Building by roaming: reading and writing one's way out of winter

I followed one interesting thing into another, as usual, and somewhere along the way my life began moving again. How and why did that work? [Read this post on the web]

The seed here was the impromptu re-reading of an old favorite book, Goethe's Italian Journey, at the end of month-long travels from Toronto back to Portland (via Mexico, briefly, of course!) in January. This prompted me to finally read his Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795/96), the most iconic work in the long, rich 'Bildungsroman' ("novel of formation [or self-development]") tradition. This somehow unfolded into months of reading/film adventures along that theme — crucial wind in the sails, and eventually the one thing that got me writing again. Bildungsroman was the vital, reviving thread of interest, but it's also centrally about self-formation around such interests, so helps explain why this might work generally.

Reading #1: Kings of the Road (1976)

For a brilliant journey into these themes, a story that in ways is weirdly parallel, and in any case my current top recommendation for your films-to-see list, take the Bildungsroman film by Wim Wenders, Kings of the Road (original German title Im Lauf der Zeit, "In the Course of Time").

Kings of the Road, and the informal "Road trilogy" it completes, concretely reference Bildungsroman tradition; while also playfully critiquing, morphing, remixing it. Which is so much of and exemplarily why it becomes a great work: both deep roots and branching widely to reach us.

Roving, solitary, 30-something movie-projector-repairman Bruno Winter is travelling through small towns of the East/West Germany borderlands, living in his truck. One day, a VW Beetle barrels past and plunges, sinking, into the nearby river Elbe. From it emerges — sheepish after his half-hearted suicide effort or dramatic gesture — Robert Lander, a reading-acquisition researcher/pediatrician, disconsolate after just separating from his wife in Genoa. Amused, the only help on hand, and possibly sensing some kindred spirit, Bruno lets Robert ride on in the truck, and they end up journeying mostly amiably on together for some weeks. They stop at cinemas for service calls, encounter variously lost souls and dying towns, and make two excursions to visit their respective childhood homes.

The film's references to Bildungsroman are less explicit than in Wenders' previous film, Wrong Move (German: Falsche Bewegung, "False Movement," 1975) in which e.g. the same lead actor, Rüdiger Vogler, plays a character literally named Wilhelm Meister. But many motifs express the link, for example at about 55mins in, when Bruno finally asks his accidental travelling companion who/what he is, leading to a sharp exchange in which Robert articulates a classic Bildungsroman credo and incurs Bruno's mockery:

"Bruno: Do you do anything else except "test-driving"? [sarcastically alluding to Robert driving his car into the river].
Robert: I'm a pediatrician… In Genoa I separated from my wife.
Bruno: I didn't ask you about that. There's no need to tell me your stories.
Robert: So what would you like to hear?
Bruno: Who you are.
Robert: I am my story."

Not only is Robert's self-making mocked by Bruno, but it's delightfully cinematographically parodied, or unfolded, as he speaks: by a cut to close-up then landscape view of the hollow plastic Michelin Man figure that Bruno keeps mounted on the front of the truck, a truck-driver tradition. As if quoting T.S. Eliot's epochal 1925 poem "The Hollow Men":
"Shape without form, shade without colour./ Paralysed force, gesture without motion…"

Later on, however, the self-contained Bruno [Winter], despite his sardonic initial takes on Robert's gestures to self-realization, seems to become drawn into such himself, starts to partly unharden. Particularly after a side-adventure by borrowed motorcycle + sidecar to visit his now-abandoned childhood home on an island in the Rhine, a surreal and haunting, dream-like episode that feels like an Underworld journey sub-episode in an epic. Afterwards, it's like Bruno having come back from the dead, is dislodged from the stasis he'd been living in before.

"I'm glad we went to the Rhine. For the first time I see myself as someone who's gone through a certain time, and that time is my story."

Reading #2: "Sentiment guides us" — the 'Bildung' (formation) cultural thread

Kings of the Road places itself in the multi-century tradition of 'Bildung' (which includes Bildungsroman): "the German tradition of self-cultivation, the development and formation of the human mind through education and cultural maturation" [—Wikipedia, "Bildung"; see also References below]. Leading with and plugging a favorite film of mine illustrates a core 'Bildung' idea: that we typically start with and proceed by what uniquely, individually compels or delights us.

As says a defining work in Bildung tradition, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) by Friedrich Schiller — in its opening epigraph: "If it is reason that makes man, it is sentiment that guides him." [taken from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie or the New Heloise, 1761].

The film's slogan might be read as centering a similar point: "These men bring the motion" (my non-standard translation to underline the similarity). Where is there motion, what moves me? one might ask, often need ask.

This is crucial in why art might, in the view e.g. of Schiller, be so important in human/social development, as compared to, say, education or parenting or social institutions: because it freely impels our interest, and offers new imaginative forms that open us to re-form. For example, it was from my entirely voluntary, roaming interest toward and on from Italian Journey that paths opened up for action, to write and to get here.

The appeal for, and path of, every person, is ultimately unique. As Rousseau epoch-definingly begins the perhaps most famous and influential autobiography of all time, his Confessions (1782): "I am forming an undertaking without precedent, and its execution will have no imitator… I am made unlike anyone I have ever seen; I dare believe I am made unlike anyone in existence."

Look, I'm just considering what seems to usefully impel, open paths, and keep you living and feeling — let's say, even if you've left the Church, aren't in school, are lacking in suitable healthcare options, or you're ill-advisedly wintering in Portland, Oregon, whose residents rank dead last among US cities in extroversion and notoriously ghost for long stretches.

Finding expression as formation — of self and society

Beyond finding what makes sense of things, realization probably requires further stages — developing concepts, articulations, forms, building something, even if only for oneself. For me this seems to matter strangely much, to the point of being crucial for living; seems to often, surprisingly, outweigh all other factors in health.

Three centuries of Bildung/Bildungsroman philosophy and art, however, have compellingly explored how/why this may be so.

A classic expression comes from Wilhelm von Humboldt, founder of the University of Berlin, and thereby the "Humboldtian model of higher education" (German: Humboldtsches Bildungsideal) underlying the modern research university. From his 1793 fragment “Theorie der Bildung des Menschen” [“Theory of Human Formation”]:

Such unfolding into form is central, in Bildung theorizing e.g. of Humboldt and Hegel, not only for individuals, but for society collectively: selves and the world come to exist by unfolding self-realization. As opposed to, say, having a 'nature' that pre-exists and is revealed; or by the working-out of fate, divine will, scientific principles, social institutions, human nature, or historical circumstances.

Reading #3: Goethe's Faust, "Easter walk"

An iconic and exemplary case of 'Bildung' literal usage is in Goethe's Faust, Part One (1808), the poem "Easter walk" ("'Osterspaziergang"). This is one of the most famous passages in German literature, commonly memorized by schoolchildren — and for me among the most deeply, decades-recurringly, resonant passages in all of literature:

As this passage depicts, and as is famously characteristic of Goethe's ways of thinking, development, i.e. in phases and through different states, is perceived as occurring in all things, interrelatedly across all phenomena, and across timescales from geologic epoch to cognitive moment.

In the state of flourishing which this poem iconically represents, the universal interrelated development is unblocked, observed, and realized — rippling and reinforcing across all realms. As hadn't been happening, implicitly, over long years in Faust the scholar's book-lined study, or in the winter-bound City before spring got people out and about.

Reading #4: Kings of the Road final scene

Finding the right path — here, literally track — and how it is tied to or enacts self-expression, is beautifully expressed in Im Lauf's somehow both humble-slice-of-life and magical-fabulist, near-final scene. Robert has decided to decamp from roaming with Bruno, and is at a rural train station platform studying schedules. Outside he sees a young boy keenly writing in a notebook, and asks what he's writing. The kid says: what I see. "It's that easy?" asks Robert, comic-quizzically. That easy! replies the high-spirited, somewhat mischievous, budding writer. Tell you what, Robert says, I'll trade you this metal suitcase, and the sunglasses, for your notebook. Which the boy immediately shrewdly assesses as a winning deal and agrees to.

There's something lovely in how the scene is simultaneously both a believable, amusing, closely-drawn exchange between drift-wearied but amiable washed-up writer and precocious kid, and also quite transparently an allegory, fairy-tale like in its clear symbols and aspect of surreality.

It's as is the character Robert spots, in an ordinary scene, the opportunity to enact an allegory of self-transformation, and "seize the name of action," literally re-acquire the means to write.

Conclusion: write on track

This is probably why I so honed in on and presently find so moving this film, and particularly this scene: because my situation is all about gathering the pieces and form to "find expression" and act. In order to get on track, in directed motion, out of a long Borderlands drift.

You might say that's all anyone does, can, or ever needs to: try to find and take a good next step, hopefully on the right track.

Sometimes, however, and for some of us, that next step may stay suspended, that track may not be or not seem to be there. Or life needs to change tracks, cross platforms, for its path to continue truely. A film or book that strikes you, that gets you, might be what gets you there, when nothing else does.

** References **

My ongoing topic ('topos') document gathering related material, in Toposcope project. "Bildung and Bildungsroman" #BildungBildungsroman https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dCzMta51jp0dglRr0sym3J3uZRhom9DkCK-fcJEjqM4/.

Below are selected, mostly critical works drawn from the References section there, that I've consulted in my Bildungs[roman] exploring this year:

Bahr, Ehrhard (1998). The Novel as Archive: The Genesis, Reception, and Criticism of Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. 9781571131461.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. "The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism". Written c. 1936–38; published posthumously in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986.

Bruford, W. H. (1975). The German Tradition of Self Cultivation and Bildung from Humboldt to Thomas Mann. 0521204828. Cambridge University Press, 1975.

Dilthey, Wilhelm. "Friedrich Hölderlin." In Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung: Lessing, Goethe, Novalis, Hölderlin. Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1906. English translation: Poetry and Experience (Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works, Vol. V). edited and translated by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. pp. 336–338. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Graham, Sarah, ed. A History of the Bildungsroman. Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Hegel, G. W. F. The Phenomenology of Spirit. (1807). Translated and with Introduction by Michael Inwood, Oxford University Press, 2018.

Humboldt, Wilhelm von. "Theorie der Bildung des Menschen" ["Theory of Bildung"]. Written c. 1793–94; unpublished in Humboldt's lifetime. First published in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. I, edited by Albert Leitzmann, pp. 282–287. Berlin: B. Behr's Verlag, 1903. Translated by Gillian Horton-Krüger as "Theory of Bildung" in Teaching as a Reflective Practice: The German Didaktik Tradition, edited by Ian Westbury, Stefan Hopmann, and Kurt Riquarts, pp. 57–61. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000.

Morgenstern, Karl. "On the Nature of the Bildungsroman." Trans. Tobias Boes. PMLA 124.2 (March 2009): 647–659. Originally delivered as a lecture at the University of Dorpat, 12 December 1819; first published in Inländisches Museum 1.2–3 (1820).

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1762). Emile, or On Education. 9780465019311. translated by Allan Bloom. Basic Books, 1979.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1782/?) The Confessions. 9780199540037. Oxford Worlds Classics, 2008.