Peter Handke - My Year in No Man's Bay

With my eyes and ears I practice this daily, and succeed time and again in making a snap judgment transform itself into the lasting pleasure of perception, of having-one’s-five-senses-together with the aid of the chronicler’s role.

Yet when it comes to writing things down, that has not worked out. Whenever I tried to achieve this kind of objective recording and witnessing, in the middle of the first sentence things would twist and turn on me into a kind of premature storytelling, even prattling. Was it conceivable that nowadays there was nothing left in the world to tell, merely the compulsion to tell stories?

On the other hand — my conflict — I encountered here, and again daily, so many phenomena for which inventorying, reporting, notifying, in short, any kind of naming, was just wrong or simply impossible. The only thing to do was to let them be — by telling about them, or circling around them, or touching on them, or letting them resonate, or letting their vibrations die away. And together with the area itself, these phenomena included, for some extraordinary moments, inhabitants of the place. (To be sure, I have almost nothing of the sort to tell about the usual adults, only about certain children, many old folks, and from one to three joggers or indefinable types.)

Even when telling about these phenomena does not promise any coherent narrative, I still find its preliminary form — observing — fascinating as nothing else can be. This is my form of participation, and participation is music enough for me, and storytelling is the music of participation.

The chronicle does not correspond to what I continue to intuit, beyond the profound dream: the chronicle does not correspond to humanity. Only when the facts, the blind facts, thousands of them, can shed their scales, get clarified, and acquire language-eyes, one here, one there, am I, leaving the chronicler behind, on the right path, the epic path, and life, once so deprived, is enriched.

And thus I muddle along, having faith in spite of everything, following that dream, and continue to circle the epic it called for. If nothing comes of it: that’s good, too. I have long since stopped being wild about doing it right. Wrong directions, wrong moves: all the better.

In truth, the situation is more dramatic than that: my panic long ago at what I could only much later call the “metamorphosis” arose, after all, when I, about to write a story, in a flash lost all certainty that deep within me a new story could always be discovered and brought to light every time I sat down to write something, a story that in the course of the sentences and paragraphs would unfold on its own, without my plucking and plotting. And I could not get on with myself, with the book, with the world until I found the other certainty that within me was, if not story after story, then something even more disarming, something that did not merely postpone the end like the stories of the thousand and one nights: storytelling, inventive in itself, independent of particular inventions.

But what if such storytelling, too, stayed away, forever, and that were the signal for the next metamorphosis, again like a fight to the death? Metamorphosis? And what came afterward? If even storytelling lost its universal significance, did anything at all come afterward?

Since the beginning of this year I have been swept back and forth. At one point I see myself traveling along, in conjunction with my undertaking, in some airborne vehicle, brand-new, spanking modern, which for short stretches dives into dark, narrow passageways filled with screeching skeletons, and then again the whole thing appears to me on the contrary as an interminable trip through a tunnel of horrors, with the wide-open, naturally colored outside spaces barely glimpsed as they flash by for an instant before the trip continues for days through nothing but black backdrops with swinging scythes and bared teeth.

Ihad been living in the area for a long time before it first revealed itself to me as a bay. Previously it had appeared to me this way only in a figurative sense, for instance late at night in the most remote bar, with a couple of silent men standing at the counter and others asleep at the tables, along with damp-shaggy stinking dogs, when I envisaged a sort of flotsam that had slipped past all the other massive and more densely entangled debris and had finally been driven and washed in here, one piece at a time, to this last station or remote “bay.”

That my domicile in fact has the form of a bay was something I finally saw one day from the ridge that traces a wide curve around it, and in addition I had to be standing way up on the catwalk at the top of the transmitter; from its base, even from the middle levels, the settlement below remains, if not hidden, at least unclear in outline, as a result of the wooded slopes that run down toward it all around; it looks as though the large, pale deciduous forest continued through the hollow, rising on the other side in the west to the next, unchanging, but already far-off glimmering hill country.

The transmitter, set in the middle of a convergence of roads and wood roads, is usually accessible only to authorized personnel, but I got in through the good offices of my petty prophet of Porchefontaine, who, in between two restaurants while one of them was in bankruptcy, was managing a canteen there in his inimitable fashion.

To have the settlement’s houses, seen from up there almost all equally squat, almost all with light red tiled roofs, at my feet as a bay, thrust deep into the wooded heights, which were otherwise of an almost unbroken green, mimicking crown by crown the mounting rows of an amphitheater, arching toward the horizon: that meant something. I stood before this form of settlement as before a discovery. This bay was at once so small and so large. And in retrospect it now seems to me as if a column of smoke were rising from every single chimney, straight, narrow, almost transparent, and one close by the other. A former refugee or work camp, erected for perhaps a month on an extended clearing in the midst of the wilderness, had become a permanent settlement, and merely as such had opened itself up to the ordinary suburban world outside, if only along a narrow corridor, as an access channel; the streets still recalled, and not merely when seen from above, the grid of the camp, just as the houses, no matter how solid they seemed, appeared in this bird’s-eye-view borough to have been pushed around like temporary huts or tents and to be standing every which way.

From the top parapet, dizzyingly high above the treetops, of the transmitter skyscraper (which strangers often take for a second Eiffel Tower, transplanted to the Seine hills), I heard, with all of Paris visible over my shoulder — white on white except for the golden dome of Les Invalides and the iron black of the original Eiffel Tower — far below in the backwoods bay, scattered guard dogs from the camp barking, and also a rooster crowing in response, while the sound of the frequent commuter trains was swallowed up in the whooshing of air currents around the platform; the only other sound that made its way up here was the whistle of the long-distance trains speeding back and forth between Paris and Brittany, on the second rail line, which I now recognized as the bay’s tangent, as the divider between it and the open sea of houses to the west, in the direction of Versailles.

The silence there in the depths of the bay seemed at the same time powerfully alive; it was an active silence, on land and likewise on water, on the two fishponds, both taking up approximately the same area as the two other largish gaps in the delicately laid-out thousand-dice game of the houses: the playing fields of the towns that share the bay area. One of the one-engine planes just flying over would lower its landing gear any minute now and touch down on the main pond as in the Alaskan interior, while from the woods along the banks a long column of camels would appear, riderless and unescorted, and by the edge of the other pond, in mammoth oaks, the temple monkeys would be chattering, and from the bus station on the most distant rim of the bay the bus line with light blue horizontal stripes would take you to Providence.