late afternoon, Friday. Super bright day, high winds have come back. Long nap before and during GH, Bela still there. I just finished Handke's essay on The Juke Box. Surely David Foster Wallace had read it at some time. Since Soria is so important for it and we have spent some time in Soria it had that special resonance even though I remember very little about Soria except being grumpy that we were even there where there clearly was nothing. Ok, the 12th century church of Santo Domingo which Bela kept trying to get me to look at more closely every time we walked around it, the street on the right being so close to it as to almost be shaving off the corner of the building. Photos on google show that they have fixed that, looks like they made it all pedestrian zone all around the church. Neither of us can recall exactly why we ever spent some time in Soria. Machado yes, but nothing of Valle-Inclán. My only notable memory is of a long walk I took down along the river, wide stretches of reeds in the shallow edges on both sides. Some young women, teenagers were playing around ahead of me and across on the other side at a distance, it was the town side, a man, middle-aged, appeared in the tall reeds, almost hidden but not quite enough, stood still and then moved slightly in very familiar bodily movements, he was masturbating as he watched the young girls far across the river.
So Handke weaves all around his topics, juke boxes and geologies and Soria and how place and the spark of writing and of completing a piece of writing are all involved in the details of places. He has found Soria of all places has one Chinese restaurant. The essay closes with this sentence which the great translator had rendered so well I can understant what Michael Lentz meant when he praised Handke's magnificent writing style in German. "The young girl, otherwise idle, was painting Chinese letters into a notebook at the next table, one close to the other, in a writing far more even than his own during these weeks (not only the storm gusts, the rain and the darkness when he took notes outdoors, since he had been at work, had ruined it), and as he kept watching her, a girl who had to feel incomparably more foreign than he did in this area, in this Spain, he sensed with amazement that he had only now really set out from the place he came from."
This almost took my breath away and with some tears. How powerful this is exactly because I have been reading his work in timeline order and so I have seen him repeat and repeat so many large and small details over and over in various ways. In this essay he mentions the woman who invited him to share experience, sex, love, with him, in Alaska at a bar where they saw each other. In his other work he allows his imagination to flesh out what happened, in this essay he explains that it did not happen, after all, but it might have and maybe it should have. She takes him out to the parking lot where her Land Cruiser is parked. "And in this moment it became clear to him that for once in his life there was a decision imagined not by him alone but by someone else; . . . . it was the moment when Percival hovered on the verge of the question that would prove his salvation, and he? on the verge of the corresponding Yes. And like Percival, and not because he was uncertain---he had that image, after all--but as if it were innate and quite proper, he hesitated, and in the next moment the image, the woman, had literally vanished into the snowy night." 229
wow, such writing such consciousness, awareness of one's consciousness, recalled & reconstructed & situated within the tale of Percival It is from Chretien de Troyes Perceval: The Story of the Grail. He hesitates to ask why the spear bled, why the king suffers, and fails in his quest. (ok had to look that up)
"as if it were innate and quite proper" a result of his naive adherence to advice against speaking too much
