finally

realized during the wee hours that I of course should be reading Rami Kaminski's book and so I ordered it even though it is hardback.  

RAMI KAMINSKI, MD, is a renowned psychiatrist and the founder and director of the Institute for Integrative Psychiatry in New York City. A true pioneer in the psychiatric field, Dr. Kaminski has served in every facet of psychiatry—from academic and research work, through clinical, government,... 

Handke writes the same book over and over throughout his career, sort of.  And the Odyssey haunts them, the exile, war and "war", wanderings, endless events, landscape as innerscape, maybe even landscape as war, scene of battles, geology as foundation of every scene in the series of dramas.  Writing and the compulsion to write primary source of his feelings of guilt (238 Moravian), guilt about his mother as well.

I kept surmising that he might just as well be a otrovirt and then it dawned on me at 3 am, well, whether he fits that new label you need to explore the fellow's book for yourself because if you resonate so deeply with Handke's ways of responding, imagining, thinking, wandering, then Kaminski has some things to say that you may find invaluable as well.  Why block him out after spending so many years being fascinated by Jung and Myers-Briggs and Enneagram?  Let's see what he says about all of that.  

but then we are in chapter 10 and the obsession with the former country of the Balkans reappears.  The karst basin above Trieste.  The sudden deaths of aging members of the conferences centered on Central Europe.  Maybe all of the satire in this chapter goes over my head.  Survivors unable to get the rusted bell to clang.  Days each with a special creature or event. "everything greening in that incomparable Balkan way."  Buses, a newspaper of a traveler, his own name as a former writer by a reporter named Melchior. 

undertaken the tour to get away from himself.  still weird in many ways Boy at the front of the bus with a smirk, uttering the shortest of all Balkan curses: "May the mouse fuck you!"  The boy has become it, in Jakob Böhme's words, in his beautiful yet terrible problem, the next writer.  

12 Porodin  gone.  every step led deeper into the fairy-tale-like unknown.  

walking the bomb craters to the river 248 his laundry number in boarding school

the woman in his arms did exist but did not belong to him    he was at odds with himself for good 

three angels  the guardian angel   the warning angel   and now the reassuring angel    geography of dreams stay with me now and in the hour of my death  

May you be the son of your moment.  And may the moment be your breath.  312  

he wrote it Jan-Nov in 2007   a meditation on what were the Balkans, what was that war, is it now gone forever

after Moravian Night comes Don Juan  (I could read it again now that I got his angle on the tale)

in 2011 The Great Fall  about an actor  and Storm Still and The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez 

2012 the essay on the Quiet Place  --- a late work, then, not an early one  

2013  Days and Works   and a new English version of Repetition

2014  Storm Still   epic about his Slovene roots 

2015  in German, The Innocent, Me and the Unknown Woman"

2016  English version of The Moravian Night 2008 

2017  The Fruit Thief  Or, One-Way Journey into the Interior

2018  The Great Fall  and Til Day You Do Part  Seagull Books 

2019  The Great Fall in English  Seagull Books   Nobel Prize 

2020  The Second Sword

2021  My Day in the Other Country 

2022 in German  The Ballad of the Last Guest  

reminder   in 2000 it was On A Dark Night I Left My Silent House

so I need to go back and pick up where I left off---Crossing the Sierra de Gredos

not sure how I got out of line with Moravian Night  

time in May is running out   Today is the 1st   Looks like The Tunnel will not be until next year !  if ever 

7

 he fell into a sink hole filled deep with snow, a chamois jumps in and talks to him.  Later he is on the train at the rear and encounters the beautiful young reader who knows who he is, knows his work, she is reading some older work, she is the true reader for whom reading is essential to life.  Earlier there was the report of his dialogues with Raimund.  On the country estate of that literary figure, Ferdinand Raimund.  Who may or may not have actually existed.  In dreams he becomes lead to go find some place, in dreams we see the back side of places where we've never been, never seen.  

silentamazement   to see and walk among the houses on the back side of the hill  

flight with a good view down into his village and how it rests in the landscape  and then on the Old Road

into it where appearances were deceptive  the painter gesturing in front of his big canvas with nothing yet on it   

talks and walks with the poet devoted to poetry from birth now become a circus barker  his eyes darting around, demanding attention, representing poetry, even when he was alone for a change, in the men's room or whereever.  father and son poets 

they infected that person through their casual art of walking 

the sorts of walkers switched identities on the road  ---  

by activating sustained human breath

Our wanderer has people from every nation using the jew's harp by page 189.  Jaw harp, juice harp, mouth harp, instructors and performers on youtube use all these names.  This international conference at The Inn of the Unknown.   The wanderere became filled with feelings, more and more feelings of great and persistent happiness, gratitude, affection and love of life    a dream sound a threshold sound 

@xirtman posted this about one novel by Handke and one by Genet

All five works share this invariant structure: A solitary mind, cut off from social reality, recursively modeling a single obsession through a self-contained linguistic system, where emotion is displaced into structure and narrative collapses into cognition.  

That is the pattern.

Austic traits  --- cross-text pattern extraction   Mono-tropism, total cognitive fixation 

single-axis obsession  

Pierre   metaphysical identity collapse

Across   perceptual traversal / space consciousness

Beckett Trilogy  --- consciousness stripped to minimal recursion

Kafka Diaries  obsessive self-monitoring

Funeral Rites  --  death, ritual, erotic fixation 

• ierre → metaphysical identity collapse
• Across → perceptual traversal / space-consciousness
• Beckett Trilogy → consciousness stripped to minimal recursion
• Kafka Diaries → obsessive self-monitoring
• Funeral Rites → death, 

not at all sure why he posted this and what he was trying to say or illustrate  

is the list---given the bullets -- an AI generated response  ?

oh  it was his reply to Troy James Weaver listing these five books as ones everyone should read once in their lives 

xirtman seems to point out who are autistic e.g. he says Nietzsche is and Frank Lloyd Wright was a high-functioning autistic 

At this point in Moravian Night I would say he's on to something in Handke.  But/and does being a writer make one eventually into a sort of autistic performer or is one autistic and becomes a writer because not much else is open or possible?  Was Joe

Monninger a sort of autistic person?  

The Jews Harp convention is an interesting trope he's figured out---the dialectic between the individual's breath and the national and geological terrain that emerges from the breathed performance.  

and now we find that the watches on each person's wrist disturbs the storytelling and the harp performances  local time reminders destroy   time as prison destroys time of play and dreams 

only defiance is left as a way to counter the world  ---Balkans as artists of defiance --  chubby boy beams forth  everyone invited

to next year's convention in the Balkans by our wanderer 

what a strange book   ---  is he not novelizing his "politics" of the Balkans---treating them as an ancient whole rather than in the recent Serbian Croatian civil war dissolution of the fake Yugoslavia ?  

now in Genet's book we have a scene with a watch---the executioner unstraps Erik's watch, it falls to the ground and he feels purer  70  

Night in Night

Handke's people wander perfectly forgotten and empty parts of Spain.  Is Moravian Night a nightmare tale, we get a touch of wife beating in Chapter 4 and then by the end we get a brilliant masterpiece of writing about perfect union of the man and the woman (she now tells the tale on the boat, or at least part of it).  The two pages of writing about their climax is storytelling, fairy tale anti-fairy tale telling wondrousness with specific and words for them.  So is it a Dark Night of the Soul novel?  Spain and all. What if I had not become a successful writer, had been a failure and long to be released from the terrors of it, to be a former writer, would that not be pretty good?  On the boat we can have a constant shifting of who speaks, who tells the next tale or purported story.  Uncertainty, indefiniteness interlaced with what we know happens.  Marked a bunch of passages, too lazy to get the book and copy some of them.  To do so might violate the mission the book gives us.  Posted on X hey Handke has a Tunnel book, too!! 

"And in their parting, in their separation, reality appeared, blossomed." 149

"an earring rang" 147

his inveterate avoidance reflex 

maybe a bit like Theroux's novel called My Other Life where he imagines his life and career going in totally different ways than it had gone

he gets a guardian angel who helps him walk the slippery rios of Galicia   hey, I've been there!!  did not try to walk the rocky fissures but I know what that rias bajas  looks and feels like   Valle landscape

who otherwise in life so often fell into the grip, if not of social phobia at least of a fear of the unknown that caused him to hesitate unduly on the threshold of a new experience  143

let things take their course

how did it happen on this particular day he knew his intuition to be infallible 138 

Actually he believed more in mutual enthusiasm than in love, or at least he avoided using that word 136

257/280

 on the otrovert test this evening.  St James Tea Room at 11 this morning.  Before that changed the air tickets to give us the three hour layover in MNSP.  

Loving Moavian Night now.  almost midway.  Got the swing of it.  Love the section on the Carthusian who left because the silence in the monastery was fake.  Could only find the other silence in the kitchen or in lavatory clean up duty.  94 

great passage on 119 how his reveries help him stop writing, help him get out of himself and into the world.  "All's well when I do nothing but live them, and keep them to myself--not well when I wish to impart them to all of you, . . . . "  This after the great sequence about hanging out with idiots when they are out on their walks.  

a guest storyteller takes over so we can see the former writer behaving strangely at the closed train station on the Galician coast  He sees him in a funeral procession.  Reminder that I read some more of Genet earlier, a funeral procession in there too.  At last I appreciate Genet, every word, every shock and surprise.  

meander, walk, zig zag 

been a while

 "I’m not really sure who I am but I love reading books."

Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1941-1996

ok, who was he ? Polish film director and screenwriter

into Moravian Night, a bit. Reading it as a devoted fan reads it. It falls into the group we call "strange" for want of a better term. Handke being lazy? or bored? or trying out this and that, moving forward, no matter what? All of his books are travel books in some sense, the path forward, through landscape. This uses a river boat.

Weds swim day Moravian one of those books we must permit our author to have written. What is he exposing or exploring, emptying out, moving on beyond? A strange book. I suppose much later on we can analyze his whole ouevre and in deep hindsight we will see what we cannot see right now. Just like a trip down a river. Or sort of. He puts a Carthusian monk together with Apaches and Navajos. Why not. Noise is the enemy experience. Noise and sound pollution of every sort. Noise sufferers at borders and thresholds, especially noise from motorcycles and motorbikes. "Another man flinched at the slightest breeze." 91

A dystopian tale of course. The Carthusian who left because the silence in the monastery was fake.

"In the current noise I have come close to losing my soul. . . . A single lovable sound, and my soul will be healed. Secrecy: show me the place where you are hidden." 98

the failed prose writer against the town-talk poet, outsider vs locked up mental case

meanwhile Eric J told me about his great bro trip to see Dawson in Spain and today about the 16th C Jesuit wisdom book of Bathasar Gracian and a Spanish film maker named Saura, film called The Hunt

Sierra de Gredos

this arrived and I realized it was published years before The Fruit Thief so I dropped that (few pages in)

and picked up this.  Unusual in many ways, hmm, what was he thinking that prompted this one?  Main character a woman, a banker, to boot!  What's up?  But still, a wanderer.  Character and her author, a hired biographer.  Story, no myth.  

"I have always hoped for a commission like this: not a work but a product to deliver.  An order.'  A man of rhythms?  What kind of rhythms? "Above all the rhythms of understanding, that most inclusive of feelings, hand in hand with the rhythm of remaining silent, and leaving things unspoken."  9  

this copy very heavy, an ingram printing product, maybe ten years old?  very heavy paper, unlike those other recent copies printed in texas two weeks ago.   

ok this will be a wild wandering like the Walked Out One Night.  Banker, woman, instead of a pharmacist, and she will realize and transform in various ways.  No names, no specific landscape, but landscape as dreamscape.  

for going to texas I'll take the small book, two novellas, tale of demons and merry month of may unusual in that they are novellas with titles and sub-titles

stroll around Netherwood the other day interesting, depressing.  The refined famous house degraded right and left by junky houses built next to it and by the whole neighborhood.  Lechusas now has the look and feel of a village.  almost   even more pleased with and proud of the whole west side 

successful day

have done a poor job of reading this essay yesterday but at the point I am at there's this: "Thus, he reflected later, in an attempt at a successful day, everything, at least in moments of misfortune, of pain, of failure, when things were going wrong--the essential was to summon up the presence of mind needed for a different variety of this moment and thus to transform it, by a liberating act of awareness or reflection, whereby the day--as though this were the prerequisite for its success--would acquire it élan and its wings." 271 

what follows is worth noting because it goes with the previous post about Lacey and Repetti 

"You make it sound as though your successful day were child's play.

No answer."  

---

ecstasy meant panic 

amazed at the size and emptiness of the toilets in the American Express Company near Opéra 

this whole long passage about his day  pp 277-278  so wonderful  

Day, let everything in you ripen something for me.  281

Unexpectedly, still in the dark, the thrust of joy in carrying on.

this essay on the successful day is Handke's prose poem prayer, his faith in writing, in the day, yes he does quote St Paul but it is the St Paul of "bring me that cloak I left with Carpus at Troas."

See how the snow falls past the empty bird's nest.  Arise to transubstantiation. To the next dream?

must re-read the essay some time because I miffed missed reading well the early part of it  the second part was successful!!!  

now to take up The Fruit Thief    back to the dream of story, of narrative flow  

tomorrow I can stroll in the Netherwood Park area and see the designated modernist house by Arthur Dekker, built just five years after Milner Mansion on Mackland but a generation apart in mindset. Maybe even two generations if we put Wright in there to buffer Gaw Meem from Mies.  2271 sq ft, 10k sq ft lot 4 bedrooms 2 baths  1961 vs 1966  4 beds 3 (2/12 baths)  2966 sq ft  10+k sq ft lot 

how would Handke respond? (Lacey -- Repetti)

 someone posted this so I can't resist pasting up a closing segment just to see how it flies 

I might suggest  for him, hmm, well, what have I been doing for the past fifty years?  breakthrough, backthrough, breakbefore 

If the writing of fiction is a treatment, what else could that treatment be but a cathartic, a purgative? The things purged in Lacey’s writing are not only strong emotions but also—and more often—ideas, images, phrases associated with those emotions that previously had a merely private and inchoate existence. Their significance remains uninterrogated until they appear on the page, written by her own hand but coming as if from elsewhere. The drama of the memoir side is most palpable in the moments when these purgings happen without conscious effort or warning—when we catch the author surprising herself, when she describes how the act of putting a particular idea, phrase, or feeling in the head, mouth, or body of a character allows her to suddenly recognize that that very thing has always been present in herself, concealed or disavowed. The fiction, likewise, is deepened and intensified upon rereading (like a Möbius strip, you have to go all the way around twice to complete the circuit), when we are compelled to imagine Lacey writing the text and arriving at such moments of spontaneous insight.

This constant return to the scene of writing—this demand that we grasp the text not just as a written thing (this being the demand of classical postmodernism, with its delight in self-reflexive textual play) but also as a writing, as the product of a writer struggling with her material, encoding that struggle into the text itself, and producing some unaccountable hybridity in excess of the “real”—is Lacey’s great breakthrough. Coupled with that is the refusal of the conflation of the person writing (the author-as-mere-author) with the act of writing itself. To write is to pass the material of one’s life through an inscrutable matrix that somehow defies the laws of physics by yielding something more than what went in. In this mysterious sense, something happens when a person writes that is profoundly impersonal. If there is a primal scene of contemporary autofiction, it is this passage through writing from the merely personal to the impersonal—and Lacey has pointed the way there precisely by refusing to write a properly autofictional work.

LARB CONTRIBUTOR

Jon Repetti is a writer and critic living in New York City. He has a PhD from Princeton University and works in publishing.

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