Crossing the Sierra De Gredos (48 page)

Read Crossing the Sierra De Gredos Online

Authors: Peter Handke

BOOK: Crossing the Sierra De Gredos
3.91Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“Foreign land: another topos of these seekers after a new myth. They see themselves, and again that means each by himself, as people without a country, as stateless people, yet they are also proud of their country- and statelessness.
“We could let this pass, were it not associated with the aforementioned ugliness. To us, in contrast to those down below, beauty is the overarching law in the following sense: What is ugly cannot be good; the ugly is evil and bad, and it must not be allowed to stand.
“And my knightly vagabonds of the Dark Clearing are of an interminable ugliness, even when one considers only their weapons and their bivouacs, an ugliness that is an insult to human dignity and makes a
mockery of existence. Does not the aesthetic world order, the law of the beautiful, include the ethical as well, the distinction between good and not good, right and wrong, or am I mistaken? How the appalling ugliness of these crossbreeds—their clothing, their hovels, their rocky gardens, fields, and stables, their greenhouses, their tools, their materials—has pierced me to the quick from the outset, preventing me from living and breathing freely.
“Not that they constantly go barefoot. But why do they always wear unmatched socks, as if on principle and out of malicious, ugly defiance, and possibly unmatched shoes as well, on the left foot a black oxford and on the right foot a yellow pigskin boot? There is nothing they are, have, or do that is not breathtakingly ugly. Even the way these denizens of the Dark Clearing move: where elsewhere people thrust themselves into the foreground, these people, each separately and yet all of them together forming a mass, huddle in the background, as if by prior arrangement.
“The ugly and the bad aspects of those who thrust themselves into the foreground are almost tolerable by comparison, allowing one at least to sense the presence of gaps and the horizon; while the masses huddling in the background block the view, the light, and the sun, and thereby any possibility of seeing the big picture, and once this is thwarted, the ugly crowd, there, and there, and back there, appears doubly ugly, ugly to the second power, ugly to the nth power.
“Whenever I go looking for them and approach them—for that is my mission here, after all—they skulk, hide, huddle in the background. Whether I want to track them down in their hovels or sheep pens or solar collectors or radio shacks, they are always way in the back. And I can never get at them there. They have installed threshold after threshold between us as obstacles, often what may not even be intentional thresholds, consisting of infinite uglinesses in the form of sights, sounds, and smells—and that seems to me the most criminal aspect of their criminal ugliness: that it makes these ugly people of mine even more inaccessible to me. Their ugliness means inaccessibility. Ugliness and inaccessibility, or unapproachableness, grievously sad, and are they not ultimately one and the same after all?
“To this day I have not succeeded in crossing these insurmountable thresholds of ugliness to get to my dear Hondarederos. How ugly even their voices are from a distance. Ravens' cawing, blue jays' screeching, and wildcats' hissing are the most mellifluous harmonies by comparison. It
must pierce the heart of every natural enemy of ugliness and make his blood boil when these voices assault him, amplified by the cliffs around here and this vast natural mountain amphitheater.
“And every word spoken, as if spat out, coughed out, vomited from the deepest and most distant background, strikes one's ear like a giant fist. I am forced to hear distinctly even their most faraway speech in all its ugliness, word for word. Although each of them by now talks almost exclusively to himself, he always expresses himself in a hideous jargon, which, adding to the ugliness, they all use, unwittingly, albeit in the most varied languages—and are not jargon, ugliness, exclusivity, and inaccessibility in the final analysis one and the same?
“And listen: this jargon echoing from the fissures in the rock consists for the most part of obsolete expressions, drawn chiefly from the language of seafarers, as if these re-immigrants wanted to recapitulate and claim for themselves the linguistic formulations of those ancestors who left the Comarca centuries ago to sail the oceans.
“How presumptuous of them to refer to their huddling here in this out-of-the-way mountainous area as ‘lying at anchor' and their various movements as ‘sailing'; to shout, upon seeing a trout, hardly as long as an arm, leaping out of a glacial pond, ‘Dolphin ahoy!' or, upon chewing a juniper berry or dipping their toes into the icy water or moistening their eyes with the admittedly special dew of the Pleasant Plantation, to screech, bark, scold, shriek into the granite wasteland: ‘Je suis embarqué! I have embarked! I am on the high seas! I will remain on the high seas! No land in sight! No, no land in sight! Oh joy: no, no, no land in sight!'”
Here the reporter on the rocky island amid the wilderness of broom paused for an eighth to a half a second and then continued in a voice even more shrill, if possible: “After all, our assignment here goes beyond mere observing. We are supposed to investigate the causes of and the reasons for things. For what reason do the people shipwrecked here no longer have a language? Why have they tossed the laws and rules of beauty overboard? Why are they bobbing here in their Dead Sea of inaccessibility?
“So hear me out: the source of this Robinson crew's terminal ugliness can be traced to the loss of images. And the additional assignment with which my team was sent up here is as follows: to cure, or at least contain, this new image-loss disease, dangerous because it is epidemic or even pandemic. Quarantine hand in hand with therapy. Curing these ominously ugly folk, but how, and by what means? By delivering images, importing
images, injecting images, without let-up. Produce, transport, and deliver an image to a person, and his soul will regain its health, his language will be revitalized, his voice will become hearty and his eye clear, accessible, and beautiful.
“For a year or more we have been struggling to steer these denizens of darkness back into the bright world of images. To stop the leakage of images. But how, you ask. Why do you not ask?—First of all we wired the enclave of Hondareda, ran underground cables, set up reflectors all around, and installed image-producing machines every few feet, at a density ten to fourteen times greater than that of the traffic lights in Frankfurt, Paris, New York, or Hong Kong: machines that reproduce images not only from external and outside sources, from civilization, but, above all, images of those Hondarederos who wander into their reception and broadcast area, images of the inside of their bodies, projecting onto this bit of cliff the heart cavity of a passerby, onto the next the inside of the head, onto a third the genital and abdominal region.
“These image-producing devices function as mirrors, reflecting not the person's face but what lies behind it. Except that none of the immigrants so much as glances at the images, whether external or internal. From the outset, the people up here did not even look away from the images we supplied; they simply ignored them. And yet we had introduced a process by which even the shadows, instead of showing mere outlines, took on shape and color: shadows with the mouth, nose, and eyes clearly inscribed in the shadow of a face, along with the eye color, even richer than in the actual face that cast the shadow, also more glowing and beautiful—the very image of beauty.
“And our equipment provided the image-loss folk with similar shadows of trees, rocks, clouds, airplanes: leaves, needles, limbs, lichens, sheets of mica, veins of quartz, strands of alabaster, strips of sunlight, blue holes, aluminum, etc., shimmered in the shadow images of these objects of the air or ground, in colors more brilliant or pure white than the objects themselves ever displayed. And did the people we were treating so much as mention these miraculous works? Why will you not hazard a guess?
“That even the moving images of films failed to make a dent on these people robbed of their image sense is superfluous to report. Neither the classic series of twenty-four images per second nor accelerated image-bombardment more in tune with the contemporary way of seeing could
straighten things out. No penetration occurs when the image receptors have been removed, you understand. Why do you not understand?
“Yet we set up an open-air cinema for them, probably more lovely than ever existed anywhere and at any time—films projected without a screen onto the smooth rock faces of the Sierra. But even the young people who moved there with the core population are already completely image-resistant, or have become so in this place.
“Even the young people, who can otherwise be distracted by any little liver spot on someone else's face and any speck of color in a dewdrop, however small, simply let the images be images—or, rather, categorically refuse to let the images be images, that is to say, they categorically refuse to let images, no matter which, pry open access to the world of today and, instead of leaving them as hostages to their parents and grandparents, connect them with their own kind, wherever they may be, beyond the mountains, no matter where—everywhere.
“Granted, my people here in the Dark Clearing do not represent a new generation of iconoclasts. Not once have our image-projecting devices, which hardly allow them to choose to look in directions we have not populated with images, been attacked or vandalized by them. It is as if their eyes simply veered past the walls of images erected on all sides, seeking the narrow, imageless strip along the horizon, as once the Israelites during their exodus from bondage in Egypt moved through the passage that opened up for them through the Dead, no, the Red, Sea.
“Each of them avers that he has not suffered a loss of images, but rather that he has sworn off images. Each claims that no image, not a single one, exists or is valid, at least during this transitional period, and not merely for him, but in general. But what matters to him, precisely in this transitional period, is perception. Along with his life in the place from which he emigrated, he has lost not the images, whether natural or created, dreamed or lived, external or internal; what he has lost, or what at least is threatened, is the ability to perceive.
“And, he says, what he misses more and more painfully in the world, and in this world, is seeing. And regaining the ability to see is what motivates him up here, on the ‘Isthmus of the Transitional Period'—such an appropriate term—in the Pleasant Plantation or the Deep Enclosure, the
Mojada Honda
, and not for the sake of one image or another, no, simply for the sake of seeing, conflict-resolving, existence-justifying, ‘world-anchoring,' dignifying, renewing, connecting, seeing. As Goethe says, ‘Born to look, appointed
to see … thus the world is pleasing to me,' thus the world is created for me, thus the world coalesces for me, or something like that.
“And accordingly the primary activity of each individual and solitary person here, independent of his neighbor and next-door property owner, is seeing, on the strips or isthmuses, wherever in their view there is something to see, no matter what. Daybreak and seeing. Deep night and more seeing, for instance of the trees' shadows on the rock faces (in the image-free strips or passages). ‘To see and let appear'—the settlement's motto, similar to ‘Dream and work.' Or is it a form of working? Or of leisure? Impossible to tell the difference.
“What do you think? Why do you say nothing? This is what the returnees believe at any rate, as always in complete unanimity, without prior consultation with one another: images are certainly essential; without them no transmission of the world and no sense of life. But in the previous century in particular, images were overexploited as never before. As a result, the world of images has dried up—has, without exception, become blind, mute, and stale—incapable of being refreshed by any science. And thus, in this transitional period, all that is possible is seeing—in which, by the way, all science is included, and out of which science must develop, one step at a time. The Hondareda idiots consider themselves scientists!
“And the childish things on which they spend their time in their Dark Clearing are, for them—even if they use entirely different terms, as for almost everything, old-fashioned and obsolete ones—‘sight-enhancing measures.' That includes not only their posing as hunters, their acting as though they were stalking, taking aim, and so on: time and again one sees them walking backward, more often than forward; that kind of thing, they assert, enhances seeing as much as their constant squatting, close to the ground (whereas standing on tiptoes is prohibited—their standard dictum: ‘Standing on tiptoes is no standing').
“When they unexpectedly whirl like dervishes, one person in the background turning to the east, then, without any connection to him, another in back to the west, it is of course no dance, either; the people of the Pedrada-Hondareda region have neither games nor dances, and that includes the young ones—but rather, well, you already know this, or do you?—an exercise in seeing!
“Instead of putting things where they belong or filing them away like adults, these people of the depression are also constantly tossing things
into place, and from as far away as possible, and, furthermore, not straightaway and forthwith—now I am using such obsolete expressions myself—but always in an arc, and one that is as high as possible, and to what end? You know this. To facilitate seeing, seeing, nothing but seeing.
“If only such exercises, measures, and exertions led to something: to moldability (ah, another word from horse-and-buggy days); to mobility; to awareness of another person—I don't necessarily mean of me—to neighborliness, or at least a hint of everyday togetherness. But as I have observed for one year, three days, and five to nine hours, each of these Hondareda desperados is holed up, stiff as a board, deep inside his hovel, shack, and barbed-wire enclosure, immobile and immovable, having taken leave for good of the present.

Other books

Don't Go Breaking My Heart by Ron Shillingford
Marine Park: Stories by Chiusano, Mark
The Dragon's Prize by Sophie Park
Wolf Asylum by Mark Fuson
The Long Green Shore by John Hepworth
Deadly Obsession by Kris Norris
Collision Course by Zoë Archer