Column | Make the dot on the horizon a comma

It goes too far to tell how I came upon the Hungarian László Krasznahorkai and his plea for the comma. At least, I think that’s going too far. That’s why I decide to put another point right away. A point is fast. A period is the instrument of the short-track thinker, the executioner, the fast boy, while the comma…

Well, I do want to point out that I got caught up in a conversation about the war in Ukraine. Someone predicted that it will come to an end in the course of this year. Once you have determined that point on the horizon, all you have to do is calculate how many weapons you need to send to the front to get to that point. I questioned that reasoning. „Assumption is the mother of all fuck ups”, I said politely. Because how do we know when a war ends?

Then someone else spoke up. He was an expert and that added extra persuasiveness to his intervention. You cannot avoid structuring and modeling history, he said. If you don’t know the end point, you don’t know where to start. That is why we now determine when the war will be over. Just as well as we can already see that inflation will fall to 5 percent in the course of the year.

This was, as they say, a sharp analysis and it’s hard to be disparaging, but I’ll try anyway. Placing a period puts a highly arbitrary end to the incalculable stream of events and incidents and offers the suggestion of an overview that does not exist. When Chancellor Scholz of Germany says his country can support Ukraine “without risk growing in the wrong direction – trust me,” he is making up a future and reasoning backwards.

I once read an essay in progress by the young philosopher Jesse Havinga, in which he pointed to the same way of reasoning in a research proposal on the energy transition. The energy demand would double in the next twenty years, the proposal stated. The authors had simply calculated this by extending the existing line in their model, and with that, Havinga wrote, their prediction fitted in flawlessly with the natural course of things: ‘God, yes, the future, of course more energy is needed then ‘. There was nothing for it but to innovate.

But, Havinga wondered, what about the concepts of future and innovation if you have already pinned them down in advance? According to the research proposal, the researcher was only supposed to find out how the predicted future could be made possible. “This kind of research does not think about the future, it starts from it. It asks how the present must be so that the future, which is inevitable, can come into being.”

This observation interested me deeply at the time, and because I now wanted to quote the philosopher Havinga properly, not from a dirty pirate edition in my archives, I went looking for his essay, only to find a reference online to another essay in progress by him , and that was about the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai and the comma.

Actually, I realized as I continued reading, Krasznahorkai is not so much about doing the comma, but more about avoiding the full stop, which too artificially orders and demarcates sentences, thoughts and experiences, because in fact no one ever speaks in short, rounded sentences with a period at the end, our speech is propelled by the search for that one sentence that describes everything and is not handily divided, but fragile, fluid, a form of groping forward.

So, to make a long story short: that’s how I came across the Hungarian László Krasznahorkai and the point. From the realization that you shouldn’t anticipate the outcome of events, I ended up with the question of how to talk about it, how to let the story progress, even if you don’t know the end yet.

You need order and structure, I concluded, but the real information is in the unpredictability, the variation, the deviation. „It’s not so much the drummer’s foot we want to know about, it’s what he is doing upstairs with his hands”, as I once heard Leonard Bernstein say.

And if you now protest that this is completely irrelevant, this thinking about the punctuation with which we shape history, then you should have heard the Prime Minister, when he apologized for the slavery past, which he had previously considered completed, but that still seems to live on in our society and the end of which cannot be predicted. “We don’t put a full stop,” he said, “but a comma.” That comma is so relevant and current.

Max February is a lawyer and writer, www.maximfebruari.nl.