But for a modern seeker like this, in addition to the temporal there was also a spatial distance from the distance of the seeker guilds, at a distance from their underbrush seeking grounds or hardly traversable plantations, for example the places behind the cemeteries here in the bay’s forests, where the layers of leaves were not only considerably thicker but also mixed with rotted flowers and such, which had been thrown over the wall. Altogether, it was the delimited, overseeable spots, and not the great expanses, where one got into the right kind of seeking without even trying. The modern seeker had only to walk up and down there attentively, and at the same time selflessly.
Was being free of oneself desirable, then? Yes. And how? Something like this: “Be still now! Be still in yourself!”
And it got warm again during the search, when leaves blown from far away, from trees entirely different from those hereabouts, mingled with the local ones. Then it became a matter of getting one’s head into the searching angle, especially since late fall played tricks on the seeker more and more, to mention only the slanting light, and the mushrooms, under the fallen leaves, took on camouflage colors.
That seeker figure that hovered before my eyes while I myself was seeking moved with a particular seeking step, of unprecedented elegance, in a unique search dance, from one foot to the other, at the same time the most inconspicuous of dances. And from his sort of seeking he had become athletic, and part of it was that again and again he went backward, or turned in a circle for a while (did not merely look over his shoulder), in a fashion similar to that in which long ago, on the Jaunfeld Plain, at the celebration of the summer solstice, the young men carrying torches had swung them around during the procession, according to ancient custom, to get these torches to flare up constantly — a custom which, according to the latest parish bulletin, is supposed to be revived soon.
But what did such renewed seeking lead to, except perhaps to a small meal? Aside from the fact that I have never in my life eaten as well and as nicely as in this year — the different kind of seeker, as I conjured him up in my imagination, let me tell you, noticed in passing more than before: saw in passing the transition in the Seine hills from the grayish-blue Fontainebleau sand to the white sandstone named after the Montmorency region, and in passing the hundreds-of-years-old wagon tracks in the forest, going back to the days of kings, and in passing the boulders thrown up half a century ago already, and now again from the bomb craters, and in passing the often amazingly intricate leaf-covered huts of the increasing numbers of homeless in the region.
And he succeeded, simply through his seeking, even without finding anything, in collecting himself. For what? For naught. And precisely when he made a great, marvelous find he was seized with anxiety: a small, innocuous one should be added to it, by way of confirmation, reassurance. And toward the end of autumn a longing for nothing but modest finds set in, for russulas, ringed boletes, blewits, and ordinary little moss mushrooms — no more majestic mushrooms! And from time to time the seeker actually set out with the motto “Today I shall succeed in not finding anything!” And in midstream, precisely because of his searching, he forgot this, too, and the beauty of the land, the clouds, the trees, and the paths gained the upper hand.
And an ever-new source of pleasure in seeking would be the mistakes. “What a sad day it will be when I no longer make mistakes!” My future seeker would welcome his mix-ups, would fondle them, use them to study the laws governing human error (and himself), would finally set up a room in his house just “for my mistakes”; would use his optical illusions to keep himself impressionable, as he would use the places in the woods searched until completely empty to collect himself. And thus collected, to continue seeking will appear to him as a renewal of the world. It will become bright, within him as well as in the landscape, from his collected seeking.
And what now, in wintertime, in the cold, when there is nothing more to seek for in the wooded areas? Yes, there was hoarfrost this morning on the few remaining mushrooms there, which, one way or another, like the ice-covered pond, across which my stones pinged, no longer had a name. And my three-season writing seat, tipped into the water by children playing, stuck up from among the ice floes. And the hoarfrosted cap of one of these nameless mushroom-people bore the mark, paper-thin, of the foot of a very light, very small, seemingly one-legged bird. And at home, from the window of my mistake room, I contemplated the plaster cast, a present from the priest in the village of my birth, of the Magi, out there under the garden beech, and likewise saw in all the lumpy gift packages, which they held out into the void, in the frankincense, gold, and myrrh, likewise a king bolete, lord of the mushrooms.
In the meantime my son Valentin, on his crisscross journey through Greece, had long since put the site of the ancient oracle in Dodona behind him. It had become a place that he now recalled in approximately the following terms: “That was where, in the morning, when I went on foot from Ioannina up into the mountains, along the road it was still white with April frost, where at noon, as the only guest sitting outdoors in front of the snack shack near the amphitheater, I had a bee fall into my glass, and where, on my way back over the hills toward evening, from behind and in front sheep dogs jumped up on me.” From Dodona he had sent me a leaf from a chestnut oak, so hard that when it was shaken or even just held up in the wind it produced a metallic clanging sound, and I could imagine how the entire oracle’s grove had once droned, rattled, spoken. (Hadn’t leaves also been gilded?)
He involuntarily spent the summer in Athens, for in the great heat the leg that had almost been severed in his accident swelled up, and he lay there, hardly able to move, in a room in a pension. In the course of the month he covered the walls with paintings, motifs, festively colorful people, ditto flowers as large as people, of the sort he had taken note of in the prehistoric frescoes from Thera or Santorini, removed to the Greek National Museum.
And one day the woman stepped through his door whom he referred to in my presence only as “your woman from Catalonia,” his mother, the person with the most reliable intuition (like me more in connection with bad luck), and took up quarters next to him for a while. For the first time she cared for her son, as if only now the moment had come, and was solicitous, so unobtrusively, as was her style, that he was not even alarmed, as was in turn his style. “My mother was good to me,” he wrote me later.
And she was then the one who helped him get back on his feet by grabbing her overgrown son, on the August-dusty Lykabettos Hill in the middle of Athens and dragging him, half naked, through a very special patch of stinging nettles: “The nettle run healed me.” After that, again as was her style, the woman from Catalonia vanished.
Not once during this year did Valentin make the crossing to one of the Greek islands. He had promised his girlfriend that he would visit them only with her, at some later date; he got as far as watching the ferries in Piraeus. In the fall, on the Peloponnesus, he received word that his text on the different winter grays, which he had illustrated with drawings and watercolors, had received a prize, was being printed and displayed in a gallery.