DISAPPEARANCE

I remember the first time I saw the well-known photograph of Robert Walser lying dead in the snow, flat on his back, with two onlookers in the distance behind him. An artist friend had sent me a photocopy - it was before the internet made such things instantly available - and I was taken aback by its impact and rawness. Then, on reflection, I began to think that it wasn’t such a bad way to move into the next world: suddenly, unexpectedly, on a Christmas Day walk. It was a kind of radical disappearance.

I regularly return to Robert Walser’s short stories. They employ all manner of ruses to ensure that nothing ever comes to a firm conclusion, and as a consequence there is something ambivalent and open-ended about them, which is part of their appeal. I also enjoy Walser’s quietly ironic Romanticism, often expressed in his descriptions of nature, as well as his obsession with walks, which seemed to be not only an opportunity to observe the world but a form of surrender and effacement, a way of reducing self-consciousness, just as his apparently childlike wonder at the glory of life may have been an escape from the torment of self-awareness. Walser’s writing is oddly humble, his humour, perhaps driven by despair, serving to undercut its earnestness. The characters in his stories are often out of step with society’s conventional values and pace, yet he can be sharp in his observations about those he considers pompous and foolish.

Walser had few possessions and was generally distant from other people; once described as ‘the most unattached of solitary poets’, he appears to have suffered from anxiety. After his early years he led a precarious existence ‘with emptiness blowing through every part of it’, as someone else once remarked. A tendency towards self-erasure is reflected in his so-called ‘microscripts’, the multitude of texts realised in tiny and nearly unintelligible handwriting, but as W.G. Sebald observed, Walser’s writing also seem to dissolve as one reads it, just as every footstep on a walk is immediately forgotten and replaced by the next. His ideal, it has been said, was to overcome the forces of gravity.

Walser’s gentle writing has attracted much commentary, some of it surprisingly forceful. Walter Benjamin, for instance, once commented that his characters ‘come from insanity and nowhere else’ and that they ‘have left madness behind them, and this is why they are marked by such a consistently heartrending, inhuman superficiality’. Susan Sontag proposed that Walser’s writing assumes depression and terror in order to accept and lighten them, just as he ironizes pretence and insincerity but leaves us with something sincere and unpretentious. In recent years he has become widely read and admired, and it is worth reflecting on why this should be so. It may be partly because Walser’s liminal world, somewhere between the real and the fictitious, the laughable and the solemn, is especially resonant in postmodern times, but his appeal is surely more timeless than that. Something analogous might be found in the poignant 18th century French painting by Watteau, known as ‘Gilles’. The pierrot stands alone, apart from his companions, and  although uneasy he has no self-pity. On the contrary, he has inner stillness.

I recently thought of Robert Walser while reading 5th century Chinese ‘rivers and mountains poetry’, which is remarkable for its profound sense of emptiness and silence. The practice of living as a recluse in the hills was the physical equivalent of the ‘empty’ awareness so prized by Taoism, as David Hinton explains in his introduction to Mountain Homes: the Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China. In our culture, when we look out at the world, we assume that that we do so from the ‘I’, a centre within ourselves; in Taoism, however, the ‘I’ exists only a an opening of consciousness. There is a story about Wu Tao-Tzu (or Wu Daozi) an 8th century painter of the Tang Dynasty, that nicely illustrates the point. One day, it is said, he stood looking at a mural he had just completed. Suddenly he clapped his hands and the temple gates in the picture opened, whereupon he walked into the painting, disappeared, and the gates closed behind him. He was never seen again. In The Myth of Wu Tao-Tzu the Swedish writer Sven Lindquist uses the tale to illustrate his conviction that art should not be a form of escapism in which we can lose ourselves and disappear. He goes on to explain that when he first encountered poverty and suffering on his travels in China and India he fell into a state of despair, wondering if beauty and harmony, in which he hitherto had such faith, had any purpose at all. He decided, perhaps a little reluctantly, that they didn’t, and most of the book describes how his interests and sensibility became more politically engaged. There is a certain irony in the fact that I recall the early pages, in which he writes about the myth, as by far the most enjoyable and enlightening in the book.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/robert-walsers-disappearing-acts
https://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/pierrot-formerly-known-gilles
https://www.hermitary.com/bookreviews/hinton.html
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-art-of-escape-on-sven-lindqvists-the-myth-of-wu-tao-tzu/

MIDWINTER


To my surprise, as I was looking at a copy of the Chinese Tao Te Ching in the school bookshop, the headmaster, who taught French and collected ceramics, came up and told me that it was a wonderful book.  I knew little about it then, but my interest in Eastern philosophy and spirituality was already beginning to take shape. A year or two later I recognised some of its verses in George Harrison’s The Inner Light, which was released in 1968 as the B-side of The Beatles' single, Lady Madonna. In the 1970s I gave my brother the book, and he has since told me, more than once, how important it is to him. Last Christmas he returned the gesture and sent me a new translation as a present, and I enjoyed reacquainting myself with this ancient, beautiful, and mysterious text, which is full of poetic and resonant thoughts. This, for instance, is a rendering of the verses that inspired Harrison’s song:

Without stirring abroad
One can know the whole world;
Without looking out of the window 
One can see the way of heaven.
The further one goes
The less one knows.
Therefore the sage knows without having to stir,
Identifies without having to see,
Accomplishes without having to act. 

The basic idea of the Tao is not difficult to grasp, although the Tao Te Ching declares that it is ‘nameless’ and can never adequately be described or intellectually understood. The word is usually translated as ‘Way’, and while it does not have definite characteristics, the Tao is commonly characterised as strong, gentle, and fluid. Historically, Taoists were often hermits and recluses; they kept their light hidden and didn’t identify themselves.

In the recent past, perhaps because of its apparent simplicity and exotic appeal, Taoism has spread widely and thinly, to the point where it has lost something of its original depth and savour. An example of this popularisation was the 1982 publication of Benjamin Hoff’s The Tao of Pooh, in which the characters from A.A.Milne’s Winnie the Pooh are used to explain the fundamentals of Taoist philosophy, and although it is overly cute, the book does have charm and interest. Pooh is the Taoist, uncomplicated and flexible, never worrying about how life will turn out; he embodies ‘wu wei’, which is often translated as ‘non-action’ or, in vernacular terms, ‘going with the flow’. His friends and companions, in contrast, tend to over-think and create bother, for themselves and other people. As Piglet says, ‘Pooh hasn’t much Brain, but he never comes to any harm’.

Hoff’s approach to Taoism reflects the manifestations of 1960s counterculture that valued childlike qualities of innocence, fantasy, and imagination. This whimsical attitude to life now seems willfully naive, but at the time, and in relation to a society that emphasised materialistic progress above all else, it made some sense. William Blake, who was also much admired by the counterculture, saw both sides of the issue. In Songs of Innocence and Experience he suggested that childhood, while pure and protected, is not immune to the fallen world, whose frailties and corruptions sometimes impose themselves. This is ‘experience’, which is usually suffused by fear and inhibition. The Songs of Experience reveal ways in which adult life destroys much of what is good in innocence, but they also articulate some of the weaknesses of a predominantly childlike way of living.

At Christmas I also took the opportunity to read Tove Jansson’s letters, which have just been published in a handsome and substantial volume. I’ve become fond of her writing, and The Summer Book, which I discovered some years ago, is now a firm favourite. It tells the story of an old woman and her grandchild who spend the summer in the Finnish archipelago. Nothing much happens, but they wander around the small island looking at life with wonder, holding vividly candid conversations. The Summer Book combines innocence and experience, and Jansson’s simple narrative, which seems to have no purpose other than the graceful illumination of everyday life and its unremarkable problems, has something of a Taoist spirit. Given the season, however, I turned instead to Moominland Midwinter, one of her children’s books, after browsing through the letters.

I have been slow in catching up with Jansson’s Moomins, those strange and  benevolent creatures whose meditative nonchalance and adaptable tolerance are also lessons in the Taoist way of life, but I’m gradually working my way through the series. Living in an archetypal Scandinavian setting of mountains, forests, seas, and valleys, the Moomins can be both joyful and melancholy, and their extended family is agreeable, inclusive, and composed of motley outsiders, both tranquil and anarchic. Their stories relate how the Moomins overcome dramas and upheavals through genial and affectionate compliance, and Moominland Midwinter is no exception. It is a tale about what happens when Moomintroll, who wakes up early during hibernation and can’t get back to sleep, decides to stay awake through the rest of the harsh winter. Normally placid, he is angered by the absence of the sun and the fierce blizzards, soon becoming resentful of those of his companions who are able to enjoy the snow and ice. Moomintroll is convinced that winter is playing an unkind trick on him. One day, however, he stops fighting the storm and notices that the wind isn't cold and that it makes him feel light, almost as though he is flying. ‘I’m nothing but air and wind, I’m part of the blizzard’, Moomintroll says to himself, and he begins to let go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swT6YTPYwgM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swT6YTPYwgM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAsGD9YLT50