This reduction condenses the dialogues to their most rudimentary, giving them the pithiness of sayings, aphorisms that pepper the entire text. The author can leave out the dialogues because they are repeated unwritten throughout the text, and constantly enter the mind of the reader.

Blecher’s question “Who am I” leads to a world eroticized by inner chafing. Adventures in Immediate Irreality is a study in observation. And it takes the reader where one generally arrives when one looks at things impartially—to a place of calm and composed resignation. In his words: “All things and all men were hemmed in by their petty, pathetic obligation to be precise, nothing more than precise.” “Exasperating as it was, I was forced to admit that I lived in the world I saw around me.”

HERTA MÜLLER

(translated by Philip Boehm)

ADVENTURES
IN IMMEDIATE
IRREALITY

Chapter One

Staring at a fixed point on the wall, I occasionally have the feeling I no longer know who or where I am. At such times, I experience the loss of my identity from a distance: I feel for a moment that I have become a complete stranger, this abstract personage and my real self vying for authenticity with equal strength.

In the following moment my identity returns. It is like a stereoscopic slide in which the two images, separated by mistake, suddenly give the illusion of three dimensionality once the projectionist brings them back together. My room seems fresher than ever. It reverts to its former consistency, its objects finding their proper places, as when a crushed lump of earth in a glass of water settles in layers of various well-defined and parti-colored elements. The elements of the room take back their own contours and the colors of the old memory I have of them.

The feeling of distance and solitude during the moments when my everyday person has dissolved into amorphousness differs from all other feelings. When it persists, it turns into a fear, a dread of never finding myself again. A vague silhouette of myself surrounded by a large luminous halo looms somewhere in the distance like an object lost in fog.

Then, the terrible question of who I actually am comes alive in me like a totally new body with unfamiliar skin and organs. The answer requires a lucidity more basic and profound than that of the brain. Everything in my body capable of stirring stirs, struggles, and revolts more intensely, more fundamentally than in everyday life. Everything begs for a solution.

Several times I find the room as I know it, as if I had opened and shut my eyes, but each time the room is clearer, as a landscape in field-glasses comes together when, adjusting the focus, one penetrates the veils of intermediary images.

Eventually I recognize myself and find the actual room again. It gives me a slightly intoxicated feeling. The room is extraordinarily dense in terms of matter, and I have returned implacably to the surface of things: the deeper the wave of obscurity, the higher its crest. Never, under no other circumstances, have I felt so clearly as in moments like these when every object must occupy the place it occupies and I must be the person I am.

My struggles with uncertainty no longer have a name; all that remains is the simple regret that I found nothing in their depths. I am surprised that a total lack of meaning should be so closely linked to my intimate being. Now that I have found myself again and am trying to express my reaction, that being seems completely impersonal: a mere exaggeration of my identity arising from its own substance, a medusa tentacle that has strayed too far and, groping exasperated through the waves, finally finds its way back to the gelatinous sucker. Thus during several moments of disquiet I have passed through all the certitudes and incertitudes of my existence only to return—painfully and definitively—to my solitude.

Each solitude is of a purer and more elevated nature than the one before. The feeling of people banished is clearer and more intimate, a limpid, mellow melancholy like a dream recalled in the depth of night. It alone still reminds me of the vaguely sad mystery and magic of my childhood “crises.” In that sudden disappearance of identity I find anew my descents into the cursed spaces of those early days, and in the moments of lucidity that return immediately after I resurface I see the world in the curious atmosphere of futility and obsolescence that forms about me when my hallucinatory trances cast me down.

It was always the same places in the street, the house, or the garden that gave rise to the crises. Whenever I entered their space, I would feel dizzy and swoon. Genuine invisible traps placed here and there in the town, in no way distinguishable from the air surrounding them, they would lie in wait for me, ferocious: I was to fall prey to the special atmosphere they exuded. One step, a single step into a “cursed space” like that and a crisis was inevitable.

One of the spaces was in the town park in a small clearing at the end of a tree-lined path no one used anymore. The only gap in the dogrose and acacia bushes surrounding it opened onto a desolate piece of wasteland. There was no sadder or more forsaken place on earth. Silence lay heavy on the dusty leaves in the stagnant summer heat. From time to time the echoes of the bugles of a regiment filtered through, long-drawn-out cries in the wilderness, heartbreakingly sad. Far off the air baked by the sun quivered vaporously like the transparent steam hovering over a boiling liquid.

It was a wild, isolated spot, as lonely as could be. The heat of the day felt more enervating there, the air I breathed more dense. The dusty bushes blazed yellow in the sun in an atmosphere of utter solitude.