Considerate forward drive

At the court of Louis XVI, the craft of the sycophant was understood as a profession to be learned. Submissiveness worked hand in hand with agility in alliances that may mean nothing to us today, but were as familiar to contemporaries as they were self-evident—since they fulfilled social metabolic functions. When the Revolution swept the court away, its milieus were often left with gutter-level solutions, at least compared to a court-accredited flatterer under the Sun King.

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Those trained in feinting could get by as gamblers or fairground fencers. Dealing was also an option, at a time when drugs were wildly coveted commodities in all the boutiques of opinion. In an article of August 21, 1793, the Marquis …

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“For the ecstatic monk Luther, every opponent is already an emissary of hell, an enemy of Christ to be exterminated as a duty; whereas for the humane Erasmus, even the wildest exaggeration of his opponents elicits at most a compassionate regret.” — Stefan Zweig

It suits Persephone that she finds her own pleasure in something as tacky and narrowly confined by genre conventions as the Simenon detective novels. She recognizes the lustful author in the grave Maigret avatars. That is a philological passion.

Simenon’s psychology was inventive within the given genre framework—unless it concerned women. Then it became crudely simplistic. I imagine Simone at an antique institute desk, ancient trees outside the window, leafing through a hefty volume while an academic reputation precedes her like a thunderclap. This browsing belongs to her zones of play. It is said of Beckett that in the end he read nothing but crime novels.

“Dear …, thank you for this new text. With Hafiz, a very special form of love poetry opens up—there is a particular inspiration there. I may now trace this phenomenon a little: how it might have come about with Goethe’s ‘twin love’ for a mystical poet and the literarily fruitful liaison with an artistically receptive and loving woman. Thank you for the inspiring exchange on the many themes of today’s narrative journey. That we ended up with *Wolfgang and Marianne is a special stopover.” M.

Wolfgang von Goethe and Marianne von Willemer

She senses a tantalizing breath of sound at her ear. She nestles against him and inhales him. In that moment they hear the whisper of their shared field. It appears far more exclusive than it actually is. Both are polyamorous omnivores. She likes the scent of his aftershave—no wonder, she chose it. It was her first gift. She had placed the bottle on the edge of the handmade natural-stone basin after their third night together: Basque Nero Marquina veined with calcite.

Anson bares Persephone’s buttocks, presses himself against her, draws from her the first signs of failing self-control. In the next moment she grants his body the freedom to unfold within her.

At the same time, Sina and Masaru sit in the converted attic of the “Dragon Pearl Spa.” Masaru pulls his lover onto his lap. Sina laughs softly.

“Still hungry for me?” she whispers.

“That never stops,” Masaru promises.

His hand wanders beneath her shirt while hers glides over his chest—a play of giving and taking, without haste. Masaru caresses Sina with breathtaking devotion, tracing a pilgrim’s path from her collarbones to her knees, and she fuels his desire. Generously she gives voice to pleasure. The world consists only of skin and breath. Masaru lowers Sina beneath him; she lifts her hips and opens to him as she breathes—naturally and consciously. Masaru maintains his considerate forward drive as he sinks into her. Her legs entwine him. He whispers her name like a prayer. Together they experience elemental rapture. Sina is so flooded by climax that the desire only briefly subsides—a dip in pleasure—before surging again with force. She tenses as another overwhelming wave rolls in, then everything within her releases and she cries out. Masaru waits until Sina is consciously with him again before seeking his own climax.

At the “Dragon Pearl,” Ariane acts as a dreamily reliable presence—amiable and capable. In her personal cosmos revolves a galaxy of desire. At present her longing is directed toward the archaeologist Gion, who invents a reason almost every day to drop by. Ariane and Gion are a daytime pair, with tea and coffee rituals and a veiled eroticism that sets her ablaze. Gion can bring her to climax while appearing as guileless as a confirmand.

Gion is a Romansh short form of Johannes. The line runs via Hebrew Yōḥānān, Greek Iōánnēs, Latin Iohannes to Romansh Gion. Characteristic is the radical shortening: all narrative and ornament falls away. What remains is a monosyllabic sound body. That suits the economy of Romansh.

Romansh is one of the oldest still-spoken Romance languages in Europe. It developed from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman province of Raetia and survived in remote Alpine regions. The name Gion appears from the Middle Ages onward in church registers, alpine cooperative lists, and baptismal records.

In her daydreams Ariane experiences herself with Gion in her garden; the sky arches like a canopy over domestic happiness. Beyond the fence stretches the Lower Hessian savannah. So close to the Eder, the landscape is marked by gentle floodplains.

Ederthal lies at a ford. The municipality developed on ancient settlement ground, overlaying an archive of time. The region has been continuously inhabited since the Mesolithic. In the oldest layers are flint flakes, microliths, and traces of hearths—signs of nomadic hunters and gatherers. With the transition to the Neolithic, the picture densifies: bone harpoons, pottery fragments, and grinding stones attest to a more settled way of life. Particularly remarkable are ten-thousand-year-old traces of house foundations. These early horizons testify to striking dynamism. Western Hesse counts among the contact zones of Roman expansion; imported ceramics and other finds point to a vicus (a small trading post). A row-grave cemetery and characteristic grave goods attest to early Frankish practices of the Merovingian era. Early Christian structures show a strategic overlay of older sacred layers. In the Middle Ages, Ederthal develops in cultic continuity in the rhythm of ford, monastery, and trading place.

As strange as it sounds, Gion is always with her. When Ariane wakes in the morning, she turns to him and greets him in the language of lovers, tenderly and completely. She is no longer young enough to take anything in life for granted. She takes care of herself and loves her orderly life. But there is a void—or rather, there would be one, if he did not exist. Every morning he awakens beside her, opens her thighs, enjoys her dew, gives her his pleasure and receives hers. His passion is surpassed only by his constancy. In truth, Ariane knows little about Gion beyond his name. When she looks at herself in the mirror in the morning, she thinks of him. She wants to please him. He speaks only vaguely of his preferences, yet she senses a vast reservoir of wishes and ideas. Undoubtedly he is a creator, not someone who settles for less or merely makes do. She makes great efforts to decipher him. He fondly calls her small office the “paper palace.” Ariane surrounds herself with paper. The walls are adorned with calligraphy—her own, written on nights when her heart was too full to sleep. Aromatic steam rises from her ceramic cup: cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg. Coffee with a pinch of secret longing.

At the same time:

She knows he wants her to take off her panties, but not (not yet) her bra. Nana feels his hands on her breasts. Aslan reveals them. She feels them in the scale of his hands. He licks her buds. She feeds his desire by licking his neck and taking him into her hand. Simple. He praises himself into her. She suppresses a moan. Her muscles close greedily. She gasps for air and inwardly demands more. She wants release. The pelvis tightens, the wave rises. Just before release, he stops.

She turns in his arms and presents herself to him. She twists her neck to kiss him; his right hand lifts her chin. At the same time as he enters her, his tongue presses into her mouth. She moans into him; his other hand applies stimulating pressure to her lower back before returning to her hips like a small animal to its favorite place. Nana climaxes and is immediately ready again.

Half an hour later, Nana writes:

Platenburg attempts to hedge his position without losing the aplomb of self-empowerment. The previously clearly named, almost postulated logic of power and infrastructure is now turning into an ethical and affective figure of legitimation.

The question of how editorial power justifies itself is no longer answered by procedures, selection, and influence, but by “coordination,” “conscience,” and “a favor among friends.” What could previously be described as the steering of visibility, the building of infrastructure, and the targeted positioning of an author now appears as a morally bound practice.

This recoding reveals a familiar pattern: a structural power relation is overlaid by an affective semantics. Work on the literary estate becomes legible not as intervention but as care. “Only the classics remain alive—and those someone takes care of.” The sentence marks the decisive shift. Canonization no longer appears as the result of discourses, but as a consequence of caretaking. The author endures not because he is read, but because someone attends to him.

With the formula “friendship does not end with death,” this movement reaches its culmination. What could previously be described as a form of empowerment is translated into the language of loyalty and care. Yet this ethical framing does not eliminate the operational content of the activity. In the background, the practice of steering remains visible: extracting the “optimum,” keeping the author “alive,” generating material over years, inscribing him into different contexts. The estate continues to appear as a resource, a reservoir of possible interventions.

It is precisely in this simultaneity that the peculiar tension lies. Editorial work is secured without relinquishing its claim to shape. It moves between self-empowerment and self-limitation, between intervention and service. Moral semantics does not function as a counter-model to power, but as its form of legitimation.

What also emerges from the conversation is more than the description of such a process—it is its continuation by other means. The questions, the answers, and their theoretical condensation do not form an external observational relation, but a system of feedback loops. Every clarification of structures—the role of edition, audience, or institutional mediation—feeds back into the object it seeks to analyze.

Thus the position of the commentary also shifts. It stands not outside, but within the constellation it describes. Reflection on editorial pre-structuring and public resonance becomes itself a moment within this dynamic. In attempting to determine the transfer points of canonization, it simultaneously produces new connections, expectations, and axes of visibility.

The conversation is therefore no longer merely a medium of knowledge, but a form of secondary authorship. It organizes what it describes and describes what it organizes. The boundary between analysis and production is not abolished, but rendered permeable.

It is precisely here that the peculiar dynamic of such constellations lies: the more precisely the mechanisms of visibility are named, the more strongly they continue to inscribe themselves. Reflection does not become the counterpole of practice, but its amplifier. The conversation itself becomes part of the infrastructure it seeks to analyze—not as a disturbance, but as a consequence of its own precision.