And how the author will stare when these patches of light he is contemplating on the woman’s body are suddenly joined by one that is considerably more extensive — that is, when a few milestones after the arrival of the aforementioned word image, one of her shoulders, again seen from above, is suddenly bared, her shirt having seemingly slipped down to her elbow of its own accord? And although the bunched material perhaps interfered with her steering, she did not pull the shirt back up. She drove on quite some distance with one shoulder bare. Her skin reflected the light. The lashes above her black eyes stuck out distinctly, without mascara, ever more distinctly, like the acacia thorns from the windshield. And finally she bit the toothpick in two.
“But even this image or word,” she indicated to the author later on, “had a black mourning border. It arrived as pure energy and was accompanied by impossibility. The more insistently it called for unity, the stronger was the echo, and that proclaimed: separation, once and for all! Not mere mourning: pain, almost screaming; pain at the impossibility of staying together forever. So then I tossed the falcon’s wing, picked up in the devastated forest after the hurricane, out the roof of the car.”
And here the moment has come in her story to indicate that, according to tradition, her clan does not belong only to the Sorbian, i.e., Slavic, minority in the easternmost reaches of Germany. More notably it descends from a minority within this minority: from an Arab trader who came to the region even before the turn of the first millennium and conducted his business there. Hence her vanished daughter’s Arabic book? Hence the blackness of her eyes?
Myriads of images, constantly brushing past her, plummeting down on her, shooting up inside her, shining through her, tickling her awake during that solitary drive. As much internal as external, high above as down low, horizontal as vertical. And each of the images, even if it was switched off after a microsecond and at most had a bit of an afterglow, was tangible, and accessible to both the senses and the mind, both leaving an aftertaste and clarifying one’s thought processes; was each image, albeit surrounded, as now, and undergirded by the glow of missed continuity, a treasure that would never be lost, even if one allowed a particular image to disappear again without making a point of tasting and contemplating it, and a treasure whose value — she of course knew all about “value”—exceeded anything one could ever “have” in life or call “one’s own”; the fundamentals underlying any “goods”?: “love” (was love a good?), “loyalty,” including to oneself (was loyalty a good?), “beauty,” and “goodness” (was goodness a good?), “renunciation” (was renunciation a good?), and of course “peace”?
At any rate, each image among the thousands was under the control of its receiver, even if it had flashed by in the twinkling of an eye, as if the receiver were also the transmitter. What remained of the image was the imprint, which, before it faded, sooner or later, and in some cases not at all (in this respect comparable to an unusual dream), could “bear fruit,” and this without exception (whereas with dreams this was the exception). And one could decide which of these images would bear fruit — as the selection and utilization of those just described rested on the intensely personal choice made by the one “image person” in question.
“Those images,” she dictated, for the moment more a “banquière” than an “aventurière,” to the author, “are a form of capital. Capital without any exchange value, but with all the more use value. Capital whose owner one remains only if one chooses to use it to the utmost. If one allows this capital to sit unused, it collapses, and — this is the unique feature of these moveable and/or immoveable image assets, my most liquid holdings and at the same time my soundest real estate — one collapses with it, even if the opposite appears to be true. Having and owning as a process of constant trading, yet not speculating and lining one’s pockets but rather pure usufruct, as much to one’s own benefit as to others’. By putting the image-capital to work, and why shouldn’t one? for profit and enrichment, shared profit and joint enrichment, without claiming to be an owner, without the title of ownership: a way of handling property that has hitherto gone unrealized in any economic and banking system—” She broke off; end of dictation. But had the author taken it all down? His scribbles indecipherable; his private shorthand.
Over time the lightning flashes of images had become sparser. In this barren countryside all one saw, as far as the horizon, was this barren countryside. The cloud behind her had dissipated, as clouds sometimes do over the ocean. Oh (in Arabic, ja), how fruitful this interlude had been: it was right that now the images dwindled and finally disappeared altogether. Although outwardly nothing was happening — which, given the rocky baldness of the mesa, perhaps contributed to the hail of images? — , the lone driver felt like someone who had just crossed a newly discovered and at the same time tranquil, strangely familiar continent. This had been the time for images, and now there would come a time without. Yet she could have spent an entire day, even an entire month, alone in their company. And hadn’t she just experienced an entire month, an entire year?
But at the end she pursued a final image, one that had filled her with particular astonishment. With it came the idiot from the riverport city at home, the “idiot of the outskirts.” He was perched on the site of the weekly fish market. As befitted such an image, she had actually once seen him sitting there in just this way. She walked past him, and he looked at her. He was bald and barefoot. The day was windy and cold — even if in the image now neither wind nor cold played a role. Or, rather, yes, at least the wind did. For between the woman walking past and the idiot, papers and plastic bags are swirling around, intermingled with the gleaming of fish scales. The market is closed. The stands are dismantled; the square is empty, although not yet cleaned up. Fish heads and lemon slices in wooden crates, or littering the ground. The idiot not perched as usual by the side of the road or on the curb, but on one of the hydrants that will be used to wash the trash out of the marketplace. He sits there as on a throne, at eye level with her, the passerby, who has known him, as he knows her, for a long time.