Now I think this may be the greatest accomplishment of Aichinger’s text: Making its readers come back to the unbearable. And making the reader feel the unbearable in its greatest atrocity in a, for me, quite unexpected place: in the encounter with the children’s relentless hope. As when they dream they might save a child from drowning and be rewarded with the permission to sit on benches and play in parks again, as when they hope “that farewell will end some time and reunion will begin.” That’s the childlike hope of the fairy tale, and when it’s aimed at the most simple things in life, the reader knows we’ve made a world that no longer deserves that name. But Aichinger’s characters are vigorous and defiant, and when Aichinger has a deportee to a concentration camp say she hoped for everything – “I’ve always hoped for everything. Why should I give that up now?” – she also blocks the easy way of defeatism for her readers, demanding their efforts for a life in critical and incorruptible hope.

Gliding through the different strands of lines in Egger’s poetry, however, there is no feeling of missing, of scissure and disruption; rather, there’s an impression of abundance. At the Audiatur festival in November 2009, Jenny Hval gave me an intriguing image that seems related to Egger’s work. Talking about feelings of amputation when speaking a foreign language, she said that writing in English to her felt like growing new limbs. Oswald Egger, it seems to me, grows new limbs in and for his mother tongue. Limbs that reach into the past, taking into hand syllables and sound-clusters the German language might have followed and developed, but didn’t. Limbs that make word-forms stretch out and grow into one another to form meanings that are quite inconceivable, but still: needed? For Egger’s work is more than an empty exercise in bending grammar and lexicon. Prosa, Proserpina, Prosa states it explicitly: all is about ich (‘I’) and alles (‘everything’). And it’s this alles which in the overgrowing twists of language seems to be present in its very nature while this very nature (these very natures) remain(s) quite out of grasp.

While it’s entirely possible that the joy of, let’s say: a noun making its way into a past tense, is one that’s accessible only to the ones who know German really well, Egger’s work is fortunately no longer confined to his mother tongue: In a co-operation with Egger, composer Michael Pisaro set out to create an equivalent of Egger’s poetry in English, which was published under the title Room of Rumor in 2004.

Diesseits der Hermeneutik presents a detailed understanding of the way Western thinking, science and art have become based on privileging a culture of meaning. In such cultures of meaning, the focus is on the individual’s reading the world from an outside position as the only legitimate source of knowledge, while her/his bodily being is classed with the material, incapable of making any sense. Gumbrecht does show what our cultures win by pushing aside bodily presence as the main means of encountering the world – but first and foremost he sketches the dimensions of what we lose in losing this mode of existence and thinking completely. Thus, he suggests developing categories for understanding art outside the terms of observation and ascribing meaning; for me, one of the central points here were Gumbrecht’s doubts in ‘innovation’ as a useful category in judging the relevance of a work of art – even if he does not yet clearly delineate how to replace it. Which shows that there’s still a lot of free space left to think into.

”Mer än kanske någon annan filosofisk klassiker ställer Filosofiska undersökningar krav, inte bara på läsarens intelligens, utan också på hans engagemang. Andra stora filosofiska verk – till exempel Schopenhauers Världen som vilja och föreställning – kan läsas med intresse och nöje av någon som ”vill veta vad Schopenhauer sade”. Men om Filosofiska undersökningar läses i denna anda blir den mycket snart en tråkig och slitsam läsning, inte för att den är intellektuellt svår, utan för att det kommer att bli praktiskt taget omöjligt att begripa vad Wittgenstein ”säger”. Ty sanningen är att han inte säger någonting; han framställer en teknik för att lösa upp förvirringar. Om detta inte är dina egna förvirringar, kommer boken att vara av mycket lite intresse.” >>
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”there where the night birds broadcast their/cries dangerous to ignore”.

Albiachs poesi har en sorts långtidsverkan – och när den väl har installerat sig går den inte att hursomhelst skaka av sig. Den lever i det fördolda, på egen hand, för att då och då bryta igenom. Detsamma gäller i någon bemärkelse även själva orden, varav vissa, till en början obemärkta, vartefter kommer att få närmast en status av personliga pronomen, att interagera som rollpersoner i ett sceniskt rum av rörliga figurationer; en geometri. >>
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Jag beställer ellerströms utgåva genast! >>
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