Journal of Repetitions

Abstract

Back to the coast. In Odenthal again, in the neighborhood of a quotation that reached from Rome to Guatemala. Or you repeat the story of mere moments, the last of which stretches out between Richthofen's flight logbook and the pictures of Irmgard Keun in exile. Showing us in a hotel again, and to the east the land getting lost again. Only the early trains were rolling further into the subjunctively possible: one might leave Ostend in the morning, by the next day be in Warsaw perhaps. How many tickets, how many faces of conductors and customs officials (some caused anxiety, others brought you hope), how many stamps in your passport...it is not a journey. You arrived a long time ago. You made the choice between the sea and the ranges of hills, over which the sky holds the invisible flight paths open. Anyway it is still going, in a game that moves places and regions through times, which are suddenly standing outside the windows in the yard light, or surface behind the fence and join in a conversation with the neighbors, of whom the one is dead and the other has not yet come home. You can interrupt and re-define the borders between afternoons in the cherry tree, telephone interviews, queues to pay, between dawn, early shift, and the untriability of guilt...it is happening anyway, the computer erases the data without prompting. So go out into the meadow; the snow is not coming back today. The woodpecker is drumming up in the peartree. It is more a rattling. Now knocking, hesitantly, it is a sound like reflection, coming before a silence. Then follows the dive, caught by suddenly spanned wings, the flight in a long curve into the nearest branches where the woods begin. Variant description. A course through the air, and how a flying body behaves as the measure of the situation says, to his knowledge, like this or like that. Outside, high above the house, a draft of soft cries, the acoustic image of a flying wedge, which instinct, drive, experience have formed for a move to the north; that repeats itself from one spring to another, (or from one autumn to another southwards), and preserves the conditions in which cranes survive, in the pattern of adaptation that prescribes the restlessly rolling chain no matter who is faster, who weaker, who an outsider, a laggard. In the distance the chain grows thinner and thinner, until it disappears in another life. It is always making signals that are too little noticed; you close the windows, you have not seen anything. Only sometimes contacts can be felt, and a tremor runs through the most insignificant things, constructed around you by habit. Nothing stirs from its place, but that is not all that counts in a movement that brings the draft from outside together with the air in the rooms. Perhaps the equation remains unclear; one so often does not know what the terms mean, especially when the context is only apparent afterwards. Here you know the area, and you see how in the morning a deeply receding landscape begins between the branches of the pear tree. A few things seem to be quite clear, at least on this evening, which suddenly sets out the relationship between alcove bench and organ music, a pen drawing and a chair. A Prelude by Nicolaus Bruhns out of the parish church in the village; church and village in the drawing by Erich Schuchardt that hangs over the alcove bench opposite the chair of Alma Schuchardt, and you are sitting in the middle of a family novel, in the chapter about the Forties, which is a tale about grandmother's kitchen, who looks from her chair at a drawing by her son, who continues to be missed as late as this evening of simultaneity, and you know you are still here, like someone who is going through the dead and empty house touching the objects one last time before it is cleared, someone who after this touch will forever recognise everything lost, in this wide, never-ending space, into which only memory is granted entry. …