Not an illustrated report; tell me a story.
A few days ago the dead body of a mole was making its way through the dust of this Andalusian road as slowly and solemnly as the statues of sorrow that are carried about on stands during Easter Week here in Andalusia; under it, when I turned it over, there was a procession of glittering-gold carrion beetles. And last winter, on a similar dirt road in the Pyrenees, I squatted down in the exact same way as we are squatting now, and watched the snow falling in small grainy flakes, but, once it lay on the ground, indistinguishable from grains of light-colored sand; in melting, however, it left strange puddles, dark spots very different from those made by raindrops, much larger and more irregular as they trickled away into the dust. And as a child, at just the same distance from the ground as we are now, I was walking in the first morning light with my grandfather, on just such a dirt road in Austria, barefoot, just as close to the ground and just as infinitely far from the dispersed craters in the dust, where the raindrops had struck — my first image, one that will let itself be repeated forever.
At last your metaphors for the effects of tiredness introduce not only small-sized objects but also human measure. But why is the tired individual always you and no one else?
It always seemed to me that my greatest tirednesses were also ours. Late one night in Dutovlje in the Karst, the old men were standing at the bar. I had been at odds with them. Tiredness tells its story through the other, even if I’ve never heard of him. Those two over there with the slicked-down hair, the gaunt faces, the split nails, and fresh shirts are farm workers, labradores, who have worked hard all day in the wilds and have come a long way on foot to the town bar, unlike all the others who are standing around here; the one over there, for instance, wolfing down his meal all alone, is a stranger to the region, whose home office has sent him to the Land Rover assembly plant in Linares far from his family, and the old man who can be seen day after day standing at the edge of the olive field, a little dog at his feet, his elbows propped on a fork of the tree, grieving for his dead wife. “Fantasy” comes to the ideally tired man but is different from the fantasy of the sleepers in the Bible or the Odyssey, who have visions: without visions his fantasy shows him what is. And now, though not tired, I have the gall to tell you my fantasy of the last stage of tiredness. In this stage the tired god sat tired and feeble in his tiredness, but — just a notch tireder than a tired human had ever been — all-seeing, with a gaze which, if acknowledged and accepted by those seen, regardless of where in the cosmos, would exert a kind of power.
That’s enough about stages! Speak to me for once about the tiredness you’re thinking of, just as your thoughts come to you, in confusion.
Thanks! Such confusion is at present just the thing for me and my problem. So let’s have a Pindaric ode, not to a victor but to a tired man. I conceive of the Pentecostal company that received the Holy Ghost as tired to a man. The inspiration of tiredness tells them not so much what should, as what need not, be. Tiredness is the angel who touches the fingers of the one dreaming king, while the other kings go on sleeping dreamlessly. Healthy tiredness is in itself recovery. A certain tired man can be seen as a new Orpheus; the wildest beasts gather around him and are at last able to join in his tiredness. Tiredness gives dispersed individuals the keynote. The more sleepless nights he lived though, the more brilliantly the private eye Philip Marlowe succeeded in solving his cases. The tired Odysseus won the love of Nausicaä. Tiredness makes you younger than you ever have been. Tiredness is greater than the self. Everything becomes extraordinary in the tranquillity of tiredness — how extraordinary, for instance, is the bundle of paper which the astonishingly easygoing man over there is carrying across the astonishingly quiet Calle Cervantes. Epitome of tiredness. On Easter Eve long ago, at the commemoration of the Resurrection, the old men of the village used to lie prone before the tomb, wearing red brocade cloaks instead of their blue work clothes, the sunburned skin of their necks split into a polygonal design by their lifelong exertions; the dying grandmother in her quiet tiredness appeased the whole household, even her incorrigibly choleric husband; and every evening here in Linares I watched the growing tiredness of the many small children who had been dragged to the bars: no more greed, no grabbing hold of things, only playfulness. And with all that, is there still any need to say that even in low-level images of tiredness distinctions are preserved?
All very well and good; undeniably, your problem is concrete enough (despite the typically mystical stammering in your way of expressing it). But how are such tirednesses to be induced? By artificially keeping yourself awake? By means of long-distance flights? Forced marches? Herculean labors? By experimenting with dying? Have you a recipe for your utopia? Pep pills for the entire population? Or powders to be added to the drinking water in the Land of the Untired?
I know of no recipe, not even for myself. All I know is this: Such tiredness cannot be planned, cannot be taken as an aim. But I also know that it never sets in without a cause, but always after a hardship, a difficulty needed to be surmounted. And now let us rise and go out into the streets, among people, to see whether a little shared tiredness may not be waiting for us and what it may have to tell us?
But does real tiredness, or real asking for that matter, imply standing rather than sitting? Remember that gnarled old woman, harassed as usual by her son, who was always in a rush in spite of his gray hair, and how she pleaded: “Oh, let’s just sit here a little longer.”
Yes, let’s sit, but not here in this lonely place, amid the rustling eucalyptus leaves, but on the edge of the boulevards, the avenidas, looking on, perhaps with a jukebox within reach.
You won’t find a jukebox in all Spain.
There’s one right here in Linares, a very strange one.
Tell me about it.
No. Another time. In an Essay on the Jukebox. Perhaps.
But before we go out into the street, one last image of tiredness.
All right. It is also my last image of mankind, reconciled in its very last moments, in cosmic tiredness.
Postscript
Those little bird cages in the savanna were not put there to attract eagles. In answer to my question, a man sitting at some distance from one of these rectangles told me he moved them out into the rubble field because he wanted to hear the little birds singing; and the olive branches thrust into the ground beside the cages were not intended to lure the eagles out of the sky, but to make the siskins sing.
Second postscript
Or do the siskins hop for the eagle up there in the sky — which the people would like to see swooping down for a change?
Linares, Andalusia
March 1989
ESSAY ON THE JUKEBOX
Dar tiempo al tiempo.
— SPANISH SAYING
And I saw her standing there.