The Invention of Solitude

Portrait Gallery in London. To note: the uncanny similarity of their poses. Both father and son facing forward, left hands on hips, right feet pointing out at forty-five degree angles, the left feet pointing forward, and the somber determination on the boy ’ s face to imitate the self-confident, imperious stare of the father. To remember: that when Raleigh was released after a thirteen-year incarceration in the Tower of London (1618) and launched out on the doomed voyage to Guiana to clear his name, Wat was with him. To remember that Wat, leading a reckless military charge against the Spanish, lost his life in the jungle. Raleigh to his wife: “ I never knew what sorrow meant until now. ” And so he went back to England, and allowed the King to chop off his head.
    To be followed by more photographs, perhaps several dozen: Mallarme ’ s son, Anatole; Anne Frank ( “ This is a photo that shows me as I should always like to l ook. Then I would surely have a chance to go to Hollywood. But now, unfortunately, I usually look different ” ); Mur; the children of Cambodia; the children of Atlanta. The dead children. The children who will vanish, the children who are dead. Himmler: “ I have made the decision to annihilate every Jewish child from the face of the earth. ” Nothing but pictures. Because, at a certain point, the words lead one to conclude that it is no longer possible to speak. Because these pictures are the unspeakable.
    He has spent the greater part of his adult life walking through cities, many of them foreign. He has spent the greater part of his adult life hunched over a small rectangle of wood, concentrating on an even smaller rectangle of white paper. He has spent the greater part of his adult life standing up and sitting down and pacing back and forth. These are the limits of the known world. He listens. When he hears something, he begins to listen again. Then he waits. He watches and waits. And when he begins to see something, he watches and waits again. These are the limits of the known world.
     
    The room. Brief mention of the room and/or the dangers lurking inside it. As in the image: Holderlin in his room.
    To revive the memory of that mysterious, three-month journey on foot, crossing the mountains of the Massif Central alone, his fingers gripped tightly around the pistol in his pocket; that journey from Bordeaux to Stuttgart (hundreds of miles) that preceeded his first mental breakdown in 1802.
    “ Dear friend…I have not written to you for a long time, and meanwhile have been in France and have seen the sad, lonely earth; the shepherds and shepherdesses of southern France and individual beauties, men and women, who grew up in fear of political uncertainty and of hunger…. The mighty element, the fire of heaven and the silence of the people, their life in nature, their confinedness and their contentment, moved me continually, and as one says of heroes, I can well say of myself that Apollo has struck me. ”
    Arriving in Stuttgart, “ deathly pa le, very thin, with hollow wild eyes, long hair and a beard, and dressed like a beggar, ” he stood before his friend Matthison and spoke one word only: “ Holderlin. ” Six months later, his beloved Suzette was dead. By 1806, schizophrenia, and thereafter, for thirty-six years, fully half his life, he lived alone in the tower built for him by Zimmer, the carpenter from Tubingen— zimmer, which in German means room.
         TO ZIMMER

    The lines of life are various as roads
    or as The limits of the mountains are,
    and what we are Down here, in harmonies,
    in recompense, In peace for ever,
    a god will finish there.
    Toward the end of Holderlin’s life, a visitor to the tower mentioned Suzette ’ s name. The poet replied: “ Ah, my Diotima. Don ’ t speak to me about my Diotima. Thirteen sons she bore me. One is  Pope, another is the Sultan, the third is the Emperor of Russia.”
    And then: “ Do you know what happened to her? She went mad, she did, mad, mad, mad. ”
    During those years, it is said, Holderlin rarely went out. When he did leave his room, it was only to take aimless walks through the countryside, filling his pockets with stones and picking flowers, which he would later tear to shreds. In town, the students laughed at him, and children ran away in fear whenever he approached to greet them. Towards the end, his mind became so muddled that he began to call himself by different names—Scardinelli, Killalu-simeno—and