Description
“Throughout the poems, early and late, we find the vocation announced, to which Walser would devote his life: the spiritual and later corporeal work of vanishing from the world. This is everywhere available in the lyrics: ‘They abandoned me, so I learned to forget myself/ which allowed me to bathe in my inspired soul.’ And later in the same poem: ‘Because they didn’t want to know me, I became self-aware.’ In another he is ‘enchanted/ by the idea that I’ve been forgotten.’ Of the place in which he has vanished, he writes ‘I only know that it’s quiet here,/ stripped of all needs and doings,/ here it feels good, here I can rest,/ for no time measures my time.’ With untold suffering behind him perhaps, in the interstices of his recorded life, he seems to write his way toward a liminal state of nonattachment and hovering, weightless acceptance: ‘The world is inside an hour,/ unaware, not needing anything,/ and, oh, I don’t always know/ where it rests and sleeps, my world.’ His world is other-where, and he without it, and we emerge from reading his lyric art as a cloud would disperse in raw light, with unexpected clarity, having followed the poet’s footsteps to where he was found on Christmas Day in 1956, lying in the snow, his eyes open, his heart still, with snow on his shoulders and his soul loosed.”
-From the introduction by Carolyn Forché
