Stifter: thinking like the wood
109. THE TREASURE OF GERMAN PROSE. from Goethe's writings and especially Goethe's conversations with Eckermann (the best German book in existence), what German prose literature remains that is worth reading over and over again ? Lichtenberg's Aphorisms, the first book of Jung-Stilling's Story of My Life, Adalbert Stifter's St. Martin's Summer and Gottfried Keller's People of Seldwyla and there, for the time being, it comes to an end.
Nietzsche -- Human, All Too Human II The Wanderer 109
[Der Schatz der deutschen Prosa 109. Der Schatz der deutschen Prosa. — Wenn man von Goethes Schriften absieht und namentlich von Goethes Unterhaltungen mit Eckermann, dem besten deutschen Buche, das es gibt: was bleibt eigentlich von der deutschen Prosa-Literatur übrig, das es verdiente, wieder und wieder gelesen zu werden? Lichtenbergs Aphorismen, das erste Buch von Jung-Stillings Lebensgeschichte, Adalbert Stifters Nachsommer und Gottfried Kellers Leute von Seldwyla, — und damit wird es einstweilen am Ende sein.]
that is nietzsche's list of important books and -- i have read the eckermann, the stifter, some of the lichtenberg, not the jung-stilling, and not the keller, but something else by keller. and the question is this: why not green henry, why the people of seldwyla.
but stifter.
st martin's summer. indian summer. aftersummer. late summer. the time now: late august, september...
i don't know what it is. i tried to read something else after i read some stories by stifter, but just couldn't. not ready for something new. but why is it so gripping. i found even things (not a lot at all) i don't like in stifters's writing but this doesn't stop me being gripped by it. all the other books, new books i bought, somehow didn't feel right and so i thought, well i have some more stifter here, i can read this just as well, so i subjected myself to witiko and it is just as gripping and just seems to get better and better. (a lot of people think that witiko is even more boring than indian summer.)
why. what is this particular stifter experience: so many people complain about stifter there is nothing going on, all that harmony and all those good people, utter boredom they say... etc also stifter maybe not the first writer you associate with nietzsche. but how he influenced them all.... for instance bernhard's woodcutters and stifter's story Der Hochwald, other instances bernhard referd to him...and how bernhard writes to h spiel about stifter, compares him with wittgenstein...
it's not beauty - or not just beauty alone, because it's beautiful too -- it's something more, the decisive thing more. the ineffable that creates significance. the innermost in indian summer: i looked and searched for something, anything inner, for something that was far beyond lines and colors, that was bigger than those things and yet had to be able to be created by (way of) lines a colours...
time and length:
some disposition, personal preference: i like boring things and which made me wonder why generally i prefer reading the long book. the first 200 pages just to get used to it all. long books require time, no shortcuts are possible. the security there is always enough time to unfold things. nothing too abrupt. the time things also need in real life and in this sense --
to abstract from the personal preference: stifter has created his own time. not so much created time as in how people were, act, what they wore etc. but how things happen. you get thrown -- not thrown, immersed rather -- into this stifter world. some inner force in the writing to be slow. this happens then that. and then you read it and see what goes on and it's sort of some kind of journey into the innermost but not without neglecting the outer world, predominantly nature, but also people, feelings... all the things that can get mocked so easily. and witiko it seems is the application of the education of the lad of indian summer in reality, but to say this would deny the reality of everything that goes on in indian summer, so this is wrong... reality -- difficult word. the application of t
what stifter called das sanfte Gesetz the gentle law, from the preface to Bunte Steine, a law that preserves and guides humans just like the law of nature preserves the world. they can't be thought independently of each other. these are quiet and incessant laws and noticable only in singular expressions and silently animating the soul: a life of justice, simplicity, restraint of oneself, prudence, being active in one's own surrounding, admiration of beauty, love of close people...
thinking like the wood is from witiko...he asks the girl whether he might be able to hear her sing when he comes back, she replies: might do, if you think and sing like the wood. i was exulted he says, and he can't sing, but he says he can think like the wood....
witiko, he's gone out in the world to look for his luck, for his happiness. not a lost luck, but a different luck from that of being at home. a fate, a huge fate. a fate yet unknown, because it wouldn't be luck if you knew where it was. you got to make your fate. it's not clear even whether one is the right person to make one's fate but after all it's about to do in the world all one is able to do, just according one's capacities. isn't it that also what art is about.... the art is about to set out to create itself. be created not the right word, what is the place of art in the world, not one that it already knows but one it has to find first, a very own place (and only that) that's suitable for that very (piece of) art according its very own characteristics. the art that goes out in the world to find its place...
*
withdrawn, quiet, kind
the handke/lenz letters
was just the right thing to read and heal me from my resentment towards the evil monolingual english... and it's not really what i mean, monolingual, i know not everyone has the time to learn languages...it's just this weird dire depressive cultural situation here that gets me down...
and i read these letters and - haven't finished them yet - and wonder why people don't talk about books anymore like that (or maybe they do, i only don't know where), in this withdrawn, quiet, kind tone. which reminded me of this recent or current discussion - i didn't follow that properly -- about how to write reviews: to write them only in an enthousiastic (enthousiastic means: the gods within, and "if only" i hear someone say) way, but they mean: superpositive about the book, no matter what; or in a critical way, ought it not to be allowed to write bad reviews and so on and so on tear the book apart if it's shit and why is that wrong. and i don't understand all that really. enthousiastic and bad are just two kinds of loud. and what ever happened to good old descriptive. all those discussions feel so strange to me, i rather sit in the garden to read and carry my teacup around to see how the flowers are doing in between those letters. who emanate just the right atmosphere to think about books and literature and writing.
but then again i also don't know whether it makes much sense for me to write about those letters. i feel this burden of - if not literally - making this mood understood and to make this mood understood is maybe already too much interference to destroy it... i don't know
but it reminds me to read more this sort of thing...
[page 279 has a honorable mention of our mr abbott in it in which he is being described by mr handke as having the spirit of mr lenz's books very much in himself (der Deine Bücher schön in sich hatte).
well, this just describes aptly the very spirit of those generous, heartwarming and intelligent letters...]
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Jellema: How to approach a literary text
The literary text determines itself with which method, with what complementary science you can approach it in the best way. And then it depends on your reading experience, your life experience, your erudition, your literary intuition (= your openness, your open mindedness, willingness to understand the impossible as possible, the improper as proper), the structure of your personality (whether you are willing to question your own insights about life or whether you're convulsively embracing absolute truths), from all this it depends what you are doing with a literary text and what the text is doing to you, in the sense of giving you an insight, creating a change, taking away a prejudice, and you answer to this in the form of giving account, formulated as clear and as precisely as possible.
The problem with believing in method (too much) is that one regards a literary text as an object, a thing that one can keep outside of oneself: and then literature is dead.
29 november 1977
C. O. Jellema
*
Sentences by Max Frisch have an incredible intensity. I don't know why that is. Maybe because they don't contain a superfluous word. Not a single literary decoration. He can smell: apple sauce, flowers. A great word: Apple sauce [Apfelmuß] - with Frisch this is very direct: a detail that is. Maybe the intensity has its origin in the fact that Frisch has a capacity for love - of things, people. Hannah in black! In such a sentence Hannah is present with all intensity of love that Faber feels for her. However problematic relationship are in Frisch, in essence those relationships are important to him, and their realness.
There is never a cold expression of brokenness, much more an attempt to go to the bottom of things, to repair the brokenness, and if this can't be done, then to look at the brokenness in a way that it/the brokenness reveals itself as guilt and shortcoming. I suddenly have to think about Anna Blaman. Also her niveau - although Frisch is virtuous where Blaman is always a bit arduous - is determined by the neverending drive to look at human relations under the sign of guilt and love. Blaman as well doesn't stop at the psychological exploration of a feeling, as Vestdijk often does - she aims for the human situations/condition in general. This is what Meckel lacks: the warmth that gives life. It is well true what Proust says: the talent of a writer is determined by their goodness - a good writer is always a good person -; by way of their capacity to love. This is why A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is Handke's best book.
This is why Frisch sentences are so intense. They create relation(ship)s in which the things are themselves - not in themselves (alone) - because they are in-relations. We need to learn to love.
6 december 1973
C. O. Jellema
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living permanence - ontgrenzing (jellema x)
not the first time you read jellema, but the first time you had his books from the library. on the way home, in some kind of waiting room, waiting (what were you waiting for, certainly also for the book and what's in it, what it would tell you), reading and feeling the significance of - those closed pages which you feel: are like an unheard melody, something without words, but very tangible.
something that is not emptiness.
(were you waiting for the reality of the not-emptiness?)
'what is emptiness: not days in which one has nothing to do, on the contrary, one might be very busy.
an emptiness of waiting, for instance: one waits for a certain letter that doesn't arrive and when it finally does one reads it real fast, hurried and looks in the contents for something that cannot be in that letter. Or one reads a book: one is moved: this is it, the truth, until one suddenly realizes the relativity of one's opinion, the onesidedness of what one has read. Every experience has as its basis a something that is not absolut, that is not a last and final truth, a something that is relative and perishable. And people, loneliness is a bigger reality than any form of social life. One suddenly can realize, while being in a conversation: this is that meeting. what will remain. a memory, vague and sometimes embarrassing.'
the impossibility of - having no boundaries, of - is it becoming one? being one with everything? what expression are you looking for? ontgrenzing means - deboundaring.
and the way this is impossible except for moments. described in a peom like this:
to lay down next to being and to be fruit, and dark together.
the absolute awareness, full well aware, of this state, and the way there is an urgency in this awareness (ik heb het absoluut gekend) and how this brings one to face nothingness.
the reality of nothingness, the reality of (social) emptiness...
and first it is about being a reality. another person can only be a reality in one's own life if one is a reality in one's own life. and sometimes those realities can fall together. how this is very close to mystic, but not quite and it's important to make that clear - just for clarity's sake? or better: to make it clear for what can be said and what not.
Considered in itself and independently of all sensuous matter, his personality is nothing but the pure virtuality of a possible infinite manifestation, and so long as there is neither intuition nor feeling, it is nothing more than a form, an empty power. Considered in itself, and independently of all spontaneous activity of the mind, sensuousness can only make a material man; without it, it is a pure form; but it cannot in any way establish a union between matter and it. So long as he only feels, wishes, and acts under the influence of desire, he is nothing more than the world, if by this word we point out only the formless contents of time. Without doubt, it is only his sensuousness that makes his strength pass into efficacious acts, but it is his personality alone that makes this activity his own. Thus, that he may not only be a world, he must give form to matter, and in order not to be a mere form, he must give reality to the virtuality that he bears in him. He gives matter to form by creating time, and by opposing the immutable to change, the diversity of the world to the eternal unity of the Ego. He gives a form to matter by again suppressing time, by maintaining permanence in change, and by placing the diversity of the world under the unity of the Ego.
Schiller -- Aesthetic Letters XI
the source of reality is in the person... and is reality an intrusion between the world and the self? is reality in the way of all the ontgrenzing, the being without boundaries? is reality in the way of me being able to hear those poems? but that reality can be mediated by way of voice (is voice always the ego?)
to see those moments, the experience of being without boundaries as - a wish to see them as songs, living, longlasting songs that sing out of themselves when they are being touched by a voice. giving those moments some living permanence.
the person brings reality to the world.
but voice brings some kind of living permanence to those moments, but only if spoken to, otherwise the songs remain silent...
duurzame, levende liederen, die uit zichzelf gaan zingen, zodra een stem ze aanraakt. 11 november 1963
when you were first with the books, you were waiting for that living permanence (but you didn't know that) and waiting for this permanence to wake up, maybe reading is just another word for touching other people with one's voice, but then the other way round - not the speaking or writing is the touching, but listening and reading gives life, is touch. the reading bestows living permanence. reading awakes something and once it's woken up one listens to those moments of ontgrenzing, and being together with the book, being dark with the book. you just need to lay yourself down next to being.
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the world as will and tenderness: de geestelijke waarde van de tederheid (jellema ix)
the concept of tenderness.
it's always interesting to find out about other people's favourite words which then might become something stronger, concepts maybe, built around a certain worldview, fitted into a system of beliefs, of perspectives.
and the way people arrive there, at finding out why one or other word might be significant and how some of those words become concepts that are not usually included in average
philosophical terminology somehow become more meaningful, maybe especially so, because they are not included in already established systems of thought. words, concepts that have to be rescued in a way. attention is one such word, although, quite a few people pondered this, such as cristina campo for instance.
similarly other people thought about tenderness as something more than just - a word.
jellema (14 maart 1962) ponders love and the way one expresses oneself in love the way one really is and in ways one can't express oneself normally, - or: verbally; with an added amount of intensity.
jellema starts with a confirmation of his belief in the intellectual value of tenderness (de geestelijke waarde van de tederheid - and it is a real shame that there is no english equivalent for the word geest/Geist). he hesitates: am i not making a fool out of myself. but then repeats: the intellectual value of the tenderness. an intellectual value of something that is commonly associated with the sensual.
he describes tenderness as a capacity all people are capable of and they ought to find it in themselves in almost all circumstances. for jellema it is for one's personal life as important as will and persistence, albeit with a different task than will. the world as will and tenderness: will is directing life through one's possibilites and tenderness is of a carrying nature, it carries life, makes life fertile for developing (those possibilities). It opens life.
Noordhuis & Jellema
this is contrasted with jellema's description of his times rather honouring and preferring 'hard & harsh masculinity' which makes it difficult to live tenderness (especially for men, and more especially: for gay men), and that in daily life generally tenderness is cornered, the longing for tenderness had to make space for calculation, accounting, the impersonal and the sober. here tenderness as something that enrichens a person, makes a person a person and consequently that jellema believes in tenderness as the most important aspect of being human. and that in literature very often tenderness is mistaken or misunderstood as blind erotic. so, tenderness also has to do with seeing, or maybe awareness. it's not a blind capacity.
tenderness then is generally built into an idea of a good way to live and that onesidedness can be damaging, upsetting the psychological equilibrium. and that the best balance and protection against onesidedness is to do or have a bit of everything: work, love, being in company, being alone, to live, to write, for others, for oneself. so the advice against one-sidedness is to do just what/the very thing one lacks of those things listed in the previous sentence and tenderness helps to balance/develop all those things, and lacks. adds an indirect intensity. because it helps one express what one cannot say otherwise (and then says it differently), and not just - in love. maybe like this: a different love. tenderness expresses life in an essential, intellectual, nonverbal way life can't be expressed otherwise. and that a lack of this expression of life is a serious impairment, of one's person and of (one's) life (and writing).
*
[while you were writing this someone's sleepy hand was resting on your back]
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