwing”). There I saw a bare declivity, somewhat veiled by distance, which, however, because of the spruce at the edge of my little plateau, seemed only a stone’s throw away. The slope, overgrown with grass, was hatched to the very top with a dense pattern of disused cow paths. These looked something like stairways, which occupied the whole breadth of the slope and crisscrossed to form nets. The large horizontal pattern was broken by a smaller one of vertical grooves, in which the clay-yellow water of the afternoon rain was now flowing. Seen from a distance, the water moved so slowly that I thought of oozing stalactites. The dead sloping pasture made me think of the cows which had climbed up and down it in the past, an image of slowness, of hulking bodies, stopping now and then to pull up grass, not jumping over any of the steps as sheep or dogs might have done, their udders grazing the tips of the grass, their hooves often getting stuck in the mud. Sometimes they slipped from level to level, thus gouging out channels for the rainwater. One beast jumped up on the one ahead and was dragged a bit of the way on its back. One raised its tail and urinated so violently that I almost thought I heard it, followed by a plopping of dung. And then I actually saw the steaming of urine on the paths. So slow was the procession that it called to mind the crossing of a great mountain range, the baggage train of a migration that had been going on since the beginning of time. And precisely the emptiness — the empty network, the deserted crisscrossing paths, the empty, slightly irregular serpentines — reinforced my impression of animal clumsiness. Here, in contrast to the terraces of a mine or gravel pit, there were no helmeted men with machines moving busily up and down the slope, but an aimless mass almost marking time, with lowered heads, on all fours or slithering on their hind parts, a caravan of carriers and slaves, coming from nowhere and heading nowhere, for which the slope was not even a stopping place, except in the event of a broken leg or an emergency slaughtering.

I thought again of my teacher. As a historian, he took a special interest in peoples who had vanished from the face of the earth. He began his course almost ritually with an example taken from his study of the Maya (because of which the students had given him a related nickname). As a student he had explored the Yucatan for years: “As a geographer,” he said, “I grew tan, and as a historian, pale — as pale as I am now.” The Maya, he said, had never succeeded in building a state, because their peninsula “lacks a great river. Think of the Euphrates and the Tigris, or of the Nile.” Nor had they known the wheel or the pulley or the windlass; the only form of Mayan wheel ever found had been part of a small toy. But what most impeded their political development was their inability to construct a supporting arch; they knew only “pseudo-arches,” incapable of sustaining the roof of a room, let alone a hall. Their one element of cohesion had been religion. Instead of the wheel, they had had the roller, and with it they built roads, used only for processions to their sanctuaries in the jungle. But every peasant’s hut was also regarded as a temple. All life was governed by the heavenly bodies, which were looked upon as sacred, because instructions for daily life could be read from them. The steles dedicated to the sun indicated the time to sow; the hieroglyphics engraved in the stone served as a clock. In these ancient inscriptions, ancestors were also honored; the popular religion demanded that every family should know its origin; the first man, the ancestor common to all, had been made of corn.