crise de vers

Why was there (is there) a crisis of language?

When I was seventeen or so I picked up a book at the recommendation of someone I hardly knew, whose sources guided him to link the title with my name. For whatever reason.

The book, The Man Without Qualities, would remain undoing and retying knots underneath, just beyond my perceived activities, and for several years. Language, private designations, secret names with allusive and elusive meanings. (And I'd always looked for meanings, arbitrary and unrelated though they might be, in names, simply for the fun of it!: hillside lake or little hawk or driftwood, defender of men, fortification; did I identify with these? I rather saw the names fabricating a fiction somewhat more stable than the one I inhabited, or the one I'd hoped to see play out.)

And here the break with causality seemed meaningful; my story did not bloom out of the sand like that lily did one day in summer, as if sent; the connection I sensed or imagined quickly fell apart; and what I thought to be a human representation of causality revealed the absence of causality (at least from an empirical point of view). How disappointing. In that storm, no rainbow came to be, and no bridge shone above the scattered and abandoned details of a story. Giant, sad, broken branches, power outages, and wet clogs were all.

The book brought these plays and puns to me again: seriously, but with the reflective and amused tone of someone come to terms with the distance, of someone reconciled to the impossibilities of full reconciliation, to the fallacy of the rainbow.
Nietzsche everywhere took the theoretical lead (Hofmannsthal too, I'd later learn), and the Rausch, the rush, worked its way in not only in the explicit scenes of music and creativity (Clara and Walter -- Clara, anything but clear; and Walter capable of commanding nothing at all) -- but in the very twisting of those split trajectories, the halved human beings; twisted, tied, woven, ein alter Tibetteppich, creation. These threads -- of all colours! -- vibrated, and tones sounded louder than thunder, maschentausendabertausendweit.

Perhaps because it was in these books, and in Faust too, in Studierzimmer I, where the confrontation with language became so tense and twisted with self-awareness, irony, and amor fati -- perhaps it is because of these books that I came to study German. This Zweifel, this doubt through infinitely splitting dualities of existence and twisting again into meaning-formation (again, the ἀναστόμωσις) grew through me like a splaying, supplicating tree of life trying to reconnect, to hold itself together. It seems to be something I was sent into, without reason, but with skill (geschickt), Schicksal. Kein Wunder, dass ich nicht selten die Worte schneller auf Deutsch (er)finde, ihre Zerbrechlichkeit spüre, wie meine eigene Hand. There --  that outgrowth of death, that Hofmannsthalian wie mein eigenes Haar, a line that will stay with me, probably, until my own hair has turned to ash.