Peter Handke: In the Woods, Might Be Late

This evening I experienced the self

as a (naturally) unreliable machine for setting the world in motion:

as if the self must first set itself in motion

to illuminate the world, enlighten it.

Peter Handke: In the woods, might be late

A film by Corinna Belz

Unfortunately l am no longer as bold as l would like to be

l am, actually...

This terrible shyness that l had, and yet l was still bold.

Everytime l go to mass l think,

I pray that I will lose this shyness.

ls it still there? -Yes,

with people.

Somehow that makes me lose my poise. -The others?

When I have a role to play...

l don't know what my role is, l insist on my role.

I insist that I am the one who does that.

But l don't know

how you make that happen,

l don't know.

l'm widely known for being crazy for mushrooms.

But it's one of the most beautiful things in life

When I'm sitting in an airplane and I am bored stiff,

in airplanes, at airports,

l think: When l get home,

everything will be better, when l'm there in that mundane little world.

That's liberating.

In this shitty, calculated technical world.

Okay then, l'll do this now

Don't want to provoke a major discussion

A little dirt is good, l like to eat a little with the mushroom

That's the problem, what to do with it... cut it open?

No idea. -Yes, but that's quite heartless.

Okay, there are no worms in it, for sure.

Of course, you can always be wrong.

But isn't that beautiful?

People always say they smell like nuts, but...

What a beautiful sound that is!

lsn't that beautiful? Still, everything is transitory.

Haven't you seen my path, my perpetual path, over there?

When I'm doing nothing, I walk back and forth.

That's the beaten path of thought?

Yes, priests have breviary paths When they are praying the breviary.

And l have... I just walk up and down.

On that successful day...

Attempt at a chronicle of the same -

...beads of dew lay on a raven's feather.

As usual, an old woman, albeit a different one than yesterday,

stood in the newspaper store, her shopping long since done,

and spoke up.

The ladder in the garden,

embodiment of getting out of oneself,

had seven rungs.

The sand in the trucks moving through the suburbs

was the same color as the façade of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

The chin of a young girl in the library touched her neck.

A tin bucket took its shape.

A mailbox turned yellow.

The marketwoman wrote the bill in the palm of her hand.

On that successful day,

it happens that a cigarette butt rolls in the gutter,

just as a cup steams on a tree stump

and in the dark church, a row of chairs is bright from the sun.

It happens that...

the few men in the cafe, even the loudmouth,

are silent with each other for a long moment,

and that even the out-of-towner joins them in silence.

It happens that my sharpened hearing for my work

also opens me up to the sounds in the house.

On that successful day, a habit will be discontinued,

an opinion vanish,

and I shall be surprised, by him, by you,

by myself.

In the house I shall discover a corner that has hitherto been overlooked,

where "someone could live!"

And at the end of the day it would have called out for a book-

something more than a mere chronicle:

"The fairytale of the successful day."

And at the very end, the glorious oblivion would have come

that the day was supposed to be successful.

Have you ever experienced a successful day?

You wrote that here, didn't you?

Up in the small room

At the very top,

in what became the nursery.

It was beautiful, it was November, December.

l still remember perfectly.

Up in the smallest room

where you look out or onto or down on the avenue of thujas.

The housewarming -

celebrated with a kind of thoughtful work, and not with some party.

That was the first time, in this house here,

and l had an especially good eye for details,

you come to live somewhere

and for a time...

Maybe there's a borderaround everything,

not the border around an announcement of mourning, but not a joyful border either.

There is an inscription around everything.

Every thing has a kind of fragmentary script drawn around it.

The rhythm opens the inner eye.

lt's a rhythm that arises out of longing...

or out of wanting to see with, or ascend with the thing.

And out of this rhythm the images come,

that may not only be from here,

but that may have arrived...

50 years earlier, that l now see here, the images.

What more was there to do, to discover, to recognize in a day?

Behold: No king of eternity, no king of life,

and if so only a "secret" one - No, here stands the king of the day!

The only odd part of it was that at this point a trifle sufficed to topple him

...from his imperious throne.

At the sight of the passerby who came sauntering out of the side street,

with his coat over his arm, stopped, patted his pockets,

and quickly turned back,

his pacing turned to exasperation.

Chronicle of Current Events Director: Peter Handke, 1971

"Disturbed, you begin to raise the question everywhere,

how one might live."

"How should one live? How to live with one another?

How to be essential for each other and for one's self?"

"How should one live?"

Sophie, hello!

...yes. Mhm.

Yes, they're filming right now...

Yes, but l can see you tonight, maybe at Montparnasse, Sophie.

Have a good day. See you in a bit.

What are you laughing about? -l'm laughing about the cats.

Never in my life have l sat in front of a computer.

lt's not a matter of principle.

l am not as technically incapable as one might think.

But there is no erotic attraction to me.

Back then...

Okay, electric typewriters are long gone as well, aren't they?

l tried those back then, but...

the faint sound, the drone of expectation,

that put me off.

But mechanical typewriters,

l liked them when l was young.

That tack-tack-tack sound!

-Mr. Handke, you have been in the writing business for only three years.

(The profile: Peter Handke In conversation with Friedrich Luft, 1969)

-You have, in this time, if l count correctly,

written three or four books of prose,

you have written radio plays,

you have written half a dozen plays,

you produce a lot. Do you produce quickly?

How do you do it?

lt only seems that these were produced very quickly.

When l, let's say, really began to write,

when I didn't just write emotionally, -Yes.

out of some feeling or impulse, -Yes.

but when l began to work methodically,

when I noticed that every sentence you write is somehow imposed on you,

then it becomes insanely difficult for me.

Almost every day the moment comes,

when l...

just sitting at the table

or somewhere else, the moment when l get tangled up.

When l just can't...

and it's not dangerous, but...

it can be almost bestial.

And then you become enraged?

Enraged, well...

Enraged isn't the right word.

lt is, as if you...

l don't know, when you want to open a door

that won't open, and you rattle and rattle

and even destroy the handle and...

and somehow destroy...

you beat your head on the door, or...

it's kind of a stupid parable, but all comparisons are false.

-Typically you might say: "kick" the door down.

But this one can't be kicked down!

They are doors that won't open...

with force.

Also not with cunning, and not with technique.

Technique won't work for sure. Technique is the way

not to do something, right?

To avoid something, while writing.

That sand in there, trickling out of the shell.

lt was in the shell for2 million years, the sand.

l always think it is salty,

it really ought to be, since it comes from the ocean,

but it's not salty.

That's quite something.

It's... it's him.

I don't need to check for scars.

He's become older but he's still the one he always was.

As soon as it begins to rain, he brings the chair out of the house,

sits down under the eaves,

and watches the rain with arms crossed.

During the storm he runs into the woods

...and squats down in the root troughs

...under a spruce and listens to the soughing tree tops.

He is the one who shirks work and who works like the dickens.

He moans and groans and plays the stoic.

He mutely feels for you and laughs at you with tinny derision.

He is his parents' joy and sorrow.

He is the one who fails to ask the question and who then scurries to recoup.

He is our neighbor