Robert Walser, Microscripts

Robert Walser's Microscripts are just the thing for desperate days. They were written in pencil, each phrase a tiny flick of (dis)quiet. Let's not think failure of nerve; in our great, unnoticed sorrow we are nerveless. These are tiny scripts on fragments of paper often already printed with something else. This is the density of the creature, inner convolution brought out as far as it will go, and then cut; off goes Herr Walser, invisible once again. Tiny text lies unread longest, on the borderlands of legibility and despair, hardly worthy of secrecy, he'd say, humble Herr Walser, that divinely gifted layabout.

In order to start writing Walser puts on a prose piece jacket. Some writers have to be dressed correctly; this is a formal moment after all; you are here to choose such of your day as deserves to be hidden, which may involve other people you have passed by on your walk, or dogs, paintings, joy-deficient cliffs. You absorb such of the world as you see, ferret away your day, make a stab at what comes your way and try not to comment, not to be rude or to disturb. You're far from the world, though eagerly in it; burrowing in is one way to slip out. In is out, and out is in, especially when snow is falling.

All observations are fully charged. All that you say is also all that you don't say. This isn't false modesty. There isn't a false feather in Herr Walser's apparel. He writes about everything equally, leaves it there to be (un)read.

That I listened to the radio for the first time yesterday fills me with a feeling of internationality, though this remark I've made is, to be sure, anything but modest.

The absence of a feeling of internationality is what underlies my despair ninety years later and sends me to Robert Walser for comfort.

All his longing, how he longed for it again!

Last night, in a short burst of sleep amid nightmarish itching, I dreamed of a young artist who'd written in a section of his painting in tiny angular script. For the first time I've written the truth, he said. Have you read Walser's Microscripts? I asked.

So I have to look at Walser again. Eloquent yet taciturn wordsmith, as he describes himself, these pieces come from a brink of some kind, they have been brought forward from their micro state into the light of a handsome volume (New Directions/Christine Burgin 2010). How to read them. Easy to reside there, to pick up phrases here and there like a dilettante at a picnic. A piece of Comté with bullace cheese. Walser wishes he had the right to find fault with a crisis of cheerfulness. He enters his every day with disarming penetration.

Usually I first put on a prose piece jacket, a sort of writer's smock, before venturing to begin with composition, but I'm in a rush right now and besides, this is just a tiny little piece, a silly trifle featuring beer coasters round as plates. Children were playing with them and I was watching them play. 

As far in as he manages to go, in words, he does not, in person, you imagine; he watches. What you are reading is someone's entire relationship to the world around him. There is no more he can say than this. Which is the same as saying this is the truth.