shamelessly typing after sharing handwriting research piece (notes on Kaminsi"s terminology)

but I took handwritten notes on Kaminski's Insta posts  so here I transcribe them

understanding vs enmeshment (in the hive)

language, clarity and permission (to be Otrovert)

vs competition and performance

not communal yet connected 

authenticity --- knowing when to lie to yourself and knowing that you are lying to yourself

infected by memes that are designed to keep us in the group

deep honoring of the self 

connect differently (not as agroup expects enmeshment, merging)

clear not cold

connect not merge

intro and extroversion both turn toward group, otro turns toward clarity, self apart from group

awake vs conformity within group

connection as a different way to belong vs belonging as group assumes belonging

otroverts can be popular and still feel do not belong    feel  within self 

social vs pure

 here's a good reminder that Handke, thank heavens, is not concerned with the artist and society --

"No theme unites these texts more than an idea Mann returned to again and again: What is the relationship between the artist and society?" Morten Høi Jensen on Thomas Mann’s writing for The Yale Review.

dividual vs. The Public: A fundamental antagonism between society and the individual runs throughout his writing. Handke often portrays the artist or individual as an outsider or observer—exploring the "periphery" of the human experience—who must navigate a world driven by mass media and rigid, cliché-driven societal norms.

The Pursuit of Pure Art: As his work evolved, Handke shifted away from direct social critique toward a more phenomenological, aesthetic utopia. Inspired by visual artists like Paul Cézanne, his later writing often retreats from the political and social realms into quiet, nature-focused exploration, seeking to capture an "extra-social innocence" and an uncorrupted reality.

peak of the Gredos

the bus driver faints and the woman adventurer takes over driving the bus down the southern slope of the mountain

such slow loving detail, Handke must have trekked this more than once himself 

"I have made my way through all these parts of the world where I was consistently filled with ecstatic feelings---no, not with illusory ecstasy but rather with a state of love, yes, of love, and of which I have only fond memories afterward. "  224 

Puerto del Pico  caught once in blinding wet snow   Escorial to the east, Plaza of Salamanca to the west

she laughs and says to her listener and her author, "I am the one you commissioned."  "The idiot at the wheel, laughed and did not stop laughing . . . " 229

Pablo was here for a piano session.  He lives with his blind teen aged son and his twenty-five year old daughter.  He flies to Mexico tomorrow for a week to see his 92 year old mother, Mercedes.  His first university classes were in a small arts school attached to the museum of anthropology and that neighborhood was his initial university campus.  Later he got injected in the butt with Marxism by the Jesuits at the large university.  Maybe not the Jesuits, they are in the story somehow but exactly where we are not sure.  He will be back on the 28th.  

 

Quest Golf Course today

 went to Optum to draw the blood but they could not send results outside of optum so we drove in the afternoon to Quest on Golf Course aka the other street name.  Got the blood drawn.  Later looked up TriCore and they have a place right here on Atrisco.  So . . . next visit we'll see if using TriCore will work for both or all labs, will they hold hands with Optum and vice versa?  

Not much work on Handke today, but did squiggle to the end of Chapter 15 and now ready to start 16

praised fellow on X for saying he is reading Handke, Modiano and Patrick White for the rest of the year. Should I try White once more.  I did like Chariot but somehow not enough to say I must read every word.  Big essay by Merve _ on Magic Mountain in new ten-year old translation.  Again, do I really want to give that another try?  Or glance at The Tunnel after all?  Bela in last tv episode of The House of the Spirits.  Glimpses I've had make me not at all interested; as she says Latin American history not much fun.  

She's worried not to be planning her birthday party for herself.  Lou's plans are set for Tuesday evening dinner party.  Bela wants to host Beckie and her husband at Cuates so we can hear mariachi with them.  

Her eye is clearing up well.  What has caused it?  Will the doctor at Eye Associates really be able to tell from the blood tests?  

19 ! days until we fly East!  how will it feel to go back much earlier this year?  

Pink Eye onward

Tues 12  Got an appointment for early this afternoon to have second look.  Telephone number for the place in Rio Rancho is for a Chinese name, Charles Chiang.  Put my finger on it at last, same name as the cowboy boots doctor we saw for cataract consult few years back.  "If it were my mother, this is what I would advise."  He must own a number of practices around town, website for this one has about eight people, none of them him.  

Charged $860. by Defined Fitness.  Twice $430.  Looking into that.  Canceling Pablo today, Jen tomorrow.  

NM for winter sunshine.  NH for health care.  Dennis sent a blurb in response to my forwarding USA Today piece, Philly #1 for art murals, Abq #3.  "There are murals everywhere. There's a school a few blocks away that I think gears itself for Muslims (Based on the activities listed on its events sign) that has wonderful mandalas and some twisting thing that has arms with golden lady bugs (my interpretation) crawling on it. The performing arts school has the front covered in scale like images in white shaded with purples, subtle blues and mauves. Just stunning. Very Japanese. There are some pretty bad ones too but most of them are fun."

Will we cross the Sierra de Gredos?  Will Godot show?  

Maria did and we talked about where to plant the hollyhocks, the Spanish broom, a few daffodils and the desert prickly pear that Bela wants.  Her boy is 11, daughter  9.  

Eye doctor seems to think not pink eye but some other sort of inflammation.  Prescribed steroid drops and they are working rapidly.  Now 7:40 pm 

yes strange continues

 Handke says, have I read Berhard, well, yes, of course I have and here's my response to him and tons of others, I'm calling it Crossing the Sierra de Gredos!!  Starting into Chapter 14.  In 13  the Lone Star Cafe glass tent and Nuevo Bazar and much else.  

In 14 we open in a hostel with a courtyard surrounded by sleeping chambers.  The mother protects her daughter.  The adolescent girl vanishes one day any way.  Mother undertakes a long search, finds her on an island in the south Atlantic.  Much happiness but later sychronicity reverses and the child longs for rescue by the mother and later disappears again.  

Chatter this past Sunday had Robert Schumann's 1853 piece Fairy Tales  Märchenerzählungen and

a contemporary re-working (somehow?) of this notion by Jörg Widmann (b. 1973) Es war einmal  2015

Once Upon a Time.    Ahh, I thought through the whole concert Handke!! and Fairy Tales and Folk Tales.  Even the Spoken Word by Ken Arkind chimed into all of it---a great piece about his father.  Arkind back after teaching schools in New Zealand for ten or fifteen years.  

so  storytelling  on and on  no wonder Lentz allowed Handke to inspire him to write his Schattenfroh 

in the one film in which she had starred the character portrayed under heavy white linen sheets had "imperceptibly dissolved into the white of the bed linens."  Notice how when I underline one or two lines and type them up here I am ruining the whole page, the chapter, the book but assuming I can outline it, condense it, select "key" elements that unlock it, provide the pre-analysis that will support a later comprehensive analysis and even a critique.  In other words I withdraw from the experience of reading, detach from it, and try to create for myself alone, a space from which I can look back onto it, into it, from this removed position as observer of the reader, of the reading.  Reading is too absorptive, I fear being subsumed into the reading, sucked into reading, and lost forever in reading the book.  The book will claim me and I will never be able to notice every detail with sufficient attention and certainly never be able to remember enough of it to really experience it to the full, once and forever.  No matter what I can do, a second or third reading will always be possible, even more desirable than the first reading, no matter how slowly I go, no matter how many notes and underlinings I make and take.  

Pres Now visit today

 

• James Karz, DO, is an emergency medicine specialist based in Albuquerque, NM. He completed his residency in emergency medicine at Rutgers Health/Robert Wood Johnson Medical School from 2017 to 2020, following his graduation from the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine in 2017. His academic background includes a B.S. in Biochemistry from Loyola Marymount University and a B.S. in Communication Arts from St. John's University. Dr. Karz has been working as an emergency department physician at Presbyterian Hospital since 2020. He has authored several publications, including research on health literacy tools for older patients in emergency settings and studies on heart failure triggers, Osborn Waves, and methods for quantifying ambient volatile organic compounds.
  
  
  we went to Pres Now this morning.  Well, first we tried Lovelace Urgent on Unser but they had no personnel on site.  Got to Pres about 11:15.  Waited until about 11:50.  Well, before that they took Bela in for a quick sight test, then about 11:50 they put her onto a bed.  Doctor Karz came in about twenty minutes later and did various test on her eye including pressure, for glaucoma.  
  
  
  Diagnosis: pink eye infection.  Antibiotic drops and tablets, should clear up in two days.  

takes a lifetime to know some things

Larry sent this about Merton and Lax.  Does it mean that Merton took thirty or forty years to realize who he really was?  Was he also an otrovert like Lax?  Or was his mimicry of Lax, if Larry is right, something else within his psyche?  

Great advice. I’ll forward your email to Josh. I wanted him to hear the way you addressed Lax in your book as an abstract painter and reader of Lax.  I was taken by a video interview with Lax on YouTube by how much Lax sounded like Merton. Same cadence, same pauses, same humor, same laugh as the Merton taped lectures and talks with the scholastics. I think Merton got this America New York voice directly from LAX because I myself remember talking  like my own mentors the first years I taught—hearing their voices in my own as I played back their eloquence in my own head in unconscious mimetic adoration.  LAX was a hero to Merton, I suppose, and became more of one as time went on. In fact, his search for a second hermitage out West mimics LAX's prior move years before.  Any thoughts?

Larry 

I know little about Merton.  Same birth years but his was the less stable childhood than Lax's, so he needed the church and the monastery much more than Lax needed the circus family.  Lax found his hermit nature much earlier, realized it more clearly from deep within his childhood, one supposes.  Would Merton have allowed himself to see his desire for a hermitage as a mimicry or as a finding of his true nature after long years of searching?  The whole thing of the voice is most interesting, think you are right about the new yorkishness of it.  From Buffalo to NYC.  Forget the exact Lax birthplace, near Buffalo.  

Once I've adopted Kaminski's reading of my life (superimposed) it is difficult to think away from it.  Joe clearly was an otrovert writer, just like Handke.  Maybe the great majority of writers are.  Writers, artists, with musicians a different story though.  Performing another dynamic but surely there are otrovert musicians too.  Joe and I were "friends" at a distance---the colleague structure gave us that link, across which we recognized each other and respected our differences.  Phil I guess was an introvert, much less need for a pleasant social face, much greater need to stay within the key communities of church and college.  

back to our trekking banker --- she dreads anyone knowing of her plan to cross the Sierra de Gredos

"as if my secret came to life, and that would mean humiliation, whereas unrevealed it remains a source of riches."  113  

inevitable that I go to the Pueblo Center this morning, Saturday . . . . tried to forego the notion yesterday but nothing doing ---  gorgeous day out now.  10:25

resistance and acquiescence

our heroine will be in constant argument with the famous author she wants to write her story and that will make the book long and dense or in great danger of being tedious or at least as formidable as an everest trek, or a passage across the sierra de gredos.  Is Handke sort of saying ok Derrida et al you want the logos deconstructed, the narrative no longer to follow the ancient and newly endorsed forms, let's go, let's do that, follow me.  First we will walk backwards to the airport to see if we can even get the journey started.   

Porous   And at the same time they were porous . . . in the direction of both day and night  between awake and the clarity of a dream 

didn't rhythm have to be the main seasoning for a chef?  98 

was something he could do only completely alone and unobserved. 99  says the chef   and of course, we think, the writer,  

now into chapter 9   What was he thinking as he wrote this book?  Write a book crazier than any other book that has ever been published?  Have the thinnest possible narrative thread or "thread"? and with that then invent as many topics to string along it as you can and word them as wildly as you can, as dream-like, as anti-novel as possible, as richly weird as you want (but no cheap horrors or sex tricks or lazy stealings).  

111 she strikes him in the throat      bit like the child on the plane hitting the woman in the throat 

glowing, shimmering, shining   a sphere, a dome   discovery as a way of  keeping possibilities open  112

slow trekking

 page 54 in Sierra could have been cited in full in Kaminski

without any reference to society or even to a community

without any sense of belonging

most truthful feelings  . . . people like her did not need . . .  a sense of community, let alone a sense of society  

always alone in the rain in the woodshed at her grandparents' house

and yes the power of Kaminski's book still with me and has convinced me that the otroic underlies all else, encompasses or situates the whole interior landscape before anything such as the glyphic comes into play

Frank Bowling's paintings!  yes.  much better than Rothko's, much more life and feeling.  He is apparently 90 now.  Sir.  British  Guyana.

Strange that after finishing Kaminski's laser sharp analysis-presentation I get emails from Larry I telling me about his experiences over the past three years with group dream analysis.  Three years with eight people---started by a doctor

"My most interesting “hobby” post-retirement has been my participation in a “dream group” run by a local retired emergency room physician.  We’ve been together 3 years with the same 8 members and have evolved in unplanned and unexpected ways.

"“The first rule of Fight Club: Don’t talk about Fight Club."

"First Rule of Dream Group: Don’t Talk about Dream Group.”

OK.  I can’t talk about specific people or specific dreams, but I can explain the dynamics that govern our weekly meetings. It is based upon the approach to dreams developed by Montague Ullman, physician and practicing psychiatrist. Unfortunately, Ullman’s books are plodding and boring and his best advocate and explicator is his protégé—a fellow named William R. Stimson-- who describes Ullman as having done for the study of Dreams what Jane Goodall did to the study of chimpanzees and Dian Fossey did to the study of gorillas.  He replaced deductive theorizing with experiential inductive field work—"learning from and communicating with the infinitely vaster intelligence that underlays our own mind.”

Stimson,

“He (Ullman) deftly lifted dreams completely out of science, no matter how correct that science might be, and he lifted them entirely out of psychotherapy, no matter how legitimate that psychotherapy might be, and he even lifted them right out of mythology or religion, no matter how true that mythology or religion might be.  And he returned dreams to the domain where they legitimately belong and can do the greatest good.  He gave dreams back to the dreamers who dreamed them.”

Only the dreamer knows what the dream means because every dream has its own scientific theory, psychological discovery, and mythological or religious illumination embedded within it---- borne in and through the experiences and body of the dreamer. But the dream ego cannot unpack these things on their own without the aid of a group of fellow  “students” because it’s hard to see one’s unconscious mind through the experiential images that “dress it up.”  It’s like trying to imagine how you’d look to yourself if the mirror didn’t reverse the features of your face. Or see through your waking thoughts with the clarity of a child who blurts out the unabashed truth, “Look the Emperor is naked!”  It helps to have a group for that.  In fact, only a group can do that!

Making sense of a dream in an Ullman Dream Group involves uncovering the deep inner core that knows the dreamer better than the dreamer knows themselves.

I’ll save you the step-by-step protocols that go into this process.  We’ve streamlined them over the years and learned a few things about how to remember dreams and their relationship to other dreams and their often-astonishing timeliness. Like metaphysical poetry, most dreams appear mundane and meaningless to the dreamer until their intricate formal dynamics are revealed and the revelations arrive on their own wings.

That's about the best I can for now. Thanks for asking.  L

---

and this morning a p s  "The book that most clearly explains the dream interpretation process per se along with "active imagination " is Robert Johnson's "Inner Work."

Larry 

the reference to fight club put me off a bit.  I remember reading Robert Johnson a bit years ago when Nicholas was super keen on dreams and dream analysis.  

this group dream work seems so far away from where I am at the moment   

and page 54 in Handke confirms this----Handke is my companion guide for this year and perhaps a while

The Gredos book is very long and very strange, like some of his other strange books, and I am comitted to reading it super slowly in the slow spiritual reading sort of way---same with Genet's Rites now too 

dream group would be so much like a committee meeting it gives me the willies just thinking about it, imagining it   ---  dreams themselves have never been that key for me ---  I sort of envied Nicholas as he talked about his vibrant and vivid and memorable his dreams were/are   Is that why his only? and primary activity on social media is posting images of paintings on facebook.  He has collected over the years in this way an exceptional body of work---huge and varied collection of photos of paintings, a curatorial masterwork of sorts, his private-public journey through images.  

H:  "at all public or political speeches she would make herself scarce, render herself invisible by going to sit or stand behind a curtain  . . . felt surrounded by a space entirely different from the one out there in the social realm." 55

not having music and sitting in the dark   as a way of life    taking half a day to walk to the airport 

the line in K's book about the woman willing to pay for first class prompted this extrapolation during the night----maybe when I was coming to the end of high school the anxiety about what would happen next as we all headed off to college was such that I "chose" going into the monastery as a way to sacrifice everything in order to get a First Class ticket for the flight into the next phase of life as a way to insure more private space and distance from lots of other people!  Irony of course almost immediately was that I had no time to myself that first novitiate year, could not get away from the group at all and could have no time for one-to-one encounters. And friendships were even forbidden!!  "particular friendships" something I had never heard of and tried to puzzle out---was the particular nature of friendship not exactly the point, the pleasure to talking all night with one friend who returned full attention and interest?   No wonder I had to crash out, eject from, my first class seat through Eugenia Memorial, where I could finally be alone and sit in the dark with nothing bothering me in any way.  a space entirely different from the one out there in the social realm.  

Kaminski

has me wondering if I do need to read Kafka.  "Franz Kafka's influence on Peter Handke is profound, particularly in how Handke constructs narratives of alienation, absurdity, and the intense focus on subjective perception. While Handke has not always been a sympathetic reader of Kafka, he has acknowledged Kafka's artistry as "pure" and "true" rather than just humorous. Or at least the Diaries.

great line from D H Lawrence on page 109  "Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe.  The others have a certain stickiness; they stick to the mass."

Kaminski's book, finished it this morning, is an elegant piece of work, indeed.  The tale from medical history about handwashing (cadavers to birthing), how it was ignored and later proven true, key quotations about Frieda Kahlo, from David Foster Wallace, Lawrence, above, Dickinson's poem in the chapter about death, the Bedouin waiter's wisdom about love as a burn (131) and, last but not least, the only (I think, or maybe, one of the few) uses of the word feeling: "Those who accept verbal language as the only language of the mind remember mostly through words.  The otroverts remembers in feelings that cannot be articulated in words; these feelings are less likely to get lost in the recesses of memory, where they become irretrievable."  141   on 148 "the child's emotional aloofness in group settings is baffling to the rest" reminded me precisely of the key event of refusing to go to Catherine Schwininger's birthday party when I was in second grade (?).  

Other ways to say how the book surprised me.  Very impressive with the soft and quiet way he handled his own autobiographical details and then in the acknowledgement other life details.  And as finale the way he puts Janus Korczak, Warsaw pediatrician who died with his orphans under the Nazis against our current T hive cruel and selfish aggressiveness.  

Brilliant, the book, in every way.  Reviewed beautifully what I already knew, strengthened my sense of myself and my takes on all of these things over my lifetime.  

One more Key passage for resonance---page 117 "one otroverts I know lives  modest lifestyle but will always splurge on first-class plane tickets; she is willing to pay an exorbitant premium not for legroom or the three-course meal but for a modicum of additional privacy and distance from fellow passengers."

Yes, for sure!!!

such long hindsight

The wanderer took renewed interest in this new personality theory because it relieved pressure long felt over so many years to understand why if the glyphic reality was active from the beginning, from early awakening, why had no action really been prompted by it, why had it never expressed itself in any important move?  What had done so over so many years, so strongly that it felt like a long and familiar form of expressive behavior was something the new theory, call it for now, the otroic or the othroic, features right at the outset.  This from the website (as we wait for the book itself to arrive, now that it is on its way we can't wait for it):  "Unlike introverts, they are not shy or quiet, and do not quickly tire from one-on-one socializing. Yet in large groups they feel uncomfortable, alienated, and alone."  Do not quickly tired from one-on-one socializing.  That is the key.  How often over the years either in my office with one student or at a gathering where I stay with one person for as long as possible while the party swirls around me without tiring of being with that one person has this been the case?  And how it has explained everything about  the engagement with the person, even when strong feeling has been the case, usually because strong feeling has been the case, but how rarely if ever (I can think of only one instance where the "rule" was broken) was there any physical reaching out or movement of any kinds.  Conversation was always more thrilling and satisfying than anything else that could have been entertained or imagined.  

Let's see if Kaminski agrees here.  Meanwhile I can keep reading his site.  Now I did just notice that he claims atheist is part of the picture.  But he is not familiar with Burke and has a psychologist's shortcomings when it comes to language, symbol and drama.  And to the ways Beckett and all the other writers of mid-20th onward have handled these things.  Handke our current hero in this regard.  Just noticed the other day that one of his recent short works is a voicing of one of Beckett's characters who is silent in Beckett's work.  So to Kaminski atheist fits necessarily with belonging to no groups but agnostic fets better and believing fits fine so long as believing is signed as believing? and in who? and in what?  

Unknowing as a perfection of belonging-not belonging, or perfection?  How often Handke's narratives, especially in Moravian just recently, proceed less and less by statement but by questioning.  Handke I'm sure is Otrovert par excellence.  

But I may have him wrong.  After all his sense of belonging to his home village, to his birth landscape and language haunts him all his life and he finds he does go home againg and longs to go home forever.  

"Otroverts rarely feel lonely. And they don’t belong to any group, family, nationality, or ideology. They are not part of a group or a circle of friends. They have friendships with individuals, they can be deeply connected to a life partner and are likely to be very loving parents, but they are eternal outsiders. Once they understand their otherness and stop trying to “fit in” and be communal, they can enjoy a life of productive individuality with few but warm and authentic relationships."

This does give me some pause.  Perhaps I am wrong about myself after all.  When the book arrives and I go through it slowly I will go back and forth and forth and back.  If not fitting in is key then reading a book we will not want to have the book figure us out either; I refuse to fit in to what the expert propounds as the proper ways I will not want to fit in.  

"It is hard for otroverts to experience and connect with what attracts and preoccupies a group. Consequently, an otrovert is an observer but never a true participant."   What comes most clearly to mind here is that one time I served on that large committee examining Greek life on campus.  At the first meeting I said to the group---we can save ourselves a lot of time if we write the report we are expected to write now and forget the silly idea of interviewing lots of people.  We know in advance what we will say, why bother with lots of meetings and discussions.  They all looked at me as if I were from another planet.  We had weeks of meetings, so many people spoke, we eventually wrote the report that was wholly predictable from the first day.  I had no idea of how the group behaved as a group and wanted to do so.  

"an otrovert cannot help but feel lonely."  "However, in a group, where a sense of belonging is the cement holding a group together, an otrovert cannot help but feel lonely."  vs "Otroverts rarely feel lonely." 

"the risk of being seen as controversial, subversive, or even insane in certain circumstances."  Who was put into a mental hospital twice?  the whole religious life chapter of my life---the greatest mistake I made in my life---demonstrated once and for all the dynamic over which I nearly indeed almost killed myself even if I thought I was taking it lightly and not seriously. But in fact I did climb onto the window ledge, luckily it was a large one, and could indeed have fallen had I not been cautious.  True I was on those medications, did they help me be more cautious?  maybe so.  But there is that exception where I did take explicit, physical action, so rarely and was it not because one person was down on the lawn below mowing the grass?  It was an action in the direction of one person, not towards the whole group.  My actions in that drama were away from the group even while I could not say that to anyone (there was no one to talk to and the official psychologist made all of that even worse---withl him there was no emotional connection because he was the official face and voice of the group life).  

"Otroverts are risk-averse, apprehensive, and insecure outside of their comfort zone. The same daring spirit that takes them to unchartered regions of thought is absent from the experiential side of life."  

The horror and adrenaline overdose of our whole road to Coroico adventure! A lifetime adrenaline trauma still felt in my chest memory.  

help on the back cover

Starting again into Crossing the Sierra Gredos.  Never has he tried a woman as main character.  She is a banker.  Before a geologist, a pharmacist, now a banker.  Outskirts of a river port, against previous life and modern life in general, sets out on quest---what else?---and has hired a famous writer (not a failed writer as in Moravian) to be her biographer.  She wants him to write her authentic biography.  She travels to meet him and passes through Five! stations, going across the Sierra and through La Mancha.  Escape from voracious mass media and commercialization of all life, all lives.  Yes, this time I have asked for help from the back cover text to get me re-started.  It is a long book, bent upon what Paul West calls "subtle unostentatious delicacy."  Oh, dear, here we go.  Again.  

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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Tiredness

 a key essay   first published in about 1990   If only I had read it before reading Don Juan because in this essay he gives his whole interpretation of Don Juan as a tale of tiredness, a hero of tiredness

"Tiredness is greater than the self.  Everything becomes extraordinary in the tranquillity of tiredness . . . . "

"despite the typically mystical stammering in your way of expressing it"   note how stammering would go with shimmering in Handke's dictionary 

remember too how was it in jukebox? that he mentioned in passing how St Teresa was of the school of relaxation into quiet surrender versus those who held one should tighten all the muscles of the body to experience God most directly

last image of mankind reconciled in its last moments in cosmic tiredness 

holy

 For the first time to my knowledge Handke uses the word holy and says I believe in that sort of transfiguration.  In the essay on Tiredness after the detailed remembering of the whole village helping to thresh and store the hay into the barn.  we-tiredness, the past transfigures 

this telling is a pure picture  equals in shared tiredness united purified   carpenters putting up roofs  a people of tiredness  the music of clairaudient tiredness  

(he decided he wanted to be a writer around age 13, at 23 or 24 he published The Hornets and dropped out of university) 

there is no picturable tiredness among the middle class  they regard it as a misbehavior like going barefoot (Kim Jones in Madrid as nanny for Pedro and Marga!) 

Ray Davies sang I'm Not Like Everybody Else   The Kinks  godfather of british pop  now 82 also knighted

how did I miss The Kinks?  and miss this song---is it a pre-anthem for Otroverts ?  his face in the b&w photo does look familiar 

8,025,200 views Feb 24, 2011 on YouTube

I won't take all that they hand me down, And make out a smile, though I wear a frown, And I'm not gonna take it all lying down, 'Cause once I get started I go to town. 'Cause I'm not like everybody else, Oh no... I'm not like everybody else, I'm not like everybody else, no.. I'm not like everybody eeelse. And I don't want to live my life like everybody else, And I don't want to be destroyed like everybody else, And I don't wanna get a job, like everybody else, 'Cause I'm not like everybody else, I'm not like everybody else. You see... Darling, you know that I love you true, And i'll do anything that you want me to, I'll even, Confess all my sins like you want me to, But there's one thing that I can't do for you, 'Cause I'm not like everybody else, (What did i say ?...) I'm not like everybody else. (How did i say it ?...) I'm not like everybody else, (One more time..) I'm not like everybody else. Like everybody else.. And I don't want to live my life like everybody else, And I won't wanna be destroyed like everybody else, And I don't wanna get a job, like everybody else, 'Cause I'm not like everybody else, What did i say ?.. I'm not like everybody else. Like everybody else. Everybody else, Everybody else, Like everybody else. Everybody... Everybody else...

Kinks Anthology 1964-1971