"I'm headed into the wilderness this morning‑‑going to a lake in between Noatak and Gates of the Arctic reserves called Feniak (autocorrect replaces Feniak with "denial"). We'll be there until August 3rd."
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| photo of Toolik Lake by Jake Snow |
Last night, sleeping in a motel in Boise after driving from Seal Rock, Oregon yesterday (what a fantastically varied landscape! I kept saying "beautiful" and then wondered if Peter had ever used the word "schoen" in a text -- bet he hasn't!), I had a long and disconnected dream tied together by subconscious responses to Ben's email and to Peter's "The Great Fall."
In the dream, I mentioned the email to several people, each of whom seemed to have more recent information about Ben. The most disconcerting came from a person who claimed Ben had told her that he was headed to Italy to travel around naked with a donkey. I couldn't complete discount it, especially because Ben has always done exactly what he thought was authentic, including living as a homeless person one year while an undergraduate student. But none of it is authentic, I claimed in the dream. The idea of the donkey in Italy comes straight from St. Francis. And the remote Alaskan lake is straight out of Peter Handke's newest book. Even the words of the sentence "I'm headed into the wilderness this morning" have been spoken for Ben by the language he grew up with.
So although I'm proud of Ben and his work on thermokarsts in a time of global warming, I couldn't authenticate anything in the dream.
I mention this in the context of Michael Roloff's latest comment:
True enough, our "actor" has a screenplay in mind and has mentioned this a number' of times. . . . I think of Handke's great play VOYAGE BY DUGOUT where the world appears,is represented through the reading and discussion of a screenplay that is acted out on stage....
On my reading of the text, there is always a another text between the actor and the world -- a necessary fact given our nature as creatures of language. This was my point about the mass in the church. And I think it's one of the major points of the book as a whole.
12 comments:
This is the first time I see Scott's post from Idaho, subsequent to his traipsing around the Oregon tide pools, and his agreement with me on the matter of the levels
of experience that DER GROSSE FALL introduces. What might Handke, the author's first notion for this book have been? There probably notes about it in his notebook, which we won't see while either Scott or I are alive.
Perhaps it was, "I've never had an actor as a lead! Hm, that affords a lot of possibilities for dissimulation and playfulness!... He might even be a kind of phantast, besotted by roles he played, that he did such a good and famous job
at!... I could work in a few things that still obsess me!... T'would be a lot of fun!"
I ran both our comments on DER GROSSE FALL through the brain once more. I note Scott's accurate assessment that there is a lot about standing up and falling, which somehow doesn't mean much to me however as I read the book - I only sense the possibility of an amoke explosion!; and his noting of narrative disruptions;
where I can't tell whether some of what I regard as gaucheries or happy go lucky stitching are part of that or not.
What the book leaves me with / in right now, until the forthcoming third reading, or forever, is in a state of uncertainty! Which I may be in in other respects as well, thus it evokes that. Handke writes projection
screens, among other things he does simultaneously, certainly even after just two readings, and more of
certain sections, many of them have etched themselves into my being, also those sections where he evidently
takes such absolute joy in sheer writing. Maybe Handke has found
or is in the process of finding new ways of being ambiguous.
the tension that comes with trying to stay upright is much like the tension of trying not to run amok.
in that case i would suggest that the actor just stay in bed and loll around with one of his squeezes, he seems very comfy there until the lightning struck!
There are lot's of good "PsychoPhysikers" in Paris for sure'
who could cure him of that tension - if he really wanted to be!
There are lot's of good "PsychoPhysikers" in Paris for sure'
who could cure him of that tension - if he really wanted to be!
But it's the tension of being human; cure him (or me or you) and then we'd just lay around squeezing women or lemons.
No, it's the tension of being Handke! Not that you can't find what called a "psychotic core" in the great majority of humans, perhaps also in all the great apes! but that was one reason why I posted the tough-guy Julian Bielicki's piece on the source of violent irruptions, but then Bielicki copped out, and refused to elaborate on the Handke case. Not everyone has thrice the impulse to rum amok, or has Handke's actual irruptions.
i don't mean to melt us all together; but i'm drawn to the tensions in this novel and peter's other work because i feel them too.
This novel has very relaxed stretches, compared to the early and earlier ones. If you mean "civilization and its discontents" - of course we live entirely unnatural lives, say, as compared to my preferred Hunter-Gatherers who only needed to work 20 hours a week, were/ are of far better stature and in better all around health.
you remind me of that footnote in das unbehagen in der kultur in which freud figures that our evolutionary step up from four to two legs was the fateful beginning of civilization because then we were ashamed of our newly visible genitals.
i think that "shame" was a middle class projection on the part of my beloved freud, all those girls loving their omphalos? proud of itself! for the monkey with its forelimbs that were designed to clamber up and down trees, the savannahs afforded the possibility to hunt prey, protein! so running on two legs was a far better means of locomotion than how, say any kind of Chimp can proceed - just a guess that a Chimp can't scamper faster than we can run. Altough the monkey troupes I saw in the ancient cities in Sri Lanka - Annaratmapura - are quite fleet.
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