And when I read on, another situation is evoked for me, from the same region: “When a person enters a stranger’s garden for the purpose of stealing …” “When a person steals grain from a stranger’s field and hauls it away with a cart or on a horse …” and “But if he hauls it away on his back …”
One section even reminds me of a specific person, my grandfather, who, after the death of his wife, when he was already quite an old man, fell in love with a neighbor’s hired woman. In the law it is mentioned that anyone who consorted with the king’s maid and openly entered into relations with her was sentenced thenceforth to serve the king likewise. And thus, when I read the Roman law I see my grandfather on a certain Sunday afternoon, when he had been left alone on purpose with his forbidden love, which was known to the entire village, being caught by his family when they returned unexpectedly — his own daughter, my mother, and also his second daughter are there. The almost seventy-year-old man stands there with his pants down, the hired woman, not much younger, in her slip. None of the witnesses laughs; that a man, and an old man at that, should enter into relations with another woman so soon after the death of his wife, and with this kind of woman, is serious, and the two daughters look most serious of all. The two elderly dissolutes have flushed cheeks, two times two small, bright red, perfectly round spots there, not from shame, but because they were just kissing, their mouths almost closed and their lips pursed like birds or children, and just as eagerly, at a frenetic pace, head against head, yet their bodies at a distance from each other. The hair of this purple-cheeked couple sticks out from their heads, the woman’s gray, the man’s still black. She looks at the bystanders while he gazes into her eyes as before. They do not pluck at their clothing, either one of them, and thousands of Sundays later, in his charity cubicle, with room only for his bed, this man, meanwhile almost ninety, pulls the blooming young woman from Catalonia, visiting with his grandson, onto his knee and breaks into dry sobs.
Where I come from, I was never considered a native, a villager. But I can say that deciphering the aforementioned legal code helped make a villager out of me in the cities, at a distance, and only there. I read: “When someone steals the bell from a stranger’s pigsty …” and I recall the bell, although there was probably no such thing, in a pigsty back home, and see or visualize our village as located in an imperial province, isolated yet within easy reach of the capital.
And yet the law, even that of classical antiquity, does not provide sufficient reading for me. Give me a sentence that begins with “In the days when” instead of “Whenever,” and I am electrified altogether differently.
I fear, though, that I have read all the “In the days when” books I am referring to. The last one was the Bible, and there I kept putting off the end, finally rationing myself to two sentences a day of the Apocalypse. After that I stopped my kind of reading for the time being. I do continue to read, but it is really more a reflex action, like watching television, no longer a way of life; it does not penetrate to a deeper layer, and just as I soon switch off the television, I soon hit a snag in my reading.
The “In the days when” books still rank highest, as far as I am concerned, although those written nowadays usually soon catapult me back into the outside world, the here and now, instead of keeping me in their “It was” and “It happened.” And I feel just as comfortable there as earlier when reading stories, even if nothing happens but a cloud’s passing overhead. I do not know why. The only strange thing is that I am back outside most quickly, have no desire to enter into a present-day book at all, when the story pretends to be one from olden times, like a classic tale. I also cannot manage to read the “In the days when” books that merely make a game of those earlier ones in which everything is possible. I need a kind of narration that is initially problematic, lifelike, urgent —“What is the question?” means to me “What comes next?”—and then, when it can finally answer all questions and take up where the earlier or eternal stories left off, comes across as something very rare, as a happening, suitable to the kind of narration I have in mind.
At the mere idea of such a thing achieved in this day and age, I, who have not taken leave of my reading, feel immeasurably relieved, a feeling that is conferred on me only in bits and pieces by the kind of hairsplitting over definitions that occurs in the texts of the various scholarly disciplines, no matter how animating and pleasurable that may be. An idea or merely a wish? A new book full of narration, that’s what I wish for. And then I again see before me and in me something grand that calls for a form entirely different from that of conventional narrative. But what sort of form?
As recently as last night I had a dream in which I was doing nothing but reading. It involved a passage from the Gospel according to St. John with which I was unfamiliar, a pure narrative, with nothing but “And he departed … and he ate … and they said … and when it became evening … and they gathered together … and he sat down … and when the sun rose … and we washed ourselves … and he said,” in large, clear print with large spaces, as if winged, and I could see simultaneously everything I had read, in the form of a constant succession of “he” and “they” and “we,” set in motion by letters and blank spaces, concrete and at the same time dancelike in a way I have not once encountered outside this book.
And like my reading, so too my writing. I need … and I hope … and I wish … and I have a dream.
For this narrative I have needed for a while all the open questions, the working-out of possibilities, the greatest possible comprehensiveness, as if it were a law. Now I hope to extricate myself from the dovetailing of objects as well as of words and to shake off the heavy hand of compulsion. More than ever I wish I could be swept away in unquestioning narrating, vibrating sympathetically just as with reading, the kind of narrating to which, it seems to me, I have not once had a breakthrough for more than a paragraph.
But I have dreamed the dream of it again and again, and that was the most profound thing in me. And in my imagination for some time now, precisely because of my taking so many detours with this present project, my starting off down so many side roads, I can feel this dream shaking free, ready to soar aloft and take wing, for the day, the desk, and the deed. I sense that it is no longer a dream. The image has changed into a tone, a voiceless one, to be detected only by my sense of taste, with which, instinct tells me, something will begin and continue, and persist, finally without more fuss or reservations or question marks, that will give whoever reads it the ability to hear without sound and to see without images and to sample without taste.
I also find myself wondering whether this might not be my second metamorphosis, which I have been waiting for and working toward since the beginning of the year. Might this presumably last metamorphosis consist in my setting out to narrate, in sentences that would be absolutely straightforward, in the sense of “Let your speech be yea, yea and nay, nay”? And might I thus be at the moment no longer the one I was at the beginning, nor yet the person I will be, but also not the one I appear to be?
The more freely I sense what is coming, the more constricting my present condition feels. This becoming aware has always been a problem for me. Whenever it has manifested itself, it has cut me off in the midst of life from living. Suddenly I become aware, and instantly my breath falters and runs out, in the middle of a sentence, in the midst of life, in the midst of an upswing. My awareness has nothing in common with any form of reason, but rather meddles like a daimon, destructively. Like my love, it has also destroyed my narrating every time.