Read The Little Town Where Time Stood Still Page 23

  AFTERWORD

  I wrote this Little Town in the early spring of 1973, when illness was in the offing, and I fondly imagined that I alone held the key to these stories of two brothers, that only I could sketch out their narrative, and if I were to die, someone else could finish it off somehow. Also, a year before that illness, I had a photographer come to Prague’s Letná cemetery, and there I had him take my portrait with the black tombstones in the background, and then I had him take another picture of me in the same place, but this time waist-deep in an open grave, and finally the black crosses on their own, as if I had sunk down into the ground. I had a feeling in the small of my back that soon I’d be confined to a white bed, and so it was to be, and while I lay there believing for a certain critical moment that I was going on somewhere else, again I remembered about The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, and I had it sent over and every morning I made cuts and then more cuts, fondly imagining that I alone held the key to this little town. So again this text, like The King of England, is written by the spontaneous method of peril in lingering, and again as in The King I made only deletions to the first draft. But I think (now that I have recovered and start looking round at the world as I convalesce) that in future it will no longer make any difference if I place my Kersko woodlands in the close vicinity of the town, it won’t matter if I enable my characters to walk out to my beloved woodlands and the lovely forest clearing. Perhaps it won’t any longer matter one bit if I haul the little town away on the trailer of the imagination about fifteen kilometres west, just to enable my heroes to reach the portals of the woods and let them enter as needed into any landscape or green abode. For, if Pieter Breughel could put the Alps down right next to the backyards of his Low Country landscapes and towns, why shouldn’t I use the same scissors and cut out of my landscape and people whatever suits my text, and why can’t I cut out of my head only that which I dream about most intensely and hence most happily? So now having got over this illness, once again I fondly imagine that only I hold the key to certain events, and hence it is up to me and me alone to try to write it down. And not only do I know what to write, and what about, but I start to sense that the most important thing will be, how I will write in the future. And because the illness came by aeroplane and is leaving on foot, being weak, I set up tough prospects for myself and start to know that Falling In Love, this first book of mine, will be borne along by a tenderly sensual dynamics in the manner of Matisse’s picture Luxe, Calme et Volupté, and that this text will be permeated with glowing pigments of light and space. The second text will be called Surprise in the Woods, and it will be full of fear and stress and vain adaptation in the manner of Edvard Munch’s lyrical expressionism. I shall try in this text to achieve something I have been contemplating for some years, something which deriving itself from realistic drawing gradually arrives at deformation and finally crosses over into that which is the essence of gestural painting, as practised by Jackson Pollock. I am putting the bar so high that it vanishes in the glittering azure, because for what I shall be attempting, to join consciousness and unconsciousness, vitality and existentiality, to abolish the object as the outer and inner model, for that a leap is required, and only my illness, that university of mine, which I lived through in the hospital on Charles Square, only that may perhaps be able to prepare for me a jumping-off point, from which I shall jump head first into the gravitational field of emotionality. Up then towards that which as yet is not.