Pallaksch!

W. reads my notebook.

Notes on Hölderlin's confinement. Pallaksch, W. reads. — 'What does that mean?' That was the word Hölderlin repeated to himself in the thirty years he spent mad, I tell W. Pallaksch!, he sang out, as he played his piano madly. Pallaksch!, he cried up to the night, when he couldn't sleep for mania.

Pallaksch!: and isn't that my word, too? Pallaksch: isn't that a word for the wordless that murmurs in everything I have written or tried to say? He hears it in my stuttering, my stammering. In the 'hellos!' that I boom out to near-strangers. And isn't it what I try to say in the middle voice? There was a dampening. There was a infestation of rats. There was a proliferation of Japanese knot-weed. There was and will be writing. There was and will be the desecration of speech ...

Pallaksch, pallaksch: faecal emergencies come, one after another, W. says. Toilet bowls are spattered. The gods, blind and deaf and mad, are screaming. The sky is darkening. The desert is growing. He can smell sulphur, W. says. He can see black wings ...