Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

After a series of nights like this, the moment came when my son strolled toward me in the early light with the dreamlike gait of a dancer, and it became a certainty to me that I would reject him. I wanted to disown my child. And I had that thought in these very words, fired up by my intention, as though, having made a breakthrough to a biblical story, I had attained a life goal. While he was asleep in his room, I paced up and down in the yard and repeated, “I don’t know you anymore; go away from here.” But I never spoke any such thing out loud, and not because on one of the following nights he had an accident but rather because the other story was still there between us, biblical or not.

Yet I know of one father or another who has expressly disowned his son. How irrevocable such ruptures are. How such fathers retroactively deny their sons any good qualities, even those things for which they once unhypocritically praised them to the skies. And besides I am preoccupied with the question: What happened to the prodigal son after his return? And: What if in reality God the Father had long since forsaken his human, crucified son — see God’s disdainful expression in many of his oldest portraits. And: Is there also a prodigal father?

These are my background stories with my friends, who, while I sit here in my study off the yard, are on the road in different parts of the world on behalf of a new — what kind of? — story.

But what is it that makes precisely these people my heroes, and not my many other acquaintances, who lend themselves far more obviously to being exemplary figures and contemporaries: my young journalist friend, who just last summer was covering the Tour de France and in the meantime has become a war correspondent; the professor of ancient languages, who now and then comes by here on his Japanese motorcycle, dressed all in leather, each time with a different beautiful woman riding behind him? Besides, don’t I know a great deal more about these acquaintances?

Yes. Yet precisely the fact that I know so little about my son, my woman friend, the singer, the architect and carpenter, the priest, the reader, the painter, and the filmmaker makes them interesting to me or draws them to me, more from afar.

That means: fundamentally I do not know any more about all the others, but the little I do know about them already seems to be everything, as if there were nothing more to be learned beyond that. No matter how I view them: they look complete to me, as Austrian society used to; inside me there seems nowhere else to go with them, and not merely because most of them have succumbed to what the petty prophet of Porchefontaine calls, with reference to all of contemporary humanity, “desperate self-deification.”

The attractive quality of my heroes is precisely that I see them as unfinished and cannot imagine that that would ever change. Unfinished? Incomplete. Incomplete and needy. And they will be incomplete and needy all their lives. Close to despair, none of them will seek salvation in the worship of false idols.

Of all those whom I know somewhat, only these seven are this way: eternally unfinished, incomplete, needy, cool, hot, always on the go. My poor carpenter, my rich painter, my loafer woman friend, my empathizing reader, my high-handed singer, my somnambulistic son, my jubilant pastor, the only ones with whom I can be together from afar, strike me, in the morning perhaps more, in the evening perhaps less, as figures of light — bold, fiercely decisive. Whenever I was in their presence, I had only to touch them accidentally to feel to the very tips of my fingers that they were in my head.

I expect something of us — what? Something from the New World. That is unthinkable for me with a single hero, even with two: but from three on it becomes exciting. And to make clear what I mean, I shall offer a variation on an experience of the early Gregor Keuschnig: place beside the pencil on the table a hairpin, for instance, and push a shard of mirror next to them: how astonishing this threesome is. But how much more so when you then roll a pebble toward them, and fifth, blow a piece of string in their direction, and sixth, plop down a lump of resin, and seventh — is this maybe too much already? — nick an eraser among them: what a metamorphosis occurs in every one of the individual objects with each addition, and likewise in all of them together. What an experience, and how it wakes one up, tension created out of nothing, nothing at all.

Yet as far as my heroes and I are concerned, there have been times when I thought in terms very different from “we.” One of the incentives to my present undertaking was actually the question: “Who is the hero? All of you or I?” In the midst of accompanying these absent ones, at the same time as I was observing things around me, the thought repeatedly interposed itself that I was the only one of us doing the right thing with his life. Only a moment ago I might have been wafting away with the smoke from the house next door or traveling with the passengers in the train to Brittany up there on the embankment, at the same moment so wrapped up in a distant friend that what he was doing just then was a first-person experience for me, and already a voice inside me was severing me from such unity, insisting that my life was entirely unique. Particularly in the backyard, there and present in the procession of impressions offered by the seasons, from within the earth-spanning stillness I became indignant at all the absent ones because they did not know what was beautiful, and were leading such a false life.

Even now, separated from the yard by the closed window, at my table in the study, when I look out at the cedar, at the beech, at the three stone kings in the grass, and order my distant friends to file past in review, for a moment also seeing them together as a frieze, I can find myself wondering: Who is more where he belongs, the pastor in his forester’s vehicle, by his deathbeds, or I at my table; which of us is on the right path: the singer with his rising and falling notes, the painter with his pictures, materials, tools, machines, or I with my pencil script?

Am I also a self-deifier? A self-crowned king? One of the millions of self-anointed emperors running around today? The new metamorphosis all the more unavoidable? Or should it be called: expulsion?

Several weeks ago, on a sunny day, at the very first greening, that of She moss, I traced a wide arc through the woods in the bay here. Beside a sandy path, along a newly reforested area, where it was light, I sat down on a tree stump. Although on one side of the path the trees stood far apart and on the other the recently planted ones had barely reached the height of shrubs, I felt as if I were deep in the forest — it was so quiet, hidden, and at the same time lively there. The occasional airplanes, high above, white, hardly visible in the blue sky, were part of it. The whirring of the highway on the plateau at my back receded behind that of not yet fallen tissue-thin leaves in the oaks, still there even now when spring was beginning.

As if it were a marker for the middle of the forest, at this place, unlike at everywhere else I had walked earlier, no more water glistened, not even the usual patches of standing water, and no rivulet. The sand, which had not been dumped on the path as elsewhere in the bay but had worked its way up from the subsoil, breaking through a thin layer of humus, fine as dust, was that of an extended dune, which emerged just as nakedly on the slope, although there it was firmer and more clayey, crisscrossed by roots, riddled in places by the mining bees, slipping into daylight en masse before my eyes, as if from ancient cave cities, reeling, flying upward.

The path ran straight ahead, though continually forming humps and hollows, and disappeared into a distant realm, where a far-off light beckoned, with the same pattern of crooked branch shadows as at the tips of my shoes. The sand changed color from one section of path to the next, going from a loessial yellow to an ash gray, from coal black to a beach white, brick red, desert brown. The colors appeared sharply separated, section after section, and for each one a corresponding animal turned up, as if growing out of that particular sand.