Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

“And accordingly the primary activity of each individual and solitary person here, independent of his neighbor and next-door property owner, is seeing, on the strips or isthmuses, wherever in their view there is something to see, no matter what. Daybreak and seeing. Deep night and more seeing, for instance of the trees’ shadows on the rock faces (in the image-free strips or passages). ‘To see and let appear’—the settlement’s motto, similar to ‘Dream and work.’ Or is it a form of working? Or of leisure? Impossible to tell the difference.

“What do you think? Why do you say nothing? This is what the returnees believe at any rate, as always in complete unanimity, without prior consultation with one another: images are certainly essential; without them no transmission of the world and no sense of life. But in the previous century in particular, images were overexploited as never before. As a result, the world of images has dried up — has, without exception, become blind, mute, and stale — incapable of being refreshed by any science. And thus, in this transitional period, all that is possible is seeing — in which, by the way, all science is included, and out of which science must develop, one step at a time. The Hondareda idiots consider themselves scientists!

“And the childish things on which they spend their time in their Dark Clearing are, for them — even if they use entirely different terms, as for almost everything, old-fashioned and obsolete ones—‘sight-enhancing measures.’ That includes not only their posing as hunters, their acting as though they were stalking, taking aim, and so on: time and again one sees them walking backward, more often than forward; that kind of thing, they assert, enhances seeing as much as their constant squatting, close to the ground (whereas standing on tiptoes is prohibited — their standard dictum: ‘Standing on tiptoes is no standing’).

“When they unexpectedly whirl like dervishes, one person in the background turning to the east, then, without any connection to him, another in back to the west, it is of course no dance, either; the people of the Pedrada-Hondareda region have neither games nor dances, and that includes the young ones — but rather, well, you already know this, or do you? — an exercise in seeing!

“Instead of putting things where they belong or filing them away like adults, these people of the depression are also constantly tossing things into place, and from as far away as possible, and, furthermore, not straightaway and forthwith — now I am using such obsolete expressions myself — but always in an arc, and one that is as high as possible, and to what end? You know this. To facilitate seeing, seeing, nothing but seeing.

“If only such exercises, measures, and exertions led to something: to moldability (ah, another word from horse-and-buggy days); to mobility; to awareness of another person — I don’t necessarily mean of me — to neighborliness, or at least a hint of everyday togetherness. But as I have observed for one year, three days, and five to nine hours, each of these Hondareda desperados is holed up, stiff as a board, deep inside his hovel, shack, and barbed-wire enclosure, immobile and immovable, having taken leave for good of the present.

“While in the meantime we have lit up even the North and South Pole, as well as the peak of Everest and the Aconcagua, only the Hondareda region persists in its self-imposed darkness. The only semblance of a joint activity I have been able to observe in my subjects here is that whenever one of them thinks he has spotted something for which he has long been searching, or something precious, or simply something beautiful — precisely in their ugliness they are obsessed with beauty, or, as they express it, with the ‘uncommonly beautiful’—but then realizes that he was mistaken — as he was every other time, by the way — that he was thoroughly mistaken and rashly pounced on what he mistook for a treasure or something uncommonly beautiful, but which turned out to be worthless, ordinary, or nothing at all, the person experiencing such a disappointment, and that is what can be astonishing, at the moment when he realizes he was deluded, turns out to be not bitter in the slightest, but rather, without any premeditation, cheerfully disappointed. Disappointment fills the person in question, no matter who in this glacial basin, with cheerfulness.

“And in this state of cheerful disappointment, and only in this state, the individual at the same time always gains the ability to turn to the others in the settlement. At the moment when he is fixated on the deceptive object there, in a rock crevice, the crook of a tree, a fissure in the ground, he calls, whistles, and drums together the entire core population of the Dark Clearing. And the others promptly cluster around him. And he tells them what value, or rarity, or uncommon beauty he allowed himself to project onto this thing or stuff or trifle or garbage or piece of junk.

“And as they stand there with him and inspect the spot or the mess or the nothing-at-all from every side, they share his disillusionment, but likewise, by virtue of the enduring effect of imagination, his cheerfulness. How they all perk up. And these are the only occasions up to now on which I have heard them laugh. Otherwise they cannot laugh, you see, either at others or at themselves — at anything at all. To be sure, disappointments like this and the resulting shared amusement are everyday occurrences down there.

“And the contemplation of mistakes and disappointments, and of absent treasures or treasures they missed again, or other objects of longing, represents for them the acme of seeing, constitutes their way of celebrating, their kind of celebration. These poor, aloof Hondarederitos — have you noticed that I even have a term of endearment for this tribe of new savages! Their dangerous solipsism: What unspeakable war, unlike any that ever took place, are they hatching? — for there is no doubt that they are on a war footing with people like us. Why will not a single one of them look at me? And why will not a single one of them speak a word to me?

“Just as you, foreign lady, have not looked me in the eye once in all this time. Why not? Not for a single micromillisecond during the year or decade of my observing and recording up here in the high Sierra have human eyes looked at me. And what about your fellow observers, you ask. (Why do you not ask?) Not a word about them. Except this: that they are not intentionally mean nor behave as if they were — their mere presence and hanging around is mischief enough. I say that? Yes, I do. In the course of time, I have even tried to meet the eyes of the animals here, the ibex, the Capra hispanica , the snakes, the bulls, the vultures, the dragonflies on the laguna, the wagtails — by the way, the only time I was eyed affectionately, it was by the latter, from a broom bush, from a boulder in a glacial brook.

“In the Pleasant Plantation not one pair of human eyes has ever met mine. Here in the Deep Enclosure not a brown or blue or green or gray or any other color of eye has ever taken me in. Not a single person sees me. On the other hand, I am not kindly ignored by anyone, except perhaps by my co-observers.

“I cannot take a single step unobserved. But what a manner of being observed. Yes, it is different from being observed reproachfully. Yet there is no doubt that these gazes are meant to punish me, if any ever were. No, these gazes are not meant to kill. Instead they declare me dead. In their eyes, I, their observer and reporter, have already been dead for a long time. The way their gaze scans me, they doubtless see a cadaver in their field of vision, or a living corpse — which does not count in this field, however — what does count there? you ask; what counts in their field of vision: light, wind, gaps, sand, also flies, spiders, and Sierra beetles. In contrast to the apathy and fatigue they exhibit toward me, what their eyes manifest at the mere glimpse of a wild boar’s droppings or a snowflake can be described as a glow.