Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

“But what are they practicing? When I tried to research this question, I received the same answer, verbatim, from every single practice hunter, although they never compare notes with each other: I am practicing so as to become composed. — Composed for what? And here again all the answers were identical, though in all the different languages: Composed, without any why or wherefore. To gain composure. To acquire composure, not for any particular purpose, for everything and nothing. Composure is all.

“And not merely because this last dictum, spoken, what is more, in unison, has a sinister after-tone: talk like this again points to the regression syndrome of my new settlers, in the sense that in positing a vague, undefined, undefinable composure that defies rational documentation, it aims to smuggle back myth into this world of ours, which for centuries has had nothing more to say, interpret, and convey in this genre — the myth of one who went forth to gain composure, thereby propagating a new knighthood, one that in reality had long since become obsolete.

“The knights of the Dark Clearing! The world has never seen more unsightly knights, and that, now, is my last play on words (speaking to you, I realize that in my previous life I spent too much time as a headline-writer). They are a cross between would-be knights, clay-pit dwellers, and vagabonds, the ugliest cross possible.

“By birth they are all crossbreeds. Did you know that your ancestors all came from here in the Sierra de Gredos, from the mountain valleys and gullies along the río Tormes in the north, from the villages and towns down there at the southern base of the range, between the steep drop and the lowland of the río Tiétar, from San Martín de la Vega del Alberque, from Aliseda, from San Esteban del Valle, from Santa Cruz del Valle, from Mombeltrán, from Arenas de San Pedro, from Jarandilla de la Vera, from Jaraiz de la Vera, and, yes, from Candeleda? That your ancestors departed from the Sierra region centuries ago and emigrated, leaving Europe for all continents, often venturing to the borders of the known world of the time, which their travels then expanded?

“One such ancestor, for instance, comes from the town of El Barco de Ávila, the bark of Ávila, in the west, where the río Tormes flows out of the central massif, and he was the helmsman, el tripulante , of the ship on which Christopher Columbus discovered America, no, plural, the Americas, just as in those days it was not yet called ‘Spain,’ in the singular, La España , but Las Españas , and similarly not La Italia but Las Italias .

“A century later, another ancestor traveled as a missionary to China, there dropped out of his order, married a native, and established his crossbreed family. A third, long before that, at the time of the Crusades, fathered a child with an Arab woman, with whom he stayed. A forebear of yours settled at the far end of each of the gold, silver, platinum, silk, and spice routes and intermarried with Mongols, Indians, Jews, Slavs, blacks.

“And today, as if by prior arrangement, their descendants have come here from the most distant continents and islands to be together in this place, which they regard as their ancestral land, and not without justification — but for what purpose? to regain composure? and have they really come together when each keeps strictly to himself?

“That, too, presumably forms part of their would-be myth: a return to their ancestral land; even though, when asked, each one of them, all of them again in complete agreement, will insist that the Hondareda basin is neither the land of his fathers nor a homeland; the Pleasant Plantation — in truth, an almost felicitous expression, at least at times — remains foreign territory to them, so foreign that it could not appear more so to any human being, foreign root, branch, and sky — but not the kind of foreign territory described in a saying common in these parts, passed down from those ancestors who emigrated — not the foreign territory, not at all the kind of foreign territory ‘where the doors slam shut on your heels.’

“This place where they are living, as each of them asserts, uninfluenced by neighbors and houses next door, is the foreign place visualized and reserved by them for the duration and for good — though precisely not the kind of foreign place of which a poet’s description was passed down from their forefathers: a foreign place where, when music from afar reached a person’s ears, the sound rent his heart, because it made him realize: Never shall I return to my home. But if music from afar was heard here in the Pleasant Plantation, it ‘heartened’ one and strengthened one in one’s resolve to stick it out in these foreign parts and never to reinterpret them or transform them into something other than what they essentially were and — another of those unwritten laws — should remain: foreign, foreign, foreign.

“Foreign land: another topos of these seekers after a new myth. They see themselves, and again that means each by himself, as people without a country, as stateless people, yet they are also proud of their country- and statelessness.

“We could let this pass, were it not associated with the aforementioned ugliness. To us, in contrast to those down below, beauty is the overarching law in the following sense: What is ugly cannot be good; the ugly is evil and bad, and it must not be allowed to stand.

“And my knightly vagabonds of the Dark Clearing are of an interminable ugliness, even when one considers only their weapons and their bivouacs, an ugliness that is an insult to human dignity and makes a mockery of existence. Does not the aesthetic world order, the law of the beautiful, include the ethical as well, the distinction between good and not good, right and wrong, or am I mistaken? How the appalling ugliness of these crossbreeds — their clothing, their hovels, their rocky gardens, fields, and stables, their greenhouses, their tools, their materials — has pierced me to the quick from the outset, preventing me from living and breathing freely.

“Not that they constantly go barefoot. But why do they always wear unmatched socks, as if on principle and out of malicious, ugly defiance, and possibly unmatched shoes as well, on the left foot a black oxford and on the right foot a yellow pigskin boot? There is nothing they are, have, or do that is not breathtakingly ugly. Even the way these denizens of the Dark Clearing move: where elsewhere people thrust themselves into the foreground, these people, each separately and yet all of them together forming a mass, huddle in the background, as if by prior arrangement.

“The ugly and the bad aspects of those who thrust themselves into the foreground are almost tolerable by comparison, allowing one at least to sense the presence of gaps and the horizon; while the masses huddling in the background block the view, the light, and the sun, and thereby any possibility of seeing the big picture, and once this is thwarted, the ugly crowd, there, and there, and back there, appears doubly ugly, ugly to the second power, ugly to the nth power.

“Whenever I go looking for them and approach them — for that is my mission here, after all — they skulk, hide, huddle in the background. Whether I want to track them down in their hovels or sheep pens or solar collectors or radio shacks, they are always way in the back. And I can never get at them there. They have installed threshold after threshold between us as obstacles, often what may not even be intentional thresholds, consisting of infinite uglinesses in the form of sights, sounds, and smells — and that seems to me the most criminal aspect of their criminal ugliness: that it makes these ugly people of mine even more inaccessible to me. Their ugliness means inaccessibility. Ugliness and inaccessibility, or unapproachableness, grievously sad, and are they not ultimately one and the same after all?