Dear Tobias, aimlessly the sunrays wander over the objects that happen to be in their way. Aimlessly do these sunrays pass into darkness till they are swallowed by starlessness. Feels good.

I would like to accompany your paintings with a few words the way your paintings accompany me when I am writing. Writing is my way of taking care of people. Some sunrays fall on the black chute of the chimney and are silently swallowed by them. Clouds continue to caress the sky, painting it almost white. Today is the fifth day since my return from Waldviertel and I can sense how the sixteen-day recuperation is coming to an end.

A lot of energy was put in by me in the writing of letters – whether to the doctor, to lawyers, to the friend or the actor for ever since I gave up painting, there is a violent stirring in my writer’s brain not to write a book, not even a short one.

This will at least spare me the corrections. I also feel drawn away from the supposed closeness implied by book covers; away from the stumbling blocks that are imprint, page numbers, sale price and literal gibberish, and away as if from the sight of the junk on our last trek to Siebenlinden like look out towers, buses, tourists and similar crap that wants to be seen but has no right to be.

The place itself is wonderfully empty: a closed inn, a deserted grocery store, not even the endless cars as in larger Großwolfgers. The church is a picture of destruction, good. Only below the chancel are four segments of a vault. “Turn it into a tavern”, I mutter again. But nobody’s interested, not even I myself. I feel as if I once had an interest centuries ago and an echo of it has survived, just a tiny trace of it. I don’t want to speak about the Gothic church before your studio window in Vienna. You know it all better than I do and move away from it in your pictures, unaware or full of knowledge, who cares! Let us try to subvert the rules of the market whenever it is possible to. We don’t want a roof, like the priest of Siebenlinden who is also responsible for Großwolfers does, a roof that continuously runs from the church all the way down to his parking space. He even wants to put in an application for a special road from Siebenlinden to Großwolfers, a roofed one, needless to say, to ensure jobs.

Don’t you feel like giving back your art award? They are only using us with their global eccentricity that only intends to stifle all individual striving for universality. I do not believe that your pining for love, so unyielding and sad, has made you carry your head to Siebenlinden where one is at least not conspicuous when one does not laugh.

For a change, I must to tell you about last evening, about my visit to the inn after the movie. The films are getting worse from day to day and I mean this literally: on Monday. The nomads of the air, it is quite good and scary to see so clearly that birds are nothing but flying objects and the question creeps in as to what apparatuses human beings are and what they are meant for. Even the music is so miserable that one has to cling onto pictures so unduely. The audience is so impossible that it laughs uncontrollably when a crane slips on the ice while dancing on his wedding, as if he were doing it for their pleasure. Ship announcements begin with too much sympathy for a loser, played so sensitively by Kevin Spacey that one would also like to give up oneself as lost and drowned. But, but then there is a murmur of complaint and revolt about the fact that even twelve-year-olds can beget on Labrador. And this is disgustingly articulated by an old woman who was made pregnant at twelve by her brother. What is the aim of all this? Bang in all this shit, crap in oil, so fashionable today. Away! Away! Away! Then on Thursday: Behind the Sun. Verdetta in Brasil, Serato. Not even seen that movie by Antonio Das Mortes? You know that I am allowing myself an error here.

On to the inn: bursting at the seams. There is always a little nook somewhere. The waiters weave past and even find another cranny for the slipping and sliding plates. Once it becomes impossible to move, a lady touches her nose. My neighbour gets coleslaw. Both of us read the paper, he reads yesterday’s and I today’s. I have covered his coleslaw with my cigar ash because it is so full here. “Do you mind if I smoke?” “No, no”, he says, and eats around the ashes. He sets down his second beer on my newspaper and I read around his glass. Because it is making no sense, I start making notes around the glass, e.g., that I have to ask at the hairdresser’s whether I must take off my hat. Before I begin to write, I feel disgusted by the thought of having human hair. I will get off at Starnberg North today. What’s this? An aluminium cage in steel – it is the station, no lake. But the lake will be here soon. Everything is ugly as usual. Only the lake is in a state, its waves play antics as if all were well. “Excuse me, please”, says my neighbour and lifts his beer. But the greatest impudence at the hairdresser’s is the sight of ones own head in the mirror. And so the sentences just drift past even though they are slightly bathed in light like your pictures. Though so endless, they still take along a few crumbs – like your father seated on the tiled fireplace, who you gave a far too flat arse. But I say to myself: You don’t have to look at me, you must look at your pictures.

But how long does it take for one to reach the point of exhaustion? At any rate, I will die in praying position because, according to my most recent insight, every animal is a position of prayer. Trivial are only human beings for they are even obscene while praying. A good painter can also be a good position of prayer. Why? Because people always want to know what man is like. And why do they no longer know what man is like? My first thought yesterday morning: ribs are bars through which the heart looks out captivated. But the heart will never have the last view of anything because the brain will always be the first to turn off the faucet. What small consolation! And who is Glauba Rocha? Have to write a love letter.

Cheers, yours Herbert.