Letter to Thomas Bernhard

Letter to Thomas Bernhard

BY Robert Kelly

I don’t know why I’m bothering to write to
you. You’re dead, for one thing. All we
really share is a love for Glenn Gould and
long sentences, probably that’s the same
love in different forms. Forms of art. I
think it’s mostly because I want to borrow
your complaining tone. Really, your skill
at complaining and making the reader keep
reading, even liking, the diet of groans,
the antiphonal maledictions of your characters.
Such skill, skill indeed. But immer schimpfend,
said a woman in Vienna years ago when I said
I liked your work, she didn’t like it, you
were always bitching. Maybe some other word,
meaning to complain and to blame, at once.
You survive in me. Any me, of course, not
this particular grieving animal who addresses
you now, you would have put that in italics
so I will, this grieving animal who speaks to
you now. Am I trying to flatter you by writing
like you, a little, not that I could really
write like you, your gravitas, humor, skill,
charm, rhythm, but I can certainly seem
to be trying to — is that flattery, or mockery?
No paragraphs, no quotations marks, no let up
’til the end, just like you know what. I have
a lot to complain about, and who else can be
trusted to listen but a dead man, a man what’s
more who in some sense chose to be a dead
man at this very time when I need a living man,
a man four years older than I am, in fact, no
older than my first wife, a woman who died the
same year that you died, if my facts are straight,
they seldom are. Dead man, will you be my friend?
Or at least listen, that’s the least you can do.
Maybe even the most, but I can’t say. What do
I know about the dead? It’s the living, of course,
I suppose, that are the problem. The living,
and the way we set about to be living. For one
thing, the most terrible thing of all probably,
I hate grown-ups. I have hated grown-ups all
my life, I hate grown-ups and now I have become
one. Isn’t that horrible? The way Saul woke up
and found he was himself a hated Christian.
Only no toppling swoons and flashing lights
for me, just the slow inexorable Work of
the Mirror that paints time’s grisaille
on my cheekbones, time’s sly etching technique
using no mordant fiercer than the nervous hours.
What can I do? I hate grown-ups, the way I hate
nature. Nature will kill you every time. As
you know perfectly well, I’m just reminding
us both, from nature there’s no way out but
out. I hate grown-ups and I look just like
a grown-up, who would know the truth looking
at me? The way you changed in your television
interviews, from the smooth cheeked shy author
of the late 1960s to the blotched skin and
annoyed celebrity, almost arrogant, of the late
interviews, but who can blame you, such dumb
questions, your books said it all, what did
they want you to say that language had not
already told them? You looked like a man
in bad health in those last interviews, and
so you were, and sure enough you came to die.
Stories are told about that but I’m not
interested in stories. Not now. Before,
you were alive; after, you were dead.
And what accesses of choice or refusing
to choose, of will or negation of will,
may have come between those two states,
that’s not on my mind now. You did what
you had to do. Bless you, my heart goes
out to you, glad to have heard you, a
little, glad to have read you. You did me
good. What I can do for you is another matter.
You did what you had to do. Nothing, I
suppose. Though we both come from people who
believed, or said they believed, in praying
for the departed souls, the souls in
Purgatory, praying for them, their happiness
in whatever follows life, does anything,
doesn’t matter, praying for them is at least
praying for other people, that can’t be wrong,
can it? Can’t hurt might help we say. Yet
selfishly we pray for our dead, our own
departed. And what about all the billions
unknown to us, nameless to us, not our dead
at all, not ours at all except by species, if
even that. But at least we pray. So this letter
is a little bit praying for you, you who are
off in some condition that likely is wholly
imaginary, in the course of a survival that is
to say the least problematic, and which, if it
has any currency at all, that is to say, if it
exists, is likely to be of a sort splendidly
(or glumly) impersonal. You survive the way
the world survives. You survive in me. Any me,
of course, not this particular grieving animal
who addresses you now, you would have put that
in italics so I will, this grieving animal who
speaks to you now. Am I trying to flatter you
by writing like you, a little, not that I could
really write like you, your gravitas, humor,
skill, charm, rhythm, but I can certainly seem
to be trying to — is that flattery, or mockery?
No paragraphs, no quotations marks, no let up
’til the end, just like you know what. What
we’ve been talking about all along. And whereas
this business of death — almost a commercial
concern, Death, Inc. — for the sake of which
life seems to be conducted, Death as the
exclusive beneficiary of all our sweat and so
forth, fluid after fluid, has preoccupied writers
of every kind from before the beginning of the
alphabet to this day, it is not death that is
the problem here, the one I entered into this
(dreary as it must be for you) correspondence
to examine and deplore. No, it is in fact birth.
Birth is hard. It is degrading. I am complaining
about birth. Not, as usual with so many of us,
complaining, blaming, schimpfen, about being
born. No, being here is fine. Or ineradicably
as it is, no question. No question about being
here makes sense. But having to get born to get
here, that’s just wrong. The fact that for
thousands of years, as they say, since the ice,
we have been being born from inside someone
else’s body. What a humiliation! What a
degradation of the woman, of the child.
This is intolerable. It is time to change it.
The fact that we have accepted this state of
affairs, this outrageous, post-Edenic way of
making more of us is the worst of all our
practices, and not doing anything to
change it is the worst failure of human
imagination and skill since we let Atlantis
founder. That we worm our way out of the
flesh, are born like maggots, soft and
defenseless and foul-smelling and bedewed
with our mother’s agony, this is not how it
should be. This is not art. This is not
science. This is not culture. This must
change. Don’t ask me how. How isn’t your
business, not any more, and certainly not
mine. I have certain pictures of my own
in my head, about how that change might look
if it did happen. Pictures of pale chambers
lit by an eternal unnatural light, like the
magic caverns of Damanhur or the crystalline
abysses in the Mines of Falun. In these
places there would be wandering about, and
from these chambers, caves, grottoes of the
future, there would come, quiet happy grown-
ups full of kindness and wisdom, yes, there
could be such beings in the time to come,
grown-ups wandering, wandering purposefully
through the luminous definition, watering
and tending and pruning and whispering little
fairy-godmother spells of pure DNA. Intentional.
Carefully thought-out. Tender. Humming a new
song for new cells. They would coax one another
into being, new being. By chemicals and word
of mouth we would grow, lit by a curious light
spilling out of the mind itself, amplified
unnaturally by some bizarre disposition of
crystals, think Novalis: In crystal grottoes
reveled a luxuriant folk. They move, we move,
in a light in which we would grow each other.
I hear in my surmise some of Blake’s raving
against the rational. Nature is the most
rational of all, all of ‘her’ escapades have
rational purpose and foundation. Nature is
the enemy, here. Nature is the enemy. Not
Novalis’s sense of it as our mind in luminous
nexus with everything there is, growing and
being grown at once. No. Nature as it is
understood by the austere simpletons who
use the word as their supreme accolade,
natural life style, natural food, natural
childbirth. I hate nature. Nature is what
happens to us, you know that, and what
happens to us is what we must despise.
If we have anything pure at all, it is
our will, maybe, our will to be better and.
And. And what. Something beyond nature. I
hate nature. Nature is my Austria. So it
is time for a poetry of pure flesh, or,
if that sounds too poetic, for a flesh
healed by poetry, flensed of its penchant
for begetting, its tendency to swell up
inside victim-women its new identities,
alien arrivers. These beings who purport
to come from our testicles and ova,
who demonstrably ripen in our wombs, who
are they? Children are horrible, I’ve
always hated them, hated to be around
other children when I was a child,
hated them even more than I hated adults,
but I knew that adults were incurable,
but there might still be some hope for
Paul or Raymond or Joan or Miriam, my
little friends. No doubt I was wrong, and
they’re all just grown-ups now, or dead,
like you. Who knows where children get to?
They are always running out of the house.
Sometimes they don’t come back. Sometimes
when they don’t come back they’re not dead,
like you, or grown up, as I seem to be,
but are just gone. Gone as a condition,
gone as a state of being all its own.
They are not some abducted changelings
like Rilke’s ‘early-snatched-away,’ not
at all, instead they vanished into being
who they are. As perhaps I may one day too,
and as you probably did. Neither child nor
grown-up, not woman and certainly not man.
Who are we, Thomas, who are we really?
Who are we, Thomas, who are we really?
I appeal to you, because of the savor
of your elevated, abstruse condition,
a condition that is bounded by certainties
of all kinds, tell me. I love my country
with a corrosive scorn like the tender
and detailed hatred you affected towards
your Austria, all emotions are one, isn’t
that finally so, all emotions are just
kleshas, just ways we feel, habitual
energies prompted into doing. I appeal
to you, because of the savor of your
elevated, abstruse condition, a condition
that is bounded by certainties of all kinds,
tell me. I love my country with a corrosive
scorn like the tender and detailed hatred
you affected towards your Austria, all
emotions are one, isn’t that finally so,
all emotions are just kleshas, just ways
we feel, habitual energies prompted into
doing. Who cares what we feel? A feeling is
just something you feel. So what. Call it
love, call it hate, I slept almost eight
hours last night for the first time in
months, and I had no dreams for the first
time in weeks. I woke uneasy, knowing they
were up to something, as it is said, never
specifying, never even knowing, who ‘they’
are. The children, I thought, it might be
them, the hated and hate-filled children
might be starting at last their long-
deferred crusade against the grown-ups
and their messed up world. The children,
they are detestable, they can’t talk, they
don’t read, they don’t love, they don’t
care about anything that I care about,
my poetry and your noble prose are trash
to them, and trash to the adults they are
likely to become. But still I’m on their
side, because they march out, maybe even
this very day, with slingshots and tasers
and ninja weapons, against our common enemy,
yours and mine, you called it Austria,
I call it Nature, grown-ups, the president,
the pope, the people. Any collective that
has no living beings in it, but only members.
A member is a thing incomplete, a hand
without an arm, an arm without a torso, a
torso without a man. These children are
still children, alas, not the dream people
I foresee and whose coming into our world,
full in flesh but dripping from no agony,
gleaming only with the radiance of the
technology from which they are spoken
into the world, whose coming into the world
I demand, demand, no weaker insistence.
Come them into us! Maranatha, new child!
Such raving your silence lets me give vent
to, you who pretend to be dead, how well
you hear for a dead man, you hear like your
dead emperors in the Kapuzinergruft, I have
stood there and heard the banal sanctity
of their anthems, the tumultuous alchemical
racket of their longaeval bones, ash, crumble,
greasy leftovers of more than one kingdom
stuffed in marble. At her grave also have I
stood, you don’t need to hear her name yet
again. When I went down those stairs and stood
alone among the dead, why was I alone, where
were the tourists who should have elbowed me
aside with their digital cameras, their cold
little remembering machines, how had the chill
November rain managed to keep them in their
snug buses? I stood there and listened to the
dead, as I listen to you now, and hear you
hearing me, and that Möbius-like infolding
of our hearing lets me talk, it seems,
confident of your acoustic eternity. If the
Hapsburg croakers could hear me, so can you.
And you know what I’m asking for, I detest
children, so of course I don’t want any more
of them in the world, but I do want people,
people of a sort, of a quality, a limpidity,
a torsion, fluid in limb and welcome in fold,
people who are born with Bach inside them,
children who are never young and adults who
are never grown up, these betweeners I yearn
for, pretty girls and boys remind us of what
they might look like, these yet-to-come, and
listening to, say, the Third Partita gives us
a sense of what their minds and hearts would be
busy with all day long, and quiet at night, and
no time for flowers. Flowers are left for the
rest of us, we leftover infantile adults that
the world endures as well as it can, its artists,
writers, swindlers, crocodile wranglers, mountain
climbers, gardeners, composers of serious modern
music. For I would be flesh, and would discourse
with my own, and my own have not come into the
world. Or they have fled from it, suicided or
snatched away by grisly ailments the doctors
pretend to name and throw vile-tasting drugs at,
or using their radiation and their surgery, grow
obscenely rich by maiming those they cannot heal.
Someone not born of woman comes to rescue me from
my life. I will write again should that person
come, or I will come walk with you in the all-too-
formal gardens of the afterlife. They may be just
like the Schönbrunn you detested, the emperor’s
palace, his lopsided Versailles with the land’s
first zoo full of uneasy animals serving life
sentences, all of it a pale yellow, color of
winter sunlight fading. The name means pretty
fountain, doesn’t it, or spring, water of the
afterlife. When life finally begins.


Robert Kelly

Posted over on Cerise Press