by Peter Handke
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.
“Not to destroy my experience yet again by adding the thought that I met my first and last love nineteen years ago; that today, at my departure, it is eleven o’clock on the second of February.”
But did not my, your, and our story demand and require for its completion that we add the notion of a time element? Yes, with the mental addition of a time element, the “three minutes” last night and the “microseconds” this morning would be transformed into the continuity that historians otherwise attribute only to centuries or millennia. What kind of time should we thus think of in conjunction with our life, our story—for here, in Hondareda at least, every person can think: “My life! My story! I exist!” Who else can say that?
So, what tenses? what images of time? what time-styles and time-rhythms, time-signs, time-words, or also merely temporal arabesques, should be added to our existence to make it shine forth beyond the boundaries of our existence and life?—And that, in a rough outline, would have been the time-reconceptualization project up here, for which, however, from the beginning it was no longer, or not yet, the time.
I know, too, observer, that for once you would agree with me, if here, on this granite outcropping under the mottled black high Sierra sky, I were to say to you that the Hondareda region is particularly suited for outlining and integrating forms and sequences of time that are less wedded to numbers.
Even just the stratospheric sky here—and not only on those nights when there seems to be not a single patch of sky without stars, and when the most distant and closest planets’ orbits are crossing, with the sparkling of their innumerable reflections in the mica, quartz, and alabaster at your feet: a different universal time from the one posted elsewhere in airports, banks, and also here and there in the remaining no-man’s-lands.
And this region is also favorable for the construction, yes, construction, of a new sense of time free of the compulsion to count, favorable precisely because of the “chaos” created and left behind by the giant glacier, the granite boulders, towers, arches, and outcroppings scattered over the broad bottom of the basin where the settlers live. It is true: all over the earth there are no longer distinct seasons for blossoming, ripening, and lying fallow. But down there in the summit-plain depression, this constant shifting of the seasons is particularly noticeable. And what is also true: those who have migrated here have helped the effect along through technical measures. But summer and winter, fall and spring, are also all mixed up naturally, with abrupt switches from windy to windless in the rocky chaos, from sunny to cloudy; it can be freezing cold in the cavernous alleys, yet hardly a step farther on, without the actual presence of the sun, merely from the heat radiating from the granite boulders standing, leaning, and lying there in a favorable spot, shone on previously by the sun: a warmth tangible like the warmth that sometimes wafts over one from a field of grain, or the warmth that streams from ears of corn being shucked, even in late fall—a silo warmth, no, an oven warmth, a broody warmth. And similar conditions in the lake in the chaos, where the ankle-freezing still water suddenly gives way to smoothing, caressing warm currents, followed by almost scalding whirlpools.
And this is true as well: at present one can observe everywhere in the world that fruit-bearing plants in particular often bloom several times a year and produce fruit all year round, even in wintertime. Whether it be elderberries, rose hips, or strawberries: next to the dark-black, heavy, sweetly ripe bunches of elderberries, in fall or summer you have surely noticed, against a barn wall, at a crossroads, by an electric pylon, April-like cream-colored clusters of bloom or still unopened buds.
And the mountainous regions are even more favorable to this magical transformation of one season into another. And the village of Hondareda, with this chaos that does not merely create blockages or obstructions but also has a dynamic or propelling effect, enhances this phenomenon, acting like a glass bell in some places and spaces, independent of the seasons. The budding, blooming, fruit-setting, greening, darkening, and ripening, the shriveling and wilting of an elderberry cluster can be seen all at the same time on the bushes.
Thus Hondareda-Comarca is both the natural glacial chaos as well as a protected enclosure, used as such by the settlers and unobtrusively enlarged by them, sheltered from the surrounding mountain wastes, and if exposed, then primarily to the stratosphere above: perhaps more related to it than exposed.
All of this could have provided fertile ground for the time-economy project. At least there were some points of departure in the speaking style and sayings of Hondareda, which seemed extremely odd when one first heard them.
Thus a verb tense in current usage again was one that had disappeared almost everywhere else, the pre- or postfuture or future perfect tense: “We will have met each other. We will have exchanged clothing.” Or we often used the equally archaic prepositional phrase “at the time of”: “at the time of our evening meal,” “at the time of his life,” “at the time of your absence,” and we used this phrase more frequently than “with,” “before,” “after,” and “during,” and also in bizar
re expressions such as “at blackberry time,” “at book time,” “at brother time,” “at grain-of-rice time,” “at the time of your lips,” “at night-wind time,” “at our deal-making time,” “at apple time,” “at grass-blowing time.”
Yet for the most part the project remained limited to this: in our thinking and speaking, our action and inaction, we rejected, often filled with anger at ourselves, the bad forms of time that had a destructive effect on being.
It was even more beautiful then, and an even more powerful reality, when, as happened all too rarely, one became aware of a time more in tune with existence, and one could finally give “time” full play as a noun: “sand-between-the-streetcar-tracks-time,” “sky-in-the-treetops-time,” “night-blindness-time,” “Orion-and-Pleiades-time,” “eye-color-time,” “steppe-roaming-time,” “baby-carriage-pushing-time,” “Death-and-the-Maiden-time,” “crumple-letters-in-the-fire-time.”
Time beyond counting and measuring? Yes, and also, in an expression found in the book that accompanied me on my journey, my vanished child’s Arabic anthology: time “beyond weighing.” Away with those ugly standard times that anger us, and distort reality—and bring on the uplifting, inspiring time beyond weighing.
Does this mean that the immigrants to the mountains despise numbers and figures? On the contrary: they worshipped numbers for their imperviousness to all dodges and tricks.
And naturally—in the sense of a law of nature—the group of new settlers in Hondareda must have aroused worldwide indignation with this new time-management plan?, no, time-management initiative, like a dangerous sect?, no, even more passionate indignation than the most notorious sect, engaged in abducting children, emptying bank accounts, and practicing human sacrifice. And yet those who sent you and the others here, my dear observer, will not even step forward to oppose the impending attack, intervention, or whatever up here in the Sierra de Gredos. They see nothing wrong with it. They also have nothing against the people here, and when they assert that, they are almost pure of heart.
They think nothing at all when the intervention, as they say without lying, “forces itself” on them. What will happen up here is completely independent of their thinking, their decisions, their will, their person. As far as they are concerned, and this is believable, the Hondarederos are not their enemies. That the Hondareda enclave must be wiped off the face of the earth has nothing to do with two different worldviews, economic systems, concepts of morality and aesthetics, but rather with the laws of nature. Hondareda must be eliminated simply on the basis of the laws of physics. Motion produces countermotion. Every action produces an equal and opposite reaction.
A vacuum—and in the Hondareda region one of these voids that, as we know, are abhorred by nature, has developed, simply as a result of the negative thinking here, a widespread “not that!” “not that way,” “not him,” etc.—a vacuum provokes, attracts, and creates fullness, in this particular case a violent fullness, in the form of a natural pushing, penetrating, overturning, rushing from all sides into the vacuum created here, which brought on this purely physical violence by keeping this space open.
And if there is any physical mass here in the basin, it is almost negligible, and furthermore hardly moving and heterogeneous, while the mass all around, to the borders of the ecumene, as far as the Arctic and Antarctica, in the meantime seems completely homogeneous, thanks to its exclusively positive signs, “that way!” “precisely so!” “you, you, and you!” etc., a constantly moving and expanding mass, and above all one infinitely larger and more powerful than the one here.
As the laws of nature dictate, energy and matter—as you will soon be able to observe here—produce motion and force. To speak of aggression, therefore, of hostile actions, forays, violations, war, or even planned liquidation, in connection with what is in the offing for the people up here is inaccurate and inexcusable anthropomorphism in view of such purely physical processes. Sweeping Hondareda from the face of the earth will be neither an act of revenge nor a punitive operation. It is imposed by the laws of nature and inevitable.
In your reports, however, although you, the observer, may not have likened the immigrants of Hondareda to a sect, you have described them, particularly in the context of their attempt to achieve a different relationship to time, as “on their way to something like a new world religion.” According to you, the Hondarederos are in unspoken agreement that everything to be revealed, from A to Z, has already been revealed, once and for all, and captured in the writings of the most diverse peoples in the most diverse ways, yet always with the same meaning, where it can be read and used as a guide to life. In the settlers’ opinion, as your report will have it, no new revelations of any sort can be expected, and none are needed—for which reason this is no sect, according to your observations.
As far as any essential or thought-provoking contrary notion of time goes, they think that anything that needed to be revealed has been revealed, from Isaiah to Buddha, from Jesus to Muhammad. Except that what you call these “unintentional founders of a religion” distinguish between uncontested religious revelations, which they accept without reservation, and prophecies. Of all that is prophesied in the revealed religions, they believe that only the prophecy of a different kind of time is a promise that has gone unfulfilled—that indeed, in the current era it has perhaps even more prophetic force for each individual and solitary person than ever before, precisely because it does not aim to be extracted from one’s thinking, one’s innermost feelings, one’s self-awareness, and imposed on the external world, to conquer or achieve power over others. As your report puts it, “What for the Jews remains the promise of the Messiah, is for them, though quite different and above all different in focus, the promised time.”
And you continue: “To be once more, as before story became history, children of time, of the god Kronos, and also to behave like children of time, unlike the original time-god-murdering children: that is the prophecy, a sort of unplanned universal religion, according to which each individual in Hondareda wants to live, with such obscure watchwords as ‘to restore time’s veil,’ ‘back to veiled time,’ and the like.” Yes, I have studied your reports closely, by means of my own peri-periscope.
And in them, in the course of your assignment here, you have hinted more and more that you are drawn to the region and the immigrants here, even filled with enthusiasm, although of a sort that differs from mine. You, too, dear Jakob Lebel—the name of this old variety of apple, named for a farmer, suits you to a T—you, too, are, or at least once were, an enthusiast: except that your original enthusiasm emerges in reshaped and often peculiar forms as a result of your profession as observer.
Thus, in your reports, the way in which each of the Hondarederos, for himself in his cave and hideout, speaks of and rethinks time, day and night, in toneless monologues, you compare with people talking in their sleep, and furthermore not adults but children.
That impression on someone passing by outside stems primarily, you say, from the voices (which you could not hear as I could when I was inside as a guest) of those people talking to themselves in the dwellings: these sounds and syllables, seemingly uttered with great effort, which to your ears seldom resolved themselves into comprehensible words and even more seldom into an audible sentence, in fact have the ability, you write, “to transport an unprepared listener out of ordinary time and to suggest to him a subliminal time, a downright violently contrary time—an underground time” (later in the report you once use the verb “to murmur” pejoratively, as proof that you are immune to what is imputed to you, but on the other hand you note, in referring to yourself personally, that “in the meantime, however, I am more likely to prick up my ears whenever something is murmured to me, than in response to all the usual speaking in no uncertain terms, explaining, clarifying, intoning, and articulating”).
And, according to you, something uncanny emanates from the people talking to themselves in Hondareda, as elsewhere from people talking in their sl
eep. But in your report, where those who gave you your assignment would perhaps, for obvious reasons, like to see the word “threat,” you unexpectedly used the word “threatened.” Which brings us back to your comparison with children talking in their sleep: like them, you wrote, especially when they were lying alone somewhere, far away or separated forever from any kin, “utterly forsaken,” and stammered and stuttered into the nocturnal stillness, and finally could not produce one coherent sentence, the people up here “exuded with their entire existence, not only at night, but also on the brightest, sunniest day, an unparalleled sense of being threatened and exposed.”
And so, you conclude, they do not represent any danger to the world—simply because they would never, ever want to proclaim themselves an enclave in the valley they cultivate, and would never lay claim to property, either personal property or real estate—but on the contrary are themselves the ones who are threatened, yes, “lost and abandoned.”
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And at this moment, so the story goes, she, the mistress of her story, standing opposite the observer up there on the granite slab in the midst of the wilderness near the Candeleda Pass, suddenly switched from thinking to speaking out loud, and directly, and continued, clearly audible to the other person: “And your enthusiasm, my dear, and mine for the people up here come together in our recognition of their loss, of everything that gives an impression of abandonment and lostness.”
And the red-haired, freckled observer promptly replied: “Yes, that is how it is. I have already been dispatched to hundreds of places and battlefields. But to Hondareda, and back and forth through the Sierra de Gredos—this has been my first real journey, and if I am ever sent anywhere else, it will be only to places like this, just as painful and just as alive.”
And she repeated out loud, though in somewhat different words, what she had previously said in her thoughts: “This is a one-day people here, most definitely. Their time reckoning does not include a year, let alone a century, and even months and weeks: canceled. Not to mention halves and quarters: how they laughed at me when, after my arrival, I slipped up once: ‘I have been here for half a month now.’ Nothing more ludicrous in Hondareda than ‘a quarter of a year’ or, heaven forbid, ‘a trimester,’ ‘a semester.’ If there is any unit of time, it is nothing but a day, a whole day. This is a one-day people, and a twilight people, and the glacial floor down there is the arena or the dance floor for their twilight dance, which will not save this people and its day and its time, and will at most postpone the extinguishing of the lights for another rowanberry or rice-grain moment.”
