Jukebox and Other Writings

by Peter Handke

  And its adjective, like that of the idea which it gave me, is, as it should be, “fantastic,” and its noun, after my solitary night of peril, the word “with.”

  So your idea of writing an essay about a successful day was itself a successful day?

  That was before the summer. Over the garden the swallows were flying “so high!” I shared a young woman’s pleasure in smoothing out the curved brim of a straw hat; the Pentecost fête was lively in the night wind of our village, the cherry tree stood fruit-red beside the railroad tracks, the workaday garden came to be called the Garden of the Step Taken—and now it was winter, as, for example, it revealed itself on the railroad curve repeated yesterday for my reassurance as I could see by the handrail and the gray flowering of the clumps of wild grapes against the misty network of the Eiffel Tower, the snowberries whishing past the distant towers of La Defense, the acacia thorn jerking past the barely discernible hazy whiteness of the domes of Sacré-Coeur.

  Once again: In the light of all this, was that a successful day?

  No answer.

  I think no, thanks to my imagination, I know it was. How much more could be done with that day, with nothing but that day. And now its momentum is in my life, in your life, in our epoch. (“We lost our momentum,” said the captain of a baseball team, which had been about to win the game.) The day is in my power, for my time. If I don’t give the day a try now, then I’ve missed my chance of enduring; more and more often, I realize, all the while growing angrier at myself, how as time goes on more and more moments speak to me and how I understand, and above all appreciate, less and less of what they say. I must repeat, I am furious with myself, over my inability to maintain the morning light on the horizon, which just now made me look up and come to rest (into rest, we read in the Pauline epistle), so that, when I start reading, the blue of the heather still occupies the middle ground, a few pages farther on it is a vague spot in the Nowhere, and by the onset of dusk the motionless form of the blackbird in the bush is still “the outline of Evening Island after a day on the open sea,” and a tick of the watch later is nothing more—meaningless, forgotten, betrayed. Yes, that’s how it is: more and more as the years go by—the richer the moments seem to me, the louder they denounce me to high heaven—I see myself as a traitor to my day, day after day, forgetful of the day, forgetful of the world. Again and again I resolve to remain faithful to the day, with the help, led “by the hand” (“maintenant,” hand-holding, that’s your word for “now”) of those moments. I would like to hold them, think about them, preserve them, and day after day, no sooner have I turned away from them than they literally “fall” from my hands, as though to punish me for my infidelity, for, it can’t be denied, I had turned away from them. Fewer and fewer of the increasingly frequent significant moments of the day ripe, yes, that’s the word, ripen anything for me. The moment of the children’s voices this morning in the lane ripened nothing; now in the afternoon, with clouds drifting eastward, it produces no aftereffect—though at the time they seemed to rejuvenate the wintry forest … Should that be taken to mean that the time for my essay on the successful day is past? Have I let the moment slip by? Should I have gotten up earlier? And rather than an essay, mightn’t the psalm form—a supplication presumed in advance to be in vain—have been more conducive to the idea of such a day? Day, let everything in you ripen something for me. Ripen the ticking of the lanceolate willow leaves as they fall through the air, the left-handed ticket agent deep in his book, who once again makes me wait for my ticket, the sun on the door handle. Ripen me. I’ve become my own enemy, I destroy the light of my day, destroy my love, destroy my book. The more often individual moments resound as pure vowels—“vowel” is another word for such a moment—the more seldom I find the consonant to go with it, to carry me through the day. The glow at the end of the sandy path to the nameless pond: Ah! but a moment later it has faded, as though it had never been. Divine Being, or “Thou, the more-than-I” that once spoke through the Prophets and later on “through the Son,” dost thou also speak in the present, purely through the day? And why am I unable to hold, grasp, pass on what thus speaks through the day, and, I believe, or rather, thanks to my imagination, know, starts speaking anew at every moment? “He who is and who was and who will be”: why can what once was said of “the god” not be said of my present day?

  On a successful day—attempt at a chronicle of this day —globules of dew on a raven feather. As usual, the old woman, though perhaps not the same one as yesterday, stood around in the newspaper shop long after completing her purchase, and spoke her mind. The ladder in the garden—embodiment of his need to get out of himself —had seven rungs. The sand in the trucks moving through the village was the same color as the façade of Saint-Germain-des-Pres. The chin of a young girl in the library touched her neck. A tin bucket took its shape. A mailbox turned yellow. The market woman wrote the bill on the palm of her hand. On a successful day it happens that a cigarette butt rolls in the gutter, that a cup smokes on a tree stump, and that a row of seats within the dark church is bright in the sunshine. It happens that the few men in the café, even the loudmouth, keep silent together for a long moment, and that the stranger to the village keeps silent with them. It happens that my sharpened hearing for my work also opens me up to the sounds in the house. It happens that one of your eyes is smaller than the other, that the blackbird hops under the bush, and that when the lower branches rise I think “updraft.” Finally, it even happens that nothing happens. On the successful day, a habit will be discontinued, an opinion vanish, and I shall be surprised by him, by you, by myself. And along with “with,” a second word form will dominate; namely, “and.” In the house I shall discover a corner that has hitherto been overlooked, where “someone could live!” As I turn into a side street, “Where am I? I’ve never been here before” will be a sensational moment; when I see the light-dark space in a hedge, the “New-World explorer” feeling will set in, and when I walk a little farther than usual and look back, a cry of “I never saw that before” will escape me. Your repose, as sometimes happens in children, will also be amazement. On the successful day, I shall simply have been its medium, simply have gone along with the day, let the sun shine on me, the wind blow on me, the rain rain on me, my verb will have been “let.” In the course of the day, your inwardness will become as varied as the outside world, and by the end of the day you will have translated Odysseus’ epithet, “the much-buffeted,” to yourself as “the many-sided,” and that many-sidedness will have made you dance inwardly. On a successful day, the hero would have been able to “laugh” at his mishaps (or would at least have started to laugh at the third mishap). He would have been in the company of forms—if only of the various leaves on the ground. His I-day would have opened out into a world-day. Every place would have acquired its moment, and he would have been able to say: “This is it.” He would have arrived at an understanding with mortality. (“Never has death spoiled the sport of the day.”) His epithet for everything would have been an unchanging “In view of”: In view of you, in view of a rose, in view of the asphalt, and matter, or “corporeity”?, would have cried out to him, time and again for creation. He would have put on a show of good cheer and cheerfully done nothing, and from time to time a weight on his back would have kept him warm. For a moment, for a “casting of the eye,” the time of a word, he would suddenly have become you. And at the end of the day he would have called out for a book—something more than a mere chronicle: “The fairy tale of the successful day.” And at the very end, he would have gloriously forgotten that the day was supposed to be successful …

  Have you ever experienced a successful day? Everyone I know has experienced one; most people have actually had many. One was satisfied if the day hadn’t been too long. Another said something like: “Standing on the bridge, with the sky over me. In the morning, laughed with the children. Just looking, nothing special. There’s happiness in looking.” And in the opinion of a third, simply the village s
treet through which he had just passed—with the raindrops dripping from the enormous key of the locksmith’s sign, with the bamboo shoots cooking in somebody’s front garden, with the three bowls on a kitchen windowsill containing tangerines, grapes, and peeled potatoes, with the taxi parked as usual outside the driver’s house—was in itself a “successful day.” The priest, whose pet word was “longing,” considered a day when he heard a friendly voice successful. And hadn’t he himself, who longed time and again for an hour in which nothing had happened, except that a bird turned about on a branch, that a white ball lay at the bottom of a bush, and that schoolchildren were sunning themselves on the station platform, thought in spite of himself: Has this been the whole day? And often in the evening, when he called the events of the past day to mind—yes, it was a kind of “calling”—didn’t the things or places of a mere moment occur to him as names for it. “That was the day when the man with the baby carriage went zigzagging through the piles of leaves.” “That was the day when the gardener’s banknotes were mixed with grass and leaves.” “That was the day when the café was empty when the refrigerator rumbled and the light went out …” So why not content ourselves with a single successful hour? Why not simply call the moment a day?

  Ungaretti’s poem “I illuminate myself with the immeasurable” is entitled “Morning.” Couldn’t those two lines just as well be about the “afternoon”? Were a fulfilled moment or a fulfilled hour really enough to make you stop asking if you had failed again that day? No use attempting a successful day—why not content ourselves with a “not entirely unsuccessful one”? And if your successful day existed, wasn’t your fantasy, however richly and wonderfully it whirred, accompanied by a strange fear of something like an alien planet, and didn’t your usual unsuccessful day appear to you as part of the planet earth, as a kind of—possibly detested—home? As though nothing here below could succeed; except perhaps in grace? in mercy? in grace and mercy—if nowadays that didn’t imply something improper, undeserved, perhaps even accomplished at someone else’s expense? Why now does “successful day” remind me of my dead grandfather, who in his last days did nothing but scratch the wall of his room with his fingernails, lower down from hour to hour. In view of all the general failure and loss, what does a single success amount to?

  Not nothing.

  The day of which I can say it was “a day,” and the day when I was only passing the time. At the crack of dawn. How have people handled their days up to now? How is it that in old stories we often find “Many days were fulfilled,” in place of “Many days passed”? Traitor to the day: my own heart. It drives me out of the day, it beats, it hammers me out of it, hunter and hunted in one. Be still! No more secret thoughts. Leaves in my garden shoes. Out of the cage of revolving thought. Be still. Bend down under the apple tree. Go into a crouch. The crouching reader. At knee height, things coalesce to form an environment. And he prepares for the daily injury. Spreads his toes. “The seven days of the garden.” That’s what the unwritten sequel to Don Quixote should be called. To be in the garden, to be on earth. The rate of the earth’s rotation is irregular, that’s why the days are of unequal length, especially in view of the mountain ranges’ resistance to the wind. The success of the day and passivity. Passivity as action. He let the fog drift outside the window; he let the grass blow behind the house. Letting the sun shine on one was an activity; now I’m going to let my forehead be warmed, now my eyeballs, now my knees—and now it’s time for teddy-bear warmth between my shoulder blades. The sunflower head does nothing but follow the sun. Compare the successful day with Job’s day. Instead of “value the moment,” it should be “heed” the moment. The course of the day—thanks precisely to its rough spots, if taken to heart—is in itself a kind of transubstantiation—more than anything else, it can tell me what I am. Pause in your endless restlessness, and you will find rest in your flight. And by resting in his flight, he began to hear. Hearing, I am at my peak. Thanks to my keen hearing, I can hear the whirring of a sparrow’s wing through the noise. When a leaf falls on the line of the distant horizon, I hear it deep inside me as a ringing. Listening as a safecracker with his jimmy listens for the clicking of the gears. Slowed by flight, the blackbird’s hop-skip-jump over the hedge is humming a tune for me. Just as some people hum when reading a book. (But the most you can expect of a newspaper reader is a whistling between the teeth.) “Seeing you are dull of hearing,” stormed the zealot in one of his epistles, and in another: “Stop disputing over mere words, it does no good and only bedevils those who listen.” A pure tone. If only I could produce a pure tone once for a whole day. Perhaps more important than hearing is pure presence—Picasso’s last wife, for example, is said to have done nothing, just to have been present in his studio. A successful day, a hard day. Suddenly, as I was raking the garden leaves, a rooster’s foot gleamed candlelight yellow from out of the pile of brownish leaves. Colors darken, form brightens. In the shady corner, where the ground is still frozen hard, my footsteps sound as they did that day in the rushes.

  When I look up, the sky is a vault. What did “snow cloud” mean? Rich whiteness with a blue cast. Cracking hazelnuts in the palm of my hand, three of them. In Greek there used to be a word for “I am,” which was simply a long-drawn-out “O”; it occurred in such sentences as “While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” And the word for what just passed through the cypress tree was: “lightwave.” Look and keep looking with the eyes of the right word. And it began to snow. It is snowing. Il neige. To be silent. There was silence. He was silent in the sign of the dead. One should not say: “He (she) blessed the temporal world” (He [she] passed away) but: “He, she, the dead, bless the temporal world for me, provided I leave them alone.” And at the same time wanting to stammer: he wanted to stammer. In the suburbs everything is supposedly so “individual” (a suburbanite speaking). The one-legged stance of the garbage collector at the back of his truck. The bumps placed on the roads at regular intervals were called “decelerators.” A single day may not have been sufficiently far-reaching as a model; perhaps it was a model only to itself—which gave pleasure? During the lunch break I help the roofers carry slats down from the ridge. Shouldn’t I have stayed home all day, doing nothing but “dwelling”? Bring about a successful day by pure dwelling? To dwell, to sit, to look up, to excel in uselessness. What did you do today? I heard. What did you hear? Oh, the house. Ah, beneath the tent of my book. But why are you going out now, instead of staying in the house, where you were in your place with your book? Because what I’ve read—I want to digest it out of doors. And look at the corner of the house, which is called “Travels”: a small suitcase, a dictionary, hiking shoes. The ringing of bells in the belfry of the village church: the pitch is just right for this noon hour, and up here in the dark dormer window all that can be seen of them is a whirring as of bicycle spokes. Deep within the earth, there are occasional tremors, the so-called slow tremors, and for a while, so it is said, the planet reverberates with them: “the bell movement,” the ringing of the earth. The silhouettes of a man and a child with a back satchel sway in the railroad underpass, as if the man were riding on a donkey. According to Goethe, life is short but the day is long, and I seem to remember Marilyn Monroe singing a song that went: “One day too long, one life too short …” and another: “Morning becomes evening under my body.” Let the quick ellipse described by the last of the leaves of the plane tree in falling provide the line for the ending of my attempted successful day—Abbrevia- tion! Hogarth’s Line of Beauty is not actually engraved in the palette; it is stretched over it like a curved rope or a whiplash. The successful day and succinctness. (And, alongside it, the desire to postpone the end—as though I, I in particular, could learn more from my essay with each passing day.) The successful day and joyful expectation. The successful day and the discoverer’s aberrations. Morning a still life—afternoon a muddle: a mere pseu-dolaw? Don’t let yourself be ruled by these daily pseudo-laws. And once again St. Paul. For h
im “the day” is the Day of Judgment—and for you? The day of measurement; it will not judge, but measure you; you are its people. Who here is talking to whom? I’m talking to myself. The dead silence of the afternoon. Nevertheless, the sound of children running, heard through the wind. And high up there the flower heads of the plane trees are still dangling: “his (her) heart is in it” (from the French). And at any moment, in the rustling of the withered dwarf oaks, now, for instance, I become you. What would we be without that rustling? And what word goes with it? The (toneless) yes. Stay with us, rustling. Keep pace with the day—speak in cadence with the day (homology). What became of that day on the curve high above all Paris, between Saint-Cloud and Suresnes, not far from the Val d’Or station. It hung in the balance. The bright-dark shimmer that day when the swallows veered in the summer sky, and the black-white-blue moment now: the magpies and the winter sky. The S-line again, a few days ago, on the shoulder, neck, and throat of John the Evangelist at the Last Supper over the portal of Saint-Germain-des-Près, his whole trunk lies there on the table next to the Lord Jesus—for, like the other stone figures, he had been beheaded by the Revolution. The successful day and again history’s glorious forgetfulness: instead, the endless lozenge pattern of human eyes—on the streets, in the corridors of the Métro, in the trains. The gray of the asphalt, the blue of the evening sky. The shakiness of my day, the solid and enduring? Set your footprint upon the snow of the station platform beside the print of a bird’s foot. A hard day once began to teeter when a single raindrop struck my inner ear. The shoe brush on the wooden stairs at sunset. A child writing its name for the first time. Keep going until the first star. Van Morrison in his song doesn’t sing about “fishing in the mountains,” but “out all day,” about bird watching. He lets his tongue sing, and barely begun, his song is at an end. The moment of the mud-spattered forester’s car in the row of clean cars. The doors of the forest open with a creak. Revolving door of a successful day: in it, things as well as people flare up as beings. The successful day and the will to divide it. Constant, wild obligation to be fair. Oh, hard day! Successful? Or “saved”? Unexpectedly, still in the dark, the thrust of joy in carrying on. Yes, a modified word—a proof correction that stands for the day: “thrust” instead of your usual “jolt.” Stop on your night walk: the path is brightening—for once you can say “my path”—and increasing awareness of secrecy, “behold, she comes with the clouds,” comes with the wind. Triad of the screech owl. Blue moment of the boat in one woodland pond, black moment of the boat in the next pond. For the first time in this suburb, behind the Heights of the Seine that hide the lights of Paris, caught sight of Orion high in the winter night, behind it parallel columns of smoke from factory chimneys, and under it the five stone steps, leading up to a door in a wall, and Ingrid Bergman in Stromboli, who collapses after an almost fatal night on the black, rocky slopes of the volcano, revives at sunrise, and can’t get over her amazement. “How beautiful! What beauty!” In the 171 night bus a lone passenger, standing. The burned-out telephone booth. Collision between two cars at the Pointe de Chaville: from one of them leaps a man with a pistol. Glaring television lights in the front windows of the Avenue Roger Salengro, the house numbers on which go up to over 2000. The thunder of the bombers taking off from the military airfield in Villacoublay, just beyond the wooded hills, more frequently from day to day with the approach of war.