Adventures In Immediate Irreality (3 page)

“All imitations make an analogous impression on me,” says the narrator. From the
incest with the things, we learn from Blecher that the objects owe their existence
to the imitation of themselves, that they need nothing apart from the ready, knowing
material in order to make us totally besotted. And we are by no means spared by the
fact that they are imitation, “artificial ornamentation,” filled with “boundless
melancholy.” Because precisely therein lies their guile. The place where they reside
and the time in which we behold them make us vulnerable. The things have “a
perfidious sign of furtiveness and complicity.” And in the moment of the
confrontation we have no choice but to adapt, the external world is thrust under our
skin, we must bear its inert or lasciviously vegetating material, even though we’re
not made for that. The world’s imitation of itself is a trap set to ensnare its own
intricate originality. The things have the advantage, because unlike us, they don’t
need to protect their flesh when they spring the trap. “It was what was most humdrum
and familiar in the objects that disturbed me most. The habit of being seen so many
times must have worn out their thin skins, and they sometimes looked flayed and
bloody to me—and alive, ineffably alive.”

One rainy day the vagabond hero wanders to the edge of town, where he succumbs to the
glistening mire of the wasteland. He steps into the slime, plunges his hands into
the muck, smears mud in his hair, on his face, with no care for his clothes. It’s an
intoxicating rush but that soon becomes a bitter disgrace when the glistening dries
on his body as mere cold filth. The usual disgrace when, after the act of incest,
the things quit the body so abruptly and return to themselves. “Such is what I had
to struggle with, what implacably opposed me: the ordinary look of things.” And “the
world was so limited by its petty passion for precision.”

In Blecher’s book the word
KNOWLEDGE
appears in italics. And this
KNOWLEDGE
is not achieved by reason, but by
SENSATION
. It is
thought by means of the flesh. For Blecher,
KNOWLEDGE
is a trace
left by the body. What’s astounding about Blecher’s language is the mixture of words
laden with feelings and phrases so technical they sound like machines. Every
sequence is infected by a form of mechanization. The emotional upheavals are
stretched across a geometric frame. Reading the book we get the impression that
Blecher’s words don’t merely describe the objects—they dig their talons into
the things and hoist them high, straight into the sentences. About the suitability
of a particular word, Blecher has his protagonist say: “It would have to contain
something of the stupefaction I feel watching a person in reality and then following
his gestures in a mirror, of the instability accompanying the falls I have in my
dreams and the subsequent unforgettable moment of fear whistling through my spinal
chord, or of the transparent mist inhabited by the bizarre decors of crystal balls I
have known.”

There are three times in this book where relationships to women are compared with the
effect of words. With Clara from the sewing machine shop the act of vice “involves a
complicity more profound and immediate than any verbal communication.” The second
woman is the dead woman mentioned above, lying in the glass coffin of the wax figure
gallery, whose image “remained lodged inside me, still vague, like a word I wished
to recall.” And the third woman is Edda. Newly married to the Webers’ rakish son,
she moves into the family’s house. Because the narrator has been visiting there for
years, and knows every nook and cranny, Edda becomes “one more object, a simple
object whose existence beleaguered and tormented me like a word repeated many
times.” The sexual arousal that she stirs inside the narrator intimidates him, while
on the outside it petrifies his body like wood.

Precisely because words are elevated to the rank of love for women, the dialogues in
this book are so tight they couldn’t be any shorter. The tone is gruff. All the
conversations have a hint of reluctance, because the talking comes too late. Either
the words sat too long on the tongue, or else they were swallowed too often. Speech
comes as a last resort, long after the reason for speaking in the first place has
passed. For every person in the book, sentences shrink whenever feelings take the
upper hand. Communication follows this rule: the more feverish the feeling, the
colder the word. This reduction condenses the dialogues to their most rudimentary,
giving them the pithiness of sayings, aphorisms that pepper the entire text. The
author can leave out the dialogues because they are repeated unwritten throughout
the text, and constantly enter the mind of the reader.

Blecher’s question “Who am I” leads to a world eroticized by inner chafing.
Adventures in Immediate Irreality
is a study in observation. And it
takes the reader where one generally arrives when one looks at things
impartially—to a place of calm and composed resignation. In his words: “All
things and all men were hemmed in by their petty, pathetic obligation to be precise,
nothing more than precise.” “Exasperating as it was, I was forced to admit that I
lived in the world I saw around me.”

HERTA MÜLLER

(translated by Philip Boehm)

Chapter One

Staring at a fixed point on the wall, I occasionally have
the feeling I no longer know who or where I am. At such times, I experience the loss
of my identity from a distance: I feel for a moment that I have become a complete
stranger, this abstract personage and my real self vying for authenticity with equal
strength.

In the following moment my identity returns. It is like a stereoscopic slide in which
the two images, separated by mistake, suddenly give the illusion of three
dimensionality once the projectionist brings them back together. My room seems
fresher than ever. It reverts to its former consistency, its objects finding their
proper places, as when a crushed lump of earth in a glass of water settles in layers
of various well-defined and parti-colored elements. The elements of the room take
back their own contours and the colors of the old memory I have of them.

The feeling of distance and solitude during the moments when my everyday person has
dissolved into amorphousness differs from all other feelings. When it persists, it
turns into a fear, a dread of never finding myself again. A vague silhouette of
myself surrounded by a large luminous halo looms somewhere in the distance like an
object lost in fog.

Then, the terrible question of who I actually am comes alive in me like a totally new
body with unfamiliar skin and organs. The answer requires a lucidity more basic and
profound than that of the brain. Everything in my body capable of stirring stirs,
struggles, and revolts more intensely, more fundamentally than in everyday life.
Everything begs for a solution.

Several times I find the room as I know it, as if I had opened and shut my eyes, but
each time the room is clearer, as a landscape in field-glasses comes together when,
adjusting the focus, one penetrates the veils of intermediary images.

Eventually I recognize myself and find the actual room again. It gives me a slightly
intoxicated feeling. The room is extraordinarily dense in terms of matter, and I
have returned implacably to the surface of things: the deeper the wave of obscurity,
the higher its crest. Never, under no other circumstances, have I felt so clearly as
in moments like these when every object must occupy the place it occupies and I must
be the person I am.

My struggles with uncertainty no longer have a name; all that remains is the simple
regret that I found nothing in their depths. I am surprised that a total lack of
meaning should be so closely linked to my intimate being. Now that I have found
myself again and am trying to express my reaction, that being seems completely
impersonal: a mere exaggeration of my identity arising from its own substance, a
medusa tentacle that has strayed too far and, groping exasperated through the waves,
finally finds its way back to the gelatinous sucker. Thus during several moments of
disquiet I have passed through all the certitudes and incertitudes of my existence
only to return—painfully and definitively—to my solitude.

Each solitude is of a purer and more elevated nature than the one before. The feeling
of people banished is clearer and more intimate, a limpid, mellow melancholy like a
dream recalled in the depth of night. It alone still reminds me of the vaguely sad
mystery and magic of my childhood “crises.” In that sudden disappearance of identity
I find anew my descents into the cursed spaces of those early days, and in the
moments of lucidity that return immediately after I resurface I see the world in the
curious atmosphere of futility and obsolescence that forms about me when my
hallucinatory trances cast me down.

It was always the same places in the street, the house,
or the garden that gave rise to the crises. Whenever I entered their space, I would
feel dizzy and swoon. Genuine invisible traps placed here and there in the town, in
no way distinguishable from the air surrounding them, they would lie in wait for me,
ferocious: I was to fall prey to the special atmosphere they exuded. One step, a
single step into a “cursed space” like that and a crisis was inevitable.

One of the spaces was in the town park in a small clearing at the end of a tree-lined
path no one used anymore. The only gap in the dogrose and acacia bushes surrounding
it opened onto a desolate piece of wasteland. There was no sadder or more forsaken
place on earth. Silence lay heavy on the dusty leaves in the stagnant summer heat.
From time to time the echoes of the bugles of a regiment filtered through,
long-drawn-out cries in the wilderness, heartbreakingly sad. Far off the air baked
by the sun quivered vaporously like the transparent steam hovering over a boiling
liquid.

It was a wild, isolated spot, as lonely as could be. The heat of the day felt more
enervating there, the air I breathed more dense. The dusty bushes blazed yellow in
the sun in an atmosphere of utter solitude. A bizarre feeling of futility hovered
over the clearing, which existed “somewhere on earth,” a place where I myself would
end up quite by chance on a summer afternoon with no rhyme or reason of its own, an
afternoon that had lost its chaotic way in the heat of the sun amidst bushes fixed
in space “somewhere on earth.” At that time I felt more deeply and painfully that I
had nothing to do in this world, nothing to do but saunter through parks, through
dusty clearings burnt by the sun, desolate and wild. But the saunter would turn into
a heart-rending experience.

There was another cursed place at the other end of town
on the high, loose banks of the river where my friends and I would go to bathe. At
one point the bank had caved in. Just above it there was a factory that made oil
from sunflower seeds. The workers would throw the discarded seed husks into the
section of the bank that had caved in, and over time, the pile grew so high that it
formed a slope of dry husks extending from the top of the bank to the water’s
edge.

My playmates would descend to the water along that slope, cautiously, holding one
another by the hand, sinking their feet deep into the carpet of rotten matter. The
walls of the high bank on either side of the slope were steep and full of outlandish
irregularities—long, fine channels sculpted by the rain, arabesque-like but as
hideous as poorly healed scars, veritable tatters of the clay’s flesh, horrible
gaping wounds. It was between these walls, which made such an impression on me, that
I too climbed down to the water.

Long before I reached the riverbank, my nostrils would fill with the odor of rotten
husks. It would prepare me for the crisis like a brief period of incubation. It was
an unpleasant smell, yet sweet. Like the crises.

Somewhere inside me my olfactory perception would split and the effluvia of
putrefaction would reach different destinations: the gelatinous odor of decomposing
husks was separate, quite distinct from—yet concomitant with—its pleasant
perfume, the warm and homely scent of toasted hazelnuts. The moment I smelled it,
the perfume would transform me, circulating throughout my body, dissolving, as it
were, my inner fibers and replacing them with a more airy, less uncertain material.
From that moment, the end was inevitable. A pleasant, heady feeling would arise in
my chest, a dizziness pushing me toward the riverbank, the place of my ultimate
defeat.

I would race down the husk pile to the water at breakneck speed, the air setting up a
fierce opposition, cutting into me like a sharp blade, and space collapsing
chaotically into an immense hole with an unexpectedly strong force of attraction. My
playmates would watch my wildly precipitous descent in horror. The pebble beach
below was very narrow, and the slightest misstep would have sent me sprawling into
the water, whose surface whirlpools betokened great depths.

But I was not fully aware of what I was doing. Having reached the
water, I would run past the husk pile at the same speed and continue downstream to a
hollow in the bank. The hollow formed a small cave, a cool, shaded grotto like a
room carved out in the rock. I would go in and fall to the ground, drenched in
sweat, dead tired, and trembling from head to toe.

Having recovered a bit, I would enjoy the grotto’s familiar and
enormously pleasant decor. There was a spring bubbling forth from the rock, running
along the ground, and forming a pool of perfectly limpid water in the middle of the
pebbles. I would never tire of leaning over the pool and gazing at the delightful
lace of green moss on the bottom, the worms caught on slivers of wood, the scraps of
rusty old ooze-covered metal, the myriad animate and inanimate objects in the
fantastically beautiful water.

Outside those two cursed places, the town sank into a
uniform and banal mass of houses easily interchangeable and trees exasperatingly
immobile, of dogs, vacant lots, and dust.

In closed rooms, however, crises took place with greater ease and frequency. I could
not tolerate being alone in a strange room. When forced to do so, I would, within a
very few minutes, fall into a sweet but terrible swoon. The room itself prepared the
way: a warm, welcoming sense of intimacy would filter down from the walls and spread
over all the furniture, every object. All at once the room was sublime and I felt
happy there. Yet that was nothing but a ruse on the part of the crisis: a subtle,
perverse little trick it played. After this moment of bliss things went topsy-turvy
and confusion reigned. I would peer around me wide-eyed, but things had lost their
usual meaning: they were awash with their new existence. It was as if someone had
removed the fine, transparent paper they had been wrapped in till then, and suddenly
they looked new beyond words. They seemed destined to be put to new, superior,
fantastic uses beyond my power to divine.

But there was more: the objects were seized by a veritable frenzy of freedom, and the
independence they declared of one another went far beyond simple isolation to
exultation, ecstasy. Their enthusiasm for living in a new light encompassed me as
well: I felt powerful bonds linking me to them, invisible networks making me every
bit as much of an object, a part of the room, as they were, the way an organ grafted
onto a living organism goes through subtle physical metamorphoses until it becomes
one with the body once foreign to it.

Once during a crisis the sun sent a small cascade of rays onto the wall like a golden
artificial lake dappled with glittering waves. I also saw the corner of a bookcase
of large, leather-bound volumes behind glass. And in the end these true-to-life
details, perceived from the distance of my swoon, stupefied and stunned me like a
last gulp of chloroform. It was what was most humdrum and familiar in the objects
that disturbed me most. The habit of being seen so many times must have worn out
their thin skins, and they sometimes looked flayed and bloody to me—and alive,
ineffably alive.

The climax of the crisis would occur when I began floating above the world, a
condition at once pleasant and painful. At the first sound of footsteps the room
reverted to its original state: things fell back into place, and I noted an ever so
slight, all but imperceptible reduction in its exaltation, which gave me to believe
that the certitudes I lived by were separated from the world of incertitudes by only
the flimsiest of membranes.

I would awake in my old familiar room, bathed in sweat, exhausted, and fully aware of
the futility of the things surrounding me but observing new details in them, as we
sometimes discover a novel feature in something we have used every day for years.
The room retained a vague memory of the catastrophe, like the smell of sulfur after
an explosion. Gazing at the bound books behind the bookshelf glass, I somehow took
their immobility for a perfidious sign of furtiveness and complicity: the objects
around me never gave up the secretive attitude fiercely guarded by their
impassivity.

Ordinary words lose their validity at certain depths of
the soul. Here I am, trying to give an exact description of my crises, and all I can
come up with are images. The magic word that might convey their essence would have
to borrow from the essences of other aspects of life, distill a new scent from a
judicious combination of them. It would have to contain something of the
stupefaction I feel watching a person in reality and then following his gestures in
a mirror, of the instability accompanying the falls I have in my dreams and the
subsequent unforgettable moment of fear whistling through my spinal chord, or of the
transparent mist inhabited by the bizarre decors of crystal balls I have known.

I envied the people around me who are hermetically
sealed inside their secrets and isolated from the tyranny of objects. They may live
out their lives as prisoners of their overcoats, but nothing external can terrorize
or overcome them, nothing can penetrate their marvelous prisons. I had nothing to
separate me from the world: everything around me invaded from head to toe; my skin
might as well have been a sieve. The attention I paid to my surroundings, nebulous
though it was, was not simply an act of will: the world, as is its nature, sank its
tentacles into me; I was penetrated by the hydra’s myriad arms. Exasperating as it
was, I was forced to admit that I lived in the world I saw around me; there was
nothing for it.

The crises belonged as much to the places where they occurred as to me. True, some
places had their own “personal” evil, but even those that did not were in a trance
long before I appeared. In some rooms, for example, I felt the crises to be the
crystallization of the melancholy caused by their immobility and boundless
solitude.

However, the conviction that objects could be inoffensive—which arose as a kind of
truce between me and the world (a truce that plunged me even more hopelessly into
the uniformity of brute matter)—came to pass off a terror equal to the terror the
objects themselves at times imposed upon me: their inoffensiveness came from a
universal lack of strength. I had the vague feeling that nothing in the world can
come to fruition, that it is impossible to accomplish anything. Even the ferocity of
objects runs its course. It was thus that the idea of the imperfection of all
phenomena in the world, natural or supernatural, took shape in me.