Bloodletting

5.IX.24

In the category of farewells to manuscripts, it is the turn of the lectures I gave this spring. I chose to call them Solar Plexus, primarily because even today, medical professionals are unable to say exactly where our largest autonomic nerve network is located in the body. The title seemed to offer a metaphor for how literature works when it strikes a chord – at least with me. Whether a text feels as drastic as a fist in the pit of the stomach or as invigorating as a tangle of electrical conductors branching out to one’s very toes and fingertips, I find it difficult to determine where the source of these sensations lies. Part of what makes literature indispensable, I suppose, is that its sensations are as difficult to pinpoint as they are impossible to deny.

»Lectures« sounds unnecessarily grand, however; in my case, it was more a matter of reflections. On what? A writer and his body. The poetics lectures held annually in Frankfurt demand not only perspectives on literature, but also reflections on one’s own work. Impressions notwithstanding, something in me resists making statements about the person behind works that bear my name. If possible, I prefer to speak durch die Blume – »through the flower,« as Germans say. Perhaps because cultivated indirectness or speaking in the third person singular sanitizes the situation? After all, hygienic conditions and a measure of detachment are required for writing beings who, having been asked to perform a vivisection on themselves, wish to leave the operating table under their own power.After emailing the edited manuscript to the publisher, I wonder if I have succeeded. Suddenly it feels as though the attachment leaves traces behind in digital space. Blood, chemicals, loose nerve fibers? Impossible to say. Nonetheless I feel a weightless relief at the thought of bloodletting. And at having escaped with just a few future scars.