198
PARTISAN REVIEW
are loud. And what is quieter than-two hands filled with water, for
example? But their very fullness-how, with what, from whence?
For it was today at five o'clock that he relinquished his needs,
departed "from all grief, anger and need"-his prayer finally arriv–
ed! They'll answer me (not you, Rainer, others): him-no, his
body-yes. Enough of that! Doesn't every survivor know deep down
that the priest, the undertaker and the photographer-are only an
excuse for our fingers which are itching to get to work, are our affir–
mation, our conventionalized "I exist"-our full consent to live.
We don't cling to the dead, we cling to the undertaker! In our hurry
to photograph the dead there is less the desire to preserve-than the
desire to replace-the living features-with a photograph (the
memory of the dead-is living torment)-or than there is the cer–
tainty of forgetting sooner or later. The photographic print-is our
subscription to oblivion. To keep? To bury deep!
Delineating. Wooing. Move something, rearrange. With tri–
fling snippets, cares, repair the old patterns of life. The barbarity of
these cares. Almost like facing
alles geschehen
-
nichts geschehen.
(And
my words to you, Rainer, but differently.
Nichts kann dem geschehen,
der geschah.
In Russian: it doesn't happen to the one who happened.)
The taming of the unknown. The domestication of death, as
once -love. The usual inability to find the right tone. Our - till the
hour of death -
awkwardness
in love.
. . . There is another, simpler explanation of this posthumous
burst of paganism. Death inhabits the house of the dying, there is no
death in the house of the dead. Death leaves the house before the
body, before the doctor and even before the soul. Death is the first to
leave the house. Hence the sigh of relief, despite grief. "Finally!"
What? Not the person himself, who was loved - but death. Whence
the celebration of its departure: for simpler people, the funeral
feast - gorging and drinking at wakes (he can't eat or drink - so we
will eat and drink!); and for us who came later, the gorging and
drinking is, I keep wanting to say, recollective-the telling and
repeating of the smallest details - to the point of stupefaction - to
muteness - to well-wornness. There - eating away, here - the talk–
ing away of the dead. The thunderousness of a house after death.
That's what I'm talking about.
And the first genuine quiet (that endless midday July
bumblebee buzzzz in the ears) sounds in the house only after the
carrying-out. When there is no longer anything to carryon about.
But visits to the cemetery do remain.
