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'Franz Fühmann - At the Burning Abyss', Daniel Fraser

The light-well: a poet[hic!] encounter

Towards the end of Franz Fühmann’s astonishing account of his life’s meetings with the poetry of Georg Trakl, At the Burning Abyss, there appears a passage from the diaries of – soldier and contemporary of Trakl’s – Karl Röck in which the latter describes an encounter with the drunken poet. My own encounter with this passage stopped my reading in its tracks. The section of the diary which produced the effect reads as follows:

Tues, 20 Aug. at MAX (borrowed 30 crowns from Fi for evening with Kr) [. . .] Evening. Theresia; Trakl comes drunk, screaming like a child [. . .] (Spitting); talk of the dying light bulb in the light well.

Those final two words ‘light well’ sent spiders skittering across my skin. This second-hand recount of an inebriated utterance struck something within. The cause of this rupture being that, over a decade earlier, ‘Light well’ had been the title I had given to a poem, a piece of juvenile doggerel, one of my first forays into poetry (forays best forgotten). Yet – as is often the case with these adolescent outpourings of feeling – one which at the time burned inside me like a black fire: a fire that, by this aleatory occurrence, was suddenly rekindled.

The light-well in my poem was ‘dampening’, a ‘shell of light and striated shadow’, caused by sun rays shining through a glass. The poem was, inevitably, about drink. The glass is one that has been filled with whiskey. It is not without personal import: alcohol is the substance that, in one manner or another, has consumed many members of my immediate family, my close friends and which has, on several occasions, come close to doing the same to me. Alcohol is of course also the substance which Fühmann repeatedly turned to in his own life and which is tied to Trakl due to his renown, amongst his soldiering compatriots, for being able to imbibe vast quantities.

The light well lit up a luminous liquid, an insignificant accident was suddenly aglow with meaning.

What has happened in this encounter?

Part of its emotional impact, undoubtedly, relates to the misty-eyed sentimentality of the drunk, a flush of feeling for dark youth and inebriated community. But can something more productive than a meeting of un-anonymous alcoholics be drawn from it?

The unearthing of this piece of debris, whose raw materials comprise the act of reading and the surging force of involuntary memory, creates a web of relations between writing and life, language and history, that glitter all at once in hieroglyphic patterns that defy interpretation. The inscription of writing into life’s body is dizzying, and often painful, blurring the senses around a gap, a lack that opens up like a thirst for something that cannot be quenched, for which no tonic exists. It can be hard, or impossible, to articulate: speech becomes slurred or falls wearily into befuddled silence.

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‘Poplars, June 2017’ by Daniel Fraser

The image of the diary entry, framed by the concentric textual and temporal layers that distance it from the received present, forges a space across which a mystical spark of the present may dart. The dissolution and re-fusing of biographies happens in a moment, and the explosion blasts out fragments and scattered splinters from the continuum of history, tying each of them together in their chaotic separation. This moment of intoxication illuminates the absent years, crossing textual forms – a soldier’s diary, a collection of poems, a memoir through which those two are inflected – arriving at a moment of reading: an encounter between a text and the natural history of a human life.

The discomforting effect, more than a simple paean for lost time, of this contingent de- and re- contextualisation is caused by a reckoning in the process of history between consciousness and nature, that is, of the alienated consciousness on its eternal search for the illumination of meaning and the reality of death (as impersonal natural fact) that both truncates this search and calls any semblance of meaning into question. History here reveals its essential utopian character, what Peter Osborne calls the ‘trans-generational unity of the human’, and its constructed conceptual make-up: that history is formed from materials that have been severed from individual subjectivities, at as such is a conceptual practice grounded in the recognition of death.

The absent presence of disintegration exposed by the encounter with the image is rendered all the more inflammable by the presence of alcohol, the literary substance of excess, memory loss and dissolution. A literary device that glints in the glass of Rhys’s early novels, that dances on the streets under Lowry’s volcano, and hides in Highsmith’s shadows, lean and menacing, alcohol washes words with contingency and tempts annihilation. As one of the peasants in Appelfeld’s The Healer, waiting for a train amid the snowdrifts, remarks:

“A man comes down here, gets drunk, and forgets himself for a moment. A man’s got to forget himself, right? Without forgetfulness there’s no hope for revival…A man comes down here, takes out his little flask, and oblivion descends upon him…That’s fine. Don’t look down your nose at that old secret of life.”

The well of light pulls time and reality down into it, re-shaping and reforming them in the crucible of memory, history and literature, so that an entirely new construction can be glimpsed, if only for a moment, before staggering and falling back down into the well, forgotten.

Somewhere in this incomplete accident, in the oscillation of utopia and death, writing forever lurks.

dan-white-cross-650kDaniel Fraser is a writer from West Yorkshire. His work has featured in the LA Review of Books, Gorse, the Quietus, Music and Literature, and 3AMMagazine among others.  He is an editor at Readysteadybook.com and lives in London. Find him on Twitter @oubliette_mag.

Some examples of his work: wanderer within the wastes: on anselm kiefer’s walhalla, MICHEL LEIRIS’S NIGHTS AS DAY, DAYS AS NIGHT and A Static Form of Remembrance.

How about you, dear reader, do you have any thoughts on this philosophical reflection?

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