On the Internet reference was made to diary entries by Peter Handke: “Bei der Nachricht vom Tod des Freundes: die Vorstellung der Welt als ein Zimmer, aus dem erschwunden ist”. The world like a room from which the dead friend has disappeared. It is said well and empathetically, and sometimes you look for images and formulations that express what it means that someone has disappeared – as if they could be expressed that way.
A friend wrote that Handke touched on what she and I were recently talking about: how a room in which someone’s last weeks unfold is a world, and becomes just a room again when the dead person has been carried out and the things have been cleared away.
And how strange it is that you can feel homesick, in a certain way, for that very space in which what you didn’t want took place.
Strange and not strange of course, because then the now dead person was still alive, no matter how ill, and then you still lived in the intensity of the farewell and now in the emptiness of the aftermath.
After the death of his wife, Gerrit Kouwenaar wrote the series of poems ‘total white room’. That sounds like what happened next, but it is also different, because in the title poem he wants to make the room white one more time ‘together’.
What is that, whitening a room? Yes, of course, running the paintbrush along the walls, but in the poem it seems to be more than that: creating a void in which the two people and their existence will be contained apart from any matter. “so once again that room, the forever total/ as we lay there, lie there, remain there/ whiter than, together –”
At Kouwenaar, too, the room takes on a much greater meaning than just any room, precisely by making it white. Handke actually makes the big smaller, he turns the world into a room.
I think of a room after a visit with friends – it’s not necessarily an annoyingly deserted room, on the contrary, the lights are still on, it’s still warm, snippets of conversation drift through the air, empty glasses exude a faint smell of liquor and in your own the company’s head is still buzzing. Such a room is actually very comfortable.
The room from which the friend has disappeared is only an abandoned room if it was his own room, which has now lost all meaning. It is not the case that you find everything in your friends’ interior meaningful, the question of the ‘sense’ or ‘meaning’ of what stands or hangs there generally does not occur to you, what you see is simply that which surrounds them and in which they live.
But once they leave it is different, even if they are still alive but for some reason you are alone in their house. It is strangely quiet there, the chairs suddenly look at you strangely, some places even take on a decidedly hostile air – everything you are doing here seems to question everything, and you dare not touch anything because everything says: this is not yours.
Because every inhabited room is a world.
Can you simply turn that image around as Handke does? The world is a friend’s room. But he is no longer present in it and now that space is no longer familiar. One’s own presence in it has also become strange. Everything comes together: the room was a world, the world has become a room, and that room is empty.
But rooms always fill up again, with voices, with music and portraits, with life.