by Peter Handke
But isn’t it the past that transfigures?
If the past was of the kind that transfigures, it’s all right with me. I believe in that sort of transfiguration. I know that those years were holy.
But isn’t the contrast you suggest between manual work in common and solitary work on a harvest combine mere opinion and therefore suspect?
When I told you all that, it wasn’t for the sake of the contrast, but of the pure picture; if such a contrast nevertheless forces itself on the reader’s attention, it must mean that I haven’t succeeded in communicating a pure picture. In the following, I shall have to take greater care than ever to avoid playing one thing off, even tacitly, against another or magnifying one thing at the expense of something else, in line with the Manichaean all-good or all-bad system, which is dominant nowadays even in what used to be the most open-minded, opinion-free mode of discourse, namely storytelling: Now I’m going to tell you about the good gardeners, but only to prepare you for what I shall have to say about the wicked hunters later on. The fact is, however, that I have affecting, communicable pictures of manual workers’ tiredness, but none (thus far) of a combine operator’s. Then, in our shared tiredness after threshing, I saw myself for once sitting in the midst of something resembling a “people,” such as I later looked for time and time again in my native Austria, and time and again failed to find. I am referring, not to the “tiredness of whole peoples,” not to the tiredness that weighs on the eyelids of one late-born individual, but to the ideal tiredness that I would like to see descending on one particular small segment of the second postwar Austrian Republic, in the hope that all its groups, classes, associations, corps, and cathedral chapters may at last sit there as honestly tired as we villagers were then, all equals in our shared tiredness, united and above all purified by it. A French friend, a Jew, who was obliged to live in hiding during the German occupation, once told me, all the more movingly because his memories were transfigured by distance, that for weeks after the Liberation the whole country had been bathed in radiance, and that is how I should imagine an Austrian work-tiredness, shared by all. A criminal who has escaped scot-free may often manage to doze off, whether in a sitting or a standing position. His sleep, like that of many a fugitive, may be prolonged, deep, and stertorous, but tiredness, not to mention the tiredness that knits people together, is unknown to him; until the day when he snores his last, nothing in all the world will succeed in making him tired, unless perhaps his final punishment, for which he himself may secretly yearn. My entire country is alive with bouncy indefatigables of this breed, among them its so-called leaders; instead of joining the army of tiredness for so much as one moment, a swarming mob of habitual criminals and their accomplices, very different from those described above, of elderly but untiring mass murderers of both sexes, who throughout the country have secreted a new generation of equally tireless young fellows, who even now are training the grandchildren of the senior murderers to be secret-police agents, with the result that in this contemptible majority-country the many minorities will never be able to join forces in a community of tiredness; in this country, everyone will remain alone with his tiredness until the end of our political history. There was a time when I actually believed in the International Court of Justice, when I thought it could do something about my country (I’m not obliged to tell you how long ago that was). But that International Court seems to have gone out of existence; or, to say it in a different way: its decisions have not been put into effect within the borders of Austria and—as I have been forced to recognize since my brief moment of hope—never will be. There is no International Court of Justice and the Austrians, I am obliged to go on believing, are the first hopelessly corrupt, totally incorrigible people in history, forever incapable of repentance or conversion.
Isn’t that last assertion a mere opinion?
It is not an opinion but a picture. For what I thought I also saw. What may be opinion and therefore untrue is the word “people,” for what I saw in my picture was not a “people” but the unrepentant “gang of the untired.” True, this picture is contradicted by other pictures, which in the interest of fairness demand attention; but they do not penetrate as deep as the others; at the most, they offer a counterweight. My ancestors, as far back as I can trace them, were Keuschler, small, landless peasants; if any of them were skilled in a craft, it was carpentry. Time and again, I saw the carpenters of the region grouped together as a people of tiredness. That was in the days of the first rebuilding after the war. As the oldest of the children, I was often sent by the women of the family, my mother, my grandmother, and my sister-in-law, to deliver warm lunch pails to the construction workers in the area. All the men in the family who had not been killed in the war, even for a time my sixty-year-old grandfather, worked there with other carpenters putting up roofs. In my picture they sit eating their lunch not far from the frame of a house—once again that special way of sitting!—on rough-hewn beams or on peeled but not yet planed tree trunks. They have taken their hats off, and their foreheads with the hair plastered to them look milky white in contrast to their dark faces. All seem sinewy, fine-boned, and sparely built, I can’t recall a single potbellied carpenter. They eat slowly and in silence; even my German stepfather, the “carpenter’s helper,” who could only hold his own in the strange country and the unfamiliar village environment with the help of his big-city bluster (may he rest in peace). After the meal they sat awhile, gently tired, talking, without jokes, without complaining, without raising their voices, mostly about their families, sometimes quietly about the weather, until in the end their work arrangements for the afternoon crowded out all other topics. Though there actually was a foreman, I had the impression that none of these workers dominated or commanded; this in a way was part of their tiredness. And yet, despite their heavy, inflamed eyelids —typical of that kind of tiredness—all were wide awake, each one of them was presence of mind personified (“Here it comes!” An apple is tossed. “Got it!”) and lively (time and again, several at once would spontaneously burst into a telling of stories: “Before the war, when Mother was still alive, we’d go and see her at the hospital in Sankt Veit, and that night we’d hike back home, a good fifty kilometers, by way of the Trixen Valley …”). The colors and shapes of my pictures of the fragmentary community of tiredness are the blue of work denims, the straight red marks that the guideline slaps on the beams, the red-and-violet of oval-shaped carpenter’s pencils, the yellow of yardsticks, the oval of the air bubble in the spirit level. By now the sweaty hair on our temples had dried and fluffed up; the hats, which have been put back on, are free from badges, and pencils rather than chamois beards have been stuck in the bands. If transistor radios had existed in those days, I’m pretty certain they’d have stayed away from those building sites. Yet a kind of music seems to reach me from there—the music of clairaudient tiredness. Not to forget the way those places looked; again I say: it was a holy time—episodes of holiness. I myself, of course, was not one of those tired people (as I had been one among the servants of the threshing machine) and I envy them. But when later, in my adolescence, I might have been one of them, it became a very different matter from what it had been in the imagination of the lunch-pail carrier. When my grandmother died and my grandfather was pensioned and gave up farming, the great household community of the generations—others in the village as well as ours—went out of existence. My parents built a house of their own, and everyone in the family, down to the smallest child, had to help with the building. For me, too, a job was found, and I learned an entirely new kind of tiredness. My work in the early stages consisted largely of pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with stone blocks uphill to the building site, which was inaccessible to trucks, over a plank walk that had been laid over mud. I no longer saw it as work done by us all in common, but as sheer drudgery. The effort of pushing those loads uphill from morning till night took so much out of me that I no longer had eyes for the things around me, and could only stare straight ahead at th
e jagged gray stones I was hauling, at the gray streams of cement that came rolling down the path, and above all at the joints between planks, which regularly forced me to lift or tilt the barrow slightly on the corners and curves. Often enough, when we came to these gaps, my wheelbarrow capsized, and I with it. Those weeks taught me what forced labor or slavery might be. At the end of the day, I was “wrecked,” as the peasants put it; my hands were bruised and my toes burned by the concrete that had oozed between them. Destroyed by tiredness, I would flop (rather than sit) down. Unable to swallow, I could neither eat nor speak. This particular tiredness—and that may have been its special characteristic—seemed to be terminal; one would never get over it. I fell asleep the moment I lay down, and awoke in the gray of dawn, when it was almost time for work, more exhausted than ever, as though the cruel drudgery had cleaned me out of everything that might have contributed to the most elementary sense of being alive—the feel of the early light, the wind on my temples—as though there would never be an end to this living death. Until then, when confronted by unpleasant chores, I had always been quick to think up dodges and evasions. Now I was even too worn out to shirk in my old familiar ways: “I have to study; there’s an exam coming up”; “I’m going to the woods to gather mushrooms for all of you.” In any case, nothing I could say would do a particle of good. Though, come to think of it, I was working for my own benefit—our house—my tiredness was invariably that of a hired hand, an isolating tiredness. Of course there were other jobs that were equally dreaded by just about everyone, such as digging ditches for water pipes: “This job is a bitch, a devil!” But oddly enough, my dead-tiredness lifted in time, giving way, to “carpenter-tiredness”? No, to a feeling of sportsmanship, to a Stakhanovite ambition, combined with a kind of gallows humor. I experienced still another kind of tiredness in my student days while working the morning shift—from early morning to early afternoon—in the shipping room of a department store during the Christmas and Easter rush, to make a little money. I’d get up at four to catch the first streetcar, urinate into an empty jam jar in my room so as not to disturb the landlady, and leave the house unwashed. The work was done by artificial light on the top floor of the building; it consisted of dismembering old cartons and with a gigantic guillotine cutting out enormous rectangles that would be used to reinforce the new cartons being packed in the adjoining room. In the long run, this activity, like chopping or sawing wood at home, did me good by leaving my thoughts free but, thanks to the steady rhythm, not too free. The new tiredness made itself felt when we stepped out into the street and separated after the shift. Alone in my tiredness, blinking, my glasses coated with dust, my open shirt collar soiled and rumpled, I suddenly had new eyes for the familiar street scene. I no longer saw myself as one with all these people who were going somewhere—to the stores, the railroad station, the movies, the university. Though wakefully tired, neither sleepy nor self-absorbed, I felt excluded from society—an eerie feeling. Moving in the opposite direction from all these other people, I was headed nowhere. I entered a lecture hall with the feeling that this was a forbidden room, and I found it even harder than usual to listen to that droning voice; what was being said wasn’t meant for me, I hadn’t even the status of a “special student.” Every day I longed more and more to be back with the tired little group of morning-shift workers up in the loft, and today, when I try to recapture the picture, I realize that even then, when I was very young, only nineteen or twenty, long before I seriously took up writing, I ceased to feel like a student among students—an unpleasant, rather frightening feeling.
But isn’t there something vaguely romantic about the way you derive all your pictures of tiredness from farmhands and manual laborers, and never from the upper or lower middle class?
I’ve never come in contact with a picturable tiredness among the middle class.
Can’t you at least imagine one?
No. It seems to me that tiredness just isn’t right for them; they regard it as a kind of misbehavior, like going barefoot. What’s more, they can’t supply an image of tiredness, because their activities don’t lend themselves to that kind of thing. The most they can do is look “weary unto death” at the end, but we can all manage that, I hope. Nor am I able to visualize the tiredness of the rich and powerful, with the possible exception of deposed kings, such as Oedipus and Lear. On the other hand, I can’t conceive of fully automated factories disgorging tired workers at closing time. I see only big, imperious-looking louts with smug faces and great flabby hands, who will hurry off to the nearest slot-machine establishment and carry on with their blissfully mindless manipulations. (I know what you’re going to say now: “Before talking like that, you yourself should get good and tired, just for the sake of fairness.” But there are times when I have to be unfair, when I want to be unfair. Anyway, I’m good and tired already from chasing after images, as you accuse me of doing.) Later on, I came to know still another kind of tiredness, comparable to what I experienced in the shipping room; that was when I finally started writing in earnest, day after day for months at a time—there was no other way out. Once again, when I went out into the city streets after the day’s work, it seemed to me that I had lost my connection with all the people around me. But the way I felt about this loss of connection wasn’t the same anymore. It no longer mattered to me that I had ceased to be a participant in normal everyday life; on the contrary, in my tiredness verging on exhaustion, my nonparticipation gave me an altogether pleasant feeling. No longer was society inaccessible to me; I, on the contrary, was now inaccessible to society and everyone in it. What are your entertainments, your festivities, your hugging and kissing to me? I had the trees, the grass, the movie screen on which Robert Mitchum displayed his inscrutable pantomime for me alone, and I had the jukebox on which, for me alone, Bob Dylan sang his “Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” or Ray Davies his and my “I’m Not Like Everybody Else.”
Wasn’t that sort of tiredness likely to degenerate into arrogance?
Yes, I’d often, in looking myself over, surprise a cold, misanthropic arrogance or, worse, a condescending pity for all the commonplace occupations that could never in all the world lead to a royal tiredness such as mine. In the hours after writing, I was an “untouchable,” enthroned, so to speak, regardless of where I happened to be: “Don’t touch me!” And if in the pride of my tiredness I nevertheless let myself be touched, it might just as well have never happened. It wasn’t until much later that I came to know tiredness as a becoming-accessible, as the possibility of being touched and of being able to touch in turn. This happened very rarely—only great events can happen so rarely—and hasn’t recurred for a long while, as though such miracles were confined to a certain segment of human existence and could be repeated only in exceptional situations, a war, a natural catastrophe, or some other time of trouble. On the few occasions when I have been—but what verb goes with it?—“favored”? “struck?” with such tiredness, I was indeed going through a period of personal distress, during which, fortunately for me, I met someone who was in a similar state. This other person always proved to be a woman. Our distress was not enough to bind us; it also took an erotic tiredness after a hardship suffered together. There seems to be a rule that before a man and a woman can become a dream couple for some hours at a time they must have a long, arduous journey behind them, must have met in a place foreign to them both and as far as possible from any sort of home or hominess, and must have confronted a danger, or perhaps only a long period of bewilderment in the midst of the enemy country, which can also be one’s own. This tiredness, in a place of refuge that has suddenly become quiet, may suddenly give these two, a man and a woman, to each other with a naturalness and fervor unknown in other unions, however loving; what happens then is “like an exchange of bread and wine,” as another friend put it. Sometimes when I try to communicate the feeling of such a union in tiredness, a line from a poem comes to mind: “Words of love—each one of them laughing …” which isn’t far fr
om the “one body and one soul” cited above, though in that case both bodies were steeped in silence; or I would simply vary the words spoken in a Hitchcock film by a tipsy Ingrid Bergman while fondling the tired and (still) rather remote Cary Grant: “Forget it—a tired man and a drunken woman—that won’t add up to much of a couple.” My variation: “A tired man and a tired woman—what a glorious couple that will be.” Or “with you” appears as a single word, like the Spanish contigo … or in German (or English), perhaps instead of saying: “I’m tired of you,” one might say: “I’m tired with you.” In the light of these extraordinary findings, I see Don Juan not as a seducer but as a perpetually tired hero who can be counted on to be overcome by tiredness at the right time in the company of a tired woman, the consequence being that all women fall into his arms, but never waste a tear on him once the mysteries of erotic tiredness have been enacted; for what has happened between those two will have been for all time: two such people know of nothing more enduring than this one entwinement, neither feels the need of a repetition; in fact, both dread the thought. That’s all very well, but how does this Don Juan bring on his forever new tiredness, which makes him and his mistress so wonderfully ready to succumb? Not only one or two but a thousand and three such simultaneities which, down to the tiniest patch of skin, engrave themselves forever on this pair of bodies, each and every impulse being genuine, unmistakable, congruent, and of course spontaneous. In any case, you and I, after such ecstasies of tiredness, would be lost to the usual bodily fuss and bother.
