It doesn’t have anything to do with asceticism when someone sits in a cell and writes. It has much more to do with the activation of the living cells that comprise their own phone booths, monks’ cells and prison cells within the body. Countless stories are told in these enclosed spaces. When I write, I try to hear the stories coming from within my body. When I listen, I realize how unfamiliar my own cells are to me. They consist of what I have inherited and what I have eaten. Thus it often happens that a story I hear within my body seems to me chronologically or geographically distant.
But can one understand the language of cells at all? The question brings to mind the image of yet another celclass="underline" the booth for simultaneous interpreters. At international congresses you often see these beautiful transparent booths in which people stand telling stories: they translate, so actually they are retelling tales that already exist. The lip movements and gestures of each interpreter and the way each of them glances about as she speaks are so various it’s difficult to believe they are all translating a single, shared text. And perhaps it isn’t really a single, shared text after all, perhaps the translators, by translating, demonstrate that this text is really many texts at once. The human body, too, contains many booths in which translations are made. I suspect that these are all translations for which no original exists. There are people, though, who assume that everyone is given an original text at birth. They call the place in which these texts are stored a soul.
2
In Hamburg-on-the-Elbe there is a small harbor known as Devil’s Bridge. A long time ago, no one was able to build a bridge across the Elbe strong enough to withstand a severe autumn storm. The devil made the desperate Hamburg merchants an offer: he would build an indestructible bridge. In payment he demanded a soul. The merchants promised to give him a soul when the bridge was completed. When the devil had finished work, it became apparent that none of the merchants was prepared to forfeit his soul, and so they sent a rat across the bridge to the devil, who stamped on the rat in fury and then sank into the earth. Since then the harbor has been called Devil’s Bridge.
When I first heard this legend, I didn’t understand it, because I didn’t know rats have no souls. That is, rats have no souls for the devil, who is quite Christian in his orientation. In other religions that tell of the lives of plant souls and animal souls, a rat most certainly does have a soul — one every bit as precious as that of a Hamburg merchant. The devil needn’t have been disappointed.
I have two ways of visualizing the human soul. In the first, the soul looks like an elongated roll I once ate in Tübingen. This sort of bread is called Seele or “soul” in Swabia, and many people have souls in this shape. But this doesn’t mean the soul is inserted into their bodies like a roll. The soul is an empty space in the body that must constantly be filled with the roll that has the same shape as this space, or with an embryo, or with the breath of love. Otherwise the owners of the souls feel as if something is missing.
The second way I picture the soul is as a fish whose name is also “sole”: thus the soul is related to water, or to the sea. I’m thinking of something like the soul of a shaman. Among the Tungus, for example, it’s said the soul of the aspiring shaman draws the tribal river down to the dwelling place of the shaman’s ancestral spirits. There, among the roots of the tribe’s shamanic tree, lies the shaman’s animal mother, who devours the soul of the new arrival and then gives birth to it in the form of an animal. This animal can be a quadruped, or it can be a bird or a fish; in any case, it functions as the shaman’s double and guardian spirit.
It’s a nice thought that somewhere in the world the soul is leading its own life in animal form. The soul is independent from the person in question. The human being has no way of knowing what the soul is experiencing, but still there is a link between him and his soul. I would like to share a life with the person I call “my soul” as the shaman does with his; I never see or speak with this person, but everything I experience and write corresponds to this person’s life. I appear to be soulless because my soul is constantly in transit.
3
In a book about Indians I once read that the soul cannot fly as fast as an airplane. Therefore one always loses one’s soul on an airplane journey, and arrives at one’s destination in a soulless state. Even the Trans-Siberian Railway travels more quickly than a soul can fly. The first time I came to Europe on the Trans-Siberian Railway, I lost my soul. When I boarded the train to go back, my soul was still on its way to Europe. I was unable to catch it. When I traveled to Europe once more, my soul was still making its way back to Japan. Later I flew back and forth so many times I no longer know where my soul is. In any case, this is a reason why travelers most often lack souls. And so tales of long journeys are always written without souls.
4
According to Walter Benjamin, there are two kinds of storytellers: “When someone goes on a trip, he has something to tell about, goes the German saying, and people imagine the storyteller as someone who has come from afar. But they enjoy no less listening to the man who has stayed at home, making an honest living, and who knows the local tales and traditions. If one wants to picture these two groups through their archaic representatives, one is embodied in the resident tiller of the soil, and the other in the trading seaman.”
There are some who travel much farther than sailors and remain in one place even longer than the oldest farmer: the dead. And so there are no storytellers more interesting than the dead. But it is a problem that their language cannot be understood, it is not even audible. How can one hear the stories of the dead? This is one of the most difficult tasks of literature and is solved in different ways in various cultures.
A theater, for example, is often a place where the dead can speak. A simple example is found in Hamlet: the dead father comes on stage and tells how he was killed by his brother. That is the decisive moment in this play, without which neither Hamlet nor the audience would have access to the past. They would have to go on believing the story of the murderer, who claimed Hamlet's father had been bitten by a poisonous snake. Through the dead man's story we learn a bit of the past that otherwise would have remained obscure. The theater is the place where knowledge not accessible to us becomes audible. In other places, we almost always hear only the tales of the living. They force their stories on us to justify themselves, and so that they will be able to go on living, like Hamlet's uncle. The tales told by the dead are fundamentally different, because their stories are not told to conceal their wounds.
5
There are other places besides theaters where one can hear the stories of the dead: for example in an anthropological museum. At the Museum of Anthropology in Hamburg there are a number of transparent coffins lined up one beside the other, each containing a dead figure. Each figure personifies a tribe. A coffin standing on end resembles a phone booth because the figures inside look as if they are about to tell a story. That is probably why these coffins have to be standing up rather than lying flat, as coffins usually do.