How could a man who never fired a shot in his life, suddenly, at a music festival, pick off twenty-four paper roses with twenty-four shots? And then hand twenty-three of these paper roses over, in passing, to an unknown girl, or an unknown young woman, keeping only one yellow rose for himself. And then keep this one yellow paper rose for so many years, taking it along wherever he goes, apparently unable to live without it ever again. By taking the paper rose out of the drawer I’d calmed myself down. I sat down with the paper rose in my hand on the old chair and held the paper rose up to the light. We mustn’t let ourselves go so far as to suspect something remarkable, something mysterious, or significant, in everything and behind everything, this is a yellow paper rose, the yellow paper rose, to be precise, which Roithamer shot down at the music festival in Stocket that one time, together with twenty-three others in different colors, that’s all. Everything is what it is, that’s all. If we keep attaching meanings and mysteries to everything we perceive, everything we see that is, and to everything that goes on inside us, we are bound to go crazy sooner or later, I thought. We may see only what we do see which is nothing else but that which we see. Again I watched Hoeller from my window in Hoeller’s garret, as he sewed together the huge black bird which he had stuffed to bursting. Suddenly I saw, perhaps my eyes had become adjusted to the lighting down there in Hoeller’s workshop, or else the lighting had suddenly changed, anyway I saw several such huge birds, the back of Hoeller’s workshop was filled with such birds, not all of these great, indeed huge birds were equally large, not all of them were black, but these were absolutely no local birds, probably, I thought, these are birds from the collection of some bird fancier, one of those rich bird freaks who can afford to travel to America, to South America or to India, in order to shoot such huge birds and add them to his collection. A huge bird collection, I kept thinking, a huge bird collection, and I slapped my forehead as I thought again and again, a huge bird collection, a huge bird collection! Roithamer had always spoken at length about Hoeller’s work, his procedures in preserving, stuffing andsoforth all kinds of animals, every possible kind of fowl, Roithamer had always profited, so he himself said, from watching Hoeller at work, seeing how those dead creatures were dissected and stuffed and sewed up. For Roithamer, I now thought, these products of nature, stuffed and turned into artifacts, always provided an occasion for various reflections on nature and art and art and nature, to him they were almost the most mysterious products of art because they were only just barely works of art andsoforth, mysterious by virtue of the fact that they had been made into artifacts here in the midst of a natural world still abounding with hundreds and thousands of creatures still purely natural andsoforth, that they had been turned into artifacts by Hoeller, products of nature turned by Hoeller’s hands into products of art here in nature’s own bosom andsoforth. Hoeller turns nature’s products into art products and these artificial creatures seem always more mysterious than the purely natural creatures they once were.
Hoeller’s work of turning purely natural creatures into purely art(ificial) creatures had often served Roithamer as a basis for ideas on art vs. nature, and all these ideas, which Roithamer naturally always linked immediately with everything else, everything other than these ideas, that is, were all coming back to me now. However, I was no longer up to formulating a definition. But I did muse about how it could be possible for so many generations, at least four or five forebears of Hoeller can be documented, to give their lives to the stuffing and preservation of animals and to keep on for centuries, consciously or unconsciously, turning purely natural creatures into purely art(ificial) creatures. This meditation lasted an hour. Pacing the floor in Hoeller’s garret I thought that I need only approach Roithamer’s legacy, approach it to begin with, if I tackle Roithamer’s papers now it is in order to sift them and then possibly edit them, which I have no right to do, neither the right nor the necessary ruthlessness, for editing involves a certain ruthlessness toward the subject, but I can never muster the requisite ruthlessness in the face of Roithamer’s legacy. For me to bring together all these bits and pieces, perhaps to put them in the right relation to each other so as to make a whole out of all these bits and pieces of his thought, something to be published, was out of the question, for I’d had to consider, from my first contact with Roithamer’s papers, that they consist for the most part of mere fragments which he had intended to combine into a whole himself, after completing or perfecting (Roithamer), finishing (Hoeller) the Cone, first he had devoted all his powers to the completion of the Cone, once I have completed the Cone (Roithamer), once he had finished the Cone (Hoeller), he would immediately set to work with all the intensity of which he was capable and after the completion of the Cone with a fresh, even more intensive intensity, with a fresh afflatus, as Roithamer said just a few months ago in England, to work on completing (Roithamer) or finishing (Hoeller) his writing, for all these years, Roithamer said, while I was busy with the Cone, I’ve been able to put together only fragments of my scientific writings, and such mere fragments by themselves aren’t enough, such fragments must be combined into a whole when, and only when, I’ve got my head in shape for it,