Listening to 'Great Waves' by the Dirty Three featuring Chan Marshall is like bathing my face in fresh water. I wake up, my attention returns from the thickets where it's caught, and the room seems to open out around me. There are a few songs that are like this, callers to attention, and I use them sparingly. They come to my aid, and I know they watch over me, waiting in reserve.
And yet I also know they watch from me, out of me, that it is also my eyes with which they see. It is as though they needed me, these waiting songs, in order to happen to themselves. Do horses like being ridden? Pointless question. One day, the horse cannot distinguish its freedom from its rider's. When, otherwise, might it go out for a gallop? And does a song like being heard? 'Gentle Waves', I tell myself, is nothing without me. It lies on my hard disk like a leaf.
Callers to order: Handke's phrase, or the phrase he allows his narrator, in Across, the book I would like to say is his purest. What happens? Read critical works, and they'll tell you there was a murder. It's true, of course: the narrator happens on a man scrawling a swastika into a tree. He kills him with one blow and throws him over a cliff.
But that murder is like the one Handke allows his narrator to imagine in On a Dark Night, who longs to topple cyclists from their mountain bikes: it is part of an order of things, an order of walking, of the natural world, of meditative noticing.
Gloriously Handkean; he needs, one presumes, to revive this sense of order every time he writes. He needs to be called to order. But then Loser, of Across, is called away from his work by those callers (what are they? certain objects - archeological remnants).
I still await the first daddy long legs of the summer, remembering how Loser calls them creatures of the threshold. And Across, the whole book, which I have not reread and do not have near me, but that lives on in me, inhabiting me, is all threshold, all plateau: the book between, the book steered gently by the same wind that ruffles the pages of all Handke's fiction. The wind at the back of the walker, the wanderer, who has as his enemy the cyclist and the fascist.