Enduring Freedom

'I wonder what Americans would say if they were shown graphic footage of the results of US drone attacks, some of the many wedding parties or funerals we mistook for gatherings of terrorists and reduced to “bug splats,” in the parlance of those dispatching our missiles.'

---Charles Simic.

| |   |

They had been, according to Major General Curtis Lemay, who was in charge of the fire bombing operations, "scorched and boiled and baked to death". President Franklin Roosevelt's son and confidant said that the bombing should continue "until we have destroyed about half the Japanese civilian population." 

A few days before the bombing of Hiroshima, Vice Admiral Radford boasted that "Japan will eventually be a nation without cities - a nomadic people". 

---J. Berger.

|  |

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it

||| ||

'Betty, do you believe that apart from you, somewhere beyond all the people who only seem to be people, there truly are still some people left, real people?'

--Derek Raymond.

||

|

'Much of what I have experienced in the wide world has vanished completely from my head over the years. It was three in the afternoon, a rainy day.

I felt a compulsion ..above all to be one with myself again. ..I resolved to carefully detach myself from an existence in which I could not place my trust and to return.'

---Walser.

songs from the broken world

Ernst Reijseger // Mola Sylla - Sanctus from ...El Exilio...y...El Viaje... on Vimeo.

'When I drink wine, I understand previous centuries; they too, I tell myself, consisted of things contemporaneous and the desire to find one's place among them. Wine makes one a connoisseur of the soul's vicissitudes. One feels great respect for everything, and for nothing at all. Wine shimmers with tact. If you are a friend of wine, you are also a friend of women and a protector of all that is dear to them...All the songs to wine that were ever composed ought to be acknowledged as justified'.

--Walser. 

~~

The obvious: if it wasn't for women there would be so much more violence in the world. Perhaps there has never been any balance in society, the world, but one can't but help feel at times that a few more twists and turns and what once bound us-human-to-human-will unravel. You imagine some fundamental human gestures persisting through it all: the arrangement of certain words, the tipping of a hat. And you can't bring yourself to accept anything else (the wisdom of men in hats, the professional mourners) as long as you're permitted to walk the tightrope.

~~~

'It is the season for wine, roses and drunken friends'. What drink is that when I look in the mirror I think you remember me?
We know no more songs..fill the cup, saki, for we are still homesick for the earth (and many other things).

'One of your heartbeats has strayed into my heart
and I can distinguish it from all others,
know how to keep it'

--Jules.

Out of the blue, a red fox appeared; her demeanour was sad and funny, restrained, a few joules down from her normal self. A septillion joules is what it takes-apparently- to warm the earth's waters by one degree. When it comes to the energy balance time is against us. Copenhagen's probably gone.

Only a few can name it; the rest want to forget or imagine it will always be like this, as if everything could carry on in good faith. Couples walk hand in hand under a winter sky, past bleak trees and under arches with a great sense of unknowingness, as if this could be the last day, the first day. London on a dark night is bluer than any city, thanks to the reflected light, a brilliance that once existed in people's hearts.  

square one

'Eating with disciplined excellence is a search for wisdom'
---NYRB.

'Somehow, as if

what's missing left me with a mystery,

its absence makes me love it twice over'

--Walser.

You look inside the room, the plates set, the order of a small and known world. We enter the season with great knowingness. Everything and everyone is in their place. For a moment the cosmos has aligned itself with us. And yet there is a fourth shadow, adding a shroud of stillness to the scene.

Outside the decaying hours of the sun, the first ice forming a fragile latticework over the grass. We laze into the afternoon, glutted on memories of former times and forgetfulness. Without any longing for outside, we are ourselves for a few wasteful hours. 

In this winter light, the light that tarries inside our homes, we see ourselves and others less harshly. Leftovers are cherished, images on the screen from many years ago are so familiar that they enhance the belief that nothing has changed-even if the world has moved on. Black and white photographs held in thick, plush covers are brought down and we wonder where all those people have gone, where are our own lives have disappeared to.

We decline, we refuse. No & Yes in everyone's eyes. The small, the last ritual we hold on to as we unbind everything else. 

Save some space for seconds. We take off our hats and become wise. Our second thoughts: what was all the year's striving for, we wonder. We can't even describe it to ourselves. Some nameless sleep that curls up on itself, an imaginary happiness, perhaps? 

We find ourselves again on deep earth and are not sorrowful.

no, not in my name.

I have nothing to say and I do not know how to say it.

The brief outline of it is this:

|| 

~~~~

...

[
[

When all is said and done.

Can one choose to be inarticulate? A question to myself. Augustine would have said.

Diary Notes: 

What keeps us a prisoner is not knowing what keeps us a prisoner.

You stumble, you trip. The form of your 'unknowingness'. A word that does not exist!

____

Roxana, are you still alive? 

_ __ __ __

Don't read too much into that.

.

To understand the one point from which the book originates. Once attained, that would exempt him from writing.

--stolen from Vila-Mattas.

In the process of reading, of figuring out. This will probably be written on my gravestone, except that wahabis don't have gravestones! 

Do cockroaches eat ants? Just asking. Today, in the morning, you saw twenty, thirty ants scrambling over the dead body of a cockroach (yes, okay, I admit it, I killed it). 

Is that a kind of justice, or just the circle of life? And why should I intervene-god-like-in the affairs of these creatures?

Is there anyone out there who likes both cinnamon roles and Walser (apart from anton, of course)? In this day and age one must do with just cinnamon rolls, I suppose. I told you I have nothing to say!

The black sun of my room is lit up by artificial lights. White light is-putting my scientific hat on for a mo-bad for you. 

| |

At Heathrow, just before boarding the plane, one of the plain clothed spooks floating about asked me: "How much money are you taking back to __?"

Instinctively I put my hand to my trouser pocket. "Five pounds"

"Are you sure?"

"Perhaps five pounds twenty".

One can get away with a lot if one is vague.


||

On a cheque you write your name four times. Twice on the front, twice on the back.

"Is this your signature?" asks the clerk.

"I've just written it in front of you, haven't I!"

"Do you have proof you are who you say you are?"

Does anyone? This is going to be a long day. But I would love, just once, to sign something not in my name.

Frau

I have a memory of a larger space of memory.
---after Louise Gluck.

|| |

Before Fall, the structure of the light weakening, we open another door, start another phase. Much is carried over, the way your back knots in anxiety through the night, only to open up during the morning. The sun, returning after some 256 years, is surprised to see none of the same people around, but the same houses, the roofs quietly blazing in the darkness. 

I have a memory of my face, thinner, taut, bryter. The rooms were larger and wider when we children. We carry an image of the white room with us, but it only leads to a more specific room, one we know better...

||

A homecoming in the snow: You return, with a simple bag in your hand and nothing much else, some coins in your pocket, maybe. The narrow, winding road to the north. Down Snake's Lane and the dark brick Church. There is ice on the road but you walk quickly... 

I aspire to recognize that there is no more desirable pleasure in life than reaping acknowledgement and saying yes to the benevolent phenomenon one has been permitted to see and experience. 

|

Many years have passed. You look back and wonder which moments were real.

|

May I see the room?

Yes, of course

Depressed and out of sorts as I was, any acceptable security would have satisfied me...

She went away without a word.

"What are you? she asked.

I had no idea. I looked out of the window, pressing my face to the thick, semi-opaque glass. There is a certain degree of raggedness and neglect on my face, it can be detected by anyone. Women, especially, find it easy to name. An earl, I think.

Who lived here before, you wonder. What lives were contained in this very room? Here in summer the green will come laughing into the room. The human mind always reaches for the future; the heart is stuck in the past. I shall sit in this room and write to myself and imagine lots of people, some of them distinguished.

You should always remember the distinctions, she said.

She had long black hair and a striking face. Introductions were made, things exchanged, there was a tinkling of china. You make me smile, she confessed. His eyes gleamed: how much was it worth...

I cannot allow you to stay in bed so long, she said.

Nothing lasts forever, which is why you sought this cavern in the first place. So I lay there in heaviness of heart; I neither knew nor could find myself any more. There is a time-there is always time- when things will end, but you should not come to the dark conclusion. There will be a time when things start again...

Remember the colours, he said.

Pfft! Can't you speak for yourself, for once in your life, she jeered. Have you ever been yourself?

No, not lately.

Seeing that he was saddened she said: Hold my hand. It's like ice. Whoever has himself been alone can never find another's loneliness strange. There was winter in her heart. I kept my face close and said to myself: Here in summer the green will come laughing into the room.

Then I didn't see her for a while and she refused to speak. I saw on the bed the things she'd worn...her dress..and on the floor, her small delicate boots.

All things past, all things vanishing away, were more close to me than ever. I stood there motionless, not understanding anything anymore.

I quietly left the room and went out into the street.

(words by Robert Walser from the lovely short story, Frau Wilke.)

fractured times

From Berlin, 1907, ...

The hours that rolled into days, before we knew it. The time spent, exhausted; the most important thing of all: to keep oneself in good spirits. I look back with narrowed eyes at all the half-closed doors behind me. A chapter has come to close and I have to muster the strength to keep my heart free. Smaller, the world makes me so. It's fine, understandable, given everything, there are techniques for letting things pass, you know. A ship sails softly in the black night. Now, are you sitting comfortably? Finish your soup before it gets cold.

***

The lively is always more contemplative than what is dead or sad.

I am not conscious of my existence, and am neither happy nor sad. I am lord of the manor and nothing at all. Up above grey skies; I want to close my eyes and imagine the most perfect green. This half-heartedness and drowsiness beneath the green. Today, in the blustery light, everything seems like a dream. Perhaps that is where we find beauty, me and you?

In a single hour at least seventy leaves fall to the ground. The streets and shops are closed. What kind of dream is this where I'm the only one awake? This talent for not being able to make any sense of anything. You tried to hold too many things in your hands with the result that everything fell to the floor. A lesson: one thing at a time.

*
1908,

A fire stops everyone, draws people together in an artificial way. Bodies jostling for space. It strikes me: everyone sees the same thing in a different way; no-one knows nobody.

An old train station. Pleasantries are exchanged: a smile, a nod, timetables and authority. This is one of the few places where the hands of strangers will almost touch one another in their daily transactions. A thousand feet, a final whistle, a man holding up a yellow card to announce the last chance. A few lunging bodies. Who will make it and who will give up the chase at the gates?

*

What became of me? I once had a fine head of hair and knew how long the day was, down to the last seven seconds. I could name many extinct animals and play the first seven notes of a tune. Now when people see me they see someone else. Much of what I have experienced in the wide world has vanished completely from my head.

What became of her, she who sat under a plum tree and grew old and whose child had grown tall. Food for thought. Her sorrow cast a romantic spell that made her appear beautiful. Is it enough to know that a beautiful woman once looked at me? Something like a beginning, something like an end. And still I say Yes, No, Yes, like time. This much has been permitted me.

"What is it you want from me?" she asked.

My mind lay as if broken in fragments before my grieving eyes.

Summer has passed in silence. I expect you to say even less in fall. Time is fractured, when will it heal?

When I look back I think to myself, certain states, circumstances, and circles are there only once, never again to appear, or only when one is least expecting it. Are not expectations and presuppositions unholy...

'Every true poet likes dust, for it is in the dust, and in the most enchanting oblivion, that, as we all know, precisely the greatest poets like to lie, the classics, that is, whose fate is like that of old bottles of wine, which, to be sure, are drawn, only on particularly suitable occasions, out from under the dust and so exalted to a place of honor.'

'I lower my eyes, huddle. Everything in me and on me hangs down like grey veils..I'm old, I sit and say nothing.'

'They say to me: "Philosophy!" Yet the death that comes before times cancels the later one.'

---Robert Walser.

~~~

We would walk and then dart into a museum, a gallery, a bookshop, small or large, to find shelter, perhaps the only kind available nowadays. Apart from home, of course. That goes without saying. 

To join the groups mulling around in the lushly restored National or to have eye and mind glance over the well-creased spines of the books in a second-hand basement shop amounts to the same thing, really: invisibility, the desire to lose oneself. 

There is no-one to talk to and there is nothing to say. Not that one strives to fail. It's just that the whole notion of success seems suspect. What kind of witness do we want is the question, I suppose.

As a Muslim one has to "bear witness" to (God's) reality. That seems like an incredible thing if you think about it.  

For the last three days I have dreamt of being in London. Someone once said, on escaping from a Gulag: the whole of Russia is one gigantic Gulag. There are prisons within the prison. But if that is true it is also the case that there are brightly lit rooms, unexplored, within the rooms.

~~~

Something as simple as buying a ticket. Floating in a train against the flow of traffic, the warmth of the light in the carriage amplified by the glass. A book, a pencil, a cup of coffee. Holes in your shoes, your hair uncombed and wild. The district line. It has to be. You cut through leafy suburbs where marriages are breaking up, over canals and bridges, looking down to spot some people who have wisely and permanently decided to live offshore. You feel at ease in your well-worn clothes. Have many deep thoughts-which you keep all to yourself. Where are you going? It doesn't matter. Find the stop that is yours, wait for the doors, and before the announcement walk back into time...  

solitude

'Between me and life is a faint glass. No matter how sharply I see and understand life, I cannot touch it.'
---Pessoa.

'If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature unto you would be a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.'
---Thomas a Kempis.


There is a sense in which this writing is too 'inward', irritatingly so. And, yes, there are typical elements to his writing which appeal, I guess, to a bourgeois intellectual or someone who is, more generally, estranged from the world, the times she is living in.

There can be something suffocating about this writing..it never curves out to the world and one really wants him to open the window, so to speak, so to speak. And yes, it's at times like this that one longs for a more substantial 'worldliness' (in Arendt's sense), a connection more tangible than these surface observations. Pessoa is like a man who wears gloves and has a good idea of the shape of the world but not its feel. But there is also, perhaps, a danger of something being too informed by history, the political. This need to escape history is also half our story, wouldn't you say?

Yes, the solipsism is definitely present. One feels like saying: yaar, give it a rest, Fernando, give us a break (all that wallowing. In England you imagine a reader saying, for fuck's sake, get a hold of yourself, man!). But I think there's something else going on here as well...this desire to be nothing, plain, neutral, small, as if that-somehow-could mean we are not tied down to the world, not overpowered by it. It is hard not to think of this in hindsight as an attempt to avoid or sidestep the large forces set into motion in the 20th century: the domination of the state, the party, ethnic determination..an attempt to not say 'Yes' or 'No' but, rather, take a step back from the whole question itself...Bartleby's 'I'd prefer not to' (no, haven't read, but seems relevant).

Primo Levi: "inert, noble, rare." Grey as a form of resistance, a resistance that doesn't even recognize the hold of power. Unable-or more to the point-unwilling to act, to interact.

As always, the key question: what is the way out of the world that is in the world? I think Pessoa's gnosticism doesn't appeal to our Muslim sensibilities. But there are moments, opening onto something else...

What redeems his writing for me, though, is the gentleness. Like Walser, he aims to escape bourgeois reality by being small, tender. He is a writer -in some ways- for the dropouts. Not the hard boiled, raw reality of the drunks, druggies, etc. but, still, along those lines. There is also a real connection here between the city and the soul, it's all very Platonic, very ancient. I can't but help read this book against a background of religious questioning: who am I, what is the self but a tissue of dreams? Such questions would be jarring if asked too insistently. And that, I think, is ultimately where Pessoa's charm lies. There's no strenuous searching, just a kind of daily reporting, the type of self-examination one imagines monks (a kind of Jesuit, he calls himself) might conduct. Yes, I think that's what makes reading this -at times-so awkward: writing that turns inwards around a centre that we're not even sure exists any more!

There's something contemporary about these small notes, the meaningless chatter, minute observations. A kind of blogging, maybe?

This, for example...when was this written?

'I write, or rather scribble, these lines not to say anything in particular but to give my distraction something to do. With the soft marks made by a blunt pencil I haven't the heart to sharpen, slowly fill the white paper the cafe uses to wrap up sandwiches (and which they provided me with because I required nothing better and anything would have done as long as it was white). And I feel content. I lean back. Evening falls....And I stop writing just because I stop writing.'

As always, this can slip into the banal but, for me, it's this kind of simple, clean recording of daily events that appeals. Maybe it isn't literature. But the blunt pencil! Is that all that is left? To carry on writing, into your own solitude, despite everything. This, again, reminds me of Walser and his microscripts...
 


What am I searching for?
Nothing.

But everyone is searching for something, whether they know it or not!
Then let it be Wales, my whore, my dark country, my black sun. 
 

...of small things

Note to self: are you ready for a life of smallness?

'You rarely succeed, yet the urge for completeness is a kind of love, doomed to be outgrown but not forgotten.'
---Anthony Lane, The New Yorker. 

Walser certainly seems to be the writer for you: the supreme artist of the person in the process of erasing himself from the books. Sum the totals. What does it all amount to? Pessoa, too, seems to be a kindred spirit (25 pages in). Like a corkscrew, turning inwards around the same point, through dry-as-dust material, though his darkness can be oppressive.  And you wonder to yourself: when will the wine flow, when will there be forgetfulness?

I somehow look forward to sleeping more than to meeting people. Not a good sign, I know, but the tedium is draining and there is little to say. The trick is to be able to go through with the motions without a second thought, so that no-one really sees you and you can then glide through, invisibly, like the man from the moon who was held in prison. 

Small one-liners, incidents, like the shining five pence piece you keep next to the bathroom mirror for good luck, to remind you of home. As long as it carries on shining, there's an opening.

"And then nothing happened", Plenty Coups says in that great book by Lear, Radical Hope. Nothing happens but you go on, until you can't. Waiting.Patience. This is where you need your religious hat. Really do. If you are in the possession of sound instincts, good health, firm habits...is this really down to your own volition or is your constitution determined elsewhere, by other means?

You think: maybe we have a store of memories that we think we can retrieve when required, at will, like a bucket that fetches cool, fresh water from a dark well. Be careful not to spill it now! But more than likely it seems as if it is chance or fate or something, something beyond our will that can draw us back. 

waltzing

There is a sense in which if we could see something from every angle we would attain universal humanity; on the other hand, such a thing may not be possible, or even desirable. We live in the arc of time and space that has been allotted to us. A self-contained life would be an acknowledgement of this. Would it be anything more? A whole-hearted acceptance of the cards-this, to me, seems impossible and not quite right. The right angle to the universe, the finding of a vantage point, through the forest, so as to see clearly. At the very least, the ability to dream oneself out of where one finds oneself and is lost...

What does W look back to? Nick Lezard says to Grimm's fairy tales, characters half-emerging into the light, a peasant dazed by the city lights. And yet, more than anything W sounds modern to our ears: easy going, light hearted, slightly unhinged, someone who repeats words to himself, like this, like this...

Everyone says he is incomparable and a great sign of that is that everyone wants to draw a comparison with him! To me he sounds a bit like Calvino's Palomar, or at least a Palomar who hasn't lived through the horrors of the 20th century. Naivete: yes!; but what distinguishes them is that one still hears a human voice talking to you in W...

"Paint me a railroad station, then, ten minutes before dark."

Commentary on this, from goldenrulejones (a lovely site on Walser):

What does "then" mean, or rather do, in that sentence?..It carries the faintest hint of a continuing conversation, and smooths out the otherwise abrupt transition the reader undertakes in the opening sentence or paragraph of any story: from knowing nothing about the world of the story to accepting that world not only extending forward through time as we follow events of the narrative, but extending also backwards in time, before the events of the story occur, and before we came along.

Imagine someone stumbling across your blog for the first time...maybe they read your latest post, quickly glance at your 'other bloggers' list or 'labels' to quickly gauge where you're coming from. An image might help. Does this person have a friendly face? Man or woman? That's always important.  Maybe, if you care enough, you look at the 'about me' page, see what films or books the other person likes. Doesn't really get you very far. What's the story, what's the story before the story? 

~~~

Last night there was an electricity shutdown from 10 'till 4:30 in the  morning so feeling a bit cranky today. The back up UPS system needs a clear two hours of electricity to gather its strength and so any continuous shortage incapacitates it. By two o' clock the fan has slowed down, a slow swirling around its centre and you think to yoursef: why bother! Please, do us a favour and stop going through the motions of being a fan, accept that your existence has changed...

By two thirty you say to yourself: show some mental strength, don't let this get to you..in the bigger scheme of things your uncomfort is a laughable trifle, something that can be forgotten with a healthy breakfast. You examine your hands in the single stream of light that penetrates the darkness...it is like a miniature stage light.

By three you are thankful for the fan which is only working intermittently now. It takes huge ten minute 'breathers' and then gets back to work, reluctantly, as if being whipped...

You think to yourself: mental strength means accepting you haven't got mental strength; you need to be more flexible. If you resist too much it will come back to haunt you so let it flow.

The battery is down to its last reserves, the copper wires barely sending out a thin pulse of energy, the last hope of the element like a tired fox that raises its head just above ground-level. The quiet interior world made visible. 

There is the call to prayer, mercifully, in the early morning. That signifies you've made it. You walk about in the last crumbling hour of darkness, without any anxiety, pacing up and down, stumbling against little r's bike, the strange waltz in the early hours of the day holding me together...

first love

You chance across a book when you are fifteen or sixteen and are captivated by it. Of course, why wouldn't you be! In comparison to your experiences of life at that age most books will sound wiser, deeper. The proportion of your life's experiences to the world's is wildly and amusingly small. Perhaps it's always a mistake to return to one's first loves...

A strange fact: the first book you read by someone is invariably the best, good in a way that is unrepeatable. Well, not so strange given that you often choose to read a book that is usually recognized to be the writer's 'best work' and, despite all the scepticism about reviewers the law of averages suggests that the chances are-and we're only talking about chance here-there will be something to it. 

So, for instance, Salter's Light Years was the thing, at the time. But no matter how hard you try, the rest is tosh. The radically abbreviated sentences..it's all so fake! Then Denis Johnson's Jesus's Son. After that Train Dreams was a huge disappointment, despite the rave reviews (yes, I know, that contradicts what I've said above).  I'm put off from reading anything by M. Robinson or Paula Fox in case it tarnishes the memory of Housekeeping and Desperate Characters. And can anything equal or rival Stoner. Best not to go there.

Is this just laziness? Well, you've read some Roth and some Bellow and some Hesse, so maybe it's not just that.

Knulp. Now, there's something I'll never go back to in case the spell is broken. Reading Walser now and loving it. But what if I'd come across this book when I was seventeen? Would I have dismissed it or just not even have been interested in it? Chance, again. Or would I have read it so that its charm might have worn off by now? There's no telling. That former self is as much a mystery to me now as I am to myself today. But you can also half imagine yourself being intoxicated by Walser then. 

~~~

57. Everything seems to stop at 57 (of course, Arendt starts at '57). I mean, page 57. The charm of Walser is that every third line or so half undermines the previous two. You're not sure if he's making a theological point or commenting on class. Probably neither. 

What if one stumbles on to a first love late in life, though?

Now that I think about it, the whole aim of my writing here on the black sun has been an attempt to return to Wales..er or some dim reflection of the dark country.  One's inability to adapt to the world and changing circumstances would be quite charming, I'm sure, if ti wasn't so clumsy!

Durer's Eyes

The way in which we draw boundaries around things, how we define the limits, the periphery, tells us what we are, what is.

We need to set up and maintain all that is not-I, all that is of lesser value and reality. How we need those barbarians!

The depth of reason is only realised in the play against what it is not-unreason, madness, precisely. And the supra-rational?

Madness: A new rite of exclusion, an expression of the desire to set apart the impure, the corrupted-whether in body or mind...

Leonardo: he was interested in everything because he was interested in nothing..

Durer: Restless, nervous energy. Lacking all self-repose. A life on the edge of a precipice, and one that understands just how precarious this is; far too aware of itself, in fact, to be at peace.

It's comforting talking about madness-especially if one isn't mad oneself. The genius of the Romantics against the philistines; mountain people vs the plains.

.

The problem with mad people is that they look at the world too intensely. Searching for a pattern when they need to let go. How many of Europe's leading lights ended up crazy: Cantor, Nietzsche, Van Gogh...

To be small and stay small

"Assuredly there exists ..work of the kind one can do in a dream? I am, to put it frankly, a Chinese, that is to say, a person who dreams everything small and modest to be beautiful and pleasing, and to whom all that is big and exacting is fearsome and horrid."

From a Boat Trip:

"Odd similarity between things at rest and things flowing occurred to me during the trip that I, too, participated in and would have been delighted to have been as fascinating a storyteller as one person there..here and there fish, driven it seemed by an uncontrollable curiosity, bobbed upward from the depths to visibility, as though wishing to help the listeners be satisfied with the tale. On fish one finds no arms. Is this why they have such huge eyes and expressive mouths?...

A girl sitting with us on the boat compared traveling over the water to the imperceptible gliding and progress of growth, that of fruit for example, which perhaps would have little desire to ripen if it knew to what end."

Walser remains for the last 27 years of his life in an asylum; there is a black and white photograph..'footprints in the snow lead to tall man lying with one arm thrown behind his head, for all the world as if his last gesture had been to toss off the hat that lies a few feet away.'

Smallness, as a way of resisting power, transcending it; but something more: the understanding that a life may always be destined to be small in many ways. A refuge, yes, a way of going unnoticed, yes, but one also wants to be recognized, seek out a witness to the words we scrawl between the lines. Our own personal lives will always be small in the vastness of time. It may be comforting to think that nothing matters, but it may also be a thought full of sadness.

~~~

A common thread: hats, of course! 

Freud's father...anti-semitism