figures on the dunes (minus)

I was straded on Jones Planet because of a broken drive unit waiting for parts to arrive.

When did it start? The year doesn’t matter, for us its the past, for ou it might be the future. At some point on the beach on the east coast. Not October 71st: perhaps October 68.

Elle and Paul are supposed to do all this in August It took longer than three days. They did. Before that, on the beach watching seals through a telescopic sight, daily recordings: 9 Aug. Rain at night. SW-W. Closed cloud cover. Icelandic low over England swivelling towards the Baltic Sea. Bathing. in the North sea at 12.00. Beach surprisingly busy. Kites made of plastic or paper with long red. tails. Lots of parents with children. Younger couples. Older couples. Trimmed tourists speaking German. Few young men with beards. Intermittent drizzle from around 13.00 arrives after 15.00. From 15.30 clouds with white sun. High tide around 17.00. Paul on the beach. White trousers. Light blue cotton jumper. Elle on the beech in lycra shorts and top. Little surf. Reading a small book in the shade. SW-S. Rain in the. the evening. The weather application gives the expected future weather in hour long segments. Blue sky and bright sunshine. The Cloud cover with edges of sunshine outlines white. Better from midday. Almost clear. 26°. Water I8°. Good surf. Break words, smallest ideological unit, smaller units and the ideologies are exposed. Brecht translated Chinese poetry without reading Chinese. Brecht was on the beach with Benjamin, they played chess. Helene holding hands with Walter on the cliffs. May also have been on the beach. On the 10 8. 1981 Rain until evening. Sat in the cafe on the pier with the Apple Mac with the M1 chip. Rain. In the later afternoon joined by Kassel and Enrique. The talk about the perfect McGuffins in literature and science. Grey mist on the horizon N. Clear until about 11AM. They agreed to publish. He had succeeded, unexpectedly, in producing a line of thought, a concept. You should call it a Rosalind, Kassel suggested. The water poured from the plastic bottle came hesitantly at first, then in a stream. Little surf. Light breeze. Westerly. Very yellow and milky blue evening. On that day, work ended, agreements made, contracts expected to be signed. A wall of clouds over the dunes to the north. Walking along the shore. The yellow sunlight changing to very light copper. Walking. Seagull shadows. Above, falcons flying. Almost windless. Voices scarcely audble from the dunes. There are silhouettes on the edge of the dunes. 18.30 An island railway with rattling noises. Taking us back. Small gauge. Three or four model days. Small white clouds far over the mainland. Cool base temperature. Fresh to moderate. O. Load car, drive south along the coast to carry out the work for K. driving in thr 918 spyder with the roof up. Colours from copper to green and white-yellow to light blue. So its Figures on the dunes. All photographers on the dunes. August. Sun like the day before. Sunset like the day before. Slightly warmer. Wind weak, occasional gusts in the afternoon. Ruins in the city centre, cleared away. We want to go to the Local Museum. Monochrome photos of the fishing port from 1880 onwards. Getting lost in the hotel. Paul returns to reception. Others there. Me: what are you doing here? Answer: yes, don’t you know that there’s nowhere better to listen to music in this town? Dream in two layers. Over longer stretches: dreaming of dreaming. Occasional images of faces and bodies . Inland walking allong the path through the fen. Dark green dyke side: dandelions blooming in the grass. An orchard on the plain beneath sea level . In the orchard young foxes play. August sun. Against this background two figures, two people, dialogic partners, who should do all this. [minus] What all? One of them carries a brown leather bag slung across their body. First of all, it was clear that one of them was to be called Elle. [minus] The company was to be dedicated to Elle. Which Elle? Not a specific one. But couldn’t that be misunderstood, and couldn’t various Ellees that I knew and know refer to themselves? [they left him by the cement.] Started collecting Ellees. All the Ellees of my life: dead, living, historical, literary. This one changing as we walk to the house. Under the dreadful blue sky. We drive westwards in the 918 Spyder, listening to an Al Haig trio. It was. the 15th of August. Elle and Paul vanished.

More recently they walk along the deserted beach in Portugal nice, of the Bluebeard and intellectual conversations. You might think of them as being like the. two office workers Bouvard and Pécuchet in Gustave Flaubert. Except for the brown leather bag and its contents. P: It’s clear that our author was thinking of Flaubert when it documented us. E: Perhaps, but I doubt it. P: but we’re different, Flaubert would only be a reminiscence. E: Bartleby and Co of death. P: Groans. The only question is whether anyone will recognise it. E: it’s too late anyway. P: I’m asking you, for our sake. E: and what do we do about it? P: well, let’s have a little chat about Flaubert E: yes, discuss Flaubert, Sarraute about Flaubert, Sartre about Flaubert, Améry about Flaubert. P smiling: now you’re playing, still its better than talking about Proust or Mallarme. opening the brown bag, as she openned the garden gate walking up the steep stairs to a house.

A note from December a year later, last year: All people walk around dressed. This is their visible dimension. Mostly in pairs, sometimes individually, sometimes in groups, they have sex unclothed. This is their invisible dimension. Assumption, in the visible dimension of clothed comfort, family, workplace, office life, pub business, street traffic, etc. The assumption is that the second invisible dimension, naked, sex, is always present at the same time as an idea, as a wishful image, as food, so to speak. No repression, no hiding, no covering up, but one in the other. (But not the other way round: the clothed drowns in naked behaviour, is not present in it). Here is a quote from Elias Canetti’s Province of Man: This ineluctable addiction to beauty, even in completely raw people – what is it other than the rest of the old polytheism? But it remains strange how even the ugliest and least dares to approach the most beautiful, as if it came to him, as if it were promised to him. It is true that, thanks to the blending of all cultures, there are more beautiful people today than ever before. They are the remnants of the lost gods. Add to this your own addition: This as an exit for them. To be destroyed as a single chain of superstition. Beauty as a mere social convention. What everyone has got used to thinking is beautiful. And that is responsible for beautiful people like gods. Gods are nothing but the perpetuation of convention. Beauty as a concept tied to the old society is useless today. Standardisation and bizarreness rather useful. See Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker, Odd John and Sirius. They retire north of London… It takes them years to get used to living away from the city.

They are discussing eroticism, sexuality, beauty, myth, children and so on. Or what? Jörg Drews on Zettel’s Dream by Arno Schmidt: For two people making the transition to passivity and office work. Talk about nothing as often as their fears, apart from the problems of interpreting literary texts. That as an understanding, deep layer or whatever? One more thing. I had not only invented these two figures, but, as the note. indicates, I had also seen and observed them. observed them. The real had been mixed with the fictional from the outset, the fictional bluntly appropriated reality. This also meant that the characters changed. They were sometimes older, sometimes younger, sometimes an island off the coast you can only walk to at low tide. The sun, heat and violence of the Northern Sea. Something like that. But such a mixture has not been able to go beyond the mere imagination. Since I realised that the plan as it had formed in me or was beginning to form could not be realised, I have been leaning towards being settled.

But they would be more clearly themselves.

I also waver in my choice of names, not wishing anyone to find them, Would it be clearer if I said Elle and Adelbert? Elvis and Adelbert, long separated from the families they once had around them. Or, if you imagine them young, still without such families. Every year they spend their holidays together. That means, perhaps not in the village itself, but sometimes in the forest, in Westerheide. Free, enlightened, open-minded, educated, interested, militant-social and lustful. Her constant lasciviousness as one of the motives for holidays and dialogue? His englishness conservative and safe. Her Englishness cynical and sardonic. Financially secure in everyday and professional life, liberal professions, small entrepreneurs, well-to-do without being rich? I would like to have taken poorer people, but then I would have too much trouble with the background. Or is that an excuse? Do I mean my own social situation without wanting to tell the full truth about it? Would they otherwise be able to provide the vehicles for transporting the whole panorama of libidinous fantasy? Psychoanalysis from Freud to Ferenczi, Lacan to Sheppard, philosophy: Groddeck plus Foucault, Reich plus Laing, Bataille plus Benjamin etc. etc. I had initially wanted to say, after a quote that I can no longer verify: Elle and Paul on the plea=sure=front. There is also an early note that speaks of Elle the Faunotype. Then I wanted to translate plea=sure=front, but it didn’t sound good. Bodies, behind them in the history of violence, from the desert to the sea off the coast.

I have sent them on a hunt for joy, transferring this word, but leaving a trace of the underlying meaning, namely the joy that is no longer joy, that only indicates the lack that is increasing. Elle and Adelbert, Elle and Paul, not leaf and ludmilla, because now I can just as well return to any old name, any old pronoun, on the hunt for joy. Not summer it wants to reveal the normal the unrecognised unbelievable monstrous normal it returns to thinking it feels indeterminate the empire wants them dead, their lives depend in an office in london, a singularity being released in a converted warehouse, they do not know this yet. (We came across a man who was on the hunt for pleasure, a pitiful man whose only pleasure had been reduced to what he deprived others of, what made them better, more favourable, happier than he was, and that was almost everyone, so that there was no end to his pleasure. Buried in concrete.)

Paul? Adelbert? It doesn’t matter. You could say that they imagine what they find, and vice versa. They are still attractive, by the way. Physically, mentally, emotionally. Charm Charm Wit Kindness Irony and sentimentality. God yes, sentimentality. A weak surf slaps the sand, which is very light, in the rising tide. They bathe, swim and come ashore again, splashing, kicking and laughing. A few white clouds sail across the blue sky. Seagulls in the air. Sun. Very bright light. Light like that of memory. In the evening, the four of them sit in one of the eateries in the fog with flickering candlelight behind wide-open windows. Above the reed roofs and the trees in between, the sky is still bright, pale, almost green. Slowly, like poured ink, blue darkness flows from above into the light. Stars shine out and multiply. It has become very quiet, and distant sounds stand alone in the night. The hum of a car. Laughter. Footsteps in the dark.

The chugging of a ship’s engine far away of the coast. As I follow my imagination, something completely different comes up. I had intended to turn these two into carriers of ideas and thoughts that did not originate from me but passed through me, or did originate from me but were also thought by others. A panorama that offers a reasonably satisfactory prospect. But I have carried them around inside me for so long that they could no longer do that. That if they wanted to achieve something, they would have to talk about me. They were supposed to be masks, substitutes, aliases, metaphors, costumes, larvae, disguises. But while I was dealing with them and also because I was dealing with them, I stepped out of masks, substitutes, code names, metaphors, costumes, larvae, camouflage. Where to? The reconstruction and retelling of a plan reveals a process in which I find myself. Images interfere.

Queues of cars waiting on the orbital motorway. The valley of the seagulls. Thin tickling rain at the edge of the forest. Evening mist at the former mill. The unstoppable distance of the Wittdün jetty in the bright sun of a July morning. And still others. And still others. And still others. Elle and Paul on the pleasure hunt? On the pleasure- front? No answer. No answer. Note from January 73, slightly corrected for the new use: It was a pleasant dream. But you have to know when dreams are over, otherwise they leave a bad taste. You were lovely and not without surprises in bed, but nothing lasting. The gymnastic exercises were fun to watch, we really liked you for a while, but we had the wrong idea about you. We feel sorry for you, but we can’t help you.