Robert had a thought and sat down. He had already been seated a few moments earlier, before rising to stretch his legs. He was about to dance a brief waltz when the thought fell into his head. So he sat down to ponder it. He did not write it down. He did not put ink to paper as was his habit with thoughts. It was not that kind of thought. It could not be put into writing, could not be sung or painted or turned into a meaningful action. It was the kind of thought he classified as pure - of and for itself, inconsequential and alone, a little out of this world. So he sat down, as if under or beside his thought, and reflected on how it resisted his scrutiny, how it defied his application, how it held fast to its own integrity. And it could not be ignored, this thought, could not be dumped on the scrapheap of all his thoughts and simply be forgotten. It had to be preserved. So he carried it around like a page (albeit a blank page) which fluttered or billowed or rustled in his mind from time to time, evoking images from the past - a woman, a sailboat, a picnic. The experience of this incommunicable thought pleased and disturbed Robert simultaneously. On the one hand it seemed as if it had fallen into his head at just the right moment in his life, clarifying and making sense of everything. He knew that it was no illusion, that it was a real thought which had to be treated seriously and with respect. In adopting this attitude he felt that he was being loyal to himself, since he had always been satisfied to be himself and this sort of habitual reflexivity suited him and was a trademark of his character. But in fact he was only following a primitive inclination to sit down and do nothing, not even wait. So while he was pleased to be himself, to be Robert Walser, the Swiss writer, he was also disturbed by it - just as the Swiss writer Robert Walser would have been both pleased and disturbed (he thought) to be not only himself but another Robert Walser who happened to be a Swiss writer. But Robert could not be absolutely sure if there really was another Robert Walser. He toyed with the word really in his mind till its meaning blurred and faded like an old charcoal drawing. His thought had produced a configuration of pleasure and pain which reflected his delicate state of mind and cloaked itself in a mysterious light. So he sat down and pondered it. He was not Swiss, he had never been to Switzerland, though he was inclined to be neutral, even a bit aloof at times, and had always loved the mountains. And yet it was not these uncanny resemblances that seized his mind now - even if he was in his seventies, had dropped dead in the snow and did lose his hat in the process- but the disquieting evidence of a duplicate existence in an identical but distinctly separate body which he could not countenance as his own. Everything seemed to be exactly the same - the scene, the action, the light- as if Robert Walser were re-enacting his own death. Clearly that was impossible. Even if a particular fleeting gesture or expression was repeated and rendered identical, the truth of Robert Walser and his act of dying could never have been reconstituted. I can only speculate as to the nature of these facts from within the realm of possibilities. The snow and the corpse lying in it are both equally cold, life-size renditions and perfect models of the man, the place and the event. For my part I only know which is living, which dead - who fell, and why.

The madness business introduced itself into Robert's head like a gift. Robert suspected that something was amiss and wondered what menacing hand lay behind it. Born into the latter part of the last century, he wrote novels, stories and odd prose pieces well into the first part of this century. As many of his writings were published as not and were variously described as poetic, laconic, good, bad. Those who described also judged - reviewing, dismissing or ignoring his texts with the sarcasm of blisters on a corpse's tongue. Robert bore derision across the expanse of his brow with the equanimity of sails gliding across a lake. In his own lifetime the verdicts pronounced upon his writings had little effect on his mind or his body - yet I find this hard to believe, even if the obverse was true too. He began at the end, with a random circular thought inside his head, first informing, then colluding with the madness business outside it. He attributed the madness business firstly to his obsession with writing and secondly to his compulsion to be mad. His obsession and compulsion thus kept a tab on each other in a system of checks and balances which prevented his relapse into total sanity or total madness. It was a kind of gift, this system, a promotional marketing ploy of the time distributed like free perfume to passers-by in the street. The gift came wrapped in silk tissues and no genius has been given the hands to deflect it. Robert dreamed of ribboned snowflakes laced in the shape of his body. He was a waiter. Before dying he wanted to serve, to bring this or that -a cup of tea or coffee - to one or another of his readers, always observing his own civility. Balancing a cup and saucer in his hand, he walked from one end of the cosmos to the other. Once he went so far as to pick a coffee bean from a plant that grew by the way, wanting to place it decoratively beside the teaspoon. As his hand reached out to pick it from a cluster hanging on a stalk, the bean momentarily eclipsed the sun, its shadow briefly obscuring the dirt under his fingernails. At that instant Robert felt purified, glimpsing his own mortality in the fruit. Thereafter his shadow moved lithely on the floor of the world, like the shadow of a fish. The event was recounted as a miracle. Death and decorum soon became his playmates. He developed a desire to inculcate a civil mode of behaviour in our feeding habits. He wanted to invest the crude sounds, odours and gestures of mastication, digestion and defecation in an epic of functionality informed by the body's nourishment business. He would attend to all that shit with humility and grace, preserving a semblance of order within the complexities of his internal body. The madness business only entered his head as a belated distraction. He began to imagine that a circus had pitched its tent under his eyelids, and whilst he was seduced by its strange enchantment the dull monotony of the band music soon grew irksome. He took to drinking spring water but failed to flush out the noise. As he was about to die and abnegate all responsibilities that life had foisted upon him, he suddenly realised his oldest ambition - to improvise dying - and remembered to say to himself, loudly and clearly, what he had neglected to say all his life: Jesus, Robert! Be lucid! Then he went on dying, as usual, with a strange fulfilment in the air around him. This myth was invented and recorded by a writer in his dream, one in a series whirring madly in the round, attached to no-one.

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