Torschlusspanik is one of those wonderful German coinages that envisions an entire universe in a single word. The South African artist William Kentridge defines it as:
The panic of closing doors. The fear of opening one door rather than another, and hearing it slam behind you, once you have made your decision; but maybe that decision is the wrong one, so you would rather stand paralysed in front of three doors to avoid making it. Torschlusspanik.
William Kentridge in interview with Peter Asden, "The art of war" for The Financial Times, 7/8 July 2018.
Sandy Horvath-Dori from Grand Junction, CO, USA [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]
Germans associate Torschlusspanik with the passage of time: a midlife crisis, a biological clock ticking, career stagnation. We've all felt that fear, even when we were still young. No one wants to be left behind. We all want to be invited to the cool kids' party.
Yet the thought of having to make a choice is even more frightening than the prospect of falling behind. Think of all the expressions we have for the regret of choosing badly: greener grasses, roads not taken, sitting on a fence.
City Walls
Torschlusspanik was first coined in medieval times when cities were walled. During the day, merchants and mendicants could enter the city gates under the watchful eye of the local garrison. Farmers would come to town to sell their wares. But at night, the city gates would close to protect its inhabitants from the dangers that lurked in the dark. Wild animals. Thieves. War.
Tabriz city gate by Eugène Flandin. Image source: Wikimedia
When those dangers threatened the countryside, the farmers would take refuge inside the city walls. Torschlusspanik was the fear of not reaching the city in time.
You don't need a medieval gate to experience Torschlusspanik. In 1961, East Germans were crossing into West Germany despite efforts by the Communist authorities to seal the border.
Everything East German leaders did to shut off the flow of refugees to the West seemed, instead, to spur it on. The day that Deputy Premier Willi Stoph announced new secret measures to halt the refugees—ostensibly at the urging of "delegations of workers"—1.532 East Germans beat it over the border and checked into the big Marienfelde refugee center in West Berlin. Time Magazine, "Torschlusspanik", 18 Aug 1961
Writer's Block
There's a different sort of Torschlusspanik that afflicts artists. It starts with people like William Kentridge setting the bar impossibly high. "A Drawing Lesson" is a series of six lectures Kentridge gave in 2012 at Harvard University.
Kentridge calls the artist's pen a loaded weapon, full of every thought that has never been expressed. When asked whether such an artistic challenge might seem a bit daunting, he responded: Torschlusspanik.
But there are many reasons why a pen might stutter. Take, for example, the predicament of Maxine Hong Kingston. She opened the way for generations of writers like me who recognized themselves in her works. Yet 40 years after the publication of The Woman Warrior, Kingston still feels the need to be uplifting and nice about her fellow Asians. Hence, her next book project.
“I’m liberating myself to write anything I want,” she told me. By stipulating that the book won’t be published until one hundred years after her death, she said, “I can let go of that duty [to be uplifting] and I can write. I can put my negative emotions in. I can write my shadow.”
Alexis Cheung, "What I Learned from Maxine Hong Kingston" in Catapult, 4 Dec 2017
Self-censorship can also afflict an entire society. In Malaysia, politics, religious freedom, and gender fluidity are all topics of furious debate. Yet they rarely surface in Malaysian literature written in English. For one, such writers are regarded as postcolonial pretenders with colonialist souls. For another, it's just dangerous.
While bemoaning the state of literature in the region and the paucity of good writers, there is still a numbing self-censorship that makes authors draw back from the precipice before they get too near.
Dipika Mukherjee, "Malaysian English Writing Today" in World Literature Today, 16 Apr 2019
Object Lessons
So let's assume you're in the possession of an idea or image never before expressed. You're also blessed by a language and a society that will tolerate your expression. Now, go write.
The craft of writing is no simple task. There are so many cats to herd. Think about something as basic as the details you put onto the page. There are orienting details that tell the reader whether a character is standing inside or outside. Descriptive details to tell us whether that character is old or young, fat or thin. And then there is granular detail.
those hyper-specific, hyper-vivid details that hold layers of time and meaning.
Laura Van den Berg, Object Lessons: An Exploration in Craft, 13 Aug 2018
An orienting detail (it was a dark and stormy night) serves to ground the reader. By contrast, the purpose of the granular detail is to startle and destabilize. Van den Berg uses a fingernail, found in the drawer of a hotel dresser, to do that in her novel The Third Hotel.
Sometimes, a granular detail can rise to the level of an object. A thing with a luminous halo in the words of Virginia Woolf. An object must do more than merely reflect the character observing that object.
[It] should be a mirror and a window and a refraction all at once.
Closing Doors
Writers make choices all the time. Every page, sentence, word. This detail or that. You can take them all back, of course. Return the ink to the barrel as Kentridge would say. But at some point you have to say, enough is enough.
As I approach the final edits of my novel-in-progress Peace Court, I hear doors slamming shut. I've chosen my characters and their fate. Drawn, tightened, and redrawn the plot lines. My narrator has found her voice. But what about my details?
I've taken a cleaver and an agate pendant from my short story Moon Cakes and put them into my novel, Peace Court. A photograph of five young friends leads to the denouement of Peace Court. That photo could only have been taken during the period described in my first novel, The Dancing Girl and the Turtle. But these are all static objects. They cast no shadows.
If I have any granular details or haloed objects, then it's the food: the making of food, the memory of food, hoarding and hunger. Cooks fill moon cakes with sweet red beans and nostalgia. Ration coupons mean millet in the last stage before famine. A bowl of glass noodles in duck's blood is all it would take to set a man free.
I've made my choices. No Torschlusspanik. Yet.
Note: Torschlusspanik was first published by Karen Kao on her blog Shanghai Noir.
Torschlusspanik - what an exquisitely layered term: Leave it to the Germans to coin such nuanced, ironic descriptor of our shadowy inner experiences! It takes dithering to a new level and nails it! Thank you for that. I've written it on a strip of masking tape to label what had been a mystery jar on the shelf of my writer's neuroses. Good luck with Peace Court. It sounds great. Kudos for getting through the many doors that must be opened and closed to reach where you are with it.
A month ago, after twenty years in publishing, I launched my first e-book. Now it's feedback time. Three words spring to mind when I ask myself how it went. Panic. Exhilaration. Exhaustion. In that order. Even the most careful planning can go awry. Everything was lined up to happen at the push of a button. Book launched on Kindle, click . New look Pauline Fisk website launched with fabulous new ‘Midnight Blue’ artwork, click . Authors Electric posting launched entitled ‘Why Now, Why an E-Book and Why Kindle’, click . Mailshot launched to two hundred and fifty addresses, click . But you can’t launch anything without the internet. At five in the morning [yes, so keen was I to get launching that I was up at five] I was to be found on the phone to a BT engineer trying to figure out what had gone wrong. After an hour of phone calls back and forth, involving crawling under my desk, pulling out plugs and reinstating them and being sent to obscure corners of my computer to click th
April 2016 Happy Daffs Five years ago on this date I was giving thanks for the joy of daffodils . I was bearing witness to the blessed moments of relief given by their inherent gaiety to my mother’s poor tired mind as her dementia worsened and paranoia set in. It wasn’t long before we were forced to admit that the illness was overwhelming her and she needed to move into the dementia nursing unit where, finally, she would die. Meanwhile, in April 2016, there was a neglected strip of flower bed opposite the window of her extra care flat. After ripping out the couch grass and cutting back the dead twigs, we planted two small clumps of daffodils. Mum's flat was increasingly filled with ghosts and murderers that set her screaming in the dark and me hurtling down the 60 miles of main road attempting to hold them at bay. In the end I lost that battle, but this time five years ago, my main allies were those daffodils. I wrote Even in the time of sundowners when Mum’s brain is exhausted a
For this post, I've been tagged by Valerie Laws to explain my writing process. We all tackle the job differently, don't we? There are one or two things we agree on, such as editing a lot and reading work aloud to spot the clunky bits, but there's no right and wrong way. It took me a while to find that out! Valerie Laws ( www.valerielaws.com ) is a crime novelist, poet, playwright and sci-art installation specialist. Of her thirteen published books, 4 are currently available as ebooks. A mathematics/physics graduate, she devises new poetic forms and science-themed poetry installations and commissions including the infamous Arts Council–funded Quantum Sheep, spray-painting haiku onto live sheep to celebrate quantum theory. Much of her recent work arises from funded residencies with pathologists, neuroscientists, human specimens and dissections. Another quantum haiku on inflated beachballs in Hackney Lido featured in BBC2’s Why Poetry Matters with Griff Rhys J
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about writing of late, more thinking than writing, especially late at night. This makes me want to beat myself up mentally sometimes, makes me wonder why I can't sleep. In the past, when want-to-be writers wanted to chat about writing, I obliged but with some trepidation. I don’t do small talk, and to wax poetic on the craft of writing seemed meaningless unless there was real life application. Were we writing a book together? If not, then what I had to contribute would probably be of little help. I’m not an academic, and theorizing about writing can never take the place of the act of writing itself. It’s a discipline that's learned while putting it in practice. Writing is also a solitary endeavour, not a group effort. I say this even though I write with a partner every month. Bill Kirton (who also contributes to this site) and I compose stories together , but our individual pieces are written without prior discussion, so the act of writing i
As I am merely one of the contributors to, rather than the owner of, this blog, I don't usually use my own image or that of my books as the main photo. I always think that would be rather presumptuous of me. However, I thought it was appropriate for this particular post and I am hoping the admins and you, as readers of this blog, will forgive me. There is a good reason for me using this today. Often, as authors, we only display a very public persona and what people know of us is what can be seen in the images we choose. These are most often chosen to show us in our best light. Of course, that makes sense as we want readers to invest in our books. From the image above you would see me as a confident prolific author, with numerous books to her name, across a range of age groups. I have also been published in, edited and compiled numerous anthologies which are not seen in the above image. Why are you telling me this, I hear you ask. The answer - you may think that words just flow fr
Comments