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So I did read Handke's journal, as suggested. It seems to be built around--and repeatedly testify to--a profound sense of a self divided from oneself (I'm thinking of W.E.B. DuBois's double consciousness--only here the doubling is existential rather than racial). And throughout the book Handke is trying to cross that divide, to arrive @ some sense of utter presence, where his experience is not separate from himself, where the unmediated experience of childhood is recaptured. His way of trying to do that is to write, without relying on cliches or formulations, but the very act of writing, like the act of reflection, further separates himself from his perceptions....

Here's a taste of this repeated dynamic (which seems to me not the least bit playful....
so: I'm not feeling inclined to use either the film or this text for our class...)

"The main thing: not to claim history for myself, not to let myself be defined by history, not to take it as an excuse—despise it in those who hide their personal insignificance behind it—and yet know it, in order to understand people and above all to see through them (my hatred of history as a refuge for be-nothings) (11).

For fear of forgetting my insights, learn not to repeat formulations of them, not even to myself; formulation as a way of forgetting (12).

The feeling that almost everything I have seen or heard up to now loses its original form the moment it enters into me…but is instantly metamorphosed into something quite formless….Thus, writing would be an awakening of thousands of unformed pupate experiences to new forms….the thought that now arises of all the innumerable, terrifyingly formless pupate hybrids within me….and of the work that lies ahead of me to fixate in speech and idea these hybrids…and to fashion them into something radiantly new, in which, however, one senses the old, the original experiences, as one senses the caterpillar in the butterfly! (21)

Something that upsets my balance; my mind is often a little ahead of whatever action I am performing; this brief moment of cleavage between consciousness and activity sometimes impedes my feeling for the activity... (31).

....now we have to hold these things close to our faces if we want to smell and feel something which in childhood permeated us without any need to pick it up....what in those days we 'just' took as it came, we must now purposely, intentionally, deliberately bring close to us (34).

My feeling of self...isolates my own self.... (35).

There is really no solution, the eternal cleavage between me and the world remains, and the hope of overcoming it once and for all...is no better than an injection of some placebo...(87).

The complacency--another kind of armor--that comes of basking in thoughts that one has experssed successfully in the presence of others: such arrogance ... impedes the constantly renewed perception without which there can be no life. Perhaps it's an affection, a pretense, to express thoughts that don't arise in the moment of speaking (88).

While I am here, I am somewhere else--
ahead or behind
elsewhere another:
Unrest, an unself.
I am only here
I am only now:
I am rest itself (101).

The psychoanalyst said, 'I have the impression that yo have put certain areas of feeling on ice. You ahve grown hedges around yourself' (110).

Most of the day I was one among many...I looked on with an open mind, but....without participating as a witness (115).

For children there seems to be no gap between knowledge and existence...whereas my little bit of knowledge is of no use to me in my daily existence.....(123).

Someone said: 'Nobody dies of hypotheses'--meaning: we need the old convictions (which are worth dying for) (126).

My power to identify with myself, with my gestalt, with my life, is always failing me--and I make no attempt to overcome this periodic failure of self-identification: I need these calamities (148).

Memory: life's most intense experience, after all.... (152).

New feeling of remoteness, unconnectedness, of congealed beside-myselfness (156).

Doppelganger experience: '...his specific way of thinking--his profoundly quiet way of letting his own life recede into the background....' (168).

Just as a often do things absentmindedly, so I sometimes think absentmindedly (for the last year I have been trying so hard to pay constant attention to what is passing through my mind) (185).

At last: blissful deafness to all possible impressions (191).

My special gift: extreme distraction, followed by extreme concentration (211).

'Perception is attention' (Novalis)...my wish to go out into the street as a wish to experiment ('Don't look for anything behind phenomena; they themselves are the doctrine'--Goethe) (224).