eventueller Abschied eines Unbekannten

On a rainy evening a week or so ago I walked past a woman lying in the street at the end of the Theodor-Heuss-Brücke. Police officers had surrounded the corner and blocked off one lane. They had covered her with a plaid blanket, and beyond her general build, only her limp feet were discernible. Two cars, it seemed, were also involved. No one stopped, a few slowed down.

The beginning of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften came to mind, only this time the title character was not Ulrich, but this woman. The novel would then have ended some thousand-plus pages earlier.

I saw nothing about this on the news.  I kept checking the police reports daily, searching for confirmation that the woman was either dead, injured, or alive, but above all I wanted confirmation that it had happened, because, curiously, I did not see it just once. A half an hour or an hour earlier, I had imagined it. The person in my thoughts was -- like the person lying in the street -- faceless, anonymous, n'importe qui. The French phrase returns to me again and again, sometimes in my dreams after watching an episode of French in Action in a rather half-hearted attempt to retain what French I managed to apprendre; interestingly, the whole show in the first 10 episodes is dedicated to characterising, to naming and giving features to the names -- Mireille, Robert. Indeed, I stared, but I couldn't marvel at this unknown, unglorified being.

N'importe qui.


But the anonymous always seems to have an inner drive towards being named -- it doesn't matter what name. It is incitation, if not incantation. And the reflex to fill in the blanks is an unpleasant one, like cringing in response to a sharp pain. Anxiety stirs thought, and the cipher body became filled with personal meaning -- though it never lost its shape. Scenarios sliced through my thoughts -- (and always the pleading voice of self-preserving 'reason' interposing: But I don't even know her, how can I be affected this way? I have no right to be affected this way! It has nothing to do with me!) -- and morphed into hypothetical mourning. But who was it that I was mourning?

A few days before that I had been in London at a conference. I spoke about death and purposiveness and beauty -- or I tried to. I feel like my paper was more eulogistic in tone than academic, but this blog isn't perhaps the best place to reflect on that, except that it seems to be part of the constellation of this entry.
London for me is and has always been an unheimlich city; it is where I can be alone, and often where I find my eyes have been opened in ways I know they can be, but rarely are. I always end up in the same places: Bloomsbury might as well be home; the rest of London is a labyrinth to me.

The National Gallery, however, was on my itinerary this time because there was an exhibition there that interested me, called "Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900". The exhibition's inclusions ranged from the marvellous colours of Makart to a row of death masks, including Gustav Mahler's.

So I don't know how the story ends, if the end has been reached, or if I dreamt it all while wake.

Wohin ich geh? Ich geh, ich wandre in die Berge.

And then there was Yeats

This other man I had dreamed

A drunken, vainglorious lout.

He had done most bitter wrong

To some who are near my heart,   

Yet I number him in the song;

He, too, has resigned his part

In the casual comedy;

He, too, has been changed in his turn,   

Transformed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.