He was still standing in front of the caryatid, whose gently rounded shoulders were supporting a multistory bay tower on this building. She seemed to him like the very picture of his hopes and wishes, an imitation that had arisen long before its original, as if they had all somehow turned to stone in the form of the caryatid’s head. Why?
But what if she wasn’t an imitation of his longing for things he knew nothing about — and of which understanding was in any case out of reach — but rather, possibly, a sort of artist’s model for it, or indeed its negative image? Why? Because he couldn’t help but project his inner images, which were vague at best, outside of himself and over the stony woman there? Was that why he’d been abandoned by his lost love, because any woman beside him was made to feel increasingly like a living, feeling, female telamon who was expected to support the entranceway to his building, or some other thing, and who therefore became afraid that she would finally turn to stone, as he had now?
Yes, he felt like a sort of telamon, even though he could probably move more quickly than this caryatid, and even though he wasn’t supporting anything fixed, but rather just a column of air that reached vertically up from his shoulders to the limits of the stratosphere.
And now he suddenly knew why, because he was touched by a gaze that had such a deep understanding of him that he felt completely penetrated by it.
When was the last time he had felt such a gaze, almost the same one? When he had looked at that woman for the first time and asked himself what she might see with such eyes. When looked at by them, everything was equally touched, presumably such eyes didn’t miss a thing, or almost nothing, and though he hadn’t felt seen-through, if he had nevertheless been seen through, to take the thought to its natural conclusion, he could have been seen through even if he’d been transparent.
On the skin of his eyes, he had felt exactly how that woman, back then, while she kept looking at him, had started to mirror herself: he had felt the contours of her face exactly, how they had been placed there by the light between them, sliding up under his eyelids, and had remained fixed over his pupils as a mirror image, as if, from her barely clouded eyes, a pleasant weather had precipitated over the open fields of his eyes, a mirror image of her face had formed in the air and had sunk down behind his forehead.
The painfully arising memory subsides again as soon as it becomes clear to him that it’s not a matter now of that gaze back then, but rather as he now feels, of a perhaps even stronger gaze today, coming from those eyes across from him, whose color is not contained in the rainbow spectrum.
He feels the copy of her face pass from his eyes on into his head, as the sails of his eyelid-curtains fall briefly down and rise up again, so that she may have been given the impression that he was either winking at her or that he could no longer bear the uninterrupted sight of her, because her looking at him so weakens the arches of his eyebrows, but no, it’s just the lines of her face that he feels fleetingly brush through his field of vision, like a long foehn rain flowing deep into his head, falling over the snowfields of his angle of vision, and he asks himself how it is that her open gaze can be so immediately perceptible, so vibrant, that he feels the outlines of this gaze floating through the surfaces of his irises, as if etched in with minute precision.
It was almost as if he was touching the caryatid despite her distance from him, as if he could already feel her very deeply without having to cross the stream of air that was flowing between them, as if he could swim toward her, to the shore of her voice, to collect some of the flotsam and jetsam of the sentences she had begun in the surf of her gaze, still directed at him, and which suddenly lowered over him like a veil. He thought he could hear something, but hear wasn’t the right word, no, it was a multicolored shimmering shadow-fluttering that glistened through the suburb.
Do you hear me, he thought he heard the stone woman say — listen!
Yes, he felt himself answer, he understood.
The caryatid seemed to go on to say that she had already heard so much about his sleep-art demonstrations back then, which had been described to her in stories, but what a shame that he’d never brought his show out here to her.
He was sorry, he replied, but in those days he had unfortunately known nothing about her, otherwise he wouldn’t have slipped up like that, he could assure her.
Would he perhaps soon, in that regard, have more time, a lot more time to devote to her, if that wouldn’t cause him too much inconvenience, she asked.
Of course, any time.
Does that mean that you now have a lot more free time than usual, perhaps even forever?
Yes, yes.
Then please lie down here with me as soon as possible, for as long as you can, my dear, and fall asleep, sleep with me forever, always, if you want, and when I’ve studied your sleep for ages, when finally I begin to learn how you sleep, because of your very special way of sleeping so conscientiously by me, because of your great care in sleeping near me, so that I will no longer be limited to simply observing your sleep, but might also begin to sleep with you. . do you understand. . together. .
Yes, he understood. He would come back to her as soon as possible to get started. He had to fetch a few necessary things from home beforehand, for their great common undertaking. He lived over there, on the other side of town. A blanket, you know, and perhaps, in any case, if dreams should fail, as does sometimes happen, several varieties of widely prescribed sleeping pills, to be able to speed up one’s individual contribution, to be as helpful as possible, you understand. .
And Burgmüller began to give one of his extensive dream lectures to the female telamon, to his stone girlfriend. He considered dreams to be not only his and our friends, but also superiors, authorities: in actual fact, people only live their lives in order to support their dreams, and it’s only to be able to offer them a good house, a roof over their heads, during the necessary times of our absence and separation from them, that we bother holding down dreamless daily jobs. When a dream plan has linked up with us, he explained, has woven its way into us, we have to make sure that it doesn’t soon get lazy and lethargic, otherwise it starts to die, rolls up the lamenting rainbow melodies of its withering sound images more and more, drops like an invisibly pupated cocoon, from which it can nonetheless slip out again, after some time, perhaps on a new flight, in search of another mind; from which it follows, though, that it isn’t just we who are dependent on dreams, but also they are dependent on us, because what would they do if no one took any notice of them? but, after all, don’t we have to grant them the right to be vain? doesn’t their life consist of being admired and longed for? because if they didn’t feel anyone’s contemplation of them, they wouldn’t know anything about themselves, the effect of their own images would remain unknown to them, the images that only become visible to them when one of us takes them inside us, comes into contact with them, because without being understood and felt, they feel nothing, they hear not a single note of their own music. I suspect that to the dreams, we represent something like the sound boxes of unimaginable acoustic spaces, or mirrors, perhaps parabolic mirrors, in which they can experience something of themselves; perhaps all of us are nothing more than a chaotically muddled, nearly endless composite gallery of parabolic mirrors that is passed through, wandered through by countless dream-chords, and the volume of its space may correspond roughly to that of the atmosphere; but when dreams start to fall away from you, to fall out of you, you have to be careful that you don’t get used to being without them all too soon, because if you’re without dreams for too long, soon you can’t be a mirror to them anymore, then they just brush past you behind the back of your eyes, and even if you’ve still noticed them from afar, no attempt, however friendly, to curry favor with them will induce them to stay with you any longer, because at such a point not even your sleep can offer them a safe haven, because then even the sound-image mirror-windows of our desires will have become blind to our thoughts, alarmingly unusable, which is why our dreams will no longer feel anything of themselves in us: no matter how long they remained with you, out of pity, that pity would be the only thing functioning — the chambers of our feelings, as rigid as in death, would be their grave, and the frozen remains of their shadows would soon fill you to the bursting point — which is to say, you’d have nightmares. . Of course, sometimes dreams come that soon get the feeling that they don’t really suit us, or else that they’ve caught us at a bad time; such a dream soon steps sadly out of you and goes on its way, distances itself slowly, though never holding a grudge; it’s disappointed, yes, but never casts blame, and only as it is falling out of your sensation chambers do you feel the sadness of the dream that is leaving you, and you feel it for a long time afterwards, even when the last trace of the memory of its images seems to have flown away, because dream-funeral music always remains behind as a feeling of bright, ebullient bitterness about the polychromatic terror of an awakening in which you know only too well that you’ve missed out on something crucial, without being able to determine exactly what; then we’re filled with the suspicion that our travels and way stations through the dream domains demand a certain vague preparedness, certain ambiguous skills of us that we can only provide to a certain extent, and we only gradually put off those travels little by little as our experience of longing increases. . But sooner or later you’re out of time, you’ve reached the limit, there’s no more room for your utopianism, because you’re just not up to the demands that follow from it, so you’ll never be able to imagine the number of potentially fulfilled wishes that haven’t so much as begun to set foot on our dream territory, or to imagine how many dream possibilities we’ll never experience; presumably we’re so far removed from the truly great plans because we just don’t have the slightest inkling about them: are they unattainable because they have to be protected from us? Not that we couldn’t endure them, but rather that they couldn’t endure us, without immediately being completely and utterly destroyed.