Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

That was more or less the story of my metamorphosis. When I reflect upon what I have experienced in my existence up to now, it was neither the war during my childhood nor our flight from Russian-occupied Germany home to Austria, nor my youth-long imprisonment in the boarding school, nor, after many feverish attempts, that first quiet line that made me certain I was now on the right path, nor being with my wife or my child, but only that metamorphosis.

Why does it seem to me that this is the only thing I have ever experienced? I do not know, just as after writing this down I do not know any more about it than before. At any rate, the other happenings came about like something that had been foreseen, while the metamorphosis seized hold of me — like an accident? an assault? — no, as a completely unknown force it seized hold of what was deepest inside me, which only in that way became distinguishable, like something in the dark lit up by lightning. There was no deeper inside than that.

And what else? Nothing else. Even the word “metamorphosis” came only long, long afterward. But then why am I convinced that it is the only major thing worth telling about that happened to me in my fifty-six years of life, on five continents, on two moons, on the highest peaks on Mars and in the hottest springs on Venus, and why does everything else, no matter how inspiring or devastating, strike me as incidental?

How wretchedly cut off from the world I found myself time and again, how blissfully at one with it, and yet only yesterday I thought: “I have never deserved to be hurled to the ground except back in my metamorphosis period!”

At intervals I continued to view myself as the only one with such a story, for otherwise wouldn’t it have been told long since, and have become a classic? Or had I, on the contrary, had innumerable forerunners, and was I perhaps merely the first who had not perished in the process?

But didn’t my story therefore cry out all the more urgently to be told? Or, again on the contrary, had all those who had had this experience survived and yet found nothing to tell? Or were they afraid to try?

Hadn’t I, too, felt a great deal of resistance to continuing the narrative, as if it were somehow improper? And is it not true that I got into this only against my will?

What I do know: that metamorphosis, or expulsion, or merely a new orientation, has been used up. It seems to me that I have lost or frittered away all of its benefits: patience, mental acuity, magnanimity, boldness, empathy, receptivity, tolerance, ability to disarm, to forget. Or have I just muddled along halfheartedly? Failed from the beginning to make the right start?

This morning I saw the first hazelnuts of the year here on the edge of the woods in the bay. The little ovals in their pale green neck ruffs reminded me of the same hazelnuts from my metamorphosis period, as one of its visual images, and I thought: “That was a time of freshness! Now is not a time of freshness anymore, and not only for me. But who knows? What does a foreigner know?”

On to the story of my friends! Let them surprise you.

The singer was about my age, and wanted to go on singing as an old man, like Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker.

And yet there had already been quite a few moments in his life when he would have been ready to die on the spot. This happened to him once after a night without sleep in a one-engine plane over the source of the Mississippi, in a morning blizzard, when, thinking of all those before him who had perished in this manner, almost customary for singers, he wanted to give the plane an additional jolt, as it tossed about in the darkness, so as to hasten the crash and be scattered in all directions, with the snowstorm outside so thick that even in the long-drawn-out flashes of lightning, prolonged further by the whirling snow, one could not make out whether the flakes were falling down or up. Instead, he promptly composed a song, his ballad, which had to be screamed almost from start to finish, with the title “Why Are You Not Serious?”

Another time he had been similarly willing to die in blissful exhaustion after a concert, not even a very large one, in the school auditorium of a midsized city in Switzerland, where (after that unfortunate period when people kept throwing themselves at him, he played at an even greater distance from them, often even with his back to them) for the encore he unexpectedly mingled with the audience, hoping a knife would be thrust into his heart, sensed that one person or another in the crowd might be the one, recognizable by his tense absentmindedness in the midst of all the elation, and even challenged him by stopping just far enough from the would-be assassin to give him room for the windup, and proffering his chest, as if that were part of his song; even at the exit, not a private one but the general one, he looked around, unprotected, in the lingering crowd for the “disturbed yet purposeful face” one could count on in such situations: “And in Switzerland my stalker was a woman every time”; and such a woman actually did pull a knife on him — except that the singer, prepared for this as he was, including dying, in that same breath, not at all bereft of will as he had thought, knocked it out of her hand. (The song occasioned by this incident began with “I’ll die at the hand of a woman.”)

Asimilar openness to death also took hold of him on that January day during his solitary trip through Scotland, as he was making his way on foot through the hilly fields above Inverness.

He had been working all fall on an album, was exhausted, yet also in a good frame of mind — less or differently irritable than usual — but still had enough breath, as was generally the case after an effort that excluded everything else, for a further undertaking, which promised for once, in contrast to his trademark works — ballads, angry tirades, sung narratives — a pure song, in fact “The Last Song.”

For now, however, he was simply glad to be out of the studios and the big cities. Precisely because of his (powerful, not loud) music, which he wanted to authorize to be played only in places where it belonged, he was elsewhere extremely sensitive to noise, and he found it soothing to be away from the clacking and scratching of high heels on the streets of Paris and London and, after a short visit to his mother in Brighton, to have escaped to this Scottish rubber-boot landscape. Even the women, the young ones, came toward him here in rubber boots, and not just in the fields, and from their footsteps there was a sighing behind him, and accordingly he, too, went about in rubber boots.

It was a mild winter day, then warm as he mounted the slope, and he, in Scotland for the first time, at least out in the country, thought at the sight of the grovelike rhododendron bushes along the path, blowing in a southerly way and greening in the rainy wind, that it was always this way here. At the crest of the hill he spread his arms, turning his palms upward. The ridge was broad, almost part of the highlands already, and he still had to swing himself over several granite walls, chest-high because he was so small, until, in the narrowest sheep pasture, he stood facing the stone circle of the Celtic burial ground.

He did not approach it immediately, even avoided focusing on it at first, just gazed around for a long time. A couple of oaks, the only ones in these bare surroundings, groaned, and in the northern distance, beyond the arm of the sea, or firth, by Inverness, snowcapped mountains shone clear. In all the pastures roundabout were sheep, but in one, just as crowded and of about the same light color, was a herd of swine, munching away, on muddier ground; and instead of the usual dog among the sheep, there were several hares, distributed evenly among the herds.