by Peter Handke
Once, she told me, she decided to create the “coat of coats.” She was sure she had the strength for it, but in the end she had been defeated by the problem of “connections,” which I “as a writer must have come up against.” (That, so she said, was the end of her megalomania.) But the unfinished coat of coats had been so beautiful that people who had seen it on the Métro had been stricken with awe.
It was D. who kept bringing me messages in Paris about “conquering enemies through self-control” or “how your sensibility can give you power over others”; that kind of thing. After seeing Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn, she spoke of Joseph Cotten’s lips, lying “so quietly in his face”; and after seeing Ozu’s films, she spread out a newspaper when cutting her nails, because that was what the Japanese master’s favorite leading man had done.
There is nothing womanly about D.; she seems childlike or mannish or girlish, and when she feels free to speak her mind she reminds one of the slave girl who knows more than any master. Once I recognized her in Rembrandt’s Jacob Wrestling with an Angel; she was the angel who in Genesis is referred to merely as “a man.” Many people reveal a selfless, demonic, evil emptiness when you get close to them; but D. remains impenetrable—and can’t bear for anyone to touch her. Yet, when I asked her what she needed her lover for, she replied: “Words alone aren’t enough comfort to me.”
Her eyes are bright and have rings under them. Once when I was sick, she came and stared at me mercilessly until I shooed her away. In other respects as well, she makes me think of a shaggy flightless bird; she doesn’t gesticulate and seldom makes faces, she either sits very still or moves about (rather awkwardly). Still, she is always alert; never a moment’s daydreaming; when she is with you, all her thinking is with you. This thinking-with makes her Voltaire’s bonne compagnie: “He spurned men of science, and resolved from then on to live only in good company.”
Yet D. doesn’t open up to many people; she is shy and often embarrassed. Her power is at its best when she is alone, at work, or in her nightly wanderings through the streets of Paris, where someone occasionally lays a hand on her head (her parents, it seems, had been “in love” with her head).
As a rule she is silent (but once in a while she talks profusely or emits peculiar sounds of emotion or tenderness). She is—unusual for a woman?—a good walker. We had often gone for walks in the deciduous forests between Paris and Versailles, where here and there one sees dark, wide-branching cedars.
It was nearly winter. I had just seen a friend die, and was again beginning to take pleasure in my own existence. This friend, who thought of himself as the “first man to experience pain,” had nevertheless tried up to the last moment to wish death away. I was thankful for all things and decreed: Enjoy yourself, take advantage of your days of good health.
At the airport the people were standing for once in dignified darkness; shadowy faces, without the usual hellish quality. When the name of someone I had once known well was called out, it seemed to me that all the people I had ever known had ceased to be anything but names over polyglot loudspeakers.
As the plane was putting down in Marseilles, Mont Sainte-Victoire plunged below the northern horizon like a whale. The plane trees on the Cours Mirabeau had lost almost all their leaves, the street had become a bare-bright row of bones. The avenue of Aix’s summer glory was now wet, gray, and bare, and had been incorporated into the street network of Paris. We had the “two comfortable rooms” customary in old novels. I looked into D.’s bright, impenetrable eyes. She was already wearing the right kind of shoes. The very next morning we struck out eastward.
In my quest for unity I had discovered yet another clue, to which I felt committed, though I had no idea where, if anywhere, it might lead. In the preceding months, every time I had looked at Cézanne’s paintings of his mountain, I had come across this clue, and it had become an obsession with me.
Seen from the west, where the mountain shows three prongs, it reveals its strata and folds in a geological cross section. I had read that Cézanne as a young man was friends with a geologist by the name of Marion, who in later years accompanied him on many of his expeditions in search of “motifs.” As I studied the maps and descriptions of the mountain, my thoughts began, involuntarily and inexplicably, to revolve around one and the same point: a fault between two strata of different kinds of rock. This occurs on the gently rising ridge path leading from the west to the actual crest, and it can fittingly be called a “point” because here, where one stratum penetrates most deeply into the other, it also intersects the line of the ridge. This point, which in nature cannot be discerned with the naked eye, nevertheless recurs time and again in Cézanne’s paintings, where it is indicated by a shadow line of varying length and thickness; even in the pencil sketches, the indentation is indicated by shading or at least by a delicate outline.
It was this spot more than anything else—I was about to start working—that impelled me to repeat the trip to Provence. From this new trip I expected the key; and even if my reason tried to talk me out of it, I knew that my imagination was right. By the time I got to Aix, to be sure, I was just looking forward to the expedition.
A bus took us as far as an aqueduct, and from there we hiked up the Chemin de Bibémus to the Plateau du Marin, an upland heath. From there, at first sight, Mont Sainte-Victoire seemed to jut out of the prickly heather like an erratic boulder. This is a quieter itinerary than the Route de Cézanne; it does not pass through the village but leads straight to the crest. After a while there is neither asphalt nor cars.
In town the sky had been veiled with rain; here on the plateau it was vast and soon turned to blue. We came to a sparse evergreen wood where the sun shone through the boughs and the pine needles sparkled on all sides. After a while, I asked D. cautiously why working on the coat of coats had dispelled her megalomania. She answered only: “I’ve got it back since then.”
On the way up, there had still been oaks, losing their leaves in swarms. Now there were only evergreens, the air was balmy, and on the horizon the seasonless shimmering of the mountain. The screech of branches rubbing together took the place of the summer’s cicadas. At the end of a side path the black-and-white magpie turned up again, fluttering like a paper glider. In time it grew so still on the plateau that the faint sounds from other levels suggested a ringing of bells. I peered between the open scales into the dark interior of a pine cone, and simultaneously at the gauze-blue cracks in a layer of cirrus clouds drifting high overhead. The thought of a bird’s voice became that voice itself.
We passed runners, hunters, and soldiers, but they all seemed to be within their rights. The Foreign Legion dog existed no longer; or perhaps he was just a lump of clay lying in a gully. There were uphill and downhill stretches, twists and turns; the plateau is not an “unbroken level expanse” (as it has been described on the basis of Cézanne’s paintings); it is crisscrossed by ravines and faults. Determined to familiarize myself with every detail of this landscape, I kept looking for shortcuts, with the result that we often got lost, looked separately for the right path, and saw each other standing like idiots on two different hills.
We hadn’t meant to climb to the top; but then, without deciding anything, we kept on climbing until we were there. It was as windy as in summer, and neither warmer nor colder. Late in the afternoon, we stopped at Le Tholonet and sat tired and contented in the Auberge Thomé, alias L‘Etoile d’Or. It was good to be able to say, simply, that we were hungry.
We looked out at the mountain where we had just been. In between there is a chain of low hills, at one point broken by a hollow. One part of it had been left bare by a forest fire. Not even bushes were growing on the slopes, and the rain had dug deep grooves in the naked clay. These grooves in the otherwise even slope twined themselves into an inextricable tangle; here and there the runoff had shaped the earth into conspicuous towers and pyramids with big bluish stones on top of them. On a small scale, this whole bare patch, with its tangle of runnels leadin
g nowhere, was very much like the vast wilderness in South Dakota, the scene of countless Westerns, to which discouraged wanderers gave the name of Badlands. The other part of the chain, spared by the fire, was covered by a dense growth of pine trees, which rose up in tiers, branch over branch, as far as the hilltop. In her dress pieced together from different-colored materials, which was at the same time a coat, D. sat between me and the view.
Only then, thinking back, did I remember the point which my imagination had circled for so long. I looked up to the mountain ridge and looked for the gap. It was not visible to the naked eye, but I knew that the place was marked by a power pylon. The place even had a name: it was called Pas de l’Escalette. And below it, in flatter alluvial land, there was a small abandoned hut, shown on the map as the Cabanne de Cézanne.
Something slowed down. The longer I looked at my gap, the surer I was—of a solution? an insight? a discovery? an inference? a finality? Gradually the gap in the distant crest transferred itself to me and became a pivot.
My first feeling was deadly fear—as though I were being crushed between two strata of rock; then—if ever—one of openness, of a single all-enveloping breath (which could immediately be forgotten). The blue sky over the hilltop grew hot. In the densely wooded area beside it, the variegated green of the pines; the dark shadow lines between the branches were rows of windows in a worldwide hillside colony; and then every tree in the forest was separately visible, spinning in its place, an everlasting top; and with it the whole forest (and the whole great colony) spun and stood still. Behind it the true and trusted silhouette of Mont Sainte-Victoire, and between it and myself D. in her colors, a comforting human form (for a moment I saw her as a blackbird).
No one threw up his arms in amazement. Someone slowly joined his hands and boldly knotted them into a fist. I would go all out and risk all for all!—I saw the realm of words opening up to me—with the Great Spirit of Form; the sheltering cloak; the interval of invulnerability; throughout “the indefinite prolongation of existence,” as the philosopher defined time; I had stopped thinking of any “reader”; I only looked at the ground in passionate gratitude. Black-and-white pebble mosaic. Over the stairs leading to the upper story of the inn floated a blue balloon, fastened to the banister. On a table out in the open stood a bright-red enamel pitcher. Far in the distance, above the Philosopher’s Plateau, the air was that unusually fresh blue that Cézanne so often used in painting this countryside. Over the mountain face itself, cloud shadows flew as though someone were drawing curtains over and over again, and at length (the early mid-December sunset) the whole mountain stood still in a yellow glow, as though turned to glass, yet did not, as another mountain would have done, cut off my homecoming. And I felt the structure of all these things within myself, as my armor. TRIUMPH! I thought—as though the whole thing had already been successfully written. And I laughed.
Once again D. had thought with me and was immediately able to answer my question about the problem of connections and transition. She had even brought samples of the different materials intended for her coat: brocade, satin, damask.
“So you want me to tell you about the coat. It began with my calling what I had thought up the Great Idea. The coat was to embody it.
“I began with a sleeve. From the start I had difficulty forcing the firm rounded form I wanted on the soft, yielding material. I decided to back the material with a stiff woolen fabric.
“The sleeve was finished. I thought it so priceless, so beautiful, that I despaired of having the same strength for the other parts of the coat.
“I thought of my idea; of nature’s moments of tension and sudden softening; how the one merges with the other.
“Every day I thought for an hour or two of the coat I had begun; I compared the parts with my idea and pondered: how was I to go on?
“The upper part was finished. When I started on the lower part, the unity was lost. The pieces I made had no connection with the upper part. At this point the weight of the thick and thin materials I had fitted together made my work more difficult. I had to hold them up in the sewing machine to keep them from slipping.
“I laid the pieces down in front of me side by side; none of them went with the others. I waited for the moment when suddenly my picture would hang together.
“During this time of examining and testing, I could feel myself growing physically weak and incapable. I forbade myself even to think of the Great Idea.
“Pictures and blueprints of Chinese roof construction, the problem of relieving the strain of heavy weights by proper distribution, filled me with excitement. I saw that connections are important no matter what one is doing.
“Then one day I stopped thinking about it and just sewed the pieces together. I made the coat curve inward at one point. It excited me to feel so sure of myself.
“I hung the coat on the wall. Every day, I tried it on. I began to think well of it. It was better than anything else I had done, but it wasn’t perfect.
“In making clothes, you have to remember every form you use for reference as the work goes on. But you shouldn’t have to quote it to yourself, you must automatically see the final form you are aiming at. In every instance there is only one correct one; the form determines the color and must solve the problem of transition.
“A transition must clearly divide and at the same time bring together.”
The Great Forest
In the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum, there is a painting by Jacob van Ruisdael titled The Great Forest. It shows a spacious deciduous forest. In among mighty oak trees one sees the striking white of the birches that are so frequent in Ruisdael. The darkly mirroring water in the foreground is also a familiar feature of his work. Here it is a river ford so shallow that you can see the traces of the yellow sand road, which on emerging turns left and leads on into the woods. The picture probably takes its name from the dimension of the canvas, because what can be seen of the forest is small; immediately beyond it, an open space begins. It is a forest inhabited by peaceful folk: in the foreground, a wayfarer with hat and stick who has laid down his bundle and is sitting by the roadside; in the background, a man and woman who, lightly dressed and carrying an umbrella (there are grayish-white clouds in the sky), emerge from the curve in the road. But the picture may actually represent a segment of a “great forest”; for possibly the point of view is not outside but inside it—perhaps the wayfarer, as seems quite natural, has turned to cast a last look before going deeper into the woods. The feeling of spaciousness is further intensified by a peculiarity of seventeenth-century Dutch landscapes: for all the minuteness of their forms, they nevertheless, with their patches of water, their roads over dunes, their dark woods (under spacious skies), begin to grow as one beholds them. The trees grow perceptibly, and with them grows a quiet, overall twilight. Even the two horsemen who have stopped to rest grow as they stand there.
There is a forest of this kind near Salzburg; it is not one of those great forests one finds at the edge of large cities; it is no forest of forests; yet it is wonderfully real. It takes its name from the village of Morzg at its eastern edge. The road to it begins in a pass-like hollow between the Mönchsberg and the Festungsberg; known as the Schartentor, this hollow forms a kind of dividing line between the inner city and the southern plain, with its housing developments extending to the foot of the Untersberg. The forest can be seen through the arch at the city limits: a band of apparently tall trees crossing the plain from east to west on this side of the two-humped rocky hill of Hellbrunn. Though hardly an hour’s walk distant, it appears, seen from the city, to be veiled in faint distant blue, as though there were a river in between (actually, the Salzach is farther east). First comes an urban sort of “meadow,” traversed by concrete walks and resounding with footsteps—in the middle of it, all by itself, the former “keeper’s house”; in the evening, one of its windows glows with an almost imperceptible inner light and muffled singing can be heard from within; then comes an intersection g
uarded by three successive stoplights; and then a “quiet zone” (the Thumeggerbezirk), where there are no shop windows to distract one, or any other mark of city life. A brook, actually the arm of a canal, runs parallel to the road, in the opposite direction; sometimes its glitter extends a long way and evokes vague memories. Here most of the trees are birches; they appear to be native to the spot, as in the woods of far-off Russia. The bushes are light-red willows, a tangle of many-armed candelabra when the sun shines through.
The road across the plain rises gently—just enough to make cyclists lift themselves briefly out of their seats—and then runs level again. The slight increase in altitude makes it possible to speak of a plateau. There is nothing citified about the meadow here; it is an open field with a lone farmhouse in it. A fall wind from the Untersberg that towers in the background is now discernible (on the way back, at a scarcely lower level, the sudden warm stillness of the air is even more evident). Over the strip of peat bog at the foot of the mountain there is often a fine haze, out of which, when it thickens to fog, the crowns of the trees blossom. The meadow in the foreground is also a peat bog; the molehills are black (with white pebbled in them); chickens from the farm, often with windblown ruffs, are scratching about in it. Through a concrete culvert another small canal passes under the road leading to the next housing development.
The unusual thing about this development is the crooked pines at the entrance to it—not at the edge of the road, but forming an island in the middle of the asphalt, a forerunner to the row of pines which appear, often in a harsh reflected light, at the end of the street. Many of the houses look out on empty fields, this village has nothing urban about it, but neither is it rural. The two rows of houses seem to be marching into the fallow fields. The houses are low, of distinctly different colors, many partly of wood; almost all have espaliers, suggesting raised ornaments, running along their fronts. In part because of the black tundra soil in the gardens and the voices, which often change language from one house to the next, this long, straight street suggests a pioneer settlement in the Far North. Except that here innumerable cats, sauntering noiselessly back and forth between the rows of houses, replace the whimpering, howling dogs chained to stakes.
