Cumberland pencils

The pencil lies diagonally across the book, in the small circle of light.  Its upper surface is imprinted, in block letters CUMBERLAND.  The writing beneath the pencil suggests several trains waiting on parallel tracks, the words being cars and the signs locomotives.  A whistle, as though to signal the trains' departure, is actually blown in the distance, prolonged by a whistle-blowing that fills the whole building. 

Peter Handke, Absence, page 9.  1990  1987 Die Abwesenheit   Also a movie 1992 The Absence 

my ideal had always been

 I couldn't be satisfied with a dissertation that would merely look for relationships in my field of inquiry--

my ideal had always been the gentle emphasis and appeasing flow of a narrative.    Handke Slow 189

For often, in reading and writing, , I had seen the truth of storytelling as a clarity in which one sentence calmly engenders another and in which the truth---the insight that came before the story---is perceptible only as a gentle something in the transitions between sentences.  Moreover, I knew that reason forgets, the imagination never.  190  

Then, in Grillparzer's The Poor Minstrel, I read "I trembled with a longing for unity."  A desire for the One in All was rekindled in me.  For I knew that unity is possible.  Every singled moment of my life hangs together with every other---without intermediate links.  I need only reconstitute that with the help of my imagination.  190  

some of my most favorite lines from Handke    

news late

 We had just seated ourselves Sunday in Los Cuates, the mariachi was singing.  My phone showed there were messages on Messenger from David and Scott Merrill.  Scott's message had been posted on Jan 1 (same day Joe died).  Phil died Dec 28.  I called Scott later that day.  He knew Phil had not been doing well for a while, was with him the night before and he was having trouble breathing, had been popping various old medicines over a few days.  A 911 call went out early Sunday morning, not clear how Scott learned about that later one, maybe from Phil's brother.  Later Ross and Scott made three visits to clear out the apartment and save some of Phil's papers and some momentos from themselves.  Ross Smart.  They talk about having a memorial get together later, maybe in May in Brattleboro.  

Quite a shock.  Felt sad all day, still.  Kim and Olen arrived that afternoon, wonderful visit with them.  They are at the Indian Cultural Center this morning.  Lou and B coming for lunch.  K and O will head back to Salida after they stop to say hello goodbye here.  Barry with them.  

Dennis excited about his move.  Has dates for the mover and for Skylar his neice to drive him to Philly.  

Finishing Handke's Child Story in Slow Homecoming.  Just ordered play he published year after that. 

Still astonished by the book, how he reconfigured the traditional material of the three "journeys" over landscape, geology and art, image and brushstroke, word choices, steps.  

Nina Kalkus the youngest, 8 years younger than older brother, who has two children, is a clinical psychologist in private schools, did univ at St Andrews. Oldest brother is ? Evan? have not gotten their names straight.  He works as an emt, may try to do med school but can't get it together.  They worry about him and about Nina.  

Ladies lunched.  Lou took a photo of us with K & O.  They headed off to home, high winds now gusting, hope they don't encounter any trouble with them.  

Finished H's Child Story and the whole of Slow Homecoming.  Have I enjoyed a book so much?  Maybe I enjoyed Repetition a bit more?  Child Story ends with Greek quote from Menander about suffering in childhood, punishment.  Greek view.  Tragic forms of experience.  Handke experiments in that essay with the distancing effect of third person and impersonal semi-abstract tone and attitude.  Trying to place his six years raising his daughter alone into the larger geology, landscape, of timeless human experience.  She attended a Jewish school for a year or so.  He so carefully honors that and globalizes that or anthropologizes that as a school and community for "the people."  

Did I read Across just before Christmas?  Amazon says I bought the book then and I think I did read it but I will ask chatgpt to give me a detailed summary to refresh memory.  

Phil Hart

 Scott Merrill wrote this obituary for Phil   on legacy.com 

Philip (Phil) B. Hart, 80, who devoted much of his life to teaching and advocating for others, died at his home in Newport, New Hampshire, on December 28, 2025.

Born in Brooklyn, NY, and raised in Ansonia, Connecticut, Phil was the son of William B. Hart and Christine (Ballantyne) Hart. He is survived by his brothers William B. Hart Jr. and James F. Hart; his nephew James Hart; nieces Halliday and Hawthorne; and many friends.

As a boy, Phil and his brothers worked at Hart's "five and dime" store in Seymour, Connecticut, owned by their father, who had served in the FBI and later as director of Mowglis School of the Open in Hebron, NH, from the 1960s through the 1980s. Phil's appreciation for the outdoors was shaped at Mowglis, where he spent summers with his brothers Jim and Bill before becoming a counselor himself and a long-time assistant director with his father.

Phil began his career as a professor and congregational minister in the 1970s. After earning a Master of Divinity from Hartford Seminary, he was ordained in the United Church of Christ (UCC) and founded the United Campus Ministry at what was then Plymouth State College in Plymouth, NH.

In addition to his work as campus minister—which included counseling students, providing grief support during crises, campus speaking events, and a Thanksgiving food drive that continues today—Phil served as advisor to the student newspaper, The Clock.

Phil taught in the philosophy department at "PSC" for nearly four decades, offering courses that crossed traditional disciplinary boundaries. His subject matter and intimate teaching style occasionally drew disapproval from department chairs, but his courses were among the college's most popular. Titles included Sex and Death, Personal Mythology, Intro to God, Women in Religion, Religion in America, and Sexual Ethics.

As a professor, Phil showed genuine concern for the individual, encouraging others to think for themselves, always with a dry sense of humor. Whether in the basement of Mary Lyons or later in Hyde Hall, his office was open to those seeking advice or reassurance.

Phil devoured books, played piano, and knew the words to countless hymns, which he sometimes sang spontaneously. He was also a writer; his poetry and short stories were playful, transgressive, and marked by intimacy, compassion, and humor.

He loved meandering road trips across the United States and Mexico, as well as sitting quietly on his porch with a White Russian or iced tea on summer nights.

Those who knew and were loved by Phil knew they were listened to and cared for. He took deep interest in others' experiences and ideas and was a source of comfort and understanding in difficult times. He will be missed by many.

landscape inside me

 Has anyone ever written about landscape as a defining drama upon one's inner life as Handke does?  

"the dark cypresses of the summer of 1971 in Yugoslavia"  149  Taking Cezanne's relationship with Mont St Victoire as another doppelgänger effect upon him.  Earlier in the first section, the stranger on the train encounter is perfect.  Not a train but a bus.  They meet for lunch after they arrive in NYC.  They need each other, do not expect to get to know each other, simply experience the encounter as a necessary moment each has on their journey, their private inner journey.  

transformation and always intrinsic guilt 149  desire for reconciliation which comes from desiring another's desire  149  as the philosopher put it  a perfectly reasonable desire  which philosopher?  

well as it happens I do now have as a companion this book by Christoph Parry "Peter Handke's Landscapes of Discourse" and just glancing through he answers this and all related questions with the great detail and depth of superior academic scholarship.  Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 shows up! Whole chapter on Repetition (which I forget I did read out of order!) and much much more.  Way much more than I'd realized---did the German Romantics not indeed invent landscape and literary inner travel?  

the metaphorical relationship of landscape and writing  Parry  131 

feels so much like a culmination of all my years of "teaching" travel literature---something I did out of a desire to"for reconciliation which comes from desiring another's desire" "as the philosopher puts it" but which I really had no way of articulating beyond reading one book after another, one writer after another---Chatwin, Leigh Fermor   etc  

Parry was born in '51 in Cambridge, traveled in Singapore and Nigeria, studied in Edinburgh and Marburg, but Chatwin is not in the Index.  Wrote his dissertation on Celan and Mandelstam (neither of whom have I read! ) and settled into teaching in Finland.  

Haunted now, as Handke climbs Mt St-Victoire, that I did read this book a long time ago, tried to read it as one for my travel lit course, and didn't know what to make of it, had no idea what Handke was doing in it.

Lunch with Steph and Louise at Thai Boran went well.  We all wondered quietly how we had missed getting together last year.  They went on to Sandia Casion resort for an overnight spa treat.  

shimmering

 I've been keeping my eye on how often Handke likes to use the word shimmering.  One could indeed write a whole book on it, on him, under the aegis of this term. I say this with confidence now, more confidence than when I was a few earlier books back, because of the extraordinary passage on pages 94-95 where looking at the beauty of the woman's face he enacts a whole drama of receiving "the happendings in someone else's face" and this "overpoweringly gentle manipulation had incorporated his limited personal life into the face of mankind, in whose openness it would go on forever."  94

how well that all could be read, re-read, mis-read, deconstructed, or reconstructed etc etc.  His search for the forms---why does he not use "archetype"?  He has a conversation with these friends as strangers that takes place in an archetypal space or realm of juxtaposition, contradiction---he wants to speak strongly aloud, he wants to be nothing.  Then he thanks them for a bite of strudel and the evening sitting with them under their lampshade.  

He flies to Denver, rides in a bus out into the snow.  Radiant daydreams, the journey within himself.  

{the late morning sinus? headache--an advil, dark chocolate and touch more of coffee.  Waiting for Pablo and piano midday.  If.  Deep wiki gossip search into the story behind last night's gold medal couples figure skating story, French won, American couple dashed.  Quite a long complex tale therein.  The precious inner world of ultra competitions.  I could easily imagine wandering as Sorger is doing, in fact I did do some of that.  That trip to Haight Ashbery, driving from Chicago to Pueblo, Colorado with Doris/Isa.  Driving with Mark years later all the way out to Bemidji, MN and flying back to NH.  Another drive when I stayed in Michigan with Dick and Sherri, Lansing.  Handke's way of describing it all as wholly inward travel "longing for an invented world that would permeate the real world and incorporate it in one vast invention."  105  Have never read any writer who does this.  Brilliant.  Perfect.  Is he writing solely for other INFPs!!!??? silly ideas

why should I be reading a few pages and then writing some comments about it?  

"No ecstasy! (Never again). To conjure up ecstasy, he looked for a landmark.  In the snow-covered, sunlit gully he distinguished a shimmering furrow--the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.  Involuntarily he cried out, and a faint echo came back at him from a bush.  He was overcome with melancholy and lust." 107  

He had found out his old ski instructor friend had just died, visited the funeral home where the body lay.  

"Fervid expectation . . . everything is (perfectly) possible, and just as an earthquake gave rise to a human dance, meaningless being alive engendered a meaningless game." 

Feb 10

Liberty Mutual bot makes this memorable because email overnight arrives this morning and makes it sound like if I don't pay (already on auto-pay but could they note that ?) they will cancel  my whole life.  

By the end of the day the auto-pay should have posted.  Fingers crossed.  

Bela seems mostly over her bout with the cold.  We talked with Roy yesterday, he called on his new number.  Jonah there but do not know his number.  They seem fine.  He sounds like himself but barely recalls just who he is talking with, agrees to vague idea of getting together.  

Is that how Burgo will sound if I call him?  Fingers crossed.

Good news---Dennis got the go ahead and expects to move Feb 20.  Fingers crossed.

Other good news the media play bad bunny's superbowl show is getting as the best resistence to the regime we've seen yet at that level of money and power.  Fingers crossed.  

After Handke:  I grew up on the hills of shale along the banks of the Potomac River in MD.  I've lived most of my life on the granite ledges along the Pemigewasset River in NH.  I've retired to the volcanic lava beds and desert escarpment overlooking the Rio Grande in NM. 

pp 72-73  in slow homecoming  "in any countryside whatever characteristic forms reveal themselves . . .inconspicuous elements no scientific insight can lay bare    on the next page  the feeling of being at home

Pablo replies, can we do it Thursday, now 11:29  if/when we go to the store should I buy some sort of sinus pressure relief concoction or leave it to chance, aspirin here or there ?  

Valentin Sorger after a concert in Berkeley, a large man, want to know who that might have been (Burl Ives? Johnny Cash? but point is not to know but to read Handke's words about it, about how the experience worked for Sorger at that moment.  

here it is --- starts at the bottom of page 45  "The man who rose from the ground was not ecstatic, only appeased.  He no longer expected illuminations, only measure and duration."   This is right after his "first intimation of the river landscape.  "My face is an unfinished sketch---when will it be complete?"  

"(And then there was even a kind of hope---disguised as a feeling that he knew something.)" 46 

Knowing (T mode?) disguised as a feeling (F mode).  

The art works in the museum, the two big exhibits, disappointed after they wowed.  Such scale, determination, money, polish, savy market/audience-wise, right in the bullseyes of the zeitgeist targets, identity vengeance.  

The singer   "He didn't sing with feeling but searched frantically for a feeling which was as puzzling to him as to anyone else."  82

quiet Sunday

We skipped Chatter, slept in.  Trying to get over my cough/cold once and for all.  Trying to make sure Bela has not really caught it.  She walked lots yesterday, 4k? I walked lots too, around Old Town.  Still had coughing bout around 2 am.  Feels good though to chill today.  Strange visit to the dentist at Salud on Atrisco.  Indian dentist and assistant.  Showed me it would cost $990.00 for the "deep clean" that Va's teeth clearly needed. After asking me politely if she were demented.  Said no and we left.  

So loving Handke's Slow Homecoming.  Exciting and thrilling.  Not so much Fosse.  I dutifully read to the end, and carefully,  The Other Name.  The death of the boy was the unexpected point of danger, the car ride with the bald old man too predictable and somehow unconvincing, or maybe unmoving.  Maybe the Latin prayers obstruct my view.  The darkness shining and shining darkness are fine.  Why could he not have been happy with that, stayed with that, left it at that.  Modian and Handke are born in the "correct" years!  Fosse I would group with "boomers" but then I would have to allow that Lentz falls into that chronological nonsense too.  

Neighbor over the back wall removed the big blue and black plastic tarps from his patio yesterday.  Sure sign of Spring?  Feels nice and warm these days.  Wrote various messages to Jonah Stephenson, hoping to hear from him about Roy.  Paper card in mail, email and facebook message.  Marilyn's cardiac inversion on Friday went well.  Bela now enjoying book about Julia Child.  

Back to Handke for me.  Do I need to skim some 2-3 star comments in goodreads about Fosse?  Had forgotten that Knausgaard was Fosse's student in writing course(s).  Fosse's plays widely produced where silence does what stream repetition does in the narratives.  

Ok, I read this one, and I read the Melancholy I.  I can let him go.  No need to read more even though in anticipatory enthusiasm, or anxiety hyped proto-enthusiasm, I bought copies of other titles.  

Now sipping the newest ceremonial cacao to arrive in the house, this from Embue, Moses Draper who started the company in Brattleboro before moving to Costa Rica.  Must be a lucrative cacao scam just like the others!!  One email said he was sending me the new version of the golden spoon, but it wasn't in this first package.  Do like the cacao in mixable form rather than the chunks provided by the other company.  But the golden frother is not gold and has a three step power button that easily makes a big mess.  The Zylo frother is just fine.  Zulo, Pacho, ? all no doubt made in same shop in China.  

Back to Handke.  And in celebration I broke my chronological discipline by starting in on the collection of essays published much later in career than Slow Homecoming.  Quiet Places.  Opening essay about the crucial importance of time in the toilet to get away from people and listen to silence.  At once I think of the toilet in the basement of the Grand Avenue store.  First the low ceiling of the basement, almost everyone had to duck to avoid hitting one's head on the pipes and floor joists above.  The toilet you had to step up into, two steps? it was up on the edge of the outer wall of the basement, also low ceiling, so you had to find a way to step up and stoop down, double over, and push your rear back onto the ring seat without falling over.  Seated you could then squat comfortably and think in perfect embodiment of Rodin's muscled hero.  

Handke lived in Berkeley 1978-79.  There is no Northern Lights boulevard there, I wonder if he tweaked City Lights bookstore into that street name.  

A Whole Day almost

 on Apple News, scanning, scrolling, dumbing out while Victoria cleaned the house and I tried to think of how Handke would have said something interesting about that, if not brilliant.  My cold is receding, good night's sleep last night with bed is almost vertical back up position.  Advil cold and sinus at 9 am, pseudephrine to the rescue thanks to 4 am delivery from amazon.  

The cold hit me a week ago tomorrow when I parked at the flixbrew lot and now I realize it must have been from lunching at the Flying Star earlier that day.  Big crowd of people, lots of germs, food and fingers, all the contextual carriers and instigators of immune system overload.  We've almost spent the whole week in the house.  Went out to Wal mart one day.  My energy has been really low all week.  Best today so far.  Day off tomorrow, maybe the art museum to see the big photos that Kith mentioned last sunday.  She was very pleased with her neckace of fetishes.  Wish we remembered where we bought those.  

Today Bela commissioned a quinciañera cake from Victoria.  She imagines we will have some sort of party to sing the song and send the video to Emma.  Maybe we will get a mariachi group on a video if we go to Quartes on Sunday when they play there. 

Dissertation idea for someone:  study the journals of two or three writers.  Pessoa and Handke?  empty idea

"Looking out the window, an experience of beauty, yet unable (and unwilling) to say what is so wbeautiful out there and why:  beauty as a removal of limits, an experience of unexpected openness"  207 

"The only feeling that really proves one is alive: the feeling of unio mystica   212 

"the deadly mechanics of opinions   boy, perfect description of apple news, all news  

now at the last section, 1977  how does he decide to end this journal?  did he? or just carved out one volume for publication ,    

"my daily panic-fantasies 217  the furnace is still running, the roof does not (yet) leak 

1977 minus 1942  he is only, only! 35 years old    wow  

"Talk" has been so defamed . . . hardly anyone takes it seriously any more

he mentions as a great writer someone I've never heard of ---Doderer  

After page 243, two completely blank pages, then another at back with the bar scan code and Made in the USA Coppell, TX 28 December 2025    Is Coppell near Austin?  nope, in Dallas 

Ok---last Saturday at Star I ate that Spanish omelette and the huge chocolate cake.  Later in the week lots of animal foods, chicken, salmon, eggs, cheeses (pizza)---so this terrible week of severe cold has been an inflammation caused by sudden, extreme animal products and unrelenting cacao and dark chocolate over the last two to four months?  doctor g has spoken---now to put the question to chat or grok et al

not clear why Handke ends the published journal  

glad for it to end as good as it is, still it makes me try too hard to imitate it 

Yes, AI informs about the existential crisis within it and mentions a later journal, the story of the pencil--

ok, will not paste in here the ai details about his life during the journal, mild heart attack, sweet and sour love affair after collapse of marriage, daughter with him, anxiety, fear of death, etc  since we can find that in google search easily enough---forever  ---- 

Now back onward into the novel that seems so astonishing  -- Slow Homecoming, first volume out in 1979, Weight published in 1977   Nothing in 1978, in German,  That year Left-Handed Woman came out in English, had come out in German in 1976.  

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