“I am not injured. I am a player living with an injury.” Rafael Nadal

*

“Quarantine, in a figurative sense, describes how we get along with one another in Maine anyway. We sit up here at the very top, where the road leads toward Canada and nowhere else. Everything else lies farther down. Social distancing is our idea of a community that holds together.” Richard Ford at the beginning of the Covid pandemic

*

We find ourselves in the situation that Boccaccio describes in The Decameron. The author chose a country house outside Florence as the setting for an encounter among the afflicted in the year 1348. Seven women and three men have fled the plague and taken refuge in the Florentine hills. Lifted by the sensations of a summer retreat and tempered by fear, they cast the immediacy of a terrible death into the chiaroscuro of storytelling. Italy’s literary head start derives from its ability to contain both profound distress and ancient wisdom. The plague gives birth to Renaissance heroines upon a Roman camp bed.

*

As long as they are together, they know nothing but the security of the group, which is far more a herd than a community. Yet once it is over and they put their clothes back on in private, they no longer know one another at all—as though something had happened between them that now fills them with shame.

*

“Digressions are incontestably the sunshine—the life, the soul of reading.” Laurence Sterne

The Trap Springs Shut – The First Encounter Outside the “Kulturschmiede Freiraum”

We remember: Elena, a detective inspector with the Hessian State Police, traveled from Edertal on the Eder River in northern Hesse to Ahrenshoop on the Baltic coast of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania to take part in a writing workshop with this year’s Peter Kurzeck Prize winner, Marek Lorenz. The two are now on their way to their first informal gathering. Marek follows his student, knowing far more about her than she knows about him. In a moment, he will present himself to her as the consummate host in the former FDGB holiday home Wilhelm Pieck, now transformed into the “Kulturschmiede Freiraum.”

The oceanic night is preparing for its part in the cosmic arrangement. Seagulls cry out, and the wind carries salt crystals. The former holiday home towers above the dunes right beside the beach. Elena enjoys an unobstructed view of the churning bathtub that is the Baltic Sea. The beach is completely flooded. She takes note of the privileged vantage point. Marek draws closer. She experiences his interest in her almost physically—unexpectedly demanding and possessive, disconcertingly intimate; as though his expectations were stretched as taut as her own. She senses the concentration of a hunter lying in wait. Yet she distrusts her perception. Was she not simply projecting her longings onto him? Against the backlight of her deliberations, she sees her willingness to leave everything behind with startling clarity.

She pulls her coat more tightly around herself.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“That you can stand up here and, for a moment, believe that everything else is far away.”

She smiles faintly.

“That sounds very much like a writing seminar.”

“Perhaps my profession has spoiled me.”

A quiet disappointment spreads through Elena. It is all rather conventional, even old-fashioned. Were it not for that burning physical presence.

He seems younger than she had imagined. Or perhaps simply more determined. She detects no uncertainty, not the slightest trace of nervousness.

Shipwrecked Odysseus – Four Days Later

Without any historical foundation, the sirtaki became the epitome of Greek folk dance. The first choreography was created in 1964 during the filming of Zorba the Greek. Mikis Theodorakis wrote the score. Anthony Quinn played the title character as a shipwrecked Odysseus. He embodied a post-Olympian way of life and, despite being far removed from reality, appeared astonishingly authentic. The suggestion was that, in the pivotal scene, he was following an ancient sequence of steps.

“The function of art, for me, is to make reality impossible,” says Heiner Müller. The sirtaki proves that power. It arrived like a danced piece of Hellenistic faience and yet was nothing of the sort. I am thinking now of the creative furor of Mikis Theodorakis. The Greek national hero lived in an unbroken frenzy of creation. He described himself as an air creature that feared water. He reproached water for its very nature. He was on familiar terms with the elements. After his death, he wanted his music to be shot into space. The heavens revealed to him a harmony rarely found among human beings.

With you I achieve harmony, dear Marek. I am writing this to you in my distress. You are not with me, and I miss you as though I could not breathe without you. Yesterday we were happy together, and tomorrow we will be again. But tonight I must endure deprivation. You promised to Skype with me around nine. I am eagerly awaiting the appointment and relying on your punctuality. You ask a great deal of me and give me even more. I know that everything is perfectly clear to you.

You determine so much in my life, my beloved. I long to be called “my sweet girl” by you. I am going to make myself another tea now and then count the minutes until your call. And tomorrow I will nestle into your arms again. You love looking into my eyes. How I love having something you are crazy about. Of course, it is not only my eyes. I do not wish to be frivolous. With you, everything is sacred.

You say that it is a privilege to cultivate oneself and to carve the finest possible form out of one’s being. You say that one must leave one’s comfort zone behind, otherwise life cannot succeed. Hunger, cold, and acts of self-mortification have been necessities for you for decades. You crave hardening your torso, your arms, and your hands against concrete pillars. Through this practice you develop such strength that the pressure waves make me vibrate. Yes, it excites me to watch you, and I also enjoy observing how, in homeopathic doses, you gradually lead me toward a higher intensity of training. Your lists and stratagems fascinate me no less than your physical exuberance and your straightforward desire, to which I surrender without reservation.