Peter Handke - Crossing the Sierra De Gredos

Why, during your entire time here, did you remain the reporter on the outside? Your guiding principle, “No, I will not go inside, for no one is there!” may be accurate in most situations, but not in the case of this high-altitude hollow, which may be stripped of its future as early as tomorrow.

It remains true: no video- and no audiotape could capture what I experienced in Hondareda. And no film could tell the story of the Hondarederos. They are not a subject for a newspaper feature, nor does their story fit into a film, not even one set in the Middle Ages or whenever. For all that exists of their story is internal images: it takes place primarily inside: inside the garden and house walls, and in general indoors. For if you, my freckled observer, had entered even one time and had let yourself enter in, once inside you would have recognized from the interior images that the people here, in contrast to the externals you observed, are by no means incapable of playing, or played-out. There is sometimes a playing and dancing inside them that is a joy to behold.

The same thing applies when, as often happens, their head is in danger of dropping from exhaustion: whereas elsewhere people nowadays deny tiredness as something shameful, the people here try to resist it by transforming it into a game, recognizable as such only to themselves.

One of the most common games here: in a crowd and in narrow passageways, to avoid each other, squeezing into the most confined space and making oneself thin, thinner, thinnest. Altogether, these games or dances take place in the most confining space and often for no more than the twinkling of an eye — and are therefore also utterly inconspicuous and altogether invisible from the outside. But how much composure they gain from a dance like this, lasting only a second.

All their internal games and dances consist of these avoiding and skirting and countering motions, a balancing of contradictions: and in addition to recaptured composure, they give them fresh strength and a new outlook, contribute to conversions: of tiredness into alertness, of timid recoiling into calm gazing around, of getting out of the way into discovery of new ways, of getting lost into finding one’s way to some other destination entirely. These are transformative games and dances that produce a reversal, growing precisely out of failures and false starts. One could thus, with more justification, characterize the dancers of Hondareda as “transformers” than as scientists, engineers, planters, animal husbandmen, bakers, shoemakers, shepherds, hunters, gatherers (yes, really), readers, writers, technicians, carpenters, breadwinners, gardeners, merchants.

They transform the bustle in the streets and town squares — after all, up here in the mountains they are not out of this world — into a dance of haste: by slowing down inwardly, not outwardly, they transform slavish haste into briskness. And they accomplish all those actions and operations that are otherwise inevitably accompanied by annoying sounds and noise either by merging the sounds into a sequence, like relaxing dance music, or, when the person nearby, a grandson, a neighbor, a person entrusted to them, is sleeping or ill, by becoming quieter and quieter in their actions, a special art, which, entirely unlike a disturbing complete absence of noise, fans the person sleeping or sick in bed in the next room or next building with relief and rocks him to sleep. A dance and a ballet like this quieting dance is something you, my observer, have never seen, and you will never see it anywhere else, and you will not see it here anymore, because with my departure it will no longer be here to be seen.

And you, my Herr Cox or Jakob Lebel, you reporters sent here from elsewhere, suspect these players and dancers of the internal world of being the evil enemies, the mortal enemies, of those who sent you on this mission, and therefore also your enemies. And the chief reason for your suspicion: the contrariness among the new settlers here, culminating in their relationship to numbers and, a critical element in the remote-controlled furor against the new settlers, above all their relationship to time.

And it is true: you outsiders have a way of experiencing and measuring time that strikes the Hondarederos as harmful to reality. Not that they would have the temerity to throw myths at you and charge that in your attitude toward time you are repeating the murder of the first of the gods, the god of time, progenitor of all the other gods. But they do accuse you — and see you in turn as their enemies — of stripping time of its reality, humiliating and desecrating it, with your way of measuring, dividing, manhandling it; instead of letting time play an active role in life, actually enlivening life, time as the life of life, even if one does not see anything supernatural or divine in it.

They are aware, of course, that they do not stand a chance against you and your kind of time, and therefore they will never foment a war against you, contrary to what one hears. Instead they sometimes — though very seldom — feud with one another, to the point of hurling insults and even beating each other up, which occurs when one of them uses your sense of time in conversation with a neighbor: “It was a year and three days ago that I moved here and began a new life.”—Don’t say that! “Those lovely minutes four and a half months ago on the peak of Almanzor.” —Be still, you blasphemer, you are committing a sin against time!

Not that the people of Hondareda have no calendars and clocks. They have the most modern clocks here — and use these time-counters and measuring devices wherever they are useful, in the workshop, the laboratory, the studio, in the wine, cider, or olive cellar. Such things are abhorred, in the sense of being proscribed and banned from the entire settlement area, only outside of normal, or mechanical, arithmetic, practical time. The many curses directed at the prevailing time here: in the form of deep sighs.

The time that is supposed to come into play now is by no means each person’s subjective, emotive, internal time. Yet time as experienced by me, you, my neighbors, by all of us neighbors, is supposed to contribute to the project of a different time system, one that would have nothing to do with calculation — a system in which time, instead of merely ticking to count things off and count them out, would commence to dance, as the friend of life — a dance like all the dances in the Hondareda region: internal, momentary yet also more lasting in its effects.

A project? Yes, a new form of time like this would have been the Grand Project, invisibly inscribed here on the horizons, in which all the new settlers’ fragmentary basic impulses — a new form of time must be found for you, for me, for him, for us, for them — could have come together. New verb tenses, time-grammars, a new way of thinking and speaking of time: accompanying existence, yes, escorting our being, illuminating it, lighting the way for it.

To date, however, tentative efforts at best have been made, and today every Hondaredero is left to his own devices in his attempt to achieve the grander time in concert with his neighbors, and all of these efforts are again negative dances, in sentence form: “Not like this! Not like this! and also not like this way of thinking and speaking of your time here on earth!”

Hasn’t every individual in the depression of Hondareda cursed himself over and over, also scratched his own face and bitten his hands, whenever he has contemplated his life, past, present, and future, and found that the numbers and norms of clock and calendrical time have converted what had been lived, was being lived, and would be lived into a mere calculation of before, now, and later; rendered even the most piquant of life’s images flat and tasteless; stripped memory’s richness and potency of its reality and value; covered the precious Now! with rust; and metronomically deprived the longing for day or night of its body and soul.