Status Updates From Mit fædreland var en æblekerne

Sometimes my cabinets with all these drawers seem to me like a train station, and I ask myself whether the words would like to set off for the text I’m working on, or would prefer to wait for some future, unforeseeable text. I also don’t know whether they feel locked up inside the drawer, or whether they feel protected.

I feel I am lucky to own hundreds of thousands of words. And when I am travelling, I often think of the fact that the words are waiting for me at home. The fact that they are allowed to lie around in the open is an expression of ease, of personal freedom. For my abundant ownership of words is the opposite of the past, the opposite of censorship.

The emergencies, the contingencies, the congruencies are entirely different with cut-out words compared to ordinary writing. Even after more than twenty years of producing collages, they still astonish me. To this day, I still don’t know what disposition is concealed within each word. This is only revealed when they come together in new ways.

I understood then that damage is an intimate connection.

I saw Harald Jung’s portrait of Jorge Semprún: In the film, Semprún visits Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was as a young man. And during his visit, he walks across the site and is so relieved that Jung is surprised by him. Semprún says simply that he has come home. It was the same with Oskar Pastior. It was trauma. Something that buries itself so deep inside your body that it destroys and enchants you.

Only with time did I learn that the effects of deportation are insidious – as cruel and intimate as hunger itself. Aside from the body’s torment, the damage also takes the shape of an addiction. One dreads the camp, while developing a homesickness for it. And it consumes the survivor. It continues to humiliate him long after he has escaped, because it enchants him against his will.

I had to ask myself whether recollection has more to do with a person’s memory or with their disposition. Or whether it is solely how one perceives an experience at the time that determines what one will remember and what one will forget later on.

Above all, I was interested in the seemingly unimportant, the inconspicuous. I wanted a personal description of the camp, from an individual, to capture its so-called ‘everyday life’.

Everything is artificially constructed, but the unreal is made valid in the text through my use of the right language. The language must be beautiful precisely because the topic is threatening. I wouldn’t be able to bear writing if it were not for the invented truth of language, in which what is beautiful is painful.

And when a manuscript seems to be finished, I read over it again twenty times. Every reading conjures up a new version. These are often detours, and I end up coming back to the very first version, but it is not for nothing: I only know that the very first version is the valid one once I have tried out twenty other possibilities.

And the habit always contains the fear that I won’t manage to both look at my life and endure it again. This double doubt is part of it, though. Otherwise, you have already lost.

Out of this discord comes procrastination and my fear that I am no match for this glassy, unnatural gaze. But even if I procrastinate, I always end up starting to write at some point. I think I have been relying on my writing for years. Over time, this has led to an outward habit of attempting to look at my life afresh through language. But then this also means enduring it again.

My experience stares me in the face once more when I write, but with a different gaze, glassy and unnatural. As if on the one hand this experience knows itself perfectly, and on the other not at all. What has happened happens again when you are writing. This is why nothing you have experienced is ever finished – and whether an experience goes well or goes awry depends entirely on the language you find to describe it.

Perhaps I frame it as ‘ruthlessness’ because I didn’t choose my subjects myself, because my writing is full of stolen life and the tyranny of other people. And perhaps I talk of ‘preservation’ because I fear that I would have been utterly defenceless against what I have experienced had these words – which were so hard to find – not come to my aid. Out of writing emerges a kind of word hunger.

I am wrapped up in it. I think that this preserves me, too. Writing has a magnetism to it, otherwise I would not have been doing it for years. I believe that this magnetism comes from the interplay between the ruthlessness of the act and the fact that writing is also a means of self-preservation.

I never write anything down until it is unavoidable. I put it off because I know that, once I get started, it will take possession of me and I will be afraid of it. Writing swallows me whole. Language abolishes time; it pulls your experience into an obsessive search for word, rhythm and sound. This precision has a ruthlessness to it, but also has an undertow that I can no longer find my way out of.

I asked myself what use freedom was to me if I had to wait until I had lost my mind for it.

Sometimes I thought this insanity would soon collapse, and sometimes it felt like it would keep its hold on the country for evermore, and certainly would outlast me. I said ‘sometimes and sometimes’ just now, but really I thought both at the same time. Perhaps I thought something different in each temple and the two things didn’t even strike me as contradictory.

I would get on the bus and feel that I needed to loudly ask people how they managed to put up with it all. I had to force myself not to. I knew that I had reached a point where things could not go on for much longer, my nerves were so raw that I would soon snap. Was I willing to go to prison for that?
So I decided that I had to get out of there, if there was still time.

I didn’t want to hang anyone out to dry and I would not have been able to bear the thought that the State would take revenge on my friends. To put it tritely: I would not have found any peace in the West at that time. I would have felt guilty that others were paying the price for my decision. And there would have been no way for me to protect them.
So I went back every time.

Something jumps out of time. The present metamorphoses into what you are carrying inside your head. Something you had forgotten about is suddenly there again and you become so helpless. Visibly or invisibly, these things you bring with you keep being made present again.

People interpret the foreign gaze geographically, but it is not geographical, it is biographical, psychological. The foreign gaze is an internal thing, it doesn’t stem from a change from one country to another, but rather from a loss of self-assurance. And I experienced this loss in Romania. I’d felt completely alienated for years – robbed and injured by the State – before I even thought of leaving the country.

How helpless we are before a grave. I have never understood people who visit graveyards as though they were parks....Every graveyard is haunting to me, because I always imagine the dead people who are under the earth. I can’t think it away. I’m not in a garden or a park. I know that I am literally walking over dead bodies – not as a figure of speech, but in actuality.

Jenny didn’t leave me alone. Everyone else in the factory avoided me, but she made a public display of our friendship: she sat down next to me on the staircase and ate with me. There was no dissidence in there, really, but her moral values resisted her environment. You needed a lot of self-confidence to do this.

The only productive sector of the economy under Socialism was the production of fear. And the secret service was, if you look at it cynically, the only institution in the country that attended to the individual – only, it did this in order to destroy them.

I have to acknowledge both my present and past selves, that is all. Nothing disappears, I can’t will it away or write it away. Literature does not heal anything; all I can do is look into things, over and over again, in different ways. Everyone does this in their own way with life, even when they don’t write.

there is a point of no return, that you should pack your suitcase while you’re still in possession of your senses and can tell the difference between reality and insanity, while you are still present.

The State-sponsored poison was the regime’s anaesthetic: the more people careened around drunk, the less they would think of rebelling. And alcohol reduced people’s life expectancy. It destroyed your guts so swiftly that the State was spared from having to pay out pensions to the drinkers.