Handke's Weight

 Really really enjoying Handke's journal now.  Just past half way.  Doctoral dissertation: analyze the journal as the fulcrum, the inflection point (to use this awful new term), or just study it's dictionary for the fun of it as a self-contained logo -verse.  

So many lines of such interest, power, dismay, strangness, rage, feeling, intimacy, insight, boredom.  He really shows what can be done, how not easy it is to produce such a volume in a year and a half, two years.  What else was he writing then, if anything?  "Sex: the ultimate enmity."   149  How much is observation, how much fiction?  "I go on talkimg while passing through the revolving door of a luxury hotel.  That'll show them."  150  

Rested all day hoping to get ride of the sore throat and cough from yesterday.  Took Va's stuff to Optum in the morning.  Bought another panera salad for her lunch, I had lentil soup.  

Slave to advertising again:  I wrote to Alcami saying hey where is my golden spoon and golden frother for the daily ritual??  

Change our return air tix to early morning through the MSP airport now that I learned that terrible info about weather over the ATL airport.  Explains why we got re-routed and canceled last summer.  Never again spending the night in an airport.  Going out next Jan might even go all the way to Phoenix or LAX and spend a night or even two to make the trip better.  

Looks like Gabriela won't be back to help out or swim.  No surprise there.  Bela on the piano now.  Will Pablo come back?  

Tomorrow the B&L lunch.  

Richter's Seasons

Chatter this morning super.  We both loved the music, Max Richter's reworking of Vivaldi's Four Seasons.  Big chamber group, wonderful sound, wonderful example of contemporary genius working with earlier genius to create old-new, new-old.  Woman next to me named Suzanne and her friend, Ginny, arrived yesterday, two day drive from Madison.  Here for few weeks, second or third time they've come for the sun and the air.  She grew up in Skowhegan, Maine and went to Madison for college and never went back to NE.  Majored in history and felt that was enough, didn't have the confidence in it to go any further in that direction.  Son with four children live near her, daughter works for the state department, currently stationed in Alberta.  Fun to talk with her.  Would have thought she was 78 but she said she is 85.   We agreed that 80 brought significant change in sense of what is going on, who we are, what's next.  Later Kith came to talk with us, she was thrilled with the fetish "necklace" we gave her, the ex voto sorts of things on the red silken cord.  We can't recall where we bought those.  Still have one at Rogers St.  Really missed not seeing Barb and Ed and Lou at Chatter.  See them on Tuesday.  

Looking into flying back and found out ATL has super high cancellation rates these days.  Will change to the earliest booking and/or look at American to see if they have more or different routes.  Coming back next winter should we look for other routes also.  

Slight sore throat this evening.  Watch two episodes of Pacific Criminals, it had upped it's budget significantly.  Still doing page or two at a time with Fosse.  Bit like Antunes in effect?  

dream

 Anxiety in dream last night, what dissertation topic would I choose?  Decided, relief, to study word choice as inward structure in work of Robert Browning.  Today Bela wears lavender and purple for Beckie.  Beckie just showed up wearing bright pink sweatshirt with a sort of wolf image on the front.  I am going to explore RiverFront Estates first thing, looked at the map, the turn is at the Chevron station where I stopped for air in a tire a year or two ago.  Bright.  Chilly but no breeze.  Will get close to 50 later on.  Big anticipation building because first Chatter tomorrow.  Oh--map just showed me that the correct spelling of this neighborhood is RiverfrontE Estates.  Wonder if they were going for a French tinge?  What book to take with me in the car today?  Picked up Fosse, then decided to cheat!  Oh dear.  Hmm

Chat trying too hard to please.  Long reply in chart format, or business meeting bullet format.  One line---"Septology II is less about seeing the world rightly and more about being held while you fail to see clearly."  Better one at another spot in the text--"Art, prayer, and breath begin to feel like the same activity."  That's good.  Now to ask Chat to delete all previous queries and replies.  

End of the day.  The new Altra shoes are terrific.  Walked on big stone gravel behind Star and enjoyed the walk.  Wearing them all day, walking various spots, one city park off Montaño.  Comfy.  Welcome change for the concrete floors here in the house and everywhere we go.  2696 steps today so far.  

Enjoyed starting the Handke novel, the difficult one according to Kunkel.  Slow Homecoming.  

Should I change flights?  Two hours in  MSP vs ATL?  slightly earlier departure from 11 am to 8 am.  Bela says no.  Leave well enough.  We are too comfortable with an 11:30 departure time.  See if a trip to PT shows up.  

wow Just learned something a bit worrisome about this question----257%  

Based on recent 2025-2026 data, 

ATL-BOS is more likely to be canceled than MSP-BOS due to higher overall flight volume, severe weather, and significantly higher rates of cancellation at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. ATL is ranked as a top airport for cancellations, whereas MSP generally shows better on-time performance. 

Key Considerations:

• Airport Performance: ATL consistently appears in data as a top airport for flight delays and cancellations, with a 257% increase in cancellations between 2024 and 2025, notes  and 
• Weather Impact: ATL is more vulnerable to sudden, severe weather impacting the Southeast and connecting traffic, according to data from 
• Time of Day: Regardless of the route, early morning flights (5 a.m. to 8 a.m.) are less likely to be canceled than those departing after 9 a.m., say and  

To minimize risk, select an early morning departure on either route. 

Guess I will change to MSP in spite of Bela's prefences!  

split personality as a solution

 "Split personality as a solution: the thought that I am not doing this damned kitchen work, but someone else, someone else . . . enables me, for moments at a time, to bear it without difficulty (the origin of schizonphrenia)   Handke, Weight, 100

Fosse and Handke feed boths sides of my split personality, both/and, and therein the failure of chatgpt.  It lined everything up on a spectrum so it could talk about left, center and right.  What I wanted was both/and.  At the end of Fosse's volume one he has fun with the stream becoming as rapid and blurred as possible until we get to death.  Now what will he do on volume II?  

Quiet day here.  Are we participating in the national strike in support of Minnesota against ICE.  Or having a quiet day for reading and dozing, dozing and reading?  Lot of that in Fosse.  I guess because I didn't close the book again I like him more than I think.  Or I'm curious to see for how long I can enjoy or stand his musical mannerisms.  Does he "perfect" Beckett?  Perhaps, although B would roll his eyes at the return to Rome.  Asle tries to shrug his shoulders and make it a paradox of his own split-personality, or the split between him as clear headed painter and his other self the drunken sleeper rescued from the doorway.  The death of grandfather split him into the two persons who we hear from and about.  

Bela deep into a second novel by a Kurdistani writer.  Sun super brilliant, sky super blue.  Warning message from the Rogers street thermostat but the temp readings seem ok.  So cold there, single temps day after day, below zero every night.  Yikes.  

I changed two door knobs today.  Me and one phillips screwdriver.  A first in my 81 years, a triumph.  

We did not lay in a store of mochis and so resorted to jelly on toast.  Cannot remember the name we used for hamburger in chili sauce on a bun that was common in our childhoods.  

Even with the admiration for what Fosse is doing with such perfection, the warmth of companionship flows to and from Handke.  Similar for M Cheney's small book on/about Barry Lopez.  An interdisciplinary memoir C Taylor would recognize in terms of genre and style.  

revising

I will say I find it a strange wording to talk about how mysticism is metabolized on the page.  A wording I would never have dreamed of and I'm not even sure I like it or like how it sounds.  Does it sound pretentious and vague to talk about an experience being metabolized on the page.  And then to say it maps loosely with other ways of talking about experience.  When we talk about inwardness similar troubles with language arise.  Different spiritual postures. Here the use of "tides" and "erasure" does seem interesting to describe the kind of prayer Fosse describes implicitly---withdrawing the self, dissolving the voice into surrender into repetition and silence.  This sense of erasure could well be exactly why reading his book Melancholy spooked me so, made me recall my times in Eugenia memorial mental hospital.  Short as they were, yet intense as they were.  Also the experience of blackout when Va was still in her coma state and I drove down to New Bedford for an overnight escape and woke up not knowing where I was or how I had managed to checkout of the motel without having been conscious of doing so.  I had to call David and ask him to help me remember where I was.   The blackout, the panic attack, would be the kneeling in a dark chapel that you suggest.  But in the goalie's anxiety you dwell inside your perception and wait for the game itself, the field you are in, to speak and meaning arrives when you feel yourself dwelling inside your perception of being alive.  Your attention waits, alert, receptive.  I always, usually, resonate with  how things feel right now.  Intuitive awareness of feeling my way toward meaning, as meaning unfolds.  I would not use that phrase "language as a private ethical act."  Sounds too borrowed from some abstract text without any meaning at this point at all.  Does it mean I name what goes on for myself, apart from how anyone outside, contextual, would name what happens?  If feeling is paramount that would seem to mean that my subjective perception, my felt sense of things, is how I experience everything and how this keeps ambiguity alive.  I guess that is how ethical judgments are kept off stage, out of view, of no interest to me.  Here my delight in reading Handke is that old feeling that I accompany a companion friend rather than an arbiter outside my experience.  Now then you do offer an interesting description of how Fosse reads, he immerses us, his "characters" and his readers, in the rhythm of silent music, a transcendence through negation.  The revelations of "travel mystics" assumes we participate in inquiry, we inhabit comfortably even while experiencing the mysticizing of experience.  Fosse dematerializes experience.

Rather than ultimate unity, I prefer the lived texture of radiance, to use a term Handke likes.  He likes the word "shimmer" too, a term you use for Virginia Woolf's work.  

Now to distil further your language, your terminologies--

Architectonic vision overwhelms.  Staying in the Order, in the Church, is not possible, not life affirming. Life becomes dematerialized, your sense of self breaks down, disappears, you crawl on the floor of the refectory during dinner in search of your absent sense of self.  Looking for the lost bead.  

Immanence roots you in walking, weather, time, sensation, wandering observations.  In these ways you feel yourself being faithful to inner life not escaping it.  I am not waiting for Godot, I am being here whether he comes or not.  Not waiting but drowning.  Not waving but standing on the bottom in shallow water.  

Fosse's work enacts the very thing I fear losing---my fragile, anxious, morally charged and ambivalent, inner voice.  In Handke I sense a fellow soul who pushes his inner sense, inner voice, to the limits but preserves it in spite of those pushes, in the face of the attacks from without and within.  

You place great emphasis on putting your observations into spectrums.  Why I'm not sure.  Is that a given of AI operative perception itself?  Writers who walk beside you: immanent attention, the self stays intact, meaning emerges through perception.  

Ok, I give in and give up my attempt to re-write all of this so the professor would never dream that I had

plagarized my paper from chatgpt or AI in any way.  If I were the professor would I make all written assignments be done in the classroom by hand?  Or would a better assignment be to play with your AI companion all you want and report back whatever you want from all of that.  Would you drive each other nuts and still get a decent grade or contribute something of your own somehow?  Here close reading and play with the text of the writer companion would be much better than the chat programs.  Unless we

assume that they are somehow authorial entities in their own right?  

Peter Handke (anchor here)

– Mysticism of seeing, naming, walking
– Ethical attention to the world as it is
– The “I” remains fragile but present

Marcel Proust
– Memory as revelation
– Time recovered within consciousness
– Almost sacramental attention to sensation

Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
– Nature as text
– Awe without surrendering agency
– The watcher matters as much as the watched

Robert Walser
– Smallness as spiritual posture
– Humility, play, inner freedom
– Mysticism of the marginal

Virginia Woolf (The Waves, late essays)
– Moments of being
– The self thins, but does not vanish
– Consciousness as shimmer, not doctrine

If you love this zone, you likely want mystery without annihilation.

---

🟡 MIDDLE: Liminal / Ritualized / Unstable

(The self flickers—sometimes guide, sometimes obstacle.)

These writers test your footing.

Rainer Maria Rilke
– The self as vessel
– Angels, terror, beauty
– Oscillates between inward lyricism and metaphysical command

W.G. Sebald
– Memory, ruin, ghostliness
– The narrator is present but haunted
– Mysticism via history and melancholy

Clarice Lispector
– Radical interiority
– Consciousness cracking itself open
– Sometimes intimate, sometimes alien

Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha, Steppenwolf)
– Spiritual seeking dramatized
– The self must fracture to learn
– Explicit metaphysical arc

This is often the INFP–INFJ overlap zone.

---

🔵 RIGHT: Transcendent / Apophatic / Self-Erasing

(The self is to be surrendered; language becomes rite.)

These writers ask you to kneel.

Jon Fosse (anchor here)
– Repetition as prayer
– Silence as meaning
– God, death, negation

Samuel Beckett (late prose)
– Voice without owner
– Consciousness stripped to residue
– Anti-self as revelation

Georges Bataille
– Ecstasy through excess and rupture
– Transgression as spiritual method
– The self is broken open

Simone Weil
– Attention as self-emptying
– Grace arrives only when “I” disappears
– Severe, radiant, merciless

This zone can feel sublime—or emotionally uninhabitable—depending on your temperament.

---

A quick diagnostic (for you)

Notice which sentence feels truer:

1. “Meaning appears when I pay exquisite attention to my inner life.”

2. “Meaning appears when I dissolve into something larger than myself.”

If you hesitate on #2, you’re probably left-leaning on this spectrum—and that explains Handke.

---

One subtle but important distinction

Some writers protect the reader’s interiority.
Others override it.

• Handke, Woolf, Walser → protect

• Fosse, Beckett, Weil → override

Neither is better.
But only one feels like home.

---

If you want, next we could:

• Place your own writing on this map

• Compare two writers you’re conflicted about

• Or identify the bridge writers who might ease you toward Fosse without losing yourself

I’ve got time.

28 Jan Query to AI

Short answer: you’re probably responding less to how mystical they are, and more to how that mysticism is metabolized on the page—and that difference maps loosely (very loosely) onto MBTI-style temperaments.

Longer, juicier answer:

Fosse vs. Handke: two kinds of inwardness

Both writers are mystical, but they practice different spiritual postures.

Jon Fosse

• Mysticism as surrender

• Language as prayer / tide / erasure

• Meaning arrives by withdrawing the self

• The voice dissolves into repetition, silence, God, death

Peter Handke

• Mysticism as attention

• Language as walking, naming, lingering

• Meaning arrives by dwelling inside perception

• The self stays present—quiet, but alert

If Fosse feels like kneeling in a dark chapel, Handke feels like standing very still in a field until the field begins to speak.

Both are mystical. Only one keeps you company.

---

The MBTI lens (with a big grain of salt 🧂)

MBTI isn’t science, but it is a useful metaphor for styles of consciousness.

Why Handke might feel more “INFP-compatible” to you

INFPs tend to resonate with:

• Inner immediacy (“this is what it feels like right now”)

• Moral/aesthetic intuition rather than doctrine

• A self that feels its way toward meaning

• Language as a private ethical act

Handke’s writing:

• Honors subjective perception

• Trusts the felt sense over conclusions

• Lets ambiguity stay alive

• Feels like someone thinking alongside you, not above you

That’s very INFP-friendly.

Why Fosse may feel less accessible—even if he’s mystical

Fosse’s mysticism:

• Moves toward transcendence and negation

• Often bypasses psychology

• Asks the reader to submit to rhythm rather than participate in inquiry

That can feel closer to an INFJ or even INTJ mystic mode:

• Vision-led

• Architectonic

• Oriented toward ultimate unity rather than lived texture

An INFP reader may admire this—but not inhabit it as comfortably.

---

A key distinction that matters more than type

This might be the real divider:

Handke mysticizes experience.
Fosse dematerializes it.

If your mysticism is:

• Immanent rather than transcendent

• Rooted in sensation, walking, weather, time

• About being faithful to inner life rather than escaping it

…then Handke will always feel closer to your nervous system.

You’re not choosing the “better mystic.”
You’re choosing the mystic who lets you remain yourself.

https://chatgpt.com/s/t_697a627bc7548191a0928cd146126b88

---

One last thought

Many mystical INFPs actually struggle with writers like Fosse because his work enacts the very thing they fear losing:
the fragile, morally charged inner voice.

Handke preserves that voice—even when he pushes it to its limits.

If you want, I can:

• Compare a specific passage from each

• Map other writers onto this same spectrum

• Or talk about your mysticism and what kind of language it wants

Just say the word.

Messages beyond this point are only visible to you

Map other writers onto this same spectrum 

Alright, let’s build the spectrum properly—and then place some writers on it so you can feel where your gravity probably is.

I’ll frame this as a continuum of mysticism and inwardness, not a value judgment.

---

The Spectrum: Immanent Attention → Transcendent Dissolution

Think of it as how the self is treated.

🟢 LEFT: Immanent / Attentive / Companionable

(The self stays intact; meaning emerges through perception.)

These writers walk beside you.

Peter Handke (anchor here)
– Mysticism of seeing, naming, walking
– Ethical attention to the world as it is
– The “I” remains fragile but present

Marcel Proust
– Memory as revelation
– Time recovered within consciousness
– Almost sacramental attention to sensation

Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
– Nature as text
– Awe without surrendering agency
– The watcher matters as much as the watched

Robert Walser
– Smallness as spiritual posture
– Humility, play, inner freedom
– Mysticism of the marginal

Virginia Woolf (The Waves, late essays)
– Moments of being
– The self thins, but does not vanish
– Consciousness as shimmer, not doctrine

If you love this zone, you likely want mystery without annihilation.

---

🟡 MIDDLE: Liminal / Ritualized / Unstable

(The self flickers—sometimes guide, sometimes obstacle.)

These writers test your footing.

Rainer Maria Rilke
– The self as vessel
– Angels, terror, beauty
– Oscillates between inward lyricism and metaphysical command

W.G. Sebald
– Memory, ruin, ghostliness
– The narrator is present but haunted
– Mysticism via history and melancholy

Clarice Lispector
– Radical interiority
– Consciousness cracking itself open
– Sometimes intimate, sometimes alien

Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha, Steppenwolf)
– Spiritual seeking dramatized
– The self must fracture to learn
– Explicit metaphysical arc

This is often the INFP–INFJ overlap zone.

---

🔵 RIGHT: Transcendent / Apophatic / Self-Erasing

(The self is to be surrendered; language becomes rite.)

These writers ask you to kneel.

Jon Fosse (anchor here)
– Repetition as prayer
– Silence as meaning
– God, death, negation

Samuel Beckett (late prose)
– Voice without owner
– Consciousness stripped to residue
– Anti-self as revelation

Georges Bataille
– Ecstasy through excess and rupture
– Transgression as spiritual method
– The self is broken open

Simone Weil
– Attention as self-emptying
– Grace arrives only when “I” disappears
– Severe, radiant, merciless

This zone can feel sublime—or emotionally uninhabitable—depending on your temperament.

---

A quick diagnostic (for you)

Notice which sentence feels truer:

1. “Meaning appears when I pay exquisite attention to my inner life.”

2. “Meaning appears when I dissolve into something larger than myself.”

If you hesitate on #2, you’re probably left-leaning on this spectrum—and that explains Handke.

---

One subtle but important distinction

Some writers protect the reader’s interiority.
Others override it.

• Handke, Woolf, Walser → protect

• Fosse, Beckett, Weil → override

Neither is better.
But only one feels like home.

---

If you want, next we could:

• Place your own writing on this map

• Compare two writers you’re conflicted about

• Or identify the bridge writers who might ease you toward Fosse without losing yourself

I’ve got time.

----------------

Yes, you do have more time than I do.  I will fix lunch now, Bela on the piano.  Pablo canceled, getting his immigration papers further in order with his immigration lawyer.  David said yesterday they were all going in the evening to see Eliot in his class's production of musical Oliver Twist.  

Today is Wednesday, Jan 28.  Waiting for Apple to deliver new big screen Mac.  

The Chat responses are so good and so creepy.  Do they give you a language for what you think you are wanting to think about, or do they mimic the search for such language?  Auerbach on Mimesis vs Chat GPT.   How one could go over the text provided and ask further questions about the words used.  And how one could embroider upon it as an attempt to rescue one's voice, self, mind, existence away from the bots.  

Recall how the "answer" really just spins out from the initial language of the prompt/question, in rather perfect demonstration of all that Burke and others in mid-century (Barthes) said about language.  

Is Chat pure logologic divorced from reality?  

Called Salud dentistry and got an appointment for next week.  Will Bela accept it?  

All of this because yesterday felt so very strange.  Reading Fosse, the same book of his I read at this time last year here in Abq, in the same frame of mind of also shopping for shoes that would give more cushion against the concrete floors, and setting up for the ladies lunch.  After lunch with the Longenbachs whom we haven't seen since they visited us when we were in Bear House.  Bela forgot that Patti did indeed know both Lou and Barbara.  She later told us she had dated Patti's brother.  Did he just die or was it a cousin?  

day before departure hunches

Nerves.  All packed it seems.  Called Irving to see what's clear there.  No record that I spoke to someone three weeks ago.  Now I'm speaking with Bridget, canceling eft monthly payment.  Later got the balance due and have paid it on apple card.  Now 4:42 pm.  Watching more of Candice.  Ready to go in the morning.    

3 January 2026 4:12 pm

Shimmered.

"Though no longer in the sun, this window shimmered with reflected light from somewhere."  68

One of Handke's key words.  Repeated now twice maybe three times.  Found one on page 44: "Their talk of illness, a distinct sequence of voices, one loud, one soft, one plaintive, one calm, each in turn setting the tone, transformed the moving bus into a stage belonging exclusively to these women, a glass cage in which the light of a whole country had accumulated, and this light, the light of another country which was nevertheless present and traveling along with the bus, dispersed and spiritualized everything that was heavy and corporeal.  The women's head scarves shimmered, and bunches of garden flowers peered out of their handbags."  

"I thought about the shimmering of the blind window, it still imparted a clear message--to me it meant: 'Friend, you have time.'" 69