And how did it happen, then, that your plan of merely recording turned into a story, and also hardly about the railroad station, whose double name was at first supposed to provide the book’s title? And why are you not sitting at a window in the Hotel des Voyageurs, but in a house a few streets away, and as a resident, a day- and nighttimer, and as a property owner? And why, during your writing year in the bay, have you not remained that pure, strong observer, but have instead participated more than ever? Where are your eyewitness notes, your annals?
I did not take my project to the hotel, first of all simply because, as it turned out, the plane trees blocked the view from every window (at least during their more than half-year foliage time), if not of the railroad yard, the wooded hills, and the sky, then certainly of the square below, of the happenings down there that I was particularly keen for, of the ground altogether, in the form of earth, grass, pavement, obvious proximity. And furthermore, I did not want to attract attention, and as a hotel guest, as was already clear to me after several test visits, my person would not have gone as unnoticed as in Paris or Versailles, and that would have jeopardized the restfulness of my observing, even if I sat there out of sight. And finally, none of the windows had the table-wide sill for taking notes or even just supporting my arm that meanwhile had become an idée fixe with me. And as a result of my becoming a resident in the place, my field of vision has expanded, from the square in front of the station and the streets leading into it to the entire forest bay, to just the degree necessary for developing and enriching my proposed undertaking.
And the fact that my planned recording, reporting, chronicling, remaining on the outside has become twisted into a story, and a first-person one, stemmed from the recognition, at the very beginning of the year, that I, the writer, would fail with this book if I did not in turn work myself into it, to give the project the necessary vulnerability, like an animal, which during a fight leaves its throat exposed at certain junctures (and it always made me, the reader, feel good when in a book this kind of first-person narrator spoke up and validated the project, and also intervened in it).
And the thing responsible for the fact that my planned sketchy recording turned into old-fashioned sequential narration was another “once more,” a dream. Tonelessly and imperiously, it outlined a narrative as the only form I could even consider, gave me an order, which at the same time made such good sense to me that I then obeyed.
Yet I ask myself whether the dream hasn’t betrayed me.
Is it possible that even the kind of dream that happens deep in one’s heart, and pierces one as no daytime image or event ever would, can be false?
Sometimes it seems to me that storytelling has been used up, or that there is something rotten about it, and not only my own. Something like the texture has become threadbare over the course of the millennia and no longer holds together, at least not for a larger context, unless it be a question of war, an odyssey, downfall. (And it is not even serviceable for that anymore?)
But on the other hand, the contention that storytelling, the book-long variety, cannot do without catastrophes is something I have never understood. I challenge this alleged principle. It should not be considered valid anymore. I want things to be different.
And that became the source of conflict in my activity. Many features of the area here have lost their original magic over the years, and in the process, the bay, at least in its totality, has come to seem no longer worth telling about, certainly not because I have become accustomed to it or because I am getting older — that with age pleasure wanes should also not be considered valid — but, perhaps, because I, now a resident, have succeeded too little at preserving my distance.
And thus even in this place, ideal for my project, I drifted more and more into the kind of judging that makes me disgusted with myself, and furthermore is destructive to the imagination, the best part of me. How determinedly ignorant I was in the beginning, as far as people were concerned, how wonderfully opinionless. And now? How I left the local passersby alone in my thoughts. And now? Torn between my exuberance here, my distaste there (at the thought of another Sunday with the various generations in warm-up suits on the railroad station/market square, of the thousandth mountain-bike rider zooming through the quiet underbrush, no doubt a great thrill to him), I then see only one possible way: to go back to my initial idea of being purely an eyewitness: look, register, record; the storytelling part as a sideline, and also never premeditated, rather, just as it comes, as a by-product of reporting, which would remain the underlying tone.
With my eyes and ears I practice this daily, and succeed time and again in making a snap judgment transform itself into the lasting pleasure of perception, of having-one’s-five-senses-together with the aid of the chronicler’s role.
Yet when it comes to writing things down, that has not worked out. Whenever I tried to achieve this kind of objective recording and witnessing, in the middle of the first sentence things would twist and turn on me into a kind of premature storytelling, even prattling. Was it conceivable that nowadays there was nothing left in the world to tell, merely the compulsion to tell stories?
On the other hand — my conflict — I encountered here, and again daily, so many phenomena for which inventorying, reporting, notifying, in short, any kind of naming, was just wrong or simply impossible. The only thing to do was to let them be — by telling about them, or circling around them, or touching on them, or letting them resonate, or letting their vibrations die away. And together with the area itself, these phenomena included, for some extraordinary moments, inhabitants of the place. (To be sure, I have almost nothing of the sort to tell about the usual adults, only about certain children, many old folks, and from one to three joggers or indefinable types.)
Even when telling about these phenomena does not promise any coherent narrative, I still find its preliminary form — observing — fascinating as nothing else can be. This is my form of participation, and participation is music enough for me, and storytelling is the music of participation.
The chronicle does not correspond to what I continue to intuit, beyond the profound dream: the chronicle does not correspond to humanity. Only when the facts, the blind facts, thousands of them, can shed their scales, get clarified, and acquire language-eyes, one here, one there, am I, leaving the chronicler behind, on the right path, the epic path, and life, once so deprived, is enriched.
And thus I muddle along, having faith in spite of everything, following that dream, and continue to circle the epic it called for. If nothing comes of it: that’s good, too. I have long since stopped being wild about doing it right. Wrong directions, wrong moves: all the better.