Masahisa Fukase,
“The Solitude Of Ravens”
Reading the comments regarding Mashisa Fukase life and his destiny,
it comes to my mind that all the commentators
seem to be writing from a position protected from the catastrophes
that inevitably come along with life.
Maybe they never have experienced helplessness in the light of fate,
maybe they have,
and if,
they have chosen not to know about it.
But there seems to be a fascination for disasters
hitting people far enough to stay abstract.
Touching pain without being subjected to it.
Death and hopelessness hitting somebody else …
that means, eventually, that you have survived again.
But nobody dedicates himself to this kind of heavy labor that unconditionally without a pressing cause.
There must be pain so huge that body and reason have to bundle themselves just to build an arch around this aching area…as if being able to cover it with a protective layer. Toughening this conjunction of body and mind by the permanent repetition of that what she has experienced, fighting the expectation of the horrible by preconceiving it through fiction, working on it, canalizing it.Because, as there is the quest for the protection against the horrible, there is the need for being protected in the horrible.
Part of an article by Thomas Steinfeld,
about Herta Müllers oeuvre,
translated in a rather loose fashion by me.
