Jukebox and Other Writings

by Peter Handke

  So, to judge by what you say about the successful moment, the successful life, whether eternal or individual, you regard the idea of the successful day as a kind of fourth power. And that leads you to endow this successful day with a fragrance that will never evaporate but, regardless of what may happen to you tomorrow, will somehow linger on. Thus it is time to ask once again: “How precisely do you envision a successful day?” I can give you no precise picture of a successful day. I have only the idea, and I almost despair of showing you a recognizable contour, bringing out the design, or tracing the original light trail of my day, or disclosing it in simple purity, as I longed to do at the start. Since there is nothing but the idea, the idea is all I can tell you about. “I’d like to tell you an idea.” But how can an idea be told? There came a jolt (the “ugliness” of this word has often been held up to me, but once again there is no other way of saying it). It grew light? It widened? It took hold of me? It vibrated? It blew warm? It cleared? It was day again at the end of the day? No, the idea resists my narrative urge. It provides me with no picture to serve as an excuse. And yet it was corporeal, more corporeal than any image or representation has ever been; it synthesized all the body’s dispersed senses into energy. Idea means this: It provided no picture, only light. This idea was not recollection of well-spent childhood days; it cast its beam exclusively forward, on the future. If it can be told, then only in the future form, a future story, such as “On a successful day, day will dawn again at noon. It will give me a jolt, two jolts: one pressing me onward, the other reaching deep inside me. At the end of the successful day, I shall have the effrontery to say that for once I had lived as one should live—with an effrontery corresponding to my innate reserve.” No, the idea was not about childhood days, the days of yore; it was about a grownup day, a future day, and the idea was in reality an action, it acted, intervened beyond the simple future, as a hortative form, with the help of which, for example, Van Morrison’s song might be rendered more or less as follows: “On the successful day, the Catskill Mountains should be the Catskills, the turn-off to the rest area should be the turn-off to the rest area, the Sunday paper should be the Sunday paper, nightfall should be nightfall, your radiance beside me should …” Of course, but how is that sort of thing to be brought about? Will my own dance be enough? Or should it be “Anmut” or “Grazia” or “Gnade” instead of “Grace”? And what does it signify that the time when the idea of the successful day first crossed my mind was not a long period of near-despair? The monster of speechlessness has given way to silence. In broad daylight his dream about the bird’s nest made of hay, flat on the ground, with the naked, cheeping chicks in it, recurred. The particles of mica in the stone sidewalk glittered close to my eyes. His memory of his mother’s warmth that day when she gave him all the money she had for a new watch strap, and his memory of the maxim: “God loveth a cheerful giver.” The flying blackbird’s wing that grazed the hedge far down the road grazed him at the same time. On the asphalt platform of the Issy–Plaine station the overlapping marks of a thousand different shoe soles imprinted by yesterday’s rain have now dried into a lighter color. As he passed the unknown child, the child’s cowlick repeated itself in his mind. The steeple of Saint-Germain-des-Près, across from the cafés, the bookshop, the salon de coiffure, and the pharmacy, was simultaneously translated to another day, removed from the “current date” and its moods. Last night’s deadly fear was what it was. The splintered shop window was what it was. The disorders beyond the Caucasus were what they were. My hand and her hip—they were. It was the warmth of earth colors from the path along the railroad to Versailles. A dream of the all-encompassing, all-absorbing book, long gone from the world, long dreamed to an end—was back again all of a sudden; or renewed? here in the daytime world, and needed only to be written down. A Mongoloid woman, or perhaps a saint, with a knapsack on her back ran across the pedestrian crossing in an ecstasy of terror. And that night there was only one customer in the bar of another small-town station; while the patron was drying glasses, the house cat was playing with a billiard ball between the tables, the jagged shadows of the plane-tree leaves were dancing over the dusty windowpane, and the urgent need arose to find a different word from “blinking” for the lights of a moving train seen through a curtain of foliage—as though the discovery of a single appropriate word could make this entire day successful in the sense that “all phenomena (or, in contemporary, secular terms: all forms) are light.”

  Then at last, in disregard of logic or timeliness, a third voice, obscure, dim of outline, stuttering-stammering, a storytelling voice that seemed to come from below, from the underbrush, from far away, butted into our essay on the successful day.—At last? Or unfortunately? To its detriment?

  Fortunately or not, an “unfortunately” is in order, for a while at least; for in the following a relapse into hairsplitting cannot be avoided. Does Van Morrison’s song tell of a successful day, or only of a happy one? Because in the present context a “successful day” was dangerous, fraught with obstacles, narrow escapes, ambushes, perils, tempests, comparable to the days of Odysseus on his homeward wanderings, a story of days that can end only in eating, drinking, reveling, and the “godlike bedding of a woman.” But the dangers of my present day are neither the boulder from the giant’s sling nor any of the other well-known perils; the dangerous part of my day is the day itself. Most likely this has always been the case, especially in epochs and parts of the world where wars and other catastrophes seemed far behind (how many diaries from how many so-called Golden Ages begin in the morning with resolutions for that one day and in the evening record their failure)—but when was such a day, yours or mine, ever seen before? And in an even more golden future mightn’t its problem be even more timely and acute? At least for people like you and me, here and now in our halfway peaceful regions, the “specific demands of the day,” quite apart from its duties, struggles, distractions—days as such, available days, each moment of which offers possibilities to be grasped at—have become a challenge, a potential friend, a potential enemy, a game of chance. But if such an adventure, or duel, or mere contest between you and the day, is to be withstood, conquered, made to bear fruit, it is essential that you receive no decisive help from any third factor, neither a piece of work nor the most delightful pastime, nor even from Van Morrison’s bumpy ride; indeed, even such a distraction as “a short walk” would seem to be incompatible with a successful day—as though the day itself were the undertaking to be accomplished and brought home folded and packaged by me, preferably right here on the spot, while lying, sitting, standing, or at the most taking a few steps back and forth, doing nothing but looking and listening, or perhaps just breathing, but that involuntarily—with no effort on my part, as in every other segment of life on such a day—as though total involuntariness were prerequisite to this success. And would it thus give rise to a dance?

  And now two fundamentally different versions of the individual’s adventure with this day can be plotted. In the first he succeeds, the moment he wakes up, in casting off those dreams that are mere ballast that would encumber him on his course, and taking with him those that will form a counterweight to world events and the happenings of his day; in the morning air the earth’s continents merge; at the same time a crackling is heard in the leaves of a bush in Tierra del Fuego; the alien light of the afternoon, unbewitched from one moment to the next through knowledge of a fata morgana emanating from yourself; and from then on what’s needed for success is just to let night fall without losing your eyes for the dusk. And then, though nothing has happened, you must have it in you to go on interminably about your day. Ah, the moment when at last there was nothing but the old man in the blue apron in the front garden! And the opposite version? It must be short—preferably something like this: Paralyzed by the gray of dawn, a bundle of misery is cast adrift; his ship, named The Adventure of the Day, capsizes in the waters of the forenoon, so he never gets to know the silence of midday, let alone the hou
rs after that—and ends up deep in the night at the exact same place from which our hero should have started out at the crack of dawn. To tell the truth, the words and images with which to relate the failure of his day do not exist, except for such worn-out allegories as we have just been using.

  Thus it would seem that, before you can regard a day as successful, every moment from waking to falling asleep at night must count, or, more specifically, represent a trial (or danger) faced. But aren’t you struck by the fact that for most other people a single moment counts as a successful day (and that there is something smug about your conception so different from the prevailing view)? “When I stood at the window in the dawning light, a little bird darted by and let out a sound which seemed to be meant for me—that in itself was a successful day” (Narrator A). —“The day became successful at the moment when the phone—though you had no other plan than to go on reading the book—communicated to me the Wanderlust of your voice” (Narrator B).—“To be able to tell myself that the day is successful, I had no need of a particular moment—all I needed on waking was a mere breath, un souffle, or something of the sort” (a third narrator). And hasn’t it occurred to you that as a rule the question of whether a day is to be successful has been decided before the day has properly begun? a

  Here at least we shall not count a single moment, however glorious, as a successful day. (We shall count only the whole day.) Nevertheless, the moments I have mentioned, especially the first moments of full consciousness after the night’s sleep, may well provide the starting point for the Line of Beauty and Grace. And once the starting point for the day is set, let the day proceed point by point in a high arc. As I listen for a tone, the tonality of the whole day’s journey reveals itself to me. The tone does not have to be a full sound, it can be indifferent, as often as not a mere noise; the essential is that I make myself all ears for it. Didn’t the clicking of the buttons, when I stripped my shirt off the chair this morning, provide me with a kind of diapason for my day? And when yesterday morning, instead of reaching blindly and heedlessly for the first thing I needed, I did so carefully, with open eyes, didn’t that supply me with the right rhythm for taking hold of things all the rest of the day? And mightn’t the continual sensation of wind and water in the new morning—or, instead of “sensation,” wouldn’t it be preferable to say “awareness,” or simply “feeling” in my eyes, my temples, and wrists—mightn’t this sensation attune me to the coming elements of the day, prepare me to dissolve into them and let them work on me? (Answer reserved for the present.) Such a successful moment: Viaticum? Impulse? Nourishment with breath as spirit for the rest of this one day; for such a moment gives strength, and in telling about the next moment one might, drawing on another literal translation of “moment” again from a Pauline epistle, begin with “And with one casting of the eye …”: With one casting of the eye the sky turned blue, and with the next casting of the eye the green of the grass became a greening, and … Who has ever experienced a successful day? But who has ever experienced a successful day? Not to mention the difficulty of tracing the curve of that line!

  The clouds of the still invisible dog’s breath came puffing through the cracks in the fence. The few remaining leaves on the trees trembled in the foggy wind. The forest began just behind the village railroad station. Two men were washing the telephone booth; the one outside was white, the one inside was black.

  And if I fail to seize a moment of this kind, does it mean that my whole day has failed? If this last apple, instead of being carefully picked, were torn blindly from the branch—would all the preceding consonances between the day and me be nullified? If I were insensitive to the glance of a child, evaded the beggar’s glance, were unable to face the glance of that woman (or even of that drunk) —would that mean a break in my rhythm, a fall from my day? And would it be impossible to make a fresh start that same day? Would that day’s failure be irrevocable? With the consequence that for me the daylight would not only diminish as it does for most other people, but also, and this is where the danger lies, that brightness of form might degenerate into the hell of formlessness? Thus, for example, if the musical clicking of the buttons against the wood were repeated on such an unsuccessful day, I should be condemned to hear it as noise. Or if in a moment of carelessness I were to reach out “blindly” for a glass and drop it, causing it to shatter into smithereens, wouldn’t that be a catastrophe and far more than a mere mishap, though of course everyone else in the room would deny it:—the incursion of death into the current day? And would I be condemned—and rightly so—as the most presumptuous of beings, because in aspiring to live a successful day I had wanted to be like a god? For the idea of such a day—to move onward and ever onward on the same level while carrying light—is, after all, a project fit only for our ill-fated Lucifer. Does this mean that my attempt at a successful day is in danger of degenerating at any moment into a story of murder and mayhem, of running amok, devastation, annihilation, and suicide?

  You are confusing a successful day with a perfect day. (No need to say anything about the latter or its god.) At the end of a thoroughly imperfect day, you might cry out in spite of yourself: “A successful day!” Conceivable, too, is a day during which you have been painfully aware of unsuccessful moments, and yet at the end of which you report at length to your friends on “a striking success.” Your leaving the book which, as you sensed in reading the first line, started the day off right, in the train, needn’t mean that you’ve lost your fight with the angel of the day; even if you never find the book again, your reading that began so full of promise may well continue in a different manner—perhaps more freely, more spontaneously. The success of my days seems to depend on how I evaluate (another ugly word, but the brooding writer finds no better—“appraise”? “estimate”?) deviations from the line, my own as well as those imposed by Madame World. The success of our “successful day” expedition seems to presuppose a certain indulgence toward myself, my nature, my incorrigibilities, as well as an insight into the hazards of daily life even under favorable circumstances: the insidiousness of objects, evil eye, that one word spoken at the wrong moment (even if only overheard by someone in a crowd). Thus in my undertaking, everything hinges on the handicap I allow myself. How much mucking around, how much carelessness or absentmindedness I tolerate in myself. How much incomprehension, impatience, unfairness, how much clumsiness, how many heartless remarks, spoken without thinking (or not even spoken), how many newspaper headlines, or advertisements that catch my eye or ear, how many stitches in my side will it take before I lose my openness to the shimmering that corresponds to the episodic greening and blueing of grass and sky, and the occasional “graying” of stone, signifying that on a certain day the “coming of day” carries over to me and to space. I am too hard on myself, not indifferent enough about my mishaps with things, too full of demands on the times, too convinced that everything is going to the dogs: I have no standard for the success of a day. Indeed, what with myself and the kind of things that happen regularly or irregularly, the situation would seem to call for a special kind of irony—the affectionate kind—and of humor, of the sort named after the gallows. Who has ever experienced a successful day?

  His day began promisingly. A few lance-shaped pencils lay on the windowsill along with a handful of oval hazelnuts. Even the numbers of both sets of objects contributed to his sense of well-being. He had dreamed about a child lying on the bare floor in a bare room, who said when he bent down to him: “You’re a good father.” On the street the postman whistled as he did every morning. The old woman in the house next door was already closing her dormer window for the rest of the day. The sand in the columns of trucks en route to the building site was as yellow as the drifting sand that made up the hills of the region. By letting the water in the hollow of his hand act on his face, he had gained awareness not only of the water in the village here but also of the “water of Ioannia on the far slope of the Pindus,” of the “water of Bitola in Macedonia,” of th
e water that morning in Santander, where the rain seemed to be pelting down, but when he went out proved to be so fine a curtain that he hardly got wet when passing through it. With the sound of a turning book page in his ears, he heard from far beyond the gardens the clanking of the local train slowing down in the station and at the same time, amid the squawking of the crows and the whining of the magpies, the lone cheeping of a sparrow. Then he looked up, never before had he seen the bare, solitary tree high up on the edge of the wooded hill, through whose branches as they shifted in the wind the brightness of the plateau shone down into the house, while on the table at which he sat reading, the letter S, sewn into the tablecloth, revealed a picture of an apple and of a smooth, black, rounded stone. When he looked up again—“work can wait, I can wait, it and I, we can both wait”—the day was literally whirring, and he noticed now, without having looked for the words, he was thinking to himself: “Sacred world!” He went out into the forest to chop wood for a fire in the fireplace, which it seemed to him would be better suited to such a day rather than to the evening. As he was sawing the thick, tough tree, the blade stuck, breaking his rhythm; he tugged violently, but it refused to budge; he could only give up, pull—or better, “wrench” the saw out—and start in a different place. The whole comedy repeated itself—the blade stuck in the heartwood, he pushed and shook until he had almost reached the point of no return … and then with stunning force the log, more mangled than sawed, fell on the foot of the would-be hero of the day. Finally, after a first flaring and a subdued hissing, his fire collapsed, and he cursed the holy day in the exact same words for which his rustic grandfather had been known throughout the village: Shut up, blasted birds, beat it, sun. Later, it sufficed for his pencil point to break, and not only the day, but the future as well, was compromised. By the time he realized that these very mishaps might have made something of the day, it had long since become a different day. If he had observed it with care, he would have recognized that this vain attempt to light a fire—hadn’t the smothering and blackening of the flame represented a mysterious moment of community?—was the quintessence of all futilities, and not only those of a personal nature. If he had recognized this, he would have stopped trying and exercised patience. And similarly, the blow of the log on his toes had given him something more than pain. It had also touched something else in him, at the same place; something like the friendly muzzle of an animal. And that again was an image—an image in which all the logs from his childhood down to the present moment united to fall—or rather, to roll, bounce, dance, or rain down on all his different shoes, socks, and variously sized child or adult feet; for that other contact was so miraculously gentle that if he had merely taken note of it for a moment he would have been all amazement. And similarly, as he realized later on when he looked back at a distance, his setbacks while sawing wood provided him with a complete parable, or fable?, for the success of his day. The main thing was to begin with a jolt and find the right starting point for the saw’s teeth, a groove in which the saw could continue to function. After that, the sawing took on a rhythm. For a time it went easily and gave him pleasure; one thing led to another; sawdust sprayed from both sides, the tiny leaves of the nearby box tree curled, the crackling of the foliage caught in it mingled with the squeaking of the saw; the rumble of a garbage can was followed by the droning of a jet plane high in the sky. And then, gradually as a rule and, provided he kept his mind on what he was doing, perceptible in advance, the saw entered into a different layer of the wood. Here it became necessary to change his rhythm—to slow down, but that was the risky part of it—to do so without halting or skipping a beat; even when the rhythm changed, the general sawing movement had to maintain its regularity; otherwise, the saw would be sure to stick. Then, if at all possible, one had to pull it out and reapply it, preferably, as the fable taught, not in the same place or in one too close to it, but in a totally different place, because … If the change of place was successful at the second try, and the sawing was finally successful in the lower half of the tree trunk—long after the exhilarated sawyer had lost sight of the saw’s teeth—already he was elsewhere in his thoughts, making plans for the evening or sawing a human enemy in two instead of the tree—then a new danger threatened, if not a forking branch he had overlooked, then (usually no more than a finger’s breadth from the point where the piece of wood, having been cut through that far, would fall of its own accord) that narrow but extremely tough layer in which steel would strike against stone, nail, and bone all in one, and just before the finale, so to speak, the undertaking would come to grief. For a brief moment, music to the ears of a stranger but to the sawyer himself caterwauling—and that was the end of it. And yet he had been so close to success that sawing for its own sake, just being with the wood, its roundness, its smell, its grain, just traversing the material, while studying its special characteristics and resistances, became the ideal embodiment of his dream of disinterested pleasure. And likewise the breaking pencil point … and so forth and so on, all day. Thus, he reflected later, in an attempt at a successful day, everything, at least in moments of misfortune, of pain, of failure, when things were going wrong—the essential was to summon up the presence of mind needed for a different variety of this moment and thus to transform it, by a liberating act of awareness or reflection, whereby the day—as though this were the prerequisite for its success—would acquire its elan and its wings.