Thus began the calmest, indeed most comatose period in Burgmüller’s life, because almost all he did was sleep: the telamones couldn’t get enough of watching his sleeping body along with the dance performances of his dreams; his sleep demonstrations in those days were considered a wonderfully exotic, peaceful Gesamtkunstwerk, which he launched into the atmosphere in all its vast incomprehensibility, along with his Gestalt, making magnificent the day-nights and the night-days.
For this reason, his body was passed from building to building, from caryatid to atlas, as comprehensively as possible, so as to give wider circulation to his sleep concerts, sleeper plays, dreamer serenades, tiredness tragedies, and exhaustion comedies. . with increasing excitement, they marveled at his performances, thinking them the ultimate or penultimate secret that would at last explain and transfigure their inflexible existence, thus solving the mysterious equation of their petrified philosophy.
It goes almost without saying that many of them tried to get to the bottom of Burgmüller’s dreams, but, alas, found them hovering unfathomably high above them; their goal in making that attempt, which they at first kept secret, was to learn for themselves how to sleep.
In vain. Not one of them got even close to it; and how could they? Burgmüller might just as well have tried to breathe time instead of air; no, he wouldn’t have succeeded in getting a single day into his lungs.
Nevertheless, or just because of that, his performances — every snore dedicated to their breathlessness, which spanned centuries — became ever more popular; hardly had he awakened than he was immediately obliged to give a new sleep demonstration.
So he took stronger and stronger sleeping pills and potions, because in one’s natural state it’s impossible to be honestly asleep all the time, that is, without affectation, and especially not when giving public demonstrations of the art, as he was doing in his new function as, on the one hand, a creative sleep artist, now very well known and famous among them, and then, on the other hand, as the interpreter of his own sleep, following each performance. He could neither bring himself to deceive them by simply pretending to sleep during his performances, which is to say without actually sleeping, because they deserved better than such amateurism, nor could he possibly expect them to have the least patience with a sham performance, because they would have seen through any deception from the start: their theoretical knowledge had in the meantime become so thoroughly sound that no one could pull any tricks on them:
Once Burgmüller had started his presentation, the stone women first carefully pulled up his drooping eyelids to measure the strength of his sleep by the position of his pupils; then they proceeded to rock his limp, sacklike body slowly and gently back and forth as it lay there relaxed and exposed on all sides, swinging it up and down to double check if he was sleeping deeply enough, after which they began to give the sandbag of his body a good shaking, throwing it up to the cloudruins of the weather station and catching it again; yes, and in conclusion they hurled him carefully and slowly over every gable in the city, even those of the highest roofs, playing catch with the crumpled, crinkled bundle of his body.
As soon as he woke up again, they held him to his agreed-upon obligation to describe his dreams. But it was above all when he succeeded in speaking from the depths of his unconsciousness that his sleep performances exceeded all expectations — for when that happened, he spoke in the person of a character inhabiting one of the dreams that came over him in the course of his increasingly unavoidable passages through nightmares, so that his audience had a very clear sense of the haunting force of these images — and such successes were downright triumphant.
Which however made no difference to his body, upon which he was visiting such harm, mainly because he had to keep increasing his dose of sleeping pills in order to continue his work, to maintain as well as to improve on the unconscious qualities of the artistic embodiment of his subconscious in the service of sleep research, because the demands of his stony admirers set into their walls were also increasing, until one day or night he had reached his limit and could go no farther; no sleeping potion helped anymore, and it turned out that he had landed himself in a terrible state of torturous ossifying wakefulness, and was thus unfortunately forced to withdraw, due to illness, from the sleep-theater palaces of the telamones’ world, of which he had become very fond. He postponed all planned performances until further notice, so that he could discontinue his sleeping-pill regimen, and so time went on without him.
How had you gotten yourself to this city anyway, Burgmüller, it almost seems as if you never really arrived here, never really climbed up the crumbling ruins of those proud walls that once formed a quay on a river that has presumably been nameless for a long time now — or was it that you yourself were supposed to bestow upon that river one more word for its miserable trickle? But how to decide on one when your memory was made up of nothing more than prophecies flashing back at you from far ahead? And they didn’t do much to convince you of your plan to settle in the aforementioned place, even if, on a daily basis, in the center of its accumulation of buildings, you happened to see the yellowed, now illegible dial fall from the peak of the clock tower of the municipal authorities’ sky — torn apart, it either crumbled down like sunsnow onto the glowing main square of the Republic, or else, depending on the weather, rained down as hail from all the cobbled floors of the clouds onto the citizens who had run for cover — but what was that supposed to mean to you, since you weren’t reliant on the landscapes themselves, but rather on their maps, according to which the entire region had only recently been formed, and the names that were entered on the maps, were those the right words, or insidious disguises for incorrect, misleading topographies? Who then could have given you the correct, accurate names? You were almost always hidden away or submerged in your suite of rooms at the edge of the suburb, still much too far away from each point of your life and of the corresponding life there in that city: you never had nor would ever get a proper impression of it, because not even its improper — let alone its proper — rules would have meant anything to you: that’s why you often couldn’t even be sure if the designation for the city corresponded to the city itself; yes, to be sure, one word or the other was clearly legible on the maps available to you, but didn’t these maps often change their shape as you were trying to orient yourself according to them?
Yes, look at the map, at the crest of that hill there on the plans, that hill is starting to change before your eyes, it’s dissolving under the blue snakeskins of this torrential trickle that meanders from the foothill countries of the map through valleys and gorges into the lowlands, suddenly streaming along into the tableland, together with its waterfall chains, as if cut into the plains, stretching straight out over the edges of the map, perhaps to wind back again soon and seep into the city map you look at when you look at the city, you who roam around its frayed outskirts, at its canvas edges, aimlessly lost between the dilapidated shacks and the many machine-chassis gangs with their shovel loaders, digging trenches where they will bury meadows alive and toss entire rolled-up forests out of their path: they grin gloatingly, wielding their pliers, and mockingly threaten the hysterical swarms of birds of prey while sending clumps of old garbage whirling through the day. . but they are also partially occupied with each other, with trying to unscrew, dismantle, and modify each other, whereby on the one hand they puff themselves up alarmingly with the steel-rib gears of their chromium- or nickel-plated thoraxes, spitting screws, almost bursting rivets, in order then on the other hand to shrivel up again into themselves, rumbling together, almost wizened, yes, sometimes they collapse in on themselves, clatter together in a huff, but more often they just attack one another with their grasping shovel tongs and mutually pluck each other’s headlight eyes out of their driverless cabs, yes, they usually can’t take a joke; but then again a lot of them wind up in an embrace after very clumsily pinching each other’s rear ends with the pincers on their clawed arms, sinking toward each other, getting wedged deeply into each other, gliding with their penis rods extended into holes the size of luggage lockers that are opening especially for them, and so in they sink, clutching each other, swinging over each other: they merge, and then, look, Burgmüller, how they all mutually roll each other through the air of this day, into the distance, or else they roll back into the municipal authorities’ fleet of vehicles, pushing each other out of the way. .