Correspondence: Robert Walser

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- Robert Walser

(In Conversation)

- Cynan Orton

(Nov 2020)

“I am excellently suited, you should know, to occupy just a modest haven, for my nature is altogether delicate, and I am essentially a quiet, polite, and dreamy child, who is made to feel cheerful by people thinking of him that he does not as for much, and allowing him to take possession of a very, very small patch of existence, where he can be useful in his own way and thus feel at ease”

“The Job Application” (1914)

From “The Walk and other Stories”

Convenient to canonise a practise once it’s passed, To claim that “Behind jauntiness and humour, depression presides and the wraith of insanity seems poised to tear through the gauze.”

Easier then, if your will, to go on, With that excuse firmly stated.

To dismiss a “Conflagration of terrible reproaches” As the slipping of a mind into darkened firs, Rather than a cry for contact, And closeness, And to be shown that another is pleased by your presence And so be made infinitely happy.

Would such a retreat be necessary if they were not so starved of touch?

If we had considered empathy before pathology would we find A treatise on freedom found in solidarity, rather than a lack of sense of “my own person either, I am pure independence, Which is not in every way quite what it ought to be, And I ask myself If I am free.”

The answer coming shortly with a familial urging, standing not in commitment but to commit them, Is it perhaps any surprise, such a man might be haunted, by “Terrible Reproaches”?

Do not dismiss then, Please, If you will, On the grounds of nested, senseless, digressive, Commas, And a particular and curious outlook on the mundane, The more tactile and enduring truth of precarious employment, When one is born a, “Quiet, Polite, and Dreamy Child” Do not then, if you will, mourn people unappreciated in their time, No matter how painful that loss might be to your canon.

When that grief is just another stop on ever stretching waiting list, Of appointments, applications, and commiserations, And, if you please, if you will, permit us Those of us who recognise in their works all the traits, To make contact, find closeness, and grasp that this mode of thought is not a novel oddity, Condemned to sorrowful post-humous documentaries, And so let us be made, at least, precariously happy.

Dearest W.

Our translation is fairing well A publisher could likely be found for any fragments of spare prose such melancholy is easy to pitch with winter near

If not, don’t Fret.

I will see to it that i have time off in the spring to visit properly

Yours, Carl.

I am not here to write, Carl

I am here to be mad

-W.

Dotted throughout our histories lie these Hidden but often playful messages Pencilled in margins, scraps, appendices Like the diaries from our adolescence Interpreting such things is difficult Fraught with ham fisted insights into minds That make mundane attractions mythical Accounts of beasts we desperately define But a rose’s name is its own to chose For no two souls will view its hues the same So where such flowers note their thoughts in prose We ought to accept the titles that they claim For the petals pink as a lover’s lips Grow in the mud of countless noble pigs

“Would it not be permissible to make so bold as to find it lovely when, for example, some lay-about lothario has a lady friend or, if you will, a goddess whom he worships and then, one day, makes the acquaintance of a young lad who pleases him because the boy’s features and build remind him of the appearance, character, and conduct of his beloved?”

“Swine”

From “Microscripts”