Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

And the journey on foot was to end at that bifurcation of the Orinoco that obsessed me even in my dreams, where the river, in midcourse, for as yet unexplained reasons, split and went rushing off in opposite directions.

Never during the writing had there been any thought of its earning money. And here, after the first sentences, it became unimaginable that this story, if I ever brought it to a conclusion, would be read by so much as a single person, and that did push me into forlornness. As I forged ahead, all the more stubbornly, I forgot this thought at first and then found myself enjoying a new kind of freedom.

For a long time I continued in this way, sitting at my table. Even when I did nothing but wait, there was this sense of symmetry, with the snowflake dissolving on the edge of the balcony, with the strip of condensation behind that. It seemed as if I were ridding myself once and for all of my impatience, and finding my own speed.

And because it was so unprecedented, I can say this: I was there, word for word, in time, as if this were my place.

Quite often, too, the thought came to me that no one had ever experienced any such thing; with me something altogether new was beginning.

In place of my forgotten body I felt a sensuality that I liked because it was simply there, without wanting anything. And then again I became strangely conscious of my body, as a whole, the way usually only a part of the body, a tooth, an ear, a foot, enters one’s consciousness, as a bothersome weight, or sometimes an absence of sensation, just before an incredible pain manifests itself there. Along with this freedom I experienced daily an equally new type of anxiety.

What made me anxious was my impression that in the process of being written down the material I was narrating was not expanding, but shrinking more and more, not what I had been accustomed to up until then. And besides, I was treading water with my story: the tour group that was supposed to have set out after only one day at the sources of the Orinoco was still stuck there, with half the rainy season gone and almost two hundred pages. The sentences with which I was circling around them, wanting to do justice to each happening — heat lightning, the sound of the rapids, the shifting sill of the river, marked by the first shadows of fish downstream — were becoming thinner than the air in those parts.

But it was not permissible — that was one of the rules that had emerged in the course of my work — for a single sentence, once it was on paper, to be revoked, at most a word or two. If there was to be any progress, then only by following the thread of the sentence, becoming more frayed from day to day.

I hoped that simply from fingering and fanning out the phenomena that nature presented I would come to a decision that would enable my heroes and me finally to take a leap and start anew. But another rule was that I could not invent such a decision, whereas every other time I had felt firm ground under my feet only when I was inventing.

The decision then turned out to be this: one day, in midsentence, my material ran out on me. And with my material for writing, my material for living. I keep brooding over that moment, and to this day do not know why the certainty suddenly came crashing down on me that I had blown my chance and that it was all over. Who can explain it to me? (No one, please.)

Those prayer books in boarding school had covered every single day, one saint after the other, and for each a miniature biography in the smallest possible print was supplied: these I had always read all through the Mass, not because they were about saints but because, compressed into all the prayers and invocations of the Lord, whose meaning remained closed to me, were, quite simply, stories. That shows how much I have always craved storytelling.

And now this, too, was closed to me. Even now I still do not know why I received this breaking of the thread as a verdict of annihilation, executed immediately.

And again I fell to the floor, but this time did not go to sleep; instead, I had to get up at once and sit down at my desk.

And for the following months that became the last of the still-usable rules. Even when I did not get out a single line, merely this staying at my desk provided a little bit of certainty. When out walking I epitomized the psalmist from whose abyss no tone issued forth. Running water, always such a reliable help in the past, whether out in the meadows along the Rio Segre or in the shower in my hotel, made me gag. Among the trees in the meadows down by the river wandered the beasts, and in the eyes of the people on the street below lurked yellow-and-black hornets. Wasn’t Spain the land of death?

I set out for the so-called Chaos of Targasonne, a desert of crags, intending to get lost or even fall off a cliff, for all I cared. But I did not succeed. I did not get lost, not at all.

And equally in vain I wished I would get sick, or the Third World War would break out, so that I would at least not be so alone with my very own war (previously I had thought that even in a world war, even if my child died, I would go on writing).

And the others sensed the state I was in. My current publisher, who blew in on his way from a book fair in Barcelona to a skiing vacation farther up in Font-Romeu, beat a hasty retreat, fled from the despair I exuded (to that degree he had a good nose), and patently gave up on me — which for an evening allowed me to take heart again. I understood him, too, in fact could smell the odor on myself.

Then something changed, with the couple of sentences by which I eventually moved on.

First of all a new title for my book thrust itself upon me. From “Prehistoric Forms” it was renamed “The Chimerical World.”

What a wonderful aura or addition emanated from a mere two words when they presented themselves in context. Holding firmly on to that, I was circling far outside with the eagle above the highland plateau.

And moments later, when again nothing happened, I became the fly lying on its back in the corner of the room and spinning in place. I had just been at the core of the world, and now I was catapulted into an outer space that was really no such thing. One morning I was thinking again that no one had ever experienced anything as glorious as I had, and in the evening of the same day I would have given God knows what to take the place of anyone else, the boil-studded beggar outside the church in Llivia, or a man condemned to death: at least he would have been declared guilty properly.

Hour after hour I sat motionless, facing me only that cloud with which there could be no conversation, filled with viper’s blood that darted its tongue into me from time to time, and unexpectedly I sat up straight and then traced out word for word the source, still so uncertain, even to the explorers who go out looking for it, of the Orinoco in the mountainous region of Guyana where my story continued to spin its spirals.

Amid this constant back-and-forth, my longing was focused only on the smallest, most ordinary, most everyday things.

All I wanted was to be able to bring my son to school again, stand idly on the suburban railway overpass, take my place in line at the post office, the bank, the movies. For the first time I felt a need for salvation. And I visualized it as embodied in everydayness, in its services, manners, and commonplace expressions.

I cursed myself for running away, seeking out an exceptional situation and exclusivity. If my work required that, something was wrong.

But now I likewise had to stay here, could not leave Llivia. Never again will I get out of this damned enclave, I thought again and again, and yet, with the next sentence that got me off dead center, I would have loved to give a party for this heavenly place and all its blessed inhabitants.