Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Crossing Am‘/aetics
Werner Hamacher
Editor
Translated by Anthony A. Nassar
Smn am’
University;
Press
Stan ml
Cali omit:
2006
FJUKE UN§V5EF§E5?iT"“a’ LEBRARY
TR/\C%ES
Ernst Bloch
‘-'
“
.-.-....a.4,u. 4-.
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
English translation © 2006 by the Board of Trustees of the
Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
Time: was originally published in German in 1969 under the title Sperm: ©
Suhrkalnp Veriag Frankfurt am Main 1969.
The publication of this work was supported by
a grant from the Goethe Institute.
PT2603.L59S6I3 2006
838'.91209—dc27. 2005033005
Original Printing 2006
Last gurebelow indicates year of this printing:
15 I4 13 12 II to 09 08 07 06
Typeset by Classic Typography
in 10.9113 Gararnond and Lithos display
For Sieg iedUnsaid
Contents*
Not Enough* 1
Sleeping I
Drawn Out 1
Always in It 2
Mingling 2
Sing—Song 2
Slight Change 3
Lamp and Closet 4
Learning Good Habits 5
The “Mark!” 5
SIT UAT I 0 N
The Poor 9
Filth 9
The Gift 9
Different Needs* IO
"Texts indicated with an asterisk appear for the first time in this edition. Most are
from the years when Times was being written (1910-1929); a smaller number were
written for this edition.
i
i
X Cgnfg tf
Games, Regrettably 10 i
The Useful Member 14
Shaker of StraWberries* 15
Bread and GRIUES
S
i5 T
Narrow~Minded Comrades* 16 _
Disturbing Whim 17
FAT E
Passing ii Forward 21
Thii Neg“) H
The Waheished 22
N0 Face 24
Comte de Miiabeau 25 _
EX I 5 T E N C ii-
Just Now 71
Dark by Us _
71
The Fall into the Now 72
The Spur ofWorlt 73
No pm LunCh* 76
Ten Years’ ]ail, Seven—Meter Train* 79
Silence and Mirrors 80
Ways Not to Be Seen 82
Imminent Boredom 83
Moment and Image 87
Poteml<in’s Signature 88
Incognito to Oneself* 89
‘
Motifs of Concealment 91
Just Knock 97
The Corner of the Blanket 97
short Excursion 93
Terror and Hope 99
Excursus: Human and Wax Figure 101
THINGs
Ha1fG00d I23
The Next Tree H3
xii Comma:
_
The First Locomotive 114
ThemUi'ban Peasant‘ I25
The House ofDay 12.6
Montages of a February Evening* 128
An Odd Fléineur 130
Eating Oli-ves Precisely* 132
Making a Point* 133
The Reverse of Things 134
Greeting and Appearance 136
Motifs of Temptation I40
Appendix: No Mans Land 147
A Russian Fairy Tale?* I49 :*
The Clever Way Out 151
Disappointment with Amusement* 154
The Invisible Hand 155
Tales ofWhite Magic I59
Wonder I69
The Mountain 171
Dead and Usable* 171
The Pearl* 172
Notes 175
T CES
Not Enough
One is alone with oneself. Together with others, most are alone even
without themselves. One has to get out of both.
Sleeping
By ourselves we are still empty. So we easily fall asleep with no external
stimuli. Soft pillows, darkness, quiet let us fall asleep; the body grows
Clark. When one lies awake at night, that is hardly waking, but rather a
stubborn, exhausting creeping in place. One notices then how unpleasant
it is With nothing but oneself.
Drawn Out
Waiting likewise makes one desolate. But it can also make one drunk.
Someone who stares too long at the door where he expects another to
enter can become intoxicated. As by tuneless singing that draws and
draws. Dark, where it draws us to; probably into nothing good. If the
man, the woman whom one awaits doesn’t arrive, the clear disappoint-
ment doesn’t really undo the intoxication. It only combines with its result,
2 Always in It
Always in It
We can't be alone for long. One doesn’t suffice with it; in one’s very own
room sornething’s not right. Nonetheless one takes the room along every-
where, especially when young. Many are drawn strangely back into them-
selves; they make themselves mute. It rattles down as with chains and
buries those who are only in themselves. Precisely because they cant get
out of themselves, they grow scared, right in the corner where they are.
Into which they’re driven, even without anything bringing them there‘.
We always dread only what we don’t see. ‘What visibly assails us causes
awe, if were weak, or resistance. But against dread, because it comes out
of us alone, when were alone, all that helps is to love oneself or forget
iii-i‘
oneself. Whoever cannot do so adequately gets bored. Whower can, ei-
‘.
ther takes himself seriously or takes what he does outside of himself just
as it is. They aren’t so far apart, and alternate in most of us. They let us get
up every morning even when we shouldn’t have to, and during the day
both disperse only halfway.
Mingling
Is it good? I asked. Children like it best at someone elses home. They
notice soon enough What’s wrong there too. If it were so nice at home,
they wouldn’t leave so eagerly. They sense early that, here as elsewhere,
much could be different.
Sing—Song
Strange, how some act when no one sees them. Some make faces in the
morning, others do a little dance, most hum senselessly to themselves.
Slig/at Change 3
Slight Change
I used to know someone who didn’t put on airs. As a child, he would
say, he’d actually been quite vain; at games he had to be the first. ‘Whoever
would not parry would be beaten, and usually the little prince would be
on top, if only because the other wouldn’t properly hit back.
But later that was gone, of course, at a stroke, as though swallowed up.
Those of us from his earlier grades could still remember: he was quite a
pitiful boy then. Others’ awkward years took their toll on this new cow-
‘.
ard; they threw him in the pool, tied a rope to his leg on the playground
and made him jump. From the boy who’d done the least to him, he stole
a notebook, for which the other was punished; in short, he’d become a
wretched boy, had and unsteady. But then something remarkable hap—
pened: at fourteen years, or a little later, in the first ushof puberty, the
same proud boy returned, and the wretched boy fell away; his character
reversed for the second time; he grew strong and soon became the leader
of the same grade. He had his personal slogans, with quite genuine force,
insolent conviction, and little affectation; he would enter pubs with the
cry, “Hats off, Fritz Klein is coming”; the patrons were already hatless.
Another, somewhat later slogan was: “Who rejects me condemns him-
self” ; but he didn’t need to say such foolish stuff, there was already some-
thing about the young man that was quite special, and actually rather dif-
ficult to explain, something he shared with others Iwould later meet, and
who by the way were not always the best people: he radiated power. One
could hardly pull away.
Yet the same man now went on to say that later—many years later, nat~
urally———he was riding high, he had a plum job. He was setting up house,
and the builders suddenly had a feeling, or rather an old, long forgotten
joke at his expense, he could describe it no better, but his other self from
,.'.-Al
4 Lamp and Closet
an earlier time was back. At least the fellows acted that way, grinning. So
something in him, he thought, must not have been right, or remained
Weak from those bad old days. If dogs can sense someone’s sex, the work-
ers in that small town (and such workers!) had a sense that was just as ex-
act. A distant memory grew fresh to him too, and he said he learned from
it that no grass grows over inner misdeeds——that one can again become
the coward one was, and again do the ill that one did, when one’s younger
brothers from the old days notice it so clearly.
One of us, who simply did not believe in the individual self, sought a
friendlier interpretation here. But of course it depends on someone’s situ-
ation; pitiful or benevolent airs, Weak or strong actions are nurtured ac-
cordingly. If that honest man had had no track for his new self, or rather
his childish self, to roll onto, he could never even have related this ind
structive stuff. Instead, the workers would have found him in the news,
where the little scoundrels fall under the wheels or are hanged, especially
the weak or lapsed.
much a man, said the teller, or a man who simply has everything move or
stand along the objective wall. Who in this case had been so unobjective,
perhaps, that his room nallywore only lovely, heavy, proud showpieces,
almost like a woman. That was a lesson to me, concluded the astonished
man, and he visited his friend, the same man we told of above, who was
so humane that he even detested thick neckties.
The “Mark!”
More and more appears among us to the side. One should observe pre-
cisely the little things, go after them.
What is slight and odd often leads the furthest. One hears a story-say,
about the soldier who arrives too late for muster. He doesn't insert himself
into the ranks but rather stands next to the officer, who “thereby” notices
6 The Mark!’
nothing. Apart from the amusement that this story provides, an impres-
sion is still working: What was that? Something moved! And it moved in
its own way. An impression that will not let us come to rest over what we
heard. An impression on the surface of life, so tl1at it tears, perhaps.
In short, its good to think in stories too. So much just isn't done with it»
self when it happens, even where its beautifully told.. Instead, very strangely,
theres more going on there. The case has something about it; this is what
"it shows or suggests. Stories of this kind are not just recounted; instead we
also count what something struck there—or We listen up: What was that?
Out of incidents comes a “Mark!” that would otherwise not be thus; or a
“Mark!” that already is, that takes little incidents as traces and examples.
They point out a “less” or “more" that will have to be thought in the tell-
ing, retold in the thinking; that isnt right in these stories, because things
aren’t right with us, or with anything. Some things can be grasped only in
such stories, not in a more expansive, elevated style, or then not in the
same way. How some such things came to notice will be retold here, and
tentatively marked; lovingly marking in the retelling; by marking, intend-
ing the retelling. It’s little strokes and such from life that haven’t been for-
gotten; our refuse is worth a lot these days. But an older impulse was also
there: to hear stories, good ones, poor ones, stories in different tones, from
different years, remarkable ones that, when they come to an end, only re-
ally come to an end in the stirring. Its a reading of traces every which way,
in sections that only divide up the frame. In the end, everything one meets
and notices is the same.
-Situation
The Poor
‘What are you doing? I asked. l’rn conserving light, said the poor woman.
She sat in the dark kitchen, a long time already. That was certainly easier
than conserving food. Since there isn’t enough for everyone, the poor step
in. They work for the rich even when they rest, alone.
Filth
How low one can go! I heard that yesterday, and everything that goes
with it.
In the Rue Blondel lay a drunk Woman; the watchman rousts her. ]e mi:
pauvre, says the woman. That’s no reason to throw up in the street, shouts
the watchman. Que mmlez mus, momieuzr, la pzzuvreté, c’e.rt dejki it maizié fat
mzlezté, says the woman, and sighs.‘ So she described, explained, and can-
celed herself, in one stroke. Whom or what could the watchman still arrest?
The Gift
Everything has a price, they say, just not happiness. On the contrary,
precisely happiness; children begin early with it. An eight-year-old girl
Io Dafjjferent Needs
recently rescued a boy from drowning. Or screamed, seeing the boy turn
blue, until others came and pulled him out. For screaming, the child re-
ceived a twenty from Santa Claus, a lot of money; not too much, as we’ll
hear. As the girl later looks out the window again, something elongated is
drifting on the water. She runs out in front of the house: Mister, there’s
twenty dollars in the water again! (It was just a log, however.) Consider-
ing the possible consequences (seeing a drowned corpse, and so on), here
the trauma was remarkably resolved by money, indeed prevented. Two
evils canceled each other out; the girl angel came to rest. It’s the lowest
sort of misfortune to be poor. Santa Claus, who rarely comes, doesn’t can-
cel it, but at least puts it in its proper place.
Different Needs
It is told that a horse and a dog were friends. The dog saved the best
bones for the horse, and the horse put the most fragrant bunches of hay
before the dog; each wanted to do his best for the other, and neither one
was fed. This depicts exactly the misery shared by two people close to each
other: particularly a man and woman, when they cant leave their own
house, but even more casual acquaintances. More modest expectations of
what others offer, usually kindly, would help a great deal, of course. For
when one sees their bundle of hay-their evening, their Sunday——one
cannot understand how they can bear to live.
Games, Regrettably
the tender creature within he spoke cheerfully once he got it, quietly and
sensibly. Here, finally, was a good not de ledby bourgeois enjoyment; the
sweat of the deprived, the disgrace of capital gains didn’t affect the avor.
Odd enough in Paris, where no bourgeois yet is embarrassed. to be one: to
call himself not just casually but proudly a rmrier. The worker with the
lobsters reminded one of something else too, of the great breakthrough
back then, long ago. A certain something, later, glimmering, when money
no longer barks at every good not wags its tail in it. When were spared the
terribly stupid choice between pure co11victi0n and pure taste.
2.
That night one didn’t walk at all the same way. Didrft try to avoid the
street, even the middle where the cars surged by, right and left, high and
low, fast and right at us.
Instead the middle of the street came alive; something was even grow-
ing on it. The barrage of traffic that usually owned it was laid down, with-
drew into the distance or to the edges; the glorious asphalt was inhabited.
Colorful paper lanterns strung across made a low ceiling: beneath it, there
was dancing. The houses became walls, the illuminated windows round—
about glowed like lamps, like mirrors with their own light source, again
with people in them. And the most beautiful thing was that the dance
Hoot was enclosed only on the sides but otherwise had the long street to
itself, a11d the side streets too. At the next corner there was already music
again, and couples roamed through the glowing quarter.
This was a Parisian street on July I4, the great day. As the Bastille was
stormed, the people also danced on the ground to which the fort had been
leveled. It stood for the Fields of the Blessed, and that has remained; of
course back then one danced differently after nature. But even if the rev-
olutionaries have been paci ed since then, long since thrown off their
horns and wings, a distant memory sometimes still courses through this
“national” holiday. Hardly belonging wholesale to the nation; rather,
without a truce with the bourgeois gmtillaomme. On July 14, 1928, as a car
driven by a man with a st1'aw hat wanted to push through one of these
dance streets, the people would not make room, even though no one was
dancing at the moment, and mere taxis had gone through in numbers.
The straw hat must have annoyed thern—usually nothing special, but
here, remarkably, a symbol of the ruling class, perhaps because of its light
12 Games Regrermbly
color and because machines tend not to be operated with straw hats. Tl1e
annoying straw hat would not give Way, and instead hit the gas, right
through the crowd. But twenty hands had grabbed the car from behind,
dragged it, despite the raging exhaust, back up the. street, back and forth,
in a discreet tempo on the voluntary jousting grounds; even the driver
performed calmly, with a certain grim reactionary sportsmanship. Only at
one point could he have broken through, but then came the second pro-
found delight: a young girl jumped suddenly in front of the car, danced,
cheerfully and fearlessly, a flower in her hand, then between her teeth,
gave the driver signals, and as the car stopped, curtsied with wonderful,
with lovely mockery. Here the driver should really have let himself be
pulled back, but the ruling classes capitulate only falsely, abstractly, and
undialectically: in short, instead of grasping the situation and sublating
himself in it, the provocateur shifted the force of his advance into a no-
less—arrogant reverse, turned around, and, with this difficult and twisted
maneuver, now truly drove into the crowd. Several women were pushed
against a wall, the men had no more leverage behind the swerving vehicle,
and the air quickly tensed; Obscenities were shouted, the car was grabbed
from the side, very mutinously, and it would have been overturned if the
driver had not regained control of the wheel again, and the car sped for-
ward, escaping.
Yet the straw hat at least learned what happens to the white lily in every
form? A young fellow had knocked the hat from his head, threw it in the
air; others caught it. Already the music began to play and couples danced,
but not only with their feet and their bodies; their hands were kept busy
looking for the straw hat as it was knocked through the air from one cou—
pie to another, until it lay on the ground, tagged and attened, a very
slight, very allegor'ically trampled representative of the Bastille. Obedient
taxi drivers who now approached and wanted to regain the narrow boule-
vard immediately turned around; the party of business takes no part in the
civil war. And even the rebel street soon forgot that it was the only one in
Paris to dance a little “July 14.” So the straw hat didn’t end up in a police
report, let alone in history, but only in this little, expectant story.
3.
Likewise in Paris, a quiet man had set the following in motion two
years earlier.
I
Gamer Regrettahiy I3
Right into rumor, indeed into childhood nightmares led the book: even
the anarchist gangs selected bore the terrifying names of urban legend
(which has no sense of humor). There were the “Hairy Lads of Billan—
court,” the “Panthers of Batignolles,” the “Oak Hearts of Cettes,” the
“Children of Nature,” the “jailbirds of Lille,” the “Pillory of Sedan,” the
“Yatagan of Terre Noire.” The harrdbills themselves, after harmless classi-
eds, displayed a standing rubric with the epigraph, “Directions for the
Manufacture of Nonbourgeois Products.” _
Here our guest had to pause, for a younger couple sat down at another
table and began conversing. The couple were so elegant they must have
been dressed in heaven, as “ladies” and “gentlemen” like to think. Now
the quiet reader stood up quite innocently; he only wanted to buy some
cigarettes, no longer even thought of the Panthers of Batignolles. Rather,
Nana was more prese-nt—before he’d gone a step away from his table there
was such a terri cexplosion that the couple jumped up, tables fell over,
the entire passage stood still.-3 Even the reader’s knees trembled, though as
a whole he was unhurt, like the couple as well, which was fortunate: for
how easily the shards from the seltzer bottle could have hurt someone
when he knocked it over on his way to the counter. The manager came
14 The Use dMember
.1‘-‘
and demanded compensation; the reader paid him, relieved though al-
most ashamed to have come away without injury. In the rest of the café
too, the emotional landscape settled; the elegant couple ordered a fresh
aperitif, by deep instinct not entirely satis ed with the man’s merely -
nancial penalty.
The reader soon left this scene, the very historical book of dynamite un~
(let his arm, nallygot his cigarettes at the counter, like peace pipes, and
drove to his customary restaurant. There he recounted his heroic story, in
which out of bad luck an assassin materialized, out of a seltzer bottle the
court of history. How quickly the genie had returned to the bottle! Yet the
man’s dark shame, the couples anger at his punishment still hung tangi-
bly in the air. The intellectuals dismay, the bourgeois’s ancestral memory:
both played over the inept incident. Replayed a past that never ended, a
future from which not even the Parisian bourgeois feels absolved. Wllat
became a celebration like the 14th of July is already past, but the fear that
was also in it is still raw. If every worker ate lobster, the splinters from the
seltzer bottle would hurt no- feelings.
Shaker of Strawberries
The rich get the best of everything and everyone. At the curb of an ele-
gant street i11 Paris, quite out of place, stood a poor devil of an invalid.
Both hands trembled, his arms Happed back and forth; thats what he’d
taken home from the war, a so—called shaker. Brillat—Savari11 passed. by,
watched, gave not the usual aims but, in departing, his addressf‘ The
shaker should apply to his chef, pour sucrer Xe: triser. Better that than
standing on the unpleasant street! Certainly Brillat-Savarin was an inven-
tive gourmet, providing joy to his peers. But the unquestionably exquisite
gentleman obviously had this in common with the merely rich: that he
could derive a particular use from misery, even earn its gratitude. Instead
of the many poor blowing him up, they merely shake his strawberries, op-
erate larger machines just as mechanically. Indeed if the boredom of un-
employment or the perpetual chill of their condition increases their un-
rest, even this can now be used to divert them, train them to sacri cetheir
peers, betray them doubly, fascistically. This is new; up to now the better
ranks had only the Lumpenprolemriat, or of course mercenaries. No bit-
terness, let alone revolt, could thus ever become a danger from the left i11-
stead of the right. So the pauper becomes a particularly good cook for
those who’ve made him a pauper or Worse.5 Then its not only the stin
the pocket that won’t get dangerous ideas.
Narrow—Mind-ed Comrades
When it seemed inappropriate for me to work any longer on a political
journal that had very subaltern contributions, a friend, unconcerned,
replied: If a hundred cats stand before the Berlin castle and meow, I don’t
care that they’re cats, but rather that they’re protesting; Iill stand next to
them and meow with them. That is certainly well put; the likeness ts.
Only: there are, especially today, far too many people who have no right to
be right. \Who Went along with the cold war, and even the hot one before—
hand, and now sound almost like the loyal reds who hate what’s become of
Disturbing Wbim 17
their leading comrades. Only this latter kind of dissident, in contrast to the
mere cats of the cold war, can stand up like a man, literally, in word and
deed, not like an opportunistic slacker.
Disturbing Whim
Most are kept dark and hardly see themselves. The man on the assembly
line who performs the same motion eight hours a day is as hidden as the
miner. No one loves the fthestate for the beautiful eyes it already has.
But then somebody who had time for the proletariat and had done
much with them, in other words not a hostile or even unfriendly figure,
but rather a mournful one, said to a Communist: A bourgeois was hidden
in the citaym; God save us from what's hidden in the comrade. He added:
That’s why you’re so careful too, and never want to say what this new
world will look like. Instead you’re precise like Prussians, all order of the
day, but if someone wants to know what kind of society is supposed to
break through here, you all become Austrian, postpone everything till to-
morrow, even the day after. In 1789, when the third estate was revolution-
ary, one didn’t need to be so formal, not such a cautious dreamer. Of
course there was more content then; the Caliph Stork of those days didn’t
need to buy a cat in a sack and simply believe it was a dream princess.“
Now, as cautiously as you consider the future, you still dream constantly
of the miracle in the working class; here youire utter believers. Here you
don’t pursue just the sober abolition of want and exploitation but paint
the whole person, the new person, into the undecided setting—whereas
the proletarian today is usually just an unsuccessful petit bourgeois; runs
to the racist parties or to the shopkeepers on the podium. From within his
class consciousness, though you think you’re deep inside it, you hear a
melody that’s unclear or inaudible to us. There is nothing but simple dis-
satisfaction there, and a very understandable, very modern will to live.
There is as much powerful melody in the noise of a car, to which you can
also sing all kinds of songs, or even something more precise.
Thus spoke this irascible man, and was homeless; drank only rarely
from the bottle of the subject, or of friendship, which still had some life
for him. Only he forgot, when giving the other such grief, that a comrade
could never disappoint him. For he represents nothing at all, in contrast
I8 Disturbing W/aim
The Negro
Someo11e already saw himself better, precisely in his error. Late one
night this gentleman arrived at a hotel with friends; all the rooms were
taken. All but one; but someone else was already asleep in the room, a
black man; we’re in America. The gentleman took the room anyway; it
was only for the night; early the next day he would have to catch a train.
He enjoined the bellhop to knock at the door as well as the bed, and the
right bed, not the black man’s. He and his friends then drank to the night,
all sorts of strong stuff, so much that his friends, before they put him in
the room, painted him in blackface without his even noticing. When the
bellhop later woke him, he raced to the station, onto the train, and into
21
;_-,2 The W/Eiters/aed
the restroom to wash his face. Seeing himself in the mirror, he bellowed,
“Now, that idiot woke the nigger after all!”
The story’s told in different ways, but always with the same outcome.
Was the man still half—asleep? Certainly, and at the same time he was never
more awake than at that moment. So inde nitelynear himself, yet his ha«
bitual whiteness fell from him like taking off a suit, however comfortable,
in which he’d been stuck. Even whites look mostly just like a distortion of I
The Watershed
Someone said, It didn’t depend on you and me at all. At least not at
first; I was hardly there when I was conceived. It probably happened quite
accidentally between Father and Mother. Afterward one is here, unfolds
from oneself, insofar as one is worth something.
Is one here by grace of oneself? the man interrupted himself. No; here
too, there°s too much accident, and it insults us. Our encounters, at least,
are unbidden; our beginning with others and the fare from it (which
wouldn’t exist without that beginning) depend on the most accidental
causes. It can be the silliest cause, and often, astonishingly, the only one,
always the same one; the other causes don’t flow then, or at least not far.
For my part, I found after sufficient consideration in a disrespectful hour
that my real life—my rebirth, as it were, or my adult baptism—depended
on the discharge of a Bavarian officer whose name I don’t even know.
As a young man I was very reserved; I sought out no one, and found no
one. in my first semester at Munich, I boarded with a woman whom I
took for a widow; sometimes she would boast of better days. An old man,
clearly ill, had just joined us as a boarder, and might occasionally be seen
in the hallway, groaning nobly. Once I came home late and passed the
widows doorway, which stood open, strangely: there lay the old man, al-
ready nicely laid out in his bed; a nightlight still burnt, and right and left
two long candles—the apartment empty, the woman gone, and I alone
with the dead man. Night terrors had returned from my childhood, the
same paralyzed legs, unable to flee this nightmare. Yet what the boy wished
he had the grown man has in plenty: at least the nerve to run. A short
The lll zters/aed 23
time later I was among living people again, in a bar that I would assuredly
not have sought out except for the dead man.
Here is the crux of the story: I had really never been in this bar, because
it was shabby, and because quite disagreeable acquaintances hung out
there. On this particular night, I went there demonstrably only because I
needed human warmth without eye contact. The hair in my soup was at
least human, and the eckof dirt in the vinegary wine oatedlike a serene
spirit. Most important, a man was there on this night who otherwise
never came, and whom I got to know—indeed, through whom, in a ver-
itable chain reaction of collision and mutual ignition, I would then get to
know all the people who became important to me. First a female student,
for whose sake I attended a small university I would otherwise never have
thought of. Then a Hungarian woman, a Russian girlfriend, a German
friend of the purest grade of absurdity~—all people who moved me just as
they were, and who cannot be replaced by others. Iwould never have vis-
ited Budapest (at least not at that time) without the Hungarian woman;
without her I would never have gotten to know the Franciscan father (at
least not at the time, a time that would decide everything) who later had
such a vivid influence on me. And again: through the man I met in the
bar, I met my future wife in a remote inn; decided even the residence
Where I would write my book (not unconnected with the landscape).
It goes without saying that there are other, certainly less accidental threads
in this causal nexus: but none is so central, none is above all so provably
originative; none so aptly determines all my new beginnings. The small
university, and what followed; the remote inn in the Isar valley, and what
followed: my entire fate would never have taken place without the man in
the bar. Berlin, where students go anyway, wouldn’t ourishlike this for a
long time; only recently has the causal force of the fortuitous corpse and
the acquaintance from the bar lessened. The old man whose deathbed I
fled, however, had in fact been an officer, cashiered over an earlier scandal
with a Munich dancer long before I was born. Deathly ill, he had returned
to his wife, whom I thought to be a widow and who would only now be-
come one. His end, in that room with the door open, with a nightlight, in
the abandoned apartment, granted me the beginning of my adult life.
Wliat is even further upstream? asked the strange storyteller. From my
entry into the house to become a tenant; from the officer’s first glimpse of
the dancer; from unrelated, distant inconsequentialities that have ab-
solutely nothing to do with me. That a roof tile should fall on someone’s
Na Face
No Face
A young girl, pretty, lively, ambitious, seemingly talented, fled the
parental home.
Burned the candle at both ends. Sought the extraordinary; regarded
herself above all as such. Became an actress at a small theater; mailed the
initial critical praise home. Maintained for a long time the impressive il—
Comte de Mirabeau 25
lusion of her fame, with a constant eye to her parents, her former circles,
her youthful tormentors, and the misunderstanding that would nally
have to capitulate. Finally, driven from one dump of a theater to another,
failed to ndwork anywhere. Stranded with empty hands and aching feet
in the same stupid town she had fled. Returned with her ambitions clearly
not satis ed; became a secretary in an office; distributed ration cards, ap«
parently voluntarily, during the War; even that was made possible only by
her father’s respectable status. Some weeks later the former actress Karoline
Lengenhardt, not yet thirty, was put in an institution.
What happened in this girl until she got where she is should give most
of us sleepless nights. Her misfortune lacks even the grandeur that tends to
console the vanity and ambition of others on. their way down. Here not
even the inner realization, to say nothing of the outer, agrees with the will
behind it. The inept fervor of her will could 11ot even come through. The
girl even lacked talent. She was not just unfavorably situated or misjudged;
sl1e had not been misjudged at all. Yet there is a agrant disproportion
between her initial fame and the accidents that hindered or derailed it.
Her face never took shape, and her life between classes, her unbourgeois
ramble, had no goal, indeed no horse, and nallyno rider; nothing came
out well, or even came out. The arbitrariness of her lot was enormous, and
sti edthe inner calling to which she hearkened, and that was truly there.
What was alive in her fantastic quest suf cedonly to put her in an asylum.
Why, asked an authority on women, must we, bounded in every way, suf»
fer so boundlessly?
Comte de Mirabeau
One who was stuck in a good skin saw a quite pitiful man going before
him. Right away it was clear to him: this man before me is my walk, my
way of raising my eyebrows, even my face. Or rather, all this would be my
body and soul, my identical twin, if things turned out as they should.
Things had not turned out as they should have. The count did not dance
to the piper of outward, fortuitous appearance; his unfortunate brother
before him was so only approximately, or just his brother in humanity, as
good folks like to say, though it costs them nothing. He was strange to
him from the outset—or perhaps only since some watershed? He couldn’t
26 Comte de Mirrzéveau
say. So many a Dickens l1ad never been sung a lullaby about himself; not
even “on his own power” could he bring about the transformation of
David Copper eldfrom a condition into a book. All the more disturbing,
shameful, and strange Were the irregular’s feelings as his ideal type Went
before him on the street, the pure product of “inheritance” and “milieu."
His mirror, yet in no way a mirror; his identity, and yet at the same time
so utterly disparate that he was not even his opposite, that nothing in him
even resisted this most dissimilar of doubles, that the man did not even
become a complex for him. The problem of the impostor appeared here,
the impostor with such rorriger la fortune that he no longer fools anyone,
least of all himself. The man spoke of this later, and let it not unclearly be
known that his good fortune was more certain to him than anything, yet
still more remarkable than the misfortune, the normal fortune, that he’d
just seen before him. Soon everyone turned to the price the imposter must
pay, who must daily regain his dream.
One can also just dream, began the man, of having one more sausage.
Someone like that settles where he ends up, falters on success. The ener-
getic striver gets somewhat further, especially in more unstable times,
when the old positions of power can more easily be had. His proper arena
is the bourgeoisie, liberalism, capitalism; this Wpe ourishes today. But
usually the striver alters nothing, neither his type not the old world; he
only shifts more badly into the old positions of power, as parvenu. The
striver too has been distanced from his origins not by his nature but only
by his intensity; he is constantly aware of his stages, so that his develop-
ment, at best a series of small steps, connects him to his beginnings. A
special case is the master suddenly become servant, along with the sud—
denly elevated pauper—say, Shakespeare’s tinker Christopher Sly (from
rmingoft/'93 Shrew). Either he breaks, because his self no longer nds
affinities (a similar process as in the sorrow of those driven fat from home,
though domrstiqm gentil/Jomme does not even want to, can not, get home-
sick), or a long exploited nature wrests from a new perceptual world the
base means of pleasure and power that it needs in order to erupt out of
long repression as a tyrant.
Much, much higher, however, continued the born but reluctant man of
fortune, much higher and more important than the striver and the par-
venu is the impostor, for he does not become, like the striver, but is; ap-
pears as seigneur because he feels himself riejure to be one. So many chil-
dren already dream of secretly being royalty, understand Hauff’s “Legend
Comte de Miraberzu 27
of the False Prince” very well, and what happened with the tailor’s ap—
prentice when he sat deep in thought, stared xedlyahead, and had some»
thing so peculiar in his aspect and manner that the other apprentices
would always say of this state only: “Labakan has his noble face again.”
There is much less selfeinterest to be found here than fastidiousness, an in-
vincible con dence, folly. If this confidence should assume aristocratic
forms, it is not to step down again like the parvenu—let alone the ser-
vant»as~master!—it is not to affirm aristocracy as such; the self—suggested
seigneur is not class-conscious. Instead, there are even transitions from
him to a type by rights opposed to him, the rebel. Transitions against his
will, insofar as Casanova and Cagliostro deprive their societies of their
strongest hold, namely, tradition.
Transitions by will: a heterogeneous guresuch as Lassalle still led the
workers like a sort of Labakan; in other words, it is not so much the aris-
tocratic as the fa mlous, at worst the mythic aspect of the great names of
history that captivates him, and that he projects even into the ground of
revolution.‘ Until after all this re11unciation, this longing, he collapses
completely into lege11d and becomes a little Quixote. This, said the man, is
the actual case I see behind the con dence man, or rather, such a newspa-
per article of that kind came especially alive again for me as a legend when
I saw that man on the street, all the peculiar emotions I had for him.
Such a dream prince at mm lucendo, a little Quixote, lived in Helbra, for
example, until his fortieth year, under the name Emil Witzel, as mechanic
and son of an invalid miner; then one day he suddenly declares that he
was only given into the invalid’s custody, but was in fact the son of Prince
Lesetto Riquetti of Mirabeau and his wife Marguerite, née de Racine; his
name was thus in truth Prince Riquetti Paul of Mirabeau.2 “In truth" the
mechanic felt himself to be a prince, and in any case he believed it l1im—
self; indeed, how do we ever know who we are? How absurd must it seem
to an immortal soul to be destined for Heaven or Hell, and yet be sitting
in a kitchen, as a maid, or see oneself objecti edas mechanic! How falsely
the usual sunrise wakes us, the clock dial, the city street, the job! How
wrongly people find themselves in these systems——our time isn’t there, our
space isnt there, not even our name is there——the addressee for whom the
alarm clock rings is identical to only a few, and the whole social story of
waking, and certainly the day of the mechanic, is false.
Mechanic Witzel, with his ludicrous and outmoded imposture, is
brother to Gottfried Keller’s tailor’s apprentice Strapinski with his velvet
28 Comte de Miméeau
waistcoat and nobly melancholy visage, with the dream of a purer, nobler,
higher existence in his heart; here is the false Prince Mirabeau, there the false
Prince Strapinski; both are dream princes with nobility as a sel ess symbol,
or as the awareness of being “in truth” no mechanic, no tailor.3 The pre-
sumptions of such imposture are not a deceptio11, but actually correct a
deception, if in a curious way; t.hey correct, if chilclishly and illusorily, the
falsi cation and the disgraceful situation in which most of humanity must
still live. Fate stifled their voices in the cradle (like a bandit who abducts
children); now they’ve become the mechanic Witzel, or this pitiful man
who passed before me, and remained abducted. The royal title enchanted
Witzel, though he meant something entirely different: something fabu«
lous, as we already said, a sign of the ultimate unknowability of a person,
and the phototropism that will resolve it. This drive needs symbols, ‘Witzefs
pompous, another’s perhaps obscure and profound, in order to find these
others, the true symbols that are right almost accidentally. No advance
“upward,” not the truly productive one, ever begins without selfarsertion:
that are not, or not yet, true. Even the young composer Beethoven, who
suddenly knew or declared that he was the greatest genius that had ever
been, practiced an imposture of the most absurd style when he felt him-
self to be the equal of Ludwig van Beethoven, who he was not yet, after
all. He used this unwarranted presumption in order to become Beethoven,
for without the audacity and even insolence of such predictions nothing
great has ever been accomplished. Mechanic Witzel certainly had no right
to call himself Prince Mirabeau, but why no right, in this accidental, hide-
and—seek world where even Easter eggs are a11 accident that one may con-
jure up, and not a “right”? The real Prince Mirabeau inherited his name,
the real Beethoven perhaps his talent (some say from himself, from an ear-
lier life), but why does one inherit and not another? And do not all artists,
if not all believers, have to appear to be, before they become? Would we
not need far more corriger la fortune in the root sense in order nallyto
eliminate the mystery of the great brother on the street?
The “sources” of imposture, concluded my friend rather wearily, might
then be exposed, and could truly live by daylight. Imposture remains
something quite remarkable: it reveals the glory that all mean and all de—.
serve. Yes, that and legend (it has many knights of fortune, and grants
them fortune) excuse the existence of princes and princesses, because they
imitate it and depict it. Someone once said that people are in Heaven and
don’t know it; Heaven certainly still seems somewhat unclear. Leave every-
thing from his statement but the will that it be true—then he was right.
Riel: Devil, Paar Devil 29
one with death at the end, whose brutality the rich devil only imitated
and made apparent, until it became his own death. However miserable,
however varied and brilliant a life might have been, death extinguishes it
in the same way, and sends it into the pit; in short, the capitalist despot
also lives under the very final fate that sets the tempo for half our lives and
afterward eonsigns us to the void.
The American devil even has similarities with the most evil despotism
into which fate was ever projected, with Calvin’s God. There no one can
know what awaits him beyond; predestination, whether one is graced or
damned cannot be known down here; but in certain people, says Calvin,
God has caused a sign of grace, as though they were particularly sure of Par-
adise. These are the people whom God will most surely damn; he .caused the
signs of grace only that they may be more terribly surprised by Hell; and the
saint already imagined himself to be walking on the parquet of Paradise.
Calvin here, Hell there: in death, which is not and par de nitianem cannot
be anyone’s true death (for our space is always life, or something more, but
not what is less than life)—in death too, there is always something of the
rich cat that lets the mouse run before devouring it. No one Could think ill
of the “saint” who shot this God like the worker the millionaire. But we
have never heard anything de nite about these things; nor is the court
known that could acquit us. The great car allows only minor guest roles in
life; nonetheless the workers revolver is already quite appealing.
Fiumpks ofjldzsrecognitian 31
Triumphs of Misrecognition
How the girl looked, he no longer quite remembered. Wfho she was, he
thought he knew. A girlfriend, sometimes charming, sometimes annoy-
ing. The smell of sewing hung about her, something of the shop as well.
32 Yiriump/as ofjldiisrecogmizion
ing a new address. As the father kept stammering on about d¢a 1, and -,1
grave, and the gravestone he had ordered, the clerk become still ruder,
cursed all foreigners and their ingenuous nature, nallythrew the new ad—
dress at the man. .
The story ends more tonelessly than one can even imagine. For as the
man climbed the stairs to the apartment, rang, asked for his daughter—
really the dead one, reborn, no longer mortal, quietly ful lled,he no longer
knew what—she came out of her room. The father saw her and said only,
Why aren’t you taller? We don’t know what the girl should have said, the
real girl and not the dead and buried heroine of the novel, who had been
larger in every way, so sad and so Romantic. The shock of the moment was
bound up with the disillusion of the image to which his daughter had
seemed adequate. It had already sustained him by night; in any case one
can certainly imagine the father’s joy at ndinghis daughter again.
Let us return to the rststory, which anyway ends more positively, and
add an equally positive, not to mention magni cent,story, which might be
only a legend, a Chassidic one, lying beneath much underbrush even in
Buber, but nonetheless shows real backgrounds. It takes place in Alexan-
drian or perhaps Napoleonic times, in a great Commercial city, wherever.“
There lived, it is told, an old man, getting by miserably. He rarely left his
garret, daring to come out only in the evening. Street urchins threw stones
at him, and the good citizens would watch, laughing to see him run away
so pitifully. It was hardly a good town; the poor were subject to the provost,
the churches mere currency exchanges between this side and the othel-_
But as the old man came onto the street again one day, he was astounded
to see a transformation: disquiet, indeed fear was in the air. Throngs stood
at the intersections and the plazas, conferring in hushed voices. The old
man heard of a great army that was advancing on the town, of an emperor
whom no enemy had withstood, and the land went up in flames before
him. An angel of death had taken over the town, and the citizen’s fat
shoulders shook, not in laughter; the old man said softly to himself:
Could he be the one? Turned away and walked through the town, under
the great gate and onto the elds, following a great crowd scattering to
and fro across the plain to see the camp res. Ever further marched the old
man, now up a small rise where other gawkers still stood, among them the
councilrnen, who were considering offering no resistance and instead go—
ing to the emperor the next day to hand over the city: when suddenly a
patrol came around the hill, through the thicker; and after a brief chase
Yiiumpks of srccognition
tl1e twelve, who were trying to hide behind trees, were caught, fettered, es-
corted to the camp in step with the horses. There the password, entry,
laughter and clamor around the campfires, the emperor’s order that the
spies immediately be brought to him.
Down the path to the imperial tent: there stood the whole motley crowd,
Councilmen beside commoners, and in the middle the old man, completely
exhausted. The emperor stepped forward and quickly looked them over; yet
no sooner did he see the old man, his quiet face and his frail body, than he
threw himself to the ground and kissed the man’s outstretched hands. And
all knew: if the emperor was the master of the sword, the old man was the
Master of Prayer, whom the mighty of the town could not recognize; he was
too much for their needs, and too great for any role. But the emperor rec-
ognized him, and he recognized him before all the council, with the old
marfs stupendous triumph in the wake of this recognition. The old man
had not sought this triumph, and even avoided it in accordance with his ul-
timate ranlt, in which there is no shame and not a whisper of vanity. The
councilmen were not granted triumph, or rather his was granted to them,
and to the listener as well; one takes unsel shpleasure in it. The Master of
Prayer went on his way, a great noble, as we see, and more.
r“--._)
Yet is our joy really pure at seeing him so great? That was the question,
and a discussion ensued; an unpleasant feeling said, No. Not everyone felt
that way, least of all the older people, who still had some Wilhelm II in
them; they loved “great” and “small,” above all “great” and “most high,”
or when valor is decorated as from a thunderclap. After some back and
forth the teller of the tale reversed himself, somewhat unwillingly, but he
couldn’t allow himself the point of his stories. Otherwise, he said, an—
other’s misfortune obviously does not always displease us. It pleases us
only conditionally when he rises up; some are debased by envy. They
might not always be so, but here they are bad company, with an evil eye
one has to take into account, as it isnt evil everywhere. Yet all envy
changes as soon as the lucky other is not alive but only being read about;
as soon as the reader can read himself into his place.
In this way, so it seems, a creature no longer suffers under another’s
splendor, no longer feels joy at another’s degradation; has of course only
changed places, not itself. Let it go well for the hero at another’s expense,
or better yet, grandly; one’s own mediocrity is avenged, finds itself happily
7
Titiumpil-s ofjwisrerognition 35
reduction to the Christ child, to the servant Isaiah, due as much to para-
dox as to his highest ascent into nearness to humanity; even God appears
as a gentle rustling, not as a package of re,floods, and earthquakes. In
the Master of Prayer, too (who could be a Biblical hero and is a Chassidic
one), all kinds of such depth are at work, a denial of the powerful, “impe-
rial” expression of self, certainly also a light that is not comprehended and
so is not entirely one. Yet precisely because of this light, the old man
should not in the end Hash monarchically; instead many a depth shows
itself otherwise, perhaps by a sign nearby that is not royal purple. The
old man may be as hidden as he needs to be, but no one can be secretly
grandiose, for grandiosity appears right away. When it belongs in the
Bible, the Bible gives not even God an allonge periwig but has him as a
likeness of man, almost as a companion who goes alongside him. Even the
old man lost his reward——-or rather, he would not even take it until the
emperor disturbed him, or until he let himself be disturbed. Without an
emperor, in a more level world, such rzmmymi would have it easier. Should
they still exist, should they still be needed, a future society will have no
such sorrows and triumphs of personal misrecognition, but will force the
fate that always hinders, never helps us, over to our side in open and col-
lective struggle. All or no ducklings will be rescued swans in the light;
there will be no other privilege or private greatness.
The young lady left the castle. Blinded by tears, she walked right past
her equipage, and on down the dusty highway back to Paris. There she
met quite a wretched little man, who marveled at such aristocratic splen-
dor going on foot, and stood there with hat in hand. The noblewoman,
brought low by misfortune, related her story yet again, whereupon the lit-
tle man said: If that’s all, then nothing could be easier. I’m scribe at the
Mairie, with the case lein my desk; between today and tomorrow the
entire verdict could vanish without anyone caring.
The documents indeed vanished; the execution did not take place; a grain
of sand in the gears functioned; the lower bureaucracy for once showed what
it could do for better this time and not for worse. With hat in hand, of
course, before a gracious young noblewornan, not before little people on the
same level, say, who would not even have attained to a scribe’s uniform, let
alone before the intellectual monsters who disturb order. Otherwise every—
one could come along and make lesdisappear. Where would we be then?
to divorce Carry even more hatred before the judge than he needs or take
I
appalling pleasure in making public what previously could not have been
more intimate and private. Which is why a writer of antiquity offers thc
noteworthy maxim, as thoughtful as it is courageous, truly kind: “Treat
your friends as though they could become your enemies again.” A very
Attic way to keep them from ever becoming enemies.
remained suspended. As the wish had before, a strange fear now gripped
him, for this could not last; it was such a peaking effect, such a cresting of
fortune, that the wave would have to break.
It had probably already broken, for as the vizier returned to the palace
he was seized by the caliph’s watch and thrown into prison. His slanderers
had won out. In the dungeon he remained many years as a forgotten pris-
oner of the state, come to terms with his fate. Of his wishes there re-
mained only one, almost laughably small: before his death he would like
to eat pomegranate seeds one more time. The sympathetic warden
brought him some, but at just that moment a rat rushed in from the pas-
sage, overturned the bowl, and are up all the seeds. Again a strange joy
went through the old man: things could not go on like this; it was such a
peaking effect, such a cresting of misfortune, that the wave would have to
40 The Rococo of zre
break. Had broken, in fact, for on that evening the caliph came to his cell:
his slanderers had been "toppled; he restored the vizier to his of ces.
A nice story, even if somewhat too clearly dressed. Closely reminiscent
of the ring of Polykrates, yet the central motif is entirely different.” The
lord of Samos throws his ring into the sea in order to assuage the jealous
gods; the gods return his sacri ceto him inside a sh.They consider it in-
decent {in the subtle remark of Wilhelin Scholz) to accept gifts from a
man they have already resolved to destroy. What is frightening here, then,
is not at all the immoderate good fortune by which the king cannot lose
his ring even as it falls into the sea; he does not lose it, after all, but offers
it up. And Polyltrates’ guest senses the motives for the gentlemanly return:
the undiminished envy of the gods. He turns away in horror, rightly.
Quite different, however, the present material: the supernatural is ab-
sent, and accident as well plays no role, or at most in the unusual form to—
day designated by the phrase “of all things” (amgerec1met)—brash enough
when applied to some absurd absence or incident. A rat from the passage,
of all things, eats the pomegranate kernels in the cell when they nallyap-
pear; that is certainly quite accidental, or more precisely quite unpre-
dictable or irrational, even in a less constructed situation. Yet conceding
even this absurdity, nothing irrational is intended in the Arabic story; in-
stead everything is a sign.
Indeed, a sign occurring in the smallest things, only there. The premises
are rst,a measure, a closed series of fortunes or misfortunes. So in fact a
certain sense of equilibrium that lets the bourgeois (in the vizier himself)
shake his head at excesses, that forbids trees to grow up to the sky. Trees
have already grown taller and excess has already been attained earlier when
they had to begin growing quite far below—in other words when viziers
become uneasy because they have already come too far from their origins.
Napoleon actually thought of fortune as a personal quality, like the shape
of a nose; the world had a duty to bestow good fortune on him, always
more, never enough. Yet in the less aristocratic view of his mother, his luck
“cannot last, ” precisely because it has risen too high, too “unnaturally.”
Where a measure is there, however, and the measure is reached, even
the smallest thing suffices to bring it to over owing.That is the mecimmzl
to! function, as it were, of the small in terms of measure; it presumes, per»
haps too strongly, a vessel, a bourgeois apportioning (which is not always
there for viziers, and never for those born to it). It transforms even the
subtle, the small, from a sign into a cause of the end. More important,
The Rococo ofFrIre 4.1
These signs of the small will not be mistaken; they have some of the
smallness of the true end that is dispersed every true beginning,
into‘ thflt
for founfdtog
gives it the direction and flavor of our They can be
direction. in
the forecourt to the bedroom was loaded; that’s where they came from—
the same forecourt reappeared in the dream. Almost every night the bed
seemed to stand outside, the white, jingling ghost clowns around it. By
day they hung at the bottom of the wall on a washed—out "poster; the cir-
cus it announced was long gone. But at night they danced with the serv-
ing girl who was so dutiful by day; on stilts, in brownish gray rags, always
the same steps, back and forth. Impossible to say a word about it; better to
go in the kitchen and sharpen pencils against the mineral deposits. That
helped. Bluish gray strokes; I took the pencils back to bed. On the streets we
would take to school, there was light in the morning. We had little pieces
of wood in our hands that we used to make noise and frighten ourselves.
Boys soon began ghting; under the bush too, theres no more room.
school and home. Wit soun s t at were a waY3 same and almost
’
emprishummlnscouse .
' ' hernselves.
. .
It fits that boys see just as precisely as they read literally. 1 cl d
dulled the marbles lay in the window, II1al‘h1€S 311: hut Scrailtp 16b
all
:1.-' I 111118‘
not at fat
’ . . b'
K
P eel as it were; but I felt utter turmoil looking at it that I could hard1)7 €X—
i
press: and never forgot the red window. Probably everyone feels that way
'
some time and then later about something 6156; Whether his
at
0:6 UiileiIn1SE(l)gIi)1'1 affect
es that one. A person starts early with it; if 116 Chchlit
JusOtl
War
stop as )
_ _become
the image would more iinpO1't3I1t than him5€lf-
This case is related only very indirectly to the
, _ _
it came that same year on a bench in the woods, and I felt mysel [6’Xp€T”1€T3CE:(OfthOEf yealtls,
one feeling, looking
as he was wonderful,
01: Wh0m
outward,‘
sits forever in
who
get
satelasi
IwihEs‘ldovxcrnevelln i:otzlmffei1:lfHuangigbeede
_ die;
Whom one always has in store, even among
alone; but of course he has the red window,
men S, all
will always stand b h_Yd
W
e
in 1t.
Everyone has a sign from those days that is noth1_11g,'l‘1€1th31‘
from nature, and not from the familiar self, but it Wlll cover every 1 domeihhitlnf fgno;
one wants. Completely silly stuff that belongs
things that would
remain after one counted up
nowherelptplt a grig;3:;
1
is. Here it was the window on the box; IICXE I30 "3: EH63 = Was at a farevegyt 31
Spirit Still Yizking S/cape
45
more crooked rudder, among the images in the ads of that time; they were
the first gallery. Away with high heels! announced
such an ad; an oversize
heel was printed there, and crossed out; it meant
nothing to us, but it was
somehow exciting. Or one of us would show off Dr.
Reifkzzifi SeIfPrererm~
firm, lustfully, and right below, the
illustration: Nena Sahib, a voluptuous
woman with eyes black as ink; we thought the
book was some sort of In-
dian pornography.
The strangest was a nocturnal still life that would
appear from time to
time, an image of laundiy all by itself, without
any people, that was in-
tended to praise a detergent (children are familiar with
anyway). Quietly the basin with the soaking laundry
kitchen things
hung in the air, right
behind it a black cellar window with a white grill, and at ai1
hung a huge, slender, pale new moon. The moon peered angle across it
into the window
all night, saying, Soak with Mondo overnight,
next days laundry duty light.
In this image was music that slept as it woke, and
always played the same.
I often held the image up to the light, and
feared having to go into the cellar
that I had loved as a small child.
Later there was something of the more cheerful window,
the red win-
dow on the box, in the attic room of a much older
seventh grader, with
whom I put gunpowder instead of salt on my buttered
bread; rather, the
wonder of that red window took on some of the smell
in this room where
the older boy paced back and forth, studied, and
smoked,
learned. But the room itself meant nothing; the intended manly and
essence could
also live in the very different sentences that one read
in Christmas books.
Such as, “The icy cold North wind blew across the
desolate prairie.”‘5
There was ai1 uncanny warmth in this cold
sentence; a self behind a win-
dow rode with the cowboy through the transfer image that
drously. In “better” images or books there’s never that separated won-
course, I forgot, the room at Baker Street, where
window. But of
Sherlock Holmes lives, is
sometimes behind it even today: when the rain beats against
the windows,
Holmes sits by the chimney with Dr. \Watson, and the bell
rings. With the
window put on like a mask, one stepped out, nallyoutward,
into the open.
walked in the country and smoked; loved each other, and respected each
other, which one has more need of at that age), a blond boy with poor
color (he’d been stuffed into Bleyle’s suits for boys, but he carried them
with bearing, a11d in his green eyes lay power; he pressed plants, and lent
us books in which the sea breezes whistled).
We also held stamps, a magnet, and a spyglass. The magnet pulled, and
the glass was a strong man who would transport us to the farthest objects; -e
we wanted to get away. Back then I would also ask: Why do things weigh
differentlyiwand Wrote it down. I stuck with the balloons from the fair,
which of course are not heavy at all. On the contrary, they rise into the air,
and in fact if one lets them go they rise until the air around them is as light
as the gas in them. They strive all the more, the further from this point they
begin. Cotton and stone, on the other hand, have their consistent densities
where they would be at home, not above but below ground. ‘Which is not
even what matters, for only separation from the same causes the attraction,
maltes something nostalgically heavy, as it were. And differently heavy de-
pending on how far things have to go to find the same density; that is
where they strive to be, all the more, the greater the separation. In short, I
myself didn’t like staying home; the room that was “like” me was outside.
Fifteen years: one got even further beyond life, namely, educated. School
of course remained appalling, consuming nine, even ten years of ones
youth; one did not always attain the class’s standard. Such petit bourgeois,
such fools, hoplites, lesson plans over me; I was their dog, and rebellious.
One, maybe two teachers were fresher, but they could do nothing against
the fustiness of the institution and knew nothing of our young, callow, im-
portant attempts to find ourselves. The way to what was “like” us got ever
colder. We read Social Democratic brochures; quite remarkable images
made it clear that the society we lived in was a deception, and the world a
machine. Only the girls with whom we rode the roller—coaster would dress
themselves up: but a few steps from the gleaming metal bars, the droning
Calliope, stood the gasoline engine that drove it all. Here were quantities,
and precise vectors; the true relationship of dream and reality, the former
nostalgic motif of gravity now also began to fade. Or in stereoscopes, which
still existed then, one needed only look under the curtains hanging before
one’s feet: behind was an empty space with a stool in the middle, on it stood
a laughably small yet very precise apparatus that threw the shining images
of Hammerfest or the Holy Sepulchet. Machinery and matter were thus
the crux of the problem, albeit a very masculine and mature one; babies
Spirit Still Tit/eing S/mpg 47
come from women, life comes from carbon, carbon consists of atoms. As
I was being con rmed, and was supposed to say the creed at the altar, I in-
serted threefold I am an mt/aein:!—pro11ouncing the ei as a diphthong, for
we had only read and never heard the word, in little freethin_ker’s tracts ti-
tled Stroll} with an Atheist and the like.
A text appeared, “The Universe in the Light of Atheism”: “No incorpo—
e real being had a hand in it,” “Matter is the mother of all existence,” our
sexual education was complete, the secret of the world was out.” What
one called God was nothing but the in nitesum of matter, energy, and
(unconscious) reason; all consciousness is mere combustion, like lights in
the night, behind which the dark dynamo stood. Indeed, consciousness it-
self seemed dearly purchased; on ones youthful bosom, or rather deep
within it, one could feel a peculiar weigl1t, the slight but persistent weight
of life, speaking figuratively, yet not only guratively. For it was physically
quite exactly focused and palpable; this slight painmmso it seemed—was
the seat of consciousness, or the source. It also heals, but likewise out—
wardly, in outward unconsciousness, above all in natural beauty, especially
inorganic beauty, in the beauty of rivers, mountains, and cliffs. The nat-
ural sciences heal even more exactly; their methods are already unfeeling,
and their object is nothing but dead matter and energy. A strange channel
for the obscure erotic desires (probably) of those days, certainly also for
death wishes, which in puberty" are not only physiological but as it were
pliysicalmabove all this impatience is a desire to go cold. Perhaps these
connections don’t accord with that time (such things are hard to remem-
ber exactly; there’s been too much maturation); yet my notebooks are still
there, and they have an erotic-antierotic tone that very much suits a boy.
The tracts of my materialist period (the nineties) also diverted the night
of love into the night of matter, where the “transformation of our bodies”
is at any rate certain.”
But now came the age of sixteen; I became much younger, and dreams
meant precisely—-—everything. I had long ago unkedand was in another
class; school remained just as stupid, but my classmates were better; it was
truly a community. Among us in the new class were grown lads and honest
comrades who took something wild and rst—borninto the quiet streets, es—
pecially at night; the last in school were the first by nature. On the ships that
came down from Holland, we listened to the sailors tell of snakes they’d
eaten; one of us nearly got a tattoo. They probably often lied, and we too
needed something to go with the Dutch tobacco, with beer and pretzels; we
48 Spirit Stili Yhfeing Shape
rialism, lived or received. A clear feeling for girls displaced our solemnity,
like this,
and the booths taught us so much, above all that everything is
there we
with a curtain over the entrance and mysterious inside. From
boys drew the energy for which the time had nallycome: namely,
the fer-
vent dream—kitsch of the nineteenth century,
seen naively. One drove to
the fairground on a beautiful day; men bedecked with musical
clocks or
the ex-
playing hurdy—gurdies stood along the way. If one came nearer to
hibits, the wooden horses would do their round, the mirrors would
re-
volve splendidly, the silver and gold tassels would sparkle. Dented tin men
the
cranked their hand mills in the shooting galleries; the round lenses of
and less
panoramas glinted like portholes, like the wreck of the
Grammar,
warmly; the waxworks stood motionless in the clamor.“ On the whole
fairgrounds there was a music of commotion. Vertically stood the terrible
or lascivious images: the execution of Schill’s
of cers, or “The Victoi"s
Spoils”; Madame sits like a Rumanian at her till with kerosene lamp, of
tarot
cai'ds, and money; behind the shabby tapestry are the clown ghosts
childhood, but without fear.“ A gong sounds, and Doktor Faustus ap—
of the
pears in the booth; there was hypnosis too—these are the mysteries
world, from all
South Paci c.There lay the world, or the symbol of the
the books from before and from now, which one read again and again be-
the booths burned,
cause one would forget them like dreams. The light in
and behind the trees it glowed; the Gypsy woman had stolen the kings
baby; Rumpelstiltskin dwells where the wolves and the foxes say good—
Zaleukos, is
night; the magic horse ies, the magnetic mountain looms,
the
this how you welcome your guest?” Lazily the sails apped against
mast of the brig; meanwhile Kilian sat in his
hut, midnight was long past,
and before morning breaks the Yumas must be surrounded; Sam Hawkens,
the
Old Wabble, Old Death, Old Surehand, Old Firehand were roaming
T
wide prairie. Nscho—Tschi shone like the sun‘ Winnetoii embraced Old
’ . the blizzard
.
th:F:?l1;l :1i:Cl , andlpow
Sh
a 16,
he was nallyrecognized again;
e monsoon, the typhoon; with a rumble like an
raged,
overblown tuba it began, and now the great caravan swun around
from Fourche la fave, from Little Rock from deserted n Llango C5lIaCaCi0a:;a();l
th - hot, teeming . Asia;
I
. the way from Bagh_
da: l:0CLl{)fIl\/-lOl1l)I1Iia,l_Il;lIS,l(lf(‘i€.p
'
o sian u
into
a e riding faithfully at one’s side; the banished Kru,
mir '
himself our guide across Schott Dsclierid, the terrible salt sea. Light
and dark, Omar and Abrahim-Mamur, Schimin the Smith Busm the be
gar, old Miibarak, the Dearth afSc/mt and The Empire cftfye Silygr Lion
met powerfully. 23
:11
As that all frothed together, it nurtured and resounded in a boy’s soul
combined all its desires; ever more strongly did girls, lively banquets, the
Thousand and One Nights shine in. Across the valleys, plains, gorges
mountains, dangerous cities, there soon glowed the Northern lights of
. those onl-
ti1[':1te:nl:3tapl1jcIlSlC3}.1l l1(l)tlOI'iS.
'
Inlshort, there almost no everyday in
'
'
111 p pyon the
15f 0V6. by
sc oo , everything was ampli ed,or became completely still
fountains of the rococo gardens, in the intoxication of
the rstspeculative books. We felt ourselves drawn to the point of pain
Lf:E) rt"l1ietl:i:l;1ult1y 0‘? trees,
t at
clouds, the night sky,
us almost to
with
a sorrow of mutcness
halluci-nations.
We [ads on the shore
mm
on Eiliefll lj nvmplC118,OV€] pree
d gods, on extraordinary evenings when the svvgllg
ICC glass. The red and green lights at port and star-
11:16 sli:1oo
board 0 [1 '3 C S .1pS, as they drew red and green through the waters, and
nothing else existed. Fabulously near, as though burned in Orion Stood
319’? T1€V€1‘ tiffid ofseeing this erydeclaration, the three
:‘a:l3‘:_ lW1n_‘,e” ‘El e
anung “P: t 1E Scabbard hanging beneath. The “same” had become
magical; F1 long gaze would transport us into that constellation.
Here an utterly enchanted essence moved about that was much too hot
to hold. The pubescent feeling for love and for nature often speaks poems,
sometimes concCPES»- We no
had
poetjamong us, and the god of life would
not b ecome conceptual. In systems, says my entry,
The world was even more pervaded with All—Life in a second manuscript,
which we debated, and which I wrote down:
The essence of energy cannot be calculated, but only experienced in the esh.
Blood and individuality are the two essences of life; the first creates reality, the
second shapes its values. This philosophy provides an approach to the Renais-
sance, and to the unknown territory beyond the Renaissance: toward German
and Greek antiquity as ll’/elmmcimuung. Our philosophy of energy not only
resolves- every substance and every element into energy, like science, not only
interprets the Ding am sick as an energetic general will that has as it were
missed ‘its calling, aimlessly flows back into itself and its cycle: rather, the
essence of the world is the urge and the power to shape, toward the unlocked
secret of life at every point; the Ding an sich is objective fantasy.”
Seventeen years: boys of that age hate the Bible, or, when mere mechanics
becomes untenable, take from the Scriptures anything but the Ten Com-
mandments, let alone their opposition to “life." A sort of Bedouin atti—
rude was affected, was allied to the Teutonic without any perceived leap,
meant the universally buried “religion of nature” that was to be revived—
the thunder deity Jehovah swung Thor’s hammer. Or a precise permis-
siveness was meant, with a magic carpet at the entrance and the cosmic
maiden of objective fantasy within, with a secret that could not be solved
but only named, for it was essence. But later, of course, the red window
returned, from the moon landscape on the sewing box in the display wind
(low; it came almost as a lunar landscape by day. The In—Itself that still lies
within it, or humanity as it still is and ferments, set itself against the
course of the world, which is not yet so Bacchantic, or not only. The gaze
into the red window, the entire human and musical ensemble set with it,
drove out the illusory All—Life of before. Something human, or the dream
of a human cause that has not yet come, entered the world, Whereithe
dream exists as tendency and only sometimes already as testimony. The se-
cret window might thus make one hostile to the world (precisely because
it af rms“life,” this life); it is the collector lens for the utopian material of
which the earth consists. Private collection was never intended, and will
not be continued.
T/as MomfofParting 51
turys dim mustiness, with all the Romantic colpartrzge that the motif of
parting demands. Its vagueness attains its truest color in partial sincerity;
parting itself is sentimental. But sentimental with depth; it is an indis-
tinguishable tremolo between illusion and depth. We will retell how the
young artist again and again listens for the hell that is already long gone,
gazes at the broad l101‘1ZOIl where everything had been; this love, this girl,
a happiness that never even came to be, but already went under in its first
stranger was just coming around a bend in the road toward a birch; under
it sat a farm girl gathering fall owers.
As she heard the steps, she sprang toward the lad with a cry of joy,
blushed, hung her head, and said, “He’s not coming.” The lad smiled at
her, yet before he could ask, she repeated in the same fearful voice, “Hein-
rich isn’t coming.”
With these words, she walked back down the narrow path leading from
the birch, the stranger at her side, ever more aware of the young girls truly
wondrous beauty.
“Is Heinrich your sweetheart, and is he keeping you waiting?”
Fhe girl sighed, and replied with a forlorn expression, “Perhaps he could
HOE COIIIC; perhaps hes sick, or even dead. I am so unfortunate, sir! You’ve
come through Brschofsroda, haven’t you? Did you hear nothing about
him? Heinrich Vollguth is his name, and hes the sheriff’s son. The day is
short, and now I’ll never see Heinrich, not until our day comes again.”
The lad didn’t know What to make of the question.
“Certainly I was in Bischofsroda, but the sheriff’s name isn’t Vollguth at
all; of course I didn’t meet everyone. I am an artist, and never stay long in
one place; I must take advantage of the lovely autumn days.”
52 The MotzfafParting
leaned into it. A small cortege went by: men carrying the cof n,and be-
hind them, holding candles, a woman with a little girl. It was all very
strange to see: the dark coats, the candles, the grayish yellow sunlight and
the silent, forlorn procession.
Already before, before they entered the village, the painter had sketched
the low steeple; now he added the procession down the deserted street to
his portfolio. Gertrud watched the image take shape, with a wholly enig-
matic expression; at that moment the painter grabbed a new sheet and
wanted to begin, when Gertrud interrupted him and held his arm.
“If you want to draw me, then, I beg you, draw me into the rstpic-
ture. There is still room enough; I don't like standing alone, but in such
serious company no one could think ill of me.”
He granted her this strange favor, and soon the image of Gertrud ap-
peared among the procession like the Virgin in anguished glory over the
dark earth.
Because the painter now wanted to see more of the old village, he rose
and bade Gertrud accompany him. The sun already stood low, and they did
not want to tarry long, for toward evening, the sheriff had said, they would
see music and gay clothing enough at the dance in the inn. The couple strode
along the broad village street; already it was not so quiet as it had been at
midday. Children played in front of their houses, the old folks watched,
and everything would even have had a quite pleasant appearance if the haze
had not grown even thicker, now already mixing with the evening fog.
Gertrud and the painter slowly ascended the rise on which the church
stood, almost outside the village, surrounded by God’s acre, and again the
painter noticed the very antiquated style of the church, shot through with
dangerous cracks; the gravestones roundabout were-entirely weathered
and mossy. Only a single fresh grave lay at the edge, where today’s proces-
sion must have ended, but otherwise the churchyard seemed long aban-
doned, iay there in such silence and contented seclusion as the painter had
never felt before. He walked about, seeking in vain to decipher the in-
scriptions and dates on the gravestones, Gertrud next to him in the gath-
ering darkness, wordless and quietly crying, immersed in a silent prayer.
Quite nearby the cracked bell now tolled in the steeple; he had not heard
it since the morning. Gertrud started.
“Now we may no longer mourn; you hear, the bell is ringing out. We
want to go to the dance; this is how our every day ends. Promise me
you’ll stay at my side that long. How I thank our Savior that you have
34 The _M0t;i'f0fP:irifing
come, and that I may go with you; perhaps God has not yet forgotten me
entirely.”
Forcefully she took his outstretched hand and descended the rise with
her friend, down into the utterly transformed village. On the streets was
the
laughter, about the inn swayed torches and an eager crowd. Quicldy
forward and found
girls greeted Gertrud and embraced her, and lads strode
their sweethearts; already the music was stamping and piping within.
He
entered with Gertrud; the ardent friend held her in his arms; the couples
whirled in the piping sound of the old dance. One thing only struck the
the church
painter beyond measure: namely, every time the clock from
on high struck the hour, the celebration would stop
momentarily, the
her-
music would die out, and the dancers would stand immobile. Gertrud
be counting the strokes.
self whom he wanted to question, seemed also to
The stroke of eleven was past; more frantic than before, the music burst
out again, transporting the painter, beside himself
with happiness, and the
elated girl.
Now the trumpets blew a fanfare for the last dance before midnight.
Gertrud tore herself away, gave her friend a long, pained look, and led
him, astonished, out of the roaring hall, down the path they had walked
at midday, up to the church and even
further, up to the outer ring—wall,
into the open field bathed in moonlight.
“Promise me,” cried Gertrud, “please promise me you’ll stay here just
a
short while, till midnight. Promise me for love of our Savior that you
wont take a step, neither to the right nor to the left, until the bell has died
out.” The lad drew his bride to him and kissed her; Gertrud kissed him
back wildly, then tore herself from his arms.
“Farewell; I’ll wait for you before the door of the dance hall. After mid-
night! Think of that, and forget me not!”
Again she stood quietly, embraced her friend, and her soft tread van-
ished in the dark. Dismayed, the youth stayed put, her strange words
echoing; he thought he was obeying a love game. And now he saw how
the night had changed. A sudden wind gusted across the eld; the dim
moon disappeared behind a pale, whirling mist. Only the windows
of the
dance hall shone warmly, and the wind from that direction carried the
piping and trilling with it, the wedding music where Gertrud waited after
midnight (“Forget me not!”).
Now, nally, the old bell in the church steeple struck, in the middle of
a gust so strong that the lad had to throw himself to the ground so as not
to be flung against the wall. The storm howled by. The time had to be
The ]lJorzfafPm'2iing 55
past, because the bell had long died out; the painter stood up and looked
for the way back down to the village. But he strayed into moors in every
direction. Dense clumps of alder rose everywhere where he expected the
path; nowhere could he yet detect a light from the village. He worked his
way back into the thickets. At once bog water rose in his tracks; he turned
back,
uncanny. soulghho
the path elsewhere,
ow. Finally he
ended
feared losing
up. again and again in the deep,
his way completely, and stayed
on a rise in order to wait there until the clock struck one and the stroke
could lead him. But he must have missed the stroke or the wind that still
blew carried it to the side. Hopeless and exhausted he nallydecided to
await the day. He
hollow remained still.
listened again and again for the old, harsh stroke; the
-
Only toward morning did the lad arise f1'om an uneasy tormented
5155133 ghtb fofehim barlied 21 dog, and an old hunter stepped forward
from the brush.
«HOW gm?d'it my called
“ good ‘E the painter, his words tumbling out with relief,
See Y‘-“ll V6 gone astray, and looked in
vain all night.
ho“: -'5 to
Wont you tell me where I can ndthe way to Germelshausen?”
old man quickly stepped back, crossed himself.
'“The Where are you from?” He looked at the painter, shaking
h_ lC1i0:l l1“egfus!course I know the way
well enough. Yet how many fathoms
hieneat
s eah. t h e earth the accursed village lies, thats for God alone to know;
doesnt concern the likes of us, either.”
thought the old man must be drunk
Th‘? Palil t r in spite of the early
and nodded agreeably. Pulled his sketches from his folder
m(:irnl11ng gut,
an s
owe him the steeple; the old man didn’t know it, claimed never to
have seen it, but grew ever more jovial as he saw thatthc young man was
neither a Vagabond nor a ghost,
.
You
must have heard something there, sir, and dreamed it. It can be
frightening
an
to lose ones way in the hollow at night. But do me this favor,
again speak that
accursed name, especially on the spot where we
geifr
stan . ct the dead rest, especially those who have no test; they appear
now here, now there, as they please.
In an?!’ 9336» 311': Contlnued the hunter, and struck a spark for his pipe,
“ those are the old stories hereabouts. Look! Right there in the marsh is
i’Vl1e}11'e the lyil age you name is supposed to have lain; then it disappeared
110 0116 knows how 01'
Why. Only the legend lives on that
111 75
every ehnlgdt.
un ied years, on the day when it sank, it is lifted up into daylight
again; no one should be so unfortunate as to happen upon in
56 Supermzrumilism, Stupid and Improved
“But you_’re amusing yourself with the likes of us, sir! Go over to Dillstedt,
straight down the road, into a warm bed. If you like I’ll go with you; its
not so far out of my way.”
The youth clutched at the air about him; the hunter tried to hold him;
he shoved him and fainted dead away. When he reopened his eyes, he
made uneasy by the
found himself alone; the hunter must again have
fevei'ish stranger. Slowly the painter gathered his
been
pages, which still lay
strewn on the ground. He saw the steeple, the procession with the out-
moded clothing; saw Gertrud sketched onto the same page. He rose and
went-his way, toward the main road, and soon reached the crossing under
the white birch where she had sat only yesterday, weaving garlands. Only
there did he stop and look back one last time. “Farewell, Gertrud!” he said
quietly, as great, glistening tears came to his eyes.
the one in a very narrow house, only two windows, one above the other, a
pale old Austrian yellow around the white window frames; the girl herself
delightful to see. Thanks very much, said the gracious man, some other
time; I’m too tired right now, but tomorrow night, perhaps; _I’ll remember
the address. He’d already gone further when she called after him, Hey,
don’t be stupid! Come on, I’ll do it Mexican for you! But the man walked
on into the night, through ever more familiar areas, Rotenturmstra e,
Karntnerstra e, Ring, home by the Mariahilferstrafée. He stopped sud-
denly: What did the girl mean by Mexican? For a long time he stood still
as a ship blown by opposing winds; tore himself away, turned around,
Ring, K.'a'irnterstra{§e, Rotei1turmstraf§e and so on, until he nallyfound
the little old ‘alley again, but nowhere was the once—so—striking little house
with the girl in its lone window. Back and forth down the alley, asking the
whores hanging out of every other window about the vanished house. You
idiot, you wanna house or a whore? cried the tongue—clicl~:ing women, and
still hurled insults after him as he nallywithdrew. Not only shaking his
head, very disappointed: both spirited away, the house and the young whore.
The case itself was really quite silly, and his hard luck would barely have
sufficed for an anecdote at his usual cafe table the next afternoon or
evening, an all too meager shock, with very little that was not quite canny,
entirely without salt. Until suddenly, already in the middle of Mariahil—
ferstra e, the illumination, the key came to him, the true and only now
complete ghost story, as it were. Thus (we quote verbatim the explanation,
the now truly fabulous elaboration by the actor Girardi):
There is an angel who can no longer stand to see how we botch everything.
Has permission to come to earth every hundred years in the shape of a whore,
to the Viennese alley, to the pretty, otherwise nonexistent, little house. May
only, however, pick up a single man as he passes by, in order to reveal to him
the way to this entirely different happiness. And her coded message is: Hey,
I’ll do it Mexican for you! If no one accepts the call that will be granted only
once, then the angel must disappear again for a hundred years. But no one has
understand the call yet—~not I, the last to hear it, and perhaps the last ever.
For if no one goes with her, the angel will say: People just don’t deserve any
better——and never come again.
Thus ended his interior monologue; with a curious regret, the sympathetic
Girardi returned to Hietzing, to his unbewitched house. Yet Nestroy would
have taken pleasure in this little invented postmagic, even if, indeed pre-
cisely because, it didn’t happen on the stage.
58 Strange Homeland, Familiar Exile
Pippa Passes
It’s terrible to be misled too little, and yet just enough. Not much more
than a twinkling arises, short and sharp, that wounds. It excites and may
well sow something, but only beginnings—nothing that blooms or could
ever come to bloom.
We should be clearer, and recount some stories. From our own experi-
ence, or stories we heard so intensely, they might be our own. A friend
told a story like this, perhaps a quite silly one, a true tram conductors
story as they’re called in Munich, like the ones a boring tram passenger
tells about radishes that were too mealy and such, stories that interest no
one but the teller. And because they interest him so much, he can only tell
them badly; his own interest is exactly what he can't convey, share. Most
dreams belong here, and everything too personal; those are strange stories,
to which one listens strangely.
Enough, already. Our friend sat in the tram car, in Autoém/LE bit in
Paris, which goes from the Opera to Montsouris Park, and across from
him a girl, whom he barely looked at, about whom he noticed only her
peculiar large pale blue eyes, noticed them dimly while talking to his com-
panions. Had to notice, actually, for those eyes watched him steadfastly,
not enticingly; rather, they were round and lonely, truly like stars. This
man cannot tolerate when a woman to whom he is indifferent begins to
love him; he doesn’t know how to say no to women, and so he prefers to
avoid it.
Now chance came to his aid: the man dropped his ticket. He picked it
up from the floor, thereby lightly brushing the girl’s knee—truly so lightly
and awkwardly, so inadvertently in that narrow space, that we need not
expand on the reasons psychoanalytically. Immediately the girl turned
away, and the man later related that he felt utterly Kierkegaardian. A
strange joy came over him that the girl must now have held him for a lout
or some predictable cad and so no longer had to love him.
Soon the tram stopped, as the stars of her eyes now rose again (or per—
haps had never set); my friend stepped off with his companions while the
girl observed, now with a truly mysterious expression, and the tram dis-
appeared in the direction of the park. The man claimed not even to have
watched the taillights, so uninteresting did the matter seem to him, and
so calm did he again feel. But no sooner was he seated at the table than
60 Pippa
there came, in the midst of the cafe, while he was still listening to light
news about the last parliamentary session or the fall exhibition, a crash
that almost buried him: love exploded on a timed fuse. 1llI1Si0I1 began to
operate and the girl within it became the beloved, the one just lost, and
neglected hopelessly gone, with whom an entire life sank. A beautiful,
jong life, never lived yet deeply familiar, wl_iich‘he recalled
lucination, and which lacked nothing but its tiny beginning.
almost in a hal-
same act; a mans love easily dies out in nothing—but—love, which is every—
thing to a woman. Not through the insatiably sexual woman but through
the insatiably erotic woman does the right man fail. He hears up to her
When such women’s essence is so closely related to a1't.
63
tices him, though he knows every doorknob, and the refrain How form»
nate we were back thenI—then at best he stands there as the lead in a sen-
timental film, who’s embarrassed before himself when he’s worth any.
thing.
' 30
Then the weakness and self—pity . in
- are revealed that live . .
the wish
for
such returns. Persons
-who ve become nothing special, or nothing ap_
proaching what they had intended, have this drive for reunion in excess—
naturally also .ltS catastrophe, which everyone knows, in particular the exa
cess. Here reunion takes on something of the faith one really keeps in a
speci cway only toward dead things (dolls, above all broken ones; closets;
and other mythical forces), not toward living things, to which one is
bound much more atmospherically.
Above all, reunion with an utterly vanished as well as splendid past has
some of the self-pity that is revealed in the usual sentimentality of such
moments. Only then does the worst catastrophe of all take shape, the
completely
airless
space: the reunion with ruins, with nothing but what is
sealed up within them, easily becomes a departure from oneself, as from
someone who never became. A dead man has then returned who goes
through these rooms handing letters to others long dead, like the Flying
Dutchman. The suspicion is always at hand, whenever a long past ends in
historical
a or domestic reliquary, that it has remained a tomb for mere
velleitieswthat it doesnt cook on in one living piece, and above all never
assumed the only decent form for “becoming”: maturity and works.
A test of oneself is therefore to dig out old and still dear things just to
sell them. Books still wrapped in the newspapers from back then on which
3
the old
-date
confronts us; antiquities, witnesses to an earlier life that
might still be uneasy yet is just as dead. Separating oneself from one’s past
is a test of ones relative adaptation to fate, and of the salvaged example )
one finds out then whether one left oneself badly in the past or somehow
f31thfUHY 30? Out 0f if; Wllether a past stroke survives in ones current ac-
tions and has become “something that has become” at another location so J
that it represents no past but rather solidity, salvage, rms:in every sense,
and Works.
‘Who
thus separates himself can throw away the loveliest reliquary ob-
jects as unthinkingly as Lessing did honor; he has the certainty that he can
I
pick them up again at any time. In this sense, separation from books, fur-
I11tU-IC: a beloved past is a mobilization of resources that havent been eaten
by rust or motl1s—in short, a rehearsal, even a double rehearsal, for death.
M
For in one instance objects move away from us" as though we were leaving
64 The Muse of'Resrz'mrion
them; their departure is as though a train on the next track were swerving
away, and we think we’re swerving: the effect is the same. Just this depa1'—
ture effect reveals what has become melancholy infatuation and What sub-
stantive memory, conservation that needs no more physical return. That
former interperson between friends will also eat none of it, but true old
age and perhaps also true death love this confection and need it. I11 short:
there simply is no reunion with union. A sentimental reunion is poiso—
nous, not nutritious. The true reunion is none at all, does not reenter the
past or times remna11ts but has what is its own as an integral present—in—
deed, outside of time, as a small, thorough, preserved room where no fur-
niture collides, and nothing is sad.“
stairs and assailed her. Clearly she was in league with that old rat bag of a
wife, was spying at her behest in order to search his room for money.
There he actually found her one evening too, as he came home early,
upstairs; trembling, she sprang from his desk, with its drawers open. The
night before had just borne a strange fruit of which he alone knew, and
which he kept more secret than his missing money. The second act of a
completely inaccessible, unmarketable, hopeless opera was nished;it was
titled Sims.
The girl became even more cautious, staying in his chamber only when
there was certain to be a performance, for many weeks on the lookout for
the unhappy man. Until one day the musician was nallydismissed; he
had refused to play along at rehearsals for the new opera by one of the
fashionable composers he despised. Indeed he had fallen out so badly with
the world that it cheered him not in the least to hear that his own daugh-
ter had been discovered as the new vocal sensation, and would be trained
as a future prime sienna on the ca1'dinal’s orders. On the contrary, the
sacked violinist now railed against himself too, the closer the new singer’s
debut approached. After all, his own eshand blood was supposed to pre—
sent the opera of the composer of the day for baptism. Completely barred
in his chamber, he no longer heard all the rumors circulating outside:
about the young stars moods, about the endless rehearsals for the new
opera, about open scandals and intervention by the prince himself.
The evening of the premier arrived. The recluse had even draped the
windows of his sanctuary. A stranger Comes through the door, presenting
himself as the emissary of the artistic director himself: His Excellency’s
coach is standing before the house to take him to the opera. Even now the
man resists. They arrive at the theater; the opera has begun. Wild, jagged,
deeply familiar music bursts from the hall; the old musician hastens for-
ward—his daughter, as siren, is singing to the sea.
Such a story is rare, yet it does happen, and still moves us afterward. If
I love you, how does that concern you?—~This statement is not only inso-
lent; it can be daughterly too. Certainly the nasty old man left the maiden
no choice but not to ask about his love. On the other hand, though, her
father concerned her extraordinarily much; no love could be more sel ess.
The girl, as she took the score to herself, copied it, always trembling for
fear of discovery, and kept herself secret and inaccessible until the last mo-
ment. Hardly any beloved could be so maidenly, in the most beautiful
sense, no one so incognito and yet so strong.
66 Rap/Mel W/irlaout Hrmair
inadvertent inspirations were hardly foreseen; yet they altered the sub-
stantive direction of the original plan, and the original material in it. Usu-
ally the inspiration from which the masterwork commences is no longer,
and in this case more “modest” than, the initial one of the youthful plan;
the details above all, in which inspiration concretizes, come not from a
frenzy but from observation and the mediation of experience. Adulthood
still muffles the distant thunder, and “reason” (if it is not the normal dis-
illusionment) cancels many primitivisms; but here they are placed in the
service of the earlier waking dream, become not a destruction as in the
dilettantes of adulthood but an affirmed detour, out of whose passionate
sobriety the goal now first returns. Out of the irony of a new beginning,
out of the incident and detail beneath the original plan, the work
first ap-
pears that sometimes realizes it.
But now, what was the beginning? Was it not just as abrupt as com«
plete, everything at once? What was meant in it does not easily return, yet
always surges forward again, as at dawn that must become loud and clear.
Much is concretely added to it later, often something unexpected, cer-
tainly also new puberty with fresh faces. Yet an early mystery persists after
all this, a red glow at the window of every first conception, itself not yet
adequately manifested, not in any fate, nor in any creation. Mere unspo—
ken intention is of course worth nothing at all; it must everywhere get out
of its beginning, put itself into expression and exteriority—yet just as far
from us be anything already complete! The youth at Sa'1's, who has noth-
ing if he does not have everything: he stands in no masterwork either, al-
though the masterwork always leads back, is always applied to what never
lets up.“ The potion (not from any witch’s kitchen) is still unknown that
would completely rescue youth beyond age, the beginning beyond the
work, make them visible. Raphael without hands would never have be-
come a great artist but, since he was nonetheless Raphael, perhaps an even
more faithful remembrance of ourselves.
Existence
Just Now
When do we ever get out, nearer to ourselves? Does one ndoneself in
bed, or on the road, or at home, where things seem better again? Everyone
knows that feeling of having forgotten something in one’s waking life that
didrft come along and become clear. That’s why it often seems so impor-
tant-so'mething one had just wanted to say, but it slipped one’s mind.
Leaving a room where one has lived for a longer time, one looks about
strangely. Here, too, something stayed back that one was never able to nd.
One takes it along nonetheless, and starts with it again somewhere else.
Dark by Us
What We have here and now, we probably notice least of all. If one gets
what one wants, and walks out on the street, sees how a happy man looks
from the inside, then that’s Worth a lot, but at the same time something
inside has been repressed. The dream from before that saw happiness
moving before it so vividly, as it truly is, has repressed itself. Now the pay-
check is really here, and so not here enough, stuck in the haze of what
one just experienced, and soon in the water one usually swims in. Suffer-
ing breaks through more strongly, likely because it’s more related to us as
We still are; We never truly have in hand something happy, as we would be,
just for that reason. A red—hot idea, as they say, is usually not a good one.
7I
72 The Fall into the Now
]oy more easily cools off in the Now when it falls in. It is usually happier
beforehand, or afterward, than just when it appears.
precisely there: they reveal that our basic being lGW”6iF€ml is W1'_0ng- 1“
the
an acute as well as still open way; only the advancing solution clarifies.
the right
problem as the problem of our human X. Sloth and solitude are
and left posts of the door into a house of which so and
many dream,
where no one could hold out. Where even many artists, with
their-voca-
tion, have likewise revolted against every kind of boredom.-For
leisures
ightfrom work is none at all, as noted, but only another kind Of W01'l<-
It is war in the enemy territory of idleness itself, an armed attack the
-on‘
The labor of the everyday flees intolerable inactivity
locus of the problem.
and subjugates the earth (which is otherwise inhospitable or unsuitable)
so that we can be at home on it. The work of leisure (which is
not com—
of all emancipated labor)
fortable or aristocratic, but the terminal Concept
itself makes order in the gloom of existence; there it builds a house for
‘an-
other time. In the middle of existence it builds this house, where not just
the here you may but above all the here you cm of inactivity can nallybe
is, the
our friend (who until now was only disgust or desolation--that
loneliness from
very spur to work). That does not prevent inactivity-and
having paralyzed even leisure up to now, because of its nearness, because
of its entry into the lion's den. Diirer’s idly solitary angel of melancholy
pays for her desire by getting it. The temptations of the womb and thc
grave appear here within each other again: of the embryo that has it quiet,
of the corpse that has it deep. But only completed work properly gives
birth to us, drives out the poison of being uncooked and perishable. No
work has ever been the right one; no test could therefore ever last. We are
not here to eat, but only to cook [leer/aen]; we can eat
later, nally. Out
Here and Now tastes bad without activity, not least because it could be so
superb, and isn’t.
No Free Lunch
He who wants to be a sickle must bend himself betimes. As in school
primers, and wherever we learn to be good. To be satisfied with what we
have; unfortunately, even the motif of Kanitverstan belongs here.‘ Differ-
ently and at the same time less dubiously consolatory are the
likewise reassure
little
petit
bourgeois stories in praise of work, though they us
111-011,1,‘
con nementby denying our envy of wealth. “Johan the Merry Soap Boiler
No Free Lzmcfa 77
belongs here, poor but happy, diligently feeding on scraps, while the rich
man, with all his soft pillows, supposedly has nothing to laugh about?
Another story belongs here even more clearly, based on the principle—
magically adorned, moreover—that ill—gotten gains pro t nothing. The
cheerfully industrious life applauds itself in particular here, only this early
bird gets more than the worm. The unspoken meaning is that the rich ai'e so
only because they were diligent and thrifty; otherwise no one would be poor.
The farmer in this story certainly found that out: the rich, though un—
justly rich, goldsrnith all the more. This farmer, usually called only “the
little farmer,” met a witch in the forest while driving wood into town. As
thanks for letting her ride along for a bit, she gave him a little gold ring.
This ring, so she said, had a special power; one need only turn it on ones
finger and a wish (but only this one) would immediately be granted. Af-
ter the farmer had unloaded his wood in town, he went to a goldsmith to
have the ring assayed. The gold itself was of little value, but when the
farmer told him about the witch the smith became especially friendly,
poured wine, persuaded the farmer to stay the night, and as he. slept, fab-
ricated an exact copy of the ring in his workshop; he placed it onto the
farmer's hand, the real ring onto his own.
No sooner was the duped child of fortune out of his house that dawn
than the smith turned the ring, cried that he wished for four hundred
thousand Taler, and at once they began to rain from the ceiling, ever more,
up to his neck, over his head, until the four hundred thousand were com-
plete. In the morning he was found suffocated; his heirs agreed this was too
much of a good thing, so they split the inheritance more prudently.
Meanwhile the farmer had come home and told his wife the story be-
hind the ring. Instantly she wished that a little plot next to their eld
would belong to them. The peasant however was for careful deliberation,
for taking time, and drove more wood; from the pro tshe was able to buy
the plot anyway. And so on, ever new wishes from the wife, ever more
work from the husband, until the couple in their old age became so pros-
perous that they forgot the ring—and nallytheir sons laid it in the grave
between farmer and wife.
So that was the end of the song, and the pedagogical, the petit b0ur—
geois moral of the story: a penny saved is a penny earned, ill—gotten gains
pro tnothing. It is not that cheap tricks will never work (the magic ring
granted the smith his gold, after all); instead the little man’s smugness and
narrowness will triumph, without any excess, folly, novelty (unless ordered
73 No Free Lune}:
ard for a pittance, hung it up in his shop, and when he had guests, would
occasionally poi11t to it with a sort of nostalgia: “Yes," he would say, “what
a time that was, when I would hunt bears in the Montenegrin hills!” Be-
cause it was spoken by a “Those that have, get,” it should also have found
favor in schoolbooks; a hunter’s tall tale in the parlor is no tightrope
Walke1"s frolic.
needs above all for its display, if it wants not only to earn but to put its
earnings on display as glamour. The misery of the Depression that watched
this seven—meter train go by was hardly deep enough for so much wealth
tryin.g to gain the light of day, or rather of night.
Only the shocking incident, as the reporters called it, really added some-
thing, criminally, out of prison. De pra mdis a white~haired woman
stormed into this pageantry and threw herself in front of the train, al—
legedly screaming, “Give me back my son! Give truth its due! My son is in
prison because of you!” If the train is out of C0t1rths—Maler, the old woman
is from those true regions of misery that were once part of feudalism, and
that now so splendidly disturb the juste milieu of our day, too: a wedding
in Baroque.8
Of the rich we still have enough, yet we lack precisely the picturesque
poor. Of great lords we have enough, yet we lack the properly writhing
worms beneath their feet, the bodyguards of contrast. From the unem-
ployed there comes merely an uneasy—and sometimes very dangerous—
misery, but not the necessary, attuned, corporatively attuned misery that
once made the dungeons below the banquet tables groan, and so left
everyone a place. This, nally, is national: to take from the rich their Jew-
ish haste, to make them a nobility, a brilliant one. This, nally, is nation-
alsazialistiscfo: to teach the poor to be so, and to remain so, by opening up
their view of the nobles again. \When will kings again ride white trotters
across the battle eldby evening light, over the bodies of cripples?
through that, and the yo/mrtzola cries. Just as a11yone would cry, even in fa~
vorable situations, to see another in his place, in l1lS habitat, and so could
connect the intensity of his dark feeling of being with the estrangement of
this view. The servant in fetters, without even any grand gestures, then be—
comes the mirror of one’s own state, which in itself is always critical. No
one should be hailed as fortunate before his death, and certainly not in the
mirror of his death.
Imminent Boredom
I once knew someone who must have wanted to get outside of himself,
but it didn’t work out. In the attempt to be sociable, he went awry, fell
mute again. Yet in the meantime one would watch curiously: how he
wanted to be lively and yet always ended otherwise.
If one asked him how he’d slept, the answer was: When? Last night? If
one claimed that he looked particularly surly again today, he would feel as
though he deserved it, as though he too had made a certain agreeable con-
tribution to the friendship. His enjoyment did not stem from vanity, but
just from the satisfaction of a desire to be liked. So he would answer, with
his slight smile, You. see it too? I saw it already last night in the mirror,
while washing my hands. Or small, very flat, in any case generally unfa-
miliar fish were being seived at the inn in Southern France where one had
run into the melancholy Miinchner: He bowed far over the plate and
shouted, The Isar has flounder too! Then he started, and said softly, The
Isarlust, I mean. And then, more softly still, Cake, I mean.” So the shand
the words that the peculiar man drew omwithin himself visibly altered
84 Imminent Boredom
their shape, like deep sea fish, as soon as he pulled them to the surface and
handed them around in the light. Consequently he would take them
back, but of course no longer in their previous form.
One afternoon, after numerous rounds had been drunk, this Mi'inch—
net, an expert on speechlessness, related a story, abruptly
and laconically,
yet with ironic intention. A gentleman wh_o’d been around found some-
Brussels, at the theater.
thing. It was given to him not on the street but in
The play didn’t interest him, so he looked for the woman who had already
struck his notice before, in the loge right above him. She was certainly
very pretty, and supposedly, as in a novel, looked back at him, holding
a
note in her hand, and waved. The gentleman stood up
and left the the—
ater, up the stairs to the next level, to the beautiful woman’s loge. She
passed the note to him with a quick glance, and pulled the door shut
again. The gentleman read the note: that is, he wanted to read ‘it, but he
couldn’t, for he understood nothing in it; the words were completely in-
comprehensible, in an apparently unfamiliar language.
The gentleman stood there, utterly baflied, but the usher was already
beside him, looked at the note sideways, turned away, and said only, Come
with me. The gentleman became rude, the usher ruder, and the gentleman
angry; the usher went to fetch the supervisor. The stranger had already
stopped paying attention and studied the mysterious note: the letters were
written with a colorless ink, round and squiggly; he had no clue. Mean—
while the supervisor arrived, very surprised, but no sooner did he see the
to leave
note than he turned, signaled security, and bade the gentleman
the theater. Completely dazed, the gentleman followed the officer down
the steps to the cash register, where his refund lay ready, out the front and
onto the broad, silent plaza. There the gentleman remained
for some
time, and could not get to the bottom of the matter.
Imminent Boredom 35
course here at our invitation, France , or
that he Hee Brussels tonight, to
even across the Channel.
Th tl . but
glz lw lilfalflti and stumbled out into the fresh air;
‘
h e r e—eff“
us
Em?” . .
Munchner, reluctantly—one can easily imagine ,
pp I C‘YIVCIWanted
1 id
e 0n
aimed fly, who would have something against him here?
to get away
a
'
sometimes,
so
outof his lifeless
. he ~ routine, or
sometimes wanted to recall something from the life that he otholwi
. ,
didn’t notice, that he forgot from one day to the next But it was not from
' SC
a n E3 d f01-" - .
adventure. nor even from an impulse, that he had fallen into
tlge 1i11af1Cl5k(I)1f
0 r e un
this unknown woman—indeed, with that note in his hand,
own as such. Now he had it - in abundance, and in. England,
Whenc hf: ed, the fantastic story did not improve ‘ Here too :- rumors
.
Spf acl; acquaintances on the street stood back for a while, business rela-
I
1) .
_
slanders and threats, received a letter from North America s from an old
which he concluded that his. misfortune was un-
klusln ss Paff fifgorlilipff
p
thousand
give you ten dollars, half of my present fortune. If you treat me as
everyone else has, I will shoot first you, then myself; it’s all the same to me'
Th 6 attoiney- loolcqd at the check,‘looked at the . .
ievolver, offered the usual
.Clg f ttéiand spoke: Of course I will grant your wish. May I see the docu.
opened his- biiefcase,
.- .
ment 1
pp 6:86 "El e geptleman
SidC 0 fl
?” felt about, looked 111--
were empty. He had lost the note,
S,0tip Mnot hing, pdcompartments
unc nei.
‘ t
- disappointing
his' exceedingly . . story; one could
hf
Se nse is regiet '
to
at again Failing '
so short. But even if - nothing was tangible, .
86 Imminent Boredom
speak. Since this character is out of action, and alone, his ears are open to
the kind of impression, or expression, of which a more solid citizen knows
nothing, thank God. As when the Miinchner, on the occasion of hearing a
phrase passing without understanding it, admits that an old suspicion
in
arose in him that there was something particularly important there that he
did not
know, whose traces he would find only by accident. Others know
it, he thinks, perhaps everyone knows it, even though they don’t know
what to do with it, and don’t care; I alone don’t know it, and I’m wasting
my life because I don’t know; what can it be? So the note stays lost, sought
b)’ the m lmpffduiWithout any Lost and Found Office. Of course no one,
Speakiilg of that equally unsatisfying story, should feel too safe from its are
.
Kafkas surveyor
3 . , ._ _
light, as though exhaled by a death; it is after all hardly agnostic. Of course
K., if hed carried around such a public wanted poster,
would also not have recognized himself in it.
interval. On the way home he gave her a belated letter that he’d written.
\Whei'eupon the girl put her friend aside and read the written words,
which were more important to her than the ones he'd just spoken. Inca-
pable of doing the immediate, she took refuge in love as a letter—fled ex-
perience as such, passed in the middle of experience over into something
external to it, into a memory, or something already set, that replaced din
rect experience. That was easier for her to see than the here and now that
mists over, and that we can never hold on to for long. But when one is
powerfully and personally there, the Now grows empty in a different way.
Why arenit you taller?—we recall the father who said that to his lost
daughter; some of that belongs here too, to the lived moment where one
sees little just when one is directly in it, without any letter. Of course we
know the will to keep returning to the site of some great happiness. Yet
when the beloved who granted this happiness is far away, lost, or dead, a
peculiar scruple, upon noticing it, turns away from her return. One not
only feels that one’s own existence should not be exploited in this way un—
der the light. Rather, the darkness of the moment just lived immediately
again back there cuts across, temptingly or destructively, a long—preserved
memory. It cuts across the letter in memory that can make immediacy
ever brighter, indeed that lets it mature as an image. For to the extent that
one is worth something, one does not just meet life immediately, but also
holds it together in memory, paces off the frontline of the past as a train
of images. But because one did not have the moment back then, not even
in ones greatest fervor, its image will not come right. One turns back, and
nds oneself refreshed in what one lived back then, but often less con-
scious of it, poorer in salvaged substance.
Poternkin’s Signature
Prince Potemkin had hours when he would admit no one. His room
would be deathly quiet then; no one knew what he was up to. Affairs of
state idled, and his councilors had a good time. No report took place; the
peak was clouded. Once, however, as an attack lasted an unusually long
time, the most urgent documents arrived. They could be handled without
the president, but not without his signature. His councilors waited in the
antechambers; no one dared to step before the prince for fear of losing his
Incognito to Oneself 89
130Siti0I1, Or being exiled. Until a young scribe by the name of Petukov saw
the great chance of his career. He fetched the sheaf of documents and went
in to the president with one push, without knocking; Potemkjn sat in a
C(_’1‘11€1-‘A01? ‘$116 dafk room,d hair unkempt, and utterly vacant, chewing
his nails. Petukov set the documents wordlessly before him, handed the
prince a pen, and the prince took his ngersfrom his mouth, undersigned
decree after decree, with his eyes as though asleep, one after the other The
scribe burst from the room: Success! The prince has signed everything1—
and held out the documents. Couriers hastened by to carry the decrees to
MOSCOW: KEV: OCl€SS‘c1, t0 the regional governors. Yet before the envelopes
W611? Seal d, an older of cialtook out one of the documents that had come
from his }l.11‘ISCl1CtiOn. Started, pulled out the remaining papers, showed
them: they had certainly all been signed. At the bottom of every document,
in Poternlnn’s hand, stood: Peruleou Petukov, 1’emfeay_ , . ,
or
Pushkin, who tells more less this stoiy, thereby provides not only the
most uncanny documentation of melancholy, of the relentless brooding
that burrows through the fog, Of the mind lost in a nameless twilight who
takes the name Petukov because there at least something stirs to that 3
mind lost under the false sun that can still make any name gray—Petukov
I
Incognito to Oneself
The
incident
was minor, but has something in it. It was reported only
as a work accident at a circus encamped on the plaza. The clown was just
supposed to lla vacant moment, and therefore climbed over the forestage,
90 Incognito to Oneself
but nothing more came of it. The ringmaster asked him, as usual: What
do
for Mr. Table
you want here? The clown replied that he was looking
d’I-Iote, who, he had heard, was due for dii1i1er at this time. This
answer
had been agreed upon earlier, and likewise the question which the ring-
master then asked: But who are you? What is your
name? Then sometlling
entirely against the script took place; the clown lost not only the thread but
consciousness, at least of himself. He began to sway, Hailed his arms
about,
mumbled the same thing over and over in a strange voice: Don’t know,
doift know, doift know. The ringmaster now also departed from the script,
quite understandably: But you must know your name, who you are!
Asked
several times, to no avail. Yet Nobody was silent; the laughter from the
public, esteemed local gentry, died out. Until the suddenly nameless man
came to, awoke as it were, and back in line, like the public too,
that un-
derstands and wants only amusement. The man who’d lost a grip on him-
self, however, now began to scream, confusingly: No! l’m a clown, and my
name is Chuckles! Tears welled; the everyday, or everynight, had
him again.
In all this, of course, the clown, who the previous and sudden Nobody
remembered himself to be, belonged to no prosaic occupation, :3! la: judge
or sales manager, whereby he might act important, as though
he really
were important. He belonged rather to the itinerants—that is, unsettled
people, seldom respected, who don’t lap much milk and honey. Even so,
they stand, shuflle, leap, tumble, lift weights at the margin of what the
bourgeois calls the performing arts, and avoid any monotony. Yet the tem—
porarily nameless clown made them think, just as if he had come to him-
self as such, and especially as if he had lost himself as someone from this or
that slot. Is the everynight truly his role, into which he’s wrapped accord-
de nition, into
ing to his pass and work permit, and is it ever our true
which a settled occupation baptizes us, even a not—at—a1l—badly—chosen one?
Do not the professionally well—accommodated, the well—named as it
were,
still have something nameless up their sleeves that was never even sung to
them in the cradle, let alone by their future trainers in useful membership?
Once it was believed that robbers carried children off in order to raise
them, train them, for their gang. The case seems less like an old wives’ tale
when we consider what is hidden from us in ourselves. \What has never yet
been accommodated, never had its day in any given name, not in Chuckles
or any other. Don’t know, don’t know: this dimming of the
self, suddenly
of
forgetting one’s “own” identi cation card, this lapse and its onset were
eventual, felicitous Aha! being Chuckles, O1‘
course pathological. Yet the at
M h0fConc'ealmmt 91
' ’
.
spired as well as provoked such an insight in mace, and perhaps some of his
in-
Motifs of Concealment
_ hEspeci
s ow thr a l y h
before others, we can almost always just show. Sometimes
b 011g 5doubtful whether this- halfness, this.
‘
ut it '
remains becom_
ing, right. Not only the Now where we always ndourselves is still dark'
I I
is
- . .
Instead it is' datl above all
. because
we, as the living, ndourselves in, qulte
ploper1y are, this Now. In this and as this dispersed Now lives the still dis-
persed person himself, according to his inner, illtraterriporal movement
_ _
Out of this always only “momentariness”' comes the Manifold then th C -
. particularity that no in.
lvidual
d. I
stranger easily
p '
enters, and oneself only inau_
1“ Part becalls the depths have too few inhabitants to be other than
‘
i liEgldiviidl gual
C
and lonely.
the whole affair turns; not That
is the true, fruitful incognito, around whose
the
false one of boredom, which has
:1:b;(i) tsiety. Wégvant to tell some little stories about the true one, mere,
- Even this- little Chi-.
1: 111:S€=AIIie11Can, Russiari—]ewish.
int : ~' ' 4
blew it far across the eld. Quickly the others threw Li out; in the same
instant lightning struck, for Li was the only just man.
If the good man was concealed in this story, then the bad man [S con-
I
Locked in a barn with bag and baggage, a sentry outside, the spy was to
be hanged at dawn. He was granted a chaplain at his own request, who at
the time was squawking about the camp, grim of countenance; he entered
the barn at nightfall to appeal to the sinner’s fear of God and began to
drone the melody of a psalm. Only occasionally could one hear the ped-
dler crying out, or sighing. Toward morning it was quiet; the man of God
opened the door and asked the watch: Good man, does this camp have
the book The Gad—Fem"z'ng Sinner} Final Hours, or, Consolation n"All Who
Must Die 4 Violent Death? The sentry laughed and shook his head: No,
but that must be a lovely book! The preacher thundered at him: Insolent
sinner! Have you no fear of God? Fetch me my horse; I want to ask the
minister in Yorktown if he has that breviaiy.
Again one heard the pitiful peddler sobbing and whimpering within;
the watch barred the door, and the minister rode off. But as they dragged
the peddler to the gallows at the break of dawn, the preacher was still not
back. The lieutenant wanted to say the prayer himself, but of course as it
got lighter the man of God was punctually on the spot, too much on the
spot, for one recognized him as the peddler, or rather as the minister
beaten and dressed in the peddler’s Clothes, and Harvey Birch had long
since edto safety.
Months passed in the country. The American army’s main body, under
incomparable leadership, advanced and decisively crushed General Clinton
at Yorktown, and in the joyous October of the year 1771 peace negotiations
began. A free America elected its best man to the presidency. Many of the
undecided now cheered the new republic, the formerly proscribed were re-
stored to their civil rights, and only traitors remained excluded from the
new brotherhood. Birch had disappeared. Only occasionally did someone
claim to hear that he had slunk off to some new settlement in the North or
West, under another name.
Then one evening—-since the War of Independence an- entire genera-
tion had passed, and Washington rested in the -grave——-the American Gen-
eral Dunwoodie and his adjutant were riding across the fields near Nia-
gara, where a late skirmish against redcoats from Canada had taken place.
As Dunwoodie turned his horse, he saw to his surprise an injured civilian,
an irregular obviously, or perhaps just a grave robber who’d fallen afoul.
The general disrnounted—and saw the long—proscribecl man, bloody, and
weathered since the time when a Lieutenant Dunwoodie had caught him
94 Matz ‘of Concealment
and locked him in a barn: the spy Harvey Birch. He gave the corpse a
kick, ippingit over into the mud. A necklace fell from the dead man’s
neck, from which hung a little tin box. The adj utant, on his sign, brought
it to him, and Dunwoodie, to his astonishment, found a note inside, on
yellowed paper; he read it, and his lips grew pale. For on the note Was
written, in a familiar hand: “Circumstances on which
tion depended have until now prevented the
the good of the na-
proclamation of what no one
but I knew. Harvey Birch was known as a spy in British employ, and so he
was able to deceive them, and pass on to me the most important news of
their plans. Even after the end of the War I could not reveal the truth, and
restitute a man who refused any reward, to whom his country owes a pro-
found debt, whom I, with great pride, call my friend. No man can repay
what he has done; his reward is with God. George ‘Washington.’’
General Dunwoodie lay his dagger on the dead man’s breast; the
was carried to his camp and wrapped in the Stars and Stripes, and laid to
spy
remembered: Near the town wall lives someone who’s often away on jour-
neys, and never lets himself be seen; we think that’s Yitzhak Leib.
The rabbi had someone point out the way through wooden Lodz,
which at that time was still a village; the first stars appea1'ed as he stood be-
fore the iight door, and he was overjoyed at celebrating the beginning of
the Sabbath with this pious man. But Yitzhak Leib was not at home. He’s
got business, said an old woman in the street, and grinned. Business on a
Friday night?—The rabbi did not know what to think of these words.
Well then, I’ll wait for him in his house.
He sat long by the fire, and thought of his dream, looked at the miserable
gear, and remembered the Words of Rabbi Eliezer: it’s easier to save someone
than to feed him. He thought of the Sabbath of the higher realms, and how
he would celebrate it with the one who had come thence. He thought of
Gideon, who had stopped the sun, and of the widow's pitcher, of David and
]onathan»——as Yitzhak Leib entered, a completely decrepit old man, and,
it seemed, drunk.” No sooner did Leib notice his guest than he asked
doubtfully if he still wanted to do business with him. No, Yitzhak Leib, I
came to you because—-the rabbi got no further, for Leib had already be-
gun eating, without saying the prayer. But Yitzhak Leib, you haven’t even
spoken the blessing yet. The wretched man shook his head, said he’d for-
gotten how to pray, and the rabbi spoke the words for him.
After the end of the meal, and numerous offers from Yitzliak Leib,
HMI4-‘Pill?-V.‘ :—.<‘e* Nil"-i
none of which was an invitation to eat, when the rabbi did not suggest a
counteroffer, the scoundrel grew angry and threw his guest out of the
house with much cursing. The rabbi stood there on the street, on a wasted
Sabbath, and in his own mirror. So I’m to sit next to this great sinner on
the other side? Tiuly, my Lord, I must say, you have some strange ideas—
and zinteddead away.
When a man found him it was already day; he was shown the way to
the inn, and ordered the stable hand to harness the horses at once to go
back to Belz. All his honors he would throw off, and chastise himself, that
God might show him his great Haw, and perhaps forgive him. Listlessly he
sat in the carriage and did not notice as it came to a river that was Hood-
ing and had almost Wrecked the bridge; the wheels only half gripped the
planks. Fortunately they got across; then they heard shouting from the
banks, and he saw Yitzhak Leib, jumping onto the bridge and calling. You
can’t come across, the bridge is cracked, shouted the rabbi. Yitzhals: Leib
threw his caftan onto the water and rode it right over the water, right
96 Mail}? of Concealment
across the river, onto the bank. I liked that prayer, said Yitzhak Leib. I
heard it that way the last time from my father, but you must say it for me
one more time; I have a weak memory and I can’t retain the words.
Yitzhak Leib, said Rabbi Raphael, crying, what could I teach you? Give
me your blessing!
Yitzhak Leib shook hi-s head, laid his hands on the head of the man
bowed down before him, threw his caftan onto the water, and rode it back
across, standing. Rabbi Raphael, however, consoled, rode back to the holy
city of Bela.
If this story is nothing, say storytellers in Africa, it belongs to the one
who told it; if it’s something, it belongs to all of us. But of course no one
has all of it here; the story won’t become clear. It also won’t nishup with
that strange man who expresses himself first wrongly, then only in symp-
toms, and not even in riddles. Neither his features nor
his actions-show
what is great about Yitzhak Leib, not even goodness in its obvious form.
The fruit that he bears lets him at most suspect, but not know; for his
walking on water is likewise just a symptom, one that in the world of the
Kabbala and elsewhere, as we know, has the highest magical tank, but still
reveals no content.
Witli the three hermits ofTolstoy’s folktale, who have something in com—
mon with the Chassidic story, and who likewise walk ac1'oss the sea to a ship
in order to learn the Lord's Prayer, everything is much more blatant, and
much more predictably decided: “They always smile, and shine like the
angels in heaven.“ They appear just as one imagines the pious, and they
already stand with Jesus. But in the incognito of Yitzhak Leib, absolutely
nothing is yet habitable, as it were; there is perhaps a key, and the house is
ready, but the key will not turn, will not open the “angel’s door” in the least,
not even halfway; perhaps just because it really is ready. This
is Chassidic:
that the zaddikim on whom life depends are hidden, perhaps even from
themselves; they may know that they are great, but they do not feel it.
Above all, concerning our nalinitiation into ourselves: in very few sto—
ries is the incognito, even of the consummate person, maintained so dis-
quietingly, so extraordinarily conscientiously, against every prior psycho-
logical, social, religious determination. There are certainly stable characters,
dependable visages and lines of vision; but they too never get completely
out of the ultimate undecidedness (that they may also have
before them-
selves). They are rounded, but not closed; nothing steps forward from this
strict overtness already closing itself; the great sage also saw his own pri—
mordial moment, that is to say ours, still unrevealed, to say nothing of the
The Corner oft/at Blanket 97
rabbi who at first misunderstood and later sensed it but likewise never knew
it. Sooner or later, says Tolstoy, one will experience all of that: one will know
what people, partial or whole, are about; the concealment will lift that is
always ones own concealment. The potential splendor will rise that, when
it exists, is always the human splendor, or part of it. Tolstoy means that
the key to us all is death: that would hardly suffice for the purpose.
Just Knock
If we
halfness
werewhich
not weallare canthen
at yet,
we'd also be there for anyone. But the
not
easily be disturbed from outside. It is lit-
tle to
in but not too little enough, and then again not yet collected
resist,
too
enough: In what disturbed us, however, there is already too much dying,
and it disperses us even more than we already are. The knocking that tears
us from our sleep, even out hard work, not only frightens but stabs and
of
lames us. Something of death is already audible in these disturbances; hard
work hardly
collects
enough—on the contrary, it makes us even more vul—
nerable. And being torn away does not always lead to ourselves, discloses
nothing good. Then something untimely can taste good, even if faintly,
and probably falsely, but it’s still here, and it halts. Friends easily become
strange then» 0f C0Ul‘S€; it’s revealed what we are and what they are to us
when the disturbing little thump ends. One feels then that one isn’t done
yet, just cant really stop. in any case, it is not always the expected that
knocks on the door.
Tl
droyel ehsame thing
even further
im
during solitary
a
experienced by
was someone even more
from himself. He had injured himself somewhat
excursion, while washing
directly, and
trainer was standing above, and tormenting little dogs, Spitzes and fox ter«
riers, who had to jump through hoops or mince into little houses and
then come out again, or put on nightcaps and get into bed, or sit on a toi-
let, and similar tricks.
Here it should be added that a year earlier the traveler, as untalented in
illness as possible, had nonetheless or therefore acquired a slight infection
in his hand, which had just healed. He knew, then, what infection was—
knew at least the signs, with all his disgust for it. Now the dogs were as
sembling for an unspeakably stupid march, each with its forepaws on the
back of the poor dog before it; the music grew lively, and the audience
laughed. Then, in the middle of this adorable scene, he felt a violent pain
in his arm, so that the cup of coffee he was holding rattled on its saucer.
The moment might well remind one of wounds, especially on this
evening, before the disgustingly comical stench of the poor animals
nearby; one could easily expire in a place such as this, if one were unlucky.
This minor peril was furnished in just the right way; it could easily re-
mind one of dying, of what is so to speak Saxon, beddish, about dying.”
The vacuity, plainness, paltriness, pastiness up there waved one corner of
'
--
the banner of death. Of course the visitor stood only at the beginning of
these feelings, and they didnt concern him at all, but he followed them as
they followed him, far back, back into diapers and bedpans and female
caregivers all around. Here was a piece of true strangeness: one had been
carried there, and not on an adventure, but the opposite, far away from
one’s people. Petit bourgeois kitsch generally goes quite well with the
deathly pap that children get.
Short Excursion
Someone falling asleep can also become alone, can of course be like
someone traveling. Awake, we prefer to sit with the wall behind us, our
gaze xedon the locale. But how amazing: when falling asleep, most turn
toward the wall, thereby turning their back to the dark, now unfamiliar
room. its as though the wall suddenly attracted us and the room para-
lyzed us, as though sleep had discovered something about the wall that
usually comes only to the better kind of death. It's as though sleep, like
disturbance and strangeness, also trained us in dying. Then this scene cer-
tainly looks different; it discloses the dialectical appearance of home.
Yérrariand Hope 99
In fact a dying man who was saved at the last moment gave an explana-
tion: I turned toward the wall, and felt: whats out there, whats in the
room, is nothing, no longer concerns me, but in the wall I’ll ndmy cause.
Later it seemed to the man as though in mam moriendi an organ of death
had developed; the wall opened up, the almost dying man thought he was
traveling into the wall, and a new eye looked inside, as though smeared
with the dervish’s salve from the Thousand and One Nights, that lets one
see the inside of cliffs and mountains as something sparkling, if not as one’s
own.” The interior of the wall was small, but his reversed senses saw some-
thing in it that seemed particularly important. Exit, exodusxindeed the
likeness recurs even more strongly outside of bed, or more understandably,
in the outwardly distancing condition of departure. Even everyone’s obvi-
ous inability, even the friendliest and inwardly richest persons, to converse
from the car down to the platform on leaving, or the other way around, is
due to the fact that the one staying back looks like an eg, the one leaving
on the other hand like an arrow; both already inhabit different spaces,
closed off from one another almost hermetically, with different contents,
'
curves, and forms. Moreover, the one leaving is usually proud, the one
staying back, melancholy. On arrival both are in the same position and
mood, though with the variation that the guest is still blinded by the new
day, whereas it seems granted to the host to teach him. If one inclifferently
watches an arrival, say of a great ship where one isn’t expecting anyone, the
potential emptiness of the disappointment combines with a strange phe—
nomenon that concerns us as well. The pride of departure, in which joy
and pride at dying already resonated, is here clearly ful lledby some tri—
umph of arrival. Above all when the ship pulls in with music; then, con-
cealed in that kitsch (which is not petit bourgeois) is something of the joy
of a (potential) resurrection of all the dead.
peared., but survives in the smile over the little trinkets that a poor child
could never have, or only by grace of a fever dream that truly hallucinates
angels and saviors out of such a secret core. The winter of the world has no
more refuted this bright core than some springtime could refute the excess
of nightmares or other terrors that are also in this core.
But even awake, many a joy radiates across, without yet lighting any-
thing. Many remember the happiness they felt as boys when they could
give a handyman his tip. The empty house when a stranger rang the bell
already made them happy; just reaching out the window gave a joy to
which even first love could not compare. It was a grand gaiety in little
things, in a hand gesture with something in it, and it had a certain, pre-
cise mysticism, as though something out of a wish dream, or better, had
appeared here. Kant, in his psychological lectures, speaks of the “moral”
organs, and how remarkable it really is that the impractical ability for
moral action should even appear in an organism. But, Kant goes on, just
as the child in the womb already has lungs and stomach, although these
organs are of no use to him i11 his condition, so does inan—even though
surrounded by the wickedness of this world—nonetheless have an organ
of his higher determination, his other citizenship. In any case it requires
strong anticipation (in Kant’s uncritical likeness itself) to put not only
“disinterested” action into its space, but also the feeling of evidence that
appeared in the tip to the handyman as happiness, as something extend-
ing outside the body, a slight moment of the good death, afterdeath. Here,
too, something grows more tropically than the familiar limits of our sub—
ject (and of the world) would already allow; irnmoderate fright, like “base—
less” joy, has hidden its cause.” It is hidden in people, and is not yet out
in the world; joy is out the least, and yet it would be the main thing.
A lady and gentleman entered. The stairway was white as marble, the
banisters bronzed, red velvet handrails. It was out of some bad dream of a
mansion. A visitor" came down the stairs and looked the couple over, but
he held his leg out in the air, would not set it down. He was made of wax,
and the couple going up, the gentleman coming down, exchanged suspi-
cious glances. Around the last landing, and__ one could look into a great,
brightly lit ballroom. No one, as it were, was in it, but it was lledfrom
top to bottom with princes, crinolines, uniforms, and giants by the en-
trances. The lady went no further, and her companion also halted, feeling
a malicious pleasure.
They sat down on the steps, and he told her of the fright he’d had as a
boy when he would read of infamous castles where no one lived, but on
stormy nights all the windows were lit. What was there, what sat there,
what was that light, what did it fall on: the sight of this gathering is what
he'd dreamed of, his body stretched up to the sill, his face at the window
of this unspeakable ballroom. Or he told of Ali the Cairene from the
Thousand and One Nights—a long time ago; he was the same age as we
are now—and of the haunted house in Cairo he’d entered; for one year
and a day no one had dared to enter, as whoever spent the night there
would vanish by morning.” I11 this house All went to bed, and all was
still. Candles glowed on the fine furniture; there was not a shadow in the
room where something could hide. Then, toward midnight, there was a
call from outside, from the other end of the stairway: Ali, shall we come
down? The voices were like children’s, and Ali did not answer. Then his
bed rose up, the door opened, and Ali and bed flew up the stairs into the
hall whence the voices had come. The childish voices were part of it, said
the man, were cloying as chloroform; for true danger may be inanimate,
but is always invisible. In the meantime they had come to the ballroom,
among the rosy and staring assembly.
Most were completely preoccupied with themselves as puppets. Only
some wax gureswearing gabardine jackets bowed and Watched the oth-
ers. In front of a lieutenant, the visitors themselves fell silent; he was just
like one of the of cers from the old Grzrtenlrzube, at grandmothers by the
stove.“ They walked across the Christmas fair, in spiked helmet, navy blue,
and epaulettes; they sat bivouacked around the camp re at Mars—La~Tour.
Bourbaki stood next to the waxen lieutenant, and indeed there was an
entire diorama full of Germans and French: Napoleon III and Bismarck
before the historic hut, also historic and Romantic scenes of every kind,
Exczmus: Human and Wax Figure 103
the Kaiser, the Czar, and King Humbert, the virgin abducted by a gorilla,
Charlotte Corday stabbing Marat in his bath, those tired of life, with
noose or sea, the beautiful witch tied to the stake——patriotic a11d crimino-
logical exhibits of every kind from the crowds view. _
The displays themselves were a very complex intersection of the porce«
lain in cabinets and the stations of a Calvary, all dead stuff that is human,
and would be just as terrible if it moved as it is mysterious that it does not.
Its clothing hung from prostheses, from the stuffing sticking out from a
burst seam, but the head was oweringundertaker’s wax; the eyes glittered
and the personality stood rmunder the loupe of silence and glass. I11to
such a WaXworks—the gentleman saw this once at the cinemaéa pair of
lovers were locked in overnight; and he told the story now. They sat on a
bench under this dwarf palm. Across from them they had Napoleon’s
coronation in Notre Dame: the Emperor, the Pope, the kneeling marshals.
The lover in the lmwas just kissing his girlfriend on the bench, and one
got a close-up of their eyes—closing, not closing, open as never beforeww
when they screamed. For with eyes agape they saw: the Emperor Napoleon
moved, the Pope set down the crown, and the waxen marshals cheered in
the night. I-Iere love was not stronger than death, or if it was, then not
stronger than undeatl1. As an illusory life that suddenly appears as illusory
death, so the narrator made a joke out of horror, as is only right, and re»
inforced his air of authority. On they walked, past the arti cial corpses
and likenesses; their own bodies became strange to them, the dead in bod-
ily form no less strange.
Then there was a call from below, from the register, tl1E|.C it was closing
time. The heart of such a waxworks is called the Chamber of Horrors; in
here one placed the robber and madman on ones nose as glasses, in order
to see flesh. But it was not the criminals who became visible here, though
they stood in. a circle, pale and soon bloody. Instead only their nearness to
anatomy appeared, the edges of the wound and the delirium of the nal
torment. A severed head with blood dripping into its beard, a hanged man
who’d bitten through his tongue—all in wax, under glass, behind the
criminals who provided this view. A lot of room on our body for pain,
found the man. Torture has been precisely adapted to it, or the body for
torture, so much more abundantly than for pleasure.
If one could turn the iron widow and the woman on her front half as
high as we can extend her downward, into this hull of flesh, then a moun-
tain of happiness would rise, and we would be the gods who live on it.
I04. Excimus: Human and Wax Figure
Like gods? asked the woman; they would have to be of glass, and have no
drop of blood in them, they would have to be made of nothing at all in or—
der to be gods. She said this in the anatomical cabinet, where wax became
entirely material, no longer seemingly alive or seemingly dead. Charlotte
Corday no longer eternally stabbed Marat, nor was she condemned to do so
as a “manifestation” in wax, even if she did move; instead the open
body it-
self was present here as a thing, and just as irrevocably. In a casket like Snow
White’s, Venus lay without expression, with nightshirt and Caesarean sec-
tion. Severed doctors hands still bobbed over her body, with scalpel pointed
downward and blue cuffs; they came out of the air and hovered like butter-
iesover the incision through which one could see the child. But otherwise
Venus became a demonstration, no longer a gure; for the specimens all
around—-the putrefaction and hellish color of diseased skin, a demonic
sculpture underneath the healthy one—were no longer those of the famil-
iar, healthy body. First prize in anatomical modeling, said the diploma over
the door~in fact deserved, for no sculptor has yet carved the intestines be-
neath the skin; a bronze Apollo is all surface; portraiture and art history only
move along the body, never here in its depths.
Over the two observers came a disgust otherwise known only to pubes-
cence, this grim stare into the guts next to love, this X-ray vision of blood
and shit next to springtime. Even afterward, even surgeons, when they have
a body cut open before them, isolated, with the patients “face”
covered, nd
no direct path from the bloody to the human phenomenon. What
a ma»
chinery they saw again here inside our bag of flesh. A snare for Apollo, and
for Christians a Babel, despite the “sacred head now wounded.” What a
good ostrich policy we follow in health, which notices none of this; what
a questionable policy with beauty, that in this clockwork of love
sees only
the dial, and then only one time zone. Wliat aprqfbuna,’ ostrich policy, but
this, always and truly, is the orgasm that blinds our eyes with desire. Does
blood have any other outlet than into the living, speaking, social human
being (which it does not in fact have), a truly precise one, Dionysiacally
opening, turning? Does the ostrich policy of orgasm, let alone the thrill of
the serial killer, see the body of blood more truly or more futurally than
our gentle, super cialeyes that sail only around the coast of the skin
and
shudder when they come into the interior? I-Iere, before this severed heart
with aorta, the aura of a squid, this pumping station of such mysterious
and perishable material, there was in any case only the terror of not seeing
oneself to the extent that one sees the body from the inside. First prize in
Nenrby.' Inn aft/as Insane 105
‘mat°mi‘331 modeling 1161? I300. so much organic reason but no one knows
what’s inside the body of blood, other than the already visible external
person, who of course is only halfway in it, and not even halfway.
eaiHell:dreight
was no longer Ali’s story, but the haunted house itself, set in the
c1 of clay. Their mood was not Greek; the light of the humanistic
wot grew faint. The puppets and dioramas along the way back had
transmitted their stare to the world of the living. The gallery closed‘ the
ornamentals at the got fresh water, and the eternally descending
entrance
gentleman on the stairs was dusted off by the attendant.
bSomeori
Out it e
(Hf:
who
often
spoke
went off the
in
beaten path had
though
images,
this to say when asked
oridly enthusiastically,
not or as
‘=1
ltoosen
loughthings
trying prophesy, but rather
to slightly frivolously,
if wanting as to
up with
modest Far from the usual solemnity with
tropes.
which fool s capers are transcribed and the insane scienti callyclassi ed, as
thoughlthey were monkeys, and the psychiatrist himself, nothing.)
The insane, he said, only want to see a bit of the country. They would
like take a little
to stroll
outside our village. To the nearest inn, which
theyve heard good things about. But between the village and the inn
theres a forest; through this forest go the lunatics. In the forest theres no
Path, 01117 i1l1Cl6I‘l31'1lSh. fallen trees and such, so that it's easy to lose the
way. There are cockatoos, parrots, even monkeys, screeching loudly. The
wanderers
become dazed? rapt in murmurings and natural spirit voices,
nallyshriek along 1I1'l:l_lI1,'iI1 fear, in anger, so that they no longer
{hey
{now how they ended up in this forest. Indeed, they even forget what
they actually wanted from this stroll. The doctors stand back at the edge
Of th Vl ag vfacing th forest, shouting into it; they call to the lunatics,
they should really come back. The lunatics hear none of this for all the din
:1
the forest, dont
want to ‘go back, only to the inn. To the Sign of the
but
ed Ox or the Merry Silesian or the Trinity, of which only the signs hang
among us, but nothing is ful lled.
I myself (said the storyteller) have also heard of the inn, and you (mm.
‘Hg 130 1113 '1€I1Cl), it seems, no less than I. I don’t go through the woods
'
IT1YS€lf, but take a little detour around it. Maybe, quite possibly, I set one
106 Thbleau with Curve
foot in the forest for a short while, or even both when the path is too
rough. You too, in any case (he addressed his listener again, although the
latter didn’t want to know), you’re there more often than I; perhaps you
don’t screech along with the jungle animals in the branches, but you
throw coconuts along with them; at least it looks that way sometimes, or
sounds that way. Yet if we keep to the outside path, we can very well find
the inn beyond the forest. Between apples and oranges, there’s the nub of
the matter. Cooked in fervent love, with the seasoning from out better
dreams. Who the innkeeper is I dont know, naturally; be probably only
took shape gradually, and is not yet there himself. From there l’ll call to
the lunatics—in short, to the. lost souls who race about objectlessly, these
decent and basically very sensible tourists. They’ll hear me, of course,
quite unlike the doctors at their back, whose village no longer interests
them at all. The parrots too will then have nothing more to say, for the
object under their noses, which calls to them, will have a better sound.
What was alive in their capers and their chatter, of course, was not these
themselves, but only the missed goal. So I will drive out the woods by
means of the goal, and “benightedness” by the lights of the inn (its mul-
lions and transoms). Then insanity will be eradicated—a few stragglers
from the rstgeneration excepted, who remain in the forest. The people
of the village will follow too, at least occasionally, as they prefer. To me,
probably, they’ll raise a monument-—next to the new highway, in the mid—
die of the forest, where there are sharp bends. A monument in the shape
of the letter S, or perhaps just a signpost with one arm. Of course without
my head; that, no one will need anymore.
Familiar postscript: the consummate psychologist (or Indologist, phi-
losopher, etc.) will cease to be one in that moment when he is one. He be—
comes an object of psychology (or Indology, philosophy, etc.).
that question and answer sometimes don’t grow on the same stalk. This
story, insofar as it has a “Mark!” doesn’t just make one want to travel to
Prague, of course. It also lifts the oorboardsin the miserable hovel of its
protagonist, lifts them and raises them up—detour here too, not loyalty
to tradition.
to arrive, or when it does land it is then often quite near us. You speeu—
lated that animals stay current with such things, and that's quite remark—
able; if I understand you 1'ightly, you consider that weird ameas a kind
of instinctual language, almost a kind of transmission within an animal
nervous system. But if one gets into its circuit, one can be strangely fright-
ened by the demonic sounds and images, as by our door. And I know
cases where people, uneasy about a warning, actually arrived at their own
house, mostly at just the wrong moment. I heard a similar story to the one
about the attorney from a Pole, who told me the story about himself; per-
haps he was also lying and had only read it; at any rate, he screamed too,
and the agent afterward was not very comical. Recently, the Pole told me,
he had been at the seaside, where, though he felt better than ever, he had
a very peculiar vision. He stepped from his hotel onto a completely empty
street and was surprised at the great noontime silence, when around the
corner came an automobile of glass, and on it an open casket, likewise of
glass; next to it walked a boy clothed in a sort of starry sky, with many
buttons and polka dots, who asked him, as the wagon halted before the
entrance, if l1e would please step into the casket. At that moment he heard
his name called behind him, and the apparition disappeared; a young Eng-
lishwoman stood behind him, the same one with whom he’d enjoyed him-
self all these days, and she was now his wife. The first stop on their honey-
moon was Paris, where they arrived toward nightfall, and they were just
about to step into the lift to the dining room when the man pulled his wife
back from the door. He’d seen exactly this con guration in his hallucina-
tion: this face on the bellhop, this uniform. As they went up the stairs they
heard screaming; the elevator cable snapped, and the bodies of the passen-
gers were carried out into the lobby. So the Pole told me, more or less,”
concluded Mr. B., “his fortune in misfortune—I think the hallucination
brought him something quite useful, more than just herrings. It seems to
lie not only in the animal sphere, its not just for animals; life and death
are in it too. We have that in common with all living things. Through this
second sight something was detected, and avoided, just as surely as by
means of the redepartment; the foresight is of course different.”
“You’ve ignored the dead for too long,” re ecteda Mr. C., “that pallor
that wanders in the moonlight. After all, we have premonitions about not
just ourselves but the afterward, or the beyond, or whatever its called.
Out of an unfamiliar state where neither humans nor animals live. I ad-
mit that our age doesn’t have it, nor did any prehistory, but its precisely a
110 Some Patrerm omthe Le Side
tanker; warlaé prehistory just noticed it better. In this world grew night
terrors, and even today the enjoyment of terror grows, which has no friv-
olity about it, even when it tries to. Instead just this, I think: the human,
the almost warm embrace of a world that will surely be our world sooner
or later. This world, it seems to me, is always around us, even when we
just lap at its edges and no longer know hpw dark the night really is. The
young still see it sometimes. I’d like to tell one of the strangest recollec-
tions from my life.
“There was once a young man among us, rather fat and wan, whom
none of us thought much of. We were nearly disgusted by him, and he
even called himself syphilitic, but of course one could discuss the strangest
things with him. He spoke as readily of the grave as of the bed, and of the
worms that lift one’s chest as though one were breathing, of the horror that
we will all become. Sixteen years old, we made a jaunt once to a neighbor-
ing town, and a quick death-and-afterlife return. Bourrierathat was the
boys name——pulled out a photograph that was supposed to have been
taken of a ghost, and I stayed somewhat back with him. We promised each
other that whoever died first would appear to the other.
“Just a year later my relation with Bourrier cooled considerably; he was
absent ever more often from our class, and fell out of our circle. Then the
teacher told us one morning, very unexpectedly, that one of our class-
mates had died after a long illness, and we were to keep the next day open
to attend his burial. The Valedictorian gave a eulogy at the edge of the
grave, about caterpillar and butter y,which he himself didn’t believe, with
our weak memory; and we shoveled clods over the school friend who had
so often slept with barmaids on the billiard table until Monday morning.
“An unlicensed pub on the way home helped us all forget the burial,
and on the evening of that day (my parents had gone to a ball) I could
stay up as late as I wanted, had the book collection to myself, forbidden
memoirs, Zarathustra and other gods, for which I’d come of age. As al-
ways on such evenings, I sounded out my student years, only I was sur-
prised to find myself glancing from time to time into the darkness of the
next room, distracted and nallystrangely sad; listened to the rain that
beat on the panes, to the steps on the street outside, which became ever
quieter, nallydying out in the night. My reverie became ever more soli-
tary, and now a distant memory, an image, shot out of the void: I saw that
spring day again, on the country road to the next town with the late Bour-
rier at my side, and the pledge we’d sworn.
Some Partterm om the Left Side III
“Now I felt myself trembling from head to toe; I was already su1'—
rounded, and the time had come, terrifyingly placed into the empty apart-
ment. Behind me was a door i11to the corridor, through which I would
have to go to my bedroom; next to me was an open door into the dark sa-
lon, where the furniture stood dimly, and only some gaslight from the
street fell on the ceiling. How I got to bed, I’ve forgotten, yet I walked a
different path just afterward in nightmares, the dream path of our rapport
from the shoddy pub back home; it was also an imprisonment on that
path, just as in the room, only the reverse: behind me the street ended at
my heels, and before me it edin a wide angle to the side, up to my par-
ent’s home. The front door was open too, despite the night-the window
by the stairs, even the doors to the apartments on the first and second
Hoots, everything wide open in the darkness. I went up to the third floor,
where I should finally be home, yet another stairway led up again. I must
have counted wrong. This door also gaped Wide open, thick darkness be-
hind it, and completely strange. Suddenly light fell on the brass name-
plate, but it was not the usual one, but enameled metal as outside a wait-
ing room, and on it stood a name: Baurrier, with a cruci xbehind it.
"At the moment I sensed I was being watched from above, and above
mcI saw about ten steps going even higher, and at the top stood Bourrier
in a nightshirt, leaning over the railing with a candle, grinning at me. Be-
fore this smile I fell asleep, into the morning hours, and heard a scream
only at the very end—I heard my mother screaming from the stairs, and
as I stumbled out of bed to my parents, we thought we saw a great black
ball fall from the upper story down the stairway, almost hesitantly, but
right down the middle. The doors slammed shut, and We stayed awake till
daylight. I told my dream-it was still more human than that great cru-
dity out there, coming down the real stairway. Only a symbol, as you can
see, yet probably from the grand army; it rides a corpse into our dreams,
and rolls a ball before our feet like the sea a breal<er—-no more, no less.”
The friends were silent, it was already late, the ball had hit home. Hal-
lucination and mythology seemed to go through each other inextricably
in this man; he might have lived through all that, but the grand army,
and believing all that hellish stuff? Mr. D., who had as yet said nothing,
started up briskly and made a hand gesture as though he wanted to set the
whole beyond on its feet.
“I don’t know,” he said, “but we can be frightened by much less already,
even though it’s from this side. We might not need to go so far across, and
112. Some Pemrm wm the Le Side
the fear is still the same. Just one little incident occurs to me here, but it
shows what living people can do. I too went up my stairs late at night,
not at all sleepy, but a healthy student—even sang something to myself.
There, at the rstbend, I felt fabric brush against me, something creased,
now behind me, now before me, now dipping, now fluttering. I hurried
down the steps; the shadow ran and jumpedmvith me, even swaying noisea
lessly before the front door. Finally, I turned the key and threw open the
door; the dancing specter shot up in front of me, and in the torchlightl
saw an old woman’s face, white, and unspeakably distorted, which
screamed like I had never heard before, not dreamed—piercingly high,
mouth, eyes, body, all gaping.
“Two men came by, and the pub next door still had its lights on. When
we grabbed this being, it still danced in our grasp, and cackled—a mad-
woman, as it later turned out, who had escaped and hidden right in my
hallway. Here she’d gotten locked in, and likely danced about all night,
searching through the darkened house where everyone was sleeping but
she and the student on the stairway. I felt no better, though, even after this
explanation; felt myself, even a day later, seized by an apparition——in fact
I still have every ghost that I dream, hear, and cannot believe, present in
that woman back there. The madwoman was, after all, a greeting out of
the caverns of life, where somethings not right, not out of our dreams, or
some problematic graveyard miasma. Rather, just as I said: it was a local
dream, which nonetheless contained almost everything when it came into
my hallway.
“I learned from it that all the errant stuff in our souls is related; insofar
as it must be the raw fears themselves that are still possible in us and else-
where, and sometimes come out. Merely negative enlightenment won’t
dispel them, as my gureshows; but perhaps light will dissolve them per-
sonally in the half-being that haunts stairways and is usually nocturnal,
terrifying. Things on the stairs too, even in my room, are uncanny when
they shift in the night and show another side, beneath the space of day;
they then become at least a good stage for the ‘parapsychological,’ pre—
cisely for what is unformed, larval, from the left side.
“All of that comes from the human core, and yet concerns it far more
than the skeptic would like or the seer guess. The drifting, gloomy, fright-
ening element concerns it that still lurks there, and is still possible, be-
cause real humanity is not yet in the house. It arises from spasms; medial
forces form crude grirnaces, and my madwoman revealed the life and ac—
T/Je Twice—Dimppmring Frame 113
The motif is old, involves a dream come true, and an awakening. Paul
Ernst also knew the story, without a real sense for what it meant.” It has
absolutely no Chinese tank, but instead restores the ‘normal, as it were.
A young man, it is told, came home from university to speak with his
fiancee, whom he no longer especially loved. After the meal Rudolf sat
alone in his parents’ parlor, staring into space. Outside his fiancee was call-
ing to him; everyone was already set to leave, what was keeping him? But
he had absolutely no desire for an outing, least of all today; the girl, greatly
annoyed, slammed the doors shut. Rudolf no longer heard any of this, be-
cause for the first time in a long while, since his boyhood, he was intently
considering the old painting over the breadboard. Tl1ere was a rococo gar-
den, with ladies and gallants on the promenade, and in the background,
half hidden by trees, a summer palace with high windows all the way
down to the ground, and gilded grills. At a crossing in the garden stood a
lady all alone; in her hand she held a white sheet, or a white cloth. That
was something Rudolf had never understood, even as a boy: was she read-
ing a letter, or was she holding a handkerchief? Was she crying?
He now stepped right up to the painting, and as he immersed himself
in the colors and shapes, the ladies and gentlemen suddenly walked softly
by him. He himself was walking, sensed the fine gravel on the path, a11d
walked toward the woman, who stood motionless and watched him. Then
at one stroke he knew, she was reading a letter—his letter; he’d written
it
long ago, to her. Have you really come, my darling? she cried, and her
hand fell to her side. I’ve never stopped waiting for you; you wrote me
that you would come, but now everything is good; you are with me. They
kissed and wandered further into the woods.
Evening came, and they returned to the castle, where a joyous feast had
been prepared. The cavaliers and their ladies greeted the returning lord of
the manor,_ and soon the lovers rested in their opulent bedchamber. Bird—
song roused them from their dreams; many days passed in this way, many
nights beneath the changing moon. Games, feasts, hunts, meaningful talk
hastened the time; youthful joy had nallyreturned to the long deserted
rooms. Everything is yours, the beautiful lady said, but one door you may
not open, if you, if we, are not to lose everything.
One quiet afternoon the lord stood in a passage, by a window, and
gazed into the garden, where the leaves had begun to change color; it sud-
denly seemed that someone was calling, calling him by a name that he
dimly remembered but that could not be his name. The voice seemed to
The Twice-Disappearing Frame 115
come from a room he had never entered; he opened the door. The apart-
ment was completely empty; out of the wall a voice seemed to issue, out of
a painting that hung on the Wall. The lord of the manor Went nearer and
saw a room in the painting that, like the voice, seemed dirnlyfamiliar; the
furniture observed him as though out of another time. The painting de-
picted another painting on a wall in the background, yet the voice came
from the painted door. He listened to it, ever more astonished: Rudolf
S'C00Cl OIICC I110r€= in his parents’ parlor. The door, no longer painted, flew
open, and his anceeshouted, Are you coming, Rudolf? How long arm I
supposed to wait for you? The coach has already left; should I waste my
whole day because of your moods?
The young man jumped slightly; then he took the hand of his fiancee,
and led her before the old painting. Quiet! Don’t you see that she’s crying?
Thats a handkerchief, not a letter. The girl, predictably, didn’t understand
this exclamation. The subsequent carriage party with the dreamer must
have been curious.
So much for the tale, certainly nothing special, but double—doored.
Rudolf ‘s last utterance is sentimental, yet the guidpro gu0—handke1-chief
for letter—belongs to an already artificial structure. But something more
Slgnlflcant belongs to 1t——namely, a doubly disappearing frame. First the
one on the painting of the castle in his parents’ home, then the one on the
painting of the parents’ parlor, in the forbidden room. Moreover, this cas-
tle, in miniature, is available within itself again, on the painted wall of the
forbidden room.
Apart from the Chinese motif (entering the painting) Japanese nesting
is evident in the reflections of reflections. (Unless one thinks of the "Re-
markable Ghost Story” in Hebel’s almanac, where the same almanac is
hanging from cord on the chimney, and the gentleman can almost read
the story hes in the middle of—again with a chimney in it, and the al-
manac, reflected ad z'n m'mm.25) Nonetheless “Rudolf’s Engagement
Party”'lets the Chinese motif of entry predominate, at least at the begin-
ning, in order of course to forsake it more awake than before. Precisely
such that the entry is rstcarried out and then retracted, in that the frame
pushing forward both Ways turns into a sort of revolving door.
Where does it lead? Certainly into a domain of poetic meaning, even if
it still hasn’t been discerned where this domain lies. Here, at least, in the
twisting story the painting, it throws the visitor back, the only dream-
of
ingly stirred visitor; the everyday has him again—and that, regrettably, is
116 The Matifoftbe Door
whatis most apt in Rudolfis story. Unless one takes the Wink he" got from
the lady, the waiting painting, at a face value that doesn’t yet exist as such,
tl1at doesn’t yet pay.
audience into a congregation (tut: res agimr); over the trivial special effects
operated a deep er stage management that, with its simultaneity of exit and
entry, brought the lethal archetype of the portal to awareness.”
Yet just what lies beyond it could hardly have been shown in images,
nor even superior means. The world is full of suffering, and the scantyjoy
in it mute; hardly extensible outward, let alone upward. So that place to
where we disappear can also more easily be lledwith visions of horror
than with gods of happiness. If the unfamiliar can be envisioned only
“presentiently” (that is, in terms of some fear or joy here that affected us
immoderately, transcendently): then “hell” usually succeeds very abun—
dantly, excitingly and full of variety, while “heaven” remains faint in im-
age and word, quite literally tiresome, indeed dangerously near to the hor-
ror of a bourgeois Sunday. Only to the side does one still sometimes nd
other traits, colorful yet modest re ections that extend this motzfoftlye
door slightly, but by those who enter, not by strange, grand, elaborate spec-
tacle. instructive in this way are Chinese legends, which perhaps deal only
with artists and their tran-sition into a work, yet thereby leave out as much
as put in their very own Orplid of sound and smell.“ Living a philosophy
means learning from it how to die, says Montaigne in a Senecan moment,
almost still magically wise; several Chinese motifs of the end also entwine
the door into the work with the door into death, remarkably, and hardly
by accident, with the greatest didactic seriousness, and hardly artistic there
and then. It suf ces to outline them as a game that cannot be intensi ed
and nallysigni es pure desire, but that is nonetheless remarkable as the
possibility of a new flag in the work, not as a desertion from the flag of
this world.
The story of the old painter belongs here, who showed his friends his
nalpainting: in it was a park, a narrow path winding gently past trees
and ponds up to the little red door of a palace. But as the friends turned
back toward the artist—~tha.t strange red—~he was no longer next to them,
but within the painting, strolling down the little path toward the fabulous
door, standing quietly before it; turned, smiled, opened it, and vanished.
Or the other story, an adaptation of the same myth that Balasz retold in
Seven Legends, the story of the dreamer Han—tse belongs here: the poet who
wrote the book of this beloved, the beautiful Li—fan, who had spurned
him.” Into The Valley of the Silver Apple Blossom he wrote the girl, wrote
her a lovely lake and a palace of jade, the most exquisite gowns, celebrations,
and playmates, and the moon never set in the valley of the silver apple
T/ae Mrotifoft/ye Door 119
blossom. All this his magical verses dreamed; indeed, he could even sum-
mon Li—fan herself from the book until daylight again drove her away. So
his life was powerfully divid.ed between the sad, aging day and the myste-
rious creature that came to him and always left him. Until that nal
morning: his relatives came looking for Han—tse in his hut, for a long time
in vain. They did not ndhim. Yet on the desk lay his book, opened to a
new, nal chapter: “Han-tse’s Arrival in the Valley of the Silver Apple
Blossom.” Thus a poet Wrote himself into his own work, “past the wall of
eternal ideograms,” aesthetically truly “productive,” in other words past
even the door of the work (Mahler’s late music sometimes has that effect
in reality).
But if the darkness that awaits us is colored somewhat by such leg—
endseat least‘ by our dreams, and their hardly obvious or regular adapt-
ability, indeed habitabilitym and if precisely the most colorful Chinese
owersgrow by the darkness of the naldoor, as though it were truly our
realest door, these are all only profound legends of a “coming to light"
(l/first/vein) from which a sickener hurls us back, even in religious ages,.
even from deeper and solider ecstasies than those of artists and poets.33
The homelessness of people on this earth goes on with a few symbols of ar-
rival, without their ever being able to illuminate the door of partial exis-
tence, let alone the fatal door of potential nonexistence, with anything but
dreams. They have not yet drunk blood, certainly never had any worldly-
othervvorldly praxis. Still, worldly homelessness with a few symbols of hap-
piness is a good teacher’s college for the real dreams behind the door.“
Things
Half Good
So we hardly have ourselves. But first ourselves, and then things: Who
can ndhis Way through? The cloth around us may still always protect us;
that still goes on. But we warm ourselves pleasantly by the stove—just a1it—
tle closer and were singed. Our hands themselves, we have to keep away.
I2 3
:24 Flower and Un ower
inventor followed his creation down the evening street. But after just a
few strokes the locomotive sprang forward, ever faster, Stephenson help—
lessly behind. From the other end of the street there now came a troop of
revelers who had been detained by beer; young men and women, the vil-
lage preacher among them. Toward them the monster now tan, hissing
past in a shape that no one on earth had ever seen, coal—black, throwing
sparks, with supernatural velocity. Even worse than the way the old books
portrayed the devil; nothing was missing, but there was something new.
A half mile further the street made a bend right along a wall; into this the
locomotive now rammed and exploded with great violence.
The next day, it is said, three of the pedestrians fell into a high fever,
and the preacher went mad. Only Stephenson understood it all and built
a new machine on rails, and with a driver’s seat, so its demonic power was
put on the right track, indeed almost organically. Now the locomotive
boils as though hot—blooded, pants as though out of breath, a tamed land
animal on a grand scale, who can make us forget the golem.
The Indians saw horses for the rsttime with the white man, about
which Johannes V Jensen has remarked, If we knew how they had seen it,
we would know how a horse looks.” In the preacher’s madness we see how
one of the greatest revolutions in technology looked before one got used
to it and lost the demonism behind it. Only an accident occasionally
brings it to mind again: the crash of the collision, the hang of explosions,
the screams of shattered people—in short, an ensemble that has no civi~
lized timetable. Modern warfare especially did its part; here iron became
even thicker than blood, and technology quite ready to recall the hellish
aspect of the rstlocomotive. There is no way back, but the crises of acci-
dents (of uncontrolled things) will persist all the longer as they lie deeper
than crises of the economy (of uncontrolled commodities).
Berlin is great, and I’m its victim, am still not equal to the consequences.
This man doesnt even like riding the elevator, and points to the thin ca-
ble from which the car hangs: When you see something like that, my aver-
sion doesn’t need to be psychoanalyzed. Or two ships collided on the
Wannsee one night. The newspapers quickly understood, for both cap—
rains were drunk. But the doubtful man only shook his head, and Said:
This only makes the incident especially mystifying. By day, and sober, it’s
no mean feat to crash on the Wannsee. But at night, when you cant see,
and drunk! So the accident was for him the successful marksmanship of
two ships against each other, or rather the longing to destroy themselves
as ships 3 to them it was no accident—quite the contrary. Only thus would
this man conceive the problem: things want to go back to their own lives;
when they succeed, its all right for them, catastrophic for us. When the
cats away, the mice will play; when the master is out, the servants re-
member that they aren’t servants.
operation. And we heard the silence, the proper installation, the familiar
comradeship with things that every healthy person senses, the aura around
them, the world of the Tao. So immediately, and nearly outside the lived
moment, so personally at home in it did we enjoy the “land,” and didn’t
even need to move away a stretch to see the full measure of it.
We were of course under a spell, but it seemed a good one—~natul‘ally
the human house was part of it, and the day was in the house, ltered,not
the house in the day. Yet as we said, the day as morning has no house, or
when it does, then the inhuman house that a second recollection might
describe, and that was hardly so “well” in operation. The morning has no
house if one just walks through it, but of course it can become a terrible
house iffone stumbles rczdicnlijr into its beginning: into the very break of
dawn that still has something about it, not just a blank surface, least of all
the macrocosrnic breathing room for which Faust at his desk longs. Life
then hardly circulates in a healthy cosmic rhythm as it did for Goethe; the
Tao of happiness sinks, and nature is no longer a living book, unexplained
yet not inexplicable. In this cosmic house, one could not bathe oneself
back to health. It did not teach us to know our fellows; nor was it an
evening house, with everything meaningfully near. Instead the reverse twi—
light began that was so uncanny in earlier times, the embryonic con ne—
ment of the day just before cock’s crow. This was a decisively inhuman en-
circlement, and it happened around four in the morning in June on the
South Italian coast.
Awakened by the early sunrise, I walked out into the open. Not in the
air, but in the. landscape, was a torpid heat. The sea seemed stifled, almost
like gruel, didn’t break; the cliffs, usually so forbidding, seemed soft, like
furniture, quite useful. In this space was the mood of a room where some-
one is hiding, or better (since there was certainly nothing frightening here),
where a guest must have moved i-n without one’s knowing it. A long cloud-
bank hung over the sea on the Southern horizon, very at;made the space
even lower and almost upholstered. But to the left stood Jupiter, the only
star on this milky skin. Jupiter ascending; a powerful eye that through its
power seemed especially near. Immediately one felt: with 5/92": gaze the land-
scape stands in agreement; yes, Jupiter himself had provoked this incon-
ceivable meeting as the guest in this space, or as a controlling god among
his creatures. The star ruled so powerfully that it even dragged the ob-
server down from his contemplative terrace right into the crowded scene,
where there were no more eyes or distances for a standing outside of, let
alone a standing before. Numb and frantic, one could merely take in a kind
mg Montages afcz Febmmfy Evening
self and its inferior stellar eye. One felt sustained, infused, captivated by the
fluids of a totem that had hardly been made in our likeness. Only gradually
did this mythical state disperse, the day grow brighter, no longer encircling;
or, with the sun rising, one could no longer enter its higher-«vaulted house
over the raised steps of days door. The single room, indeed single body, had
become floors, finally the shining palace where one could again lose oneself,
with ground floor, mountains, and the vaulted sky, and nallythe Old,
cheerful morning itself that lives and radiates into the day. .
Yet the image persisted of a morning that simply obliterates us and 13 no
friend to us. What attracts us later in the young day, or is external,or beau-
tiful surface, or even splendid expanse, looked absolutely inhuman in its lair.
The experience was too unique, too much of an “experience” to say much;
since no eye had a place here, there might not even be a proper recollection,
and certainly no concept there and then. It was a very dismal, almost head-
only by the
less consciousness, although entirely normal and determined the most
object of perception. In its breathlessness perhaps
it sustained
extreme exclusion of reason, was determined purely atavistically,
places in the world not even colored by any known mythology, let alone zl-
from
luminated by reason. If we may use categories out of Bachofen, then we
must reverse them: here something expansive seemed to have become cav-
ernous, something heavenly become chthonic, full of nearness and embry—
onic warmth, but without bringing, as the chthonic otherwise often does,
anything familiar with it, let alone anything human. The memory of
mixed emotions of disgust and awe remained: disgust for a Moloch with
the
stomach acids instead of fire; fear and awe as before the old animal gods.
to disappear. The newer the streets, the better they know how to seem
twice as cold.
One’s breath fogs out here like a completely foreign flag. Overnight the
North wind has moved the city there, whence the wind came. Removed it
like Aladdin’s palace, but the front door suddenly opens onto Greenland.
No more transition, no fog, no overcast sky, no merely passing North, or
the average to which heat usually raises it, but hard, and at home, its very
self. Insistently something is advancing that needs no breath, and would
remain after the last breath went out.
Yet the light doesn’t seem to t at all. A few weeks before March, and it
hasnt gone along back to the North. Therefore only stranger, for the sun
shines coldly. The desolate streets channel the icy wind, and it tsthem.
Only into the mountains, the high, utterly unfabricated mountains, does
the sun send warmth, bring images of the South into the pure air. Here in
the city, however, these images are estranged; they reveal their South as
merely an association, which is dispensable.
Italian nonetheless the sun, the clouds in the spring night, their pale
pink with gold, floating extraordinarily, and free without struggle: in a
landscape beyond any springtime, in the high—pressure zone over the city’s
Greenland. A little later, a Hesperidean moon, even; with the evening star
very near, it moves into a sky that knows something of the most Southern
turquoise. Delicately the woman in the moon begins to emerge, the girl
in the moon; over a rococo garden, by gentle evening breezes, this sickle
could shine on the song of Susanna. Or she was above the old gardens of
Baghdad, the dancing girl who governed love, palms, fountains, poetry
with her silvery torch (notrumnfizce for Mozart’s Susanna), who indeed
rose from the poetry itself into the sky. Here, however, the Orient rhymes
precisely with the jingling North, and then with the stars that belong
completely to the North. Ice cold remains the polar night, in the old way;
its marvelous jaws eat up the clouds and the woman in the moon.
Does the moon even rhyme? it rhymes with a situation to which nothing
is still accustomed, that shifts its objects. ‘What was familiar, separates; a pro-
claimed landscape‘ appears, the habitual juxtaposition drops out in the
aforementioned night in Berlin 1932. Conversely, very distant elements re-
veal themselves in this stark outlook as assembled, as by the exquisitely
strange syzygies of a poem by Rimbaud. The spring clouds are none at all,
the girl in the moon, who once was the horned Astarte, abandons the spring
night, zephyr, love, and how much more the rural family of the nineteenth
130 An Odd Ffa neur
century, where she lived with stable connotations; the moon of Baghdad
stands as such, with an unknown goal, over a city endured like the Arctic.
The light above is no longer a comfort, not even a thrilling or melan—
choly contrast drifting along the heavenly paths; this kind of attribution
too has disappeared. A transformed vision notices new ensembles in na-
ture, and not only for vision is the city transported on such nights: Nature
in person wanders out of the appointments of the Romantic century, even
the mythological centuries. There remains beauty, but it upsets us; if it has
nothing clearly before it, then the collapse of the old spheres, the montage
of once impenetrable zones behind it. Ice violins on high evoke a new
sound; the clouds are corals from the ocean floor; death has the brightness
of green turquoise; the girl in the moon, who allies herself with the frost,
shows the ambiguity that, personified as Zephyr, she had only with Su—
sanna. Nights like this tear us out of the habit of giving every element of
nature its ready place instead of its carriage. The dislocation of such an
evening is montage, separating what is near, bringing together what is for-
thest, as intensi edin paintings like Max Ernst’s or de Chirico’s.
This shattering in things is certainly objectively there, even if the more
or less accurate sense for it has only awakened now, brought about by the
social earthquake. As we said, artists and poets were the first to register di-
rect connections between things so distant. The gentle cloud of this Feb-
ruary night rernains quite objectively in the harsh cirrus ice, and the girl
in the moon, complete with affectionately gazing evening star, not. only
belongs to the warm love song of Susanna in the Arabian garden, but at
the same time understands how to put on Old Death as coolly, cheerfully,
and deftly as a new dress. Existence is full of gures, but not organized g-
ures, with each and every one in its xedplace. Instead an echo ofzz11egor—
ital mean-ing will still resound everywhere, instructively relaying back and
forth, ambiguously reflective, before a form will -stand there: as good
woman who is a good woman; as our day, when (in both senses, a past as
well as an entourage) it has the ambiguous, meaningful twilight behind it.
An Odd Flaneur
I knew someone who knew how to get along without himself. Not that
he had no noticeable self, even, preferably, a rather ghostly seeming self. A
An Odd Fldneur 131
streak of vanity too was not lacking, but even that came to life only outside
of him, so to speak. As in the pleasure that came to this Mr. Kahler when-
ever he was suitably dressed, proper to the situation where he presently
found himself among people and things. The I—Tl1ou relationship entered
all his I—It relationships too, full of questions about a persorfs proper be-
havior with respect to every kind of externality. In an again completely self»
oblivious effort, intended precisely with the utmost objectivity, adequately
to encounter the respective Not—I. Already beginning in the question, May
I sit as casually across from my wine glass as I doubtlessly may from my
beer mug? Or by the bedside of a sick woman, very restless, almost des-
perately laying the proffered cigarette aside, and later, on his departure,
outside, Please ask your Wife. to excuse me, but I really don’t know how
one should smoke a cigarette in a sickroom. Or: Would you rather yield
to a car, even with its top down, when it’s empty or when it’s full? Or,
in K'2ihler’s style: Two officers meet in public, both decorated with high
honors, one’s barely perceptibly higher than the other’s. Question: which
of them may bring up the subject of decorations?
In this way every relationship to other people was like that to things—
and that, precisely, with both on the same level—embroidered with good
manners, correct manners, indeed manners nallymade true, proper. Thus
initiating an interaction, friendly while at the same time, in spite of its out»
moded form, thoroughly democratic, without any below—a_ncl-above,
above—and-below in this direct visual encounter, one on a fraternal level
with everything.
Eccentric, absolutely; the also comical oddity of daily practicing this as-
sociation of a new courtesy and a proper understanding for his counter-
part isobvious; ultimately Kiihler himself even outdid it. When I ran into
him again in the first months of the War in 1914, and saw this otherwise
so tolerant, not exactly patriotic man nearly decorated with the Order of
Merit, he answered my cold state, after his features were overcome by
growing sorrow: If you don’t understand me, who will? Don’t you see that
this miserable war offered me a unique chance to learn the proper treat-
ment of grenades? I’ve learned it, and it has nothing to do with service to
the Fatherland.
There was nothing for me but shame, as it were, at such a truly Kahler—
ish reunion with, or in, such folly. Nonetheless here too something re-
mained: what comradely relations this absurd man sought, had, with the
most alien things!
I32 Eating Olives Precisely
In any case, in life it is not always unpleasant to run into such a fellow,
or better, a nonfellow. Kiihler died on one of his frequent trips, inciden—
tally among suspicious acquaintances, now vanished. His £.neur's rm
czmrzmii with everything laid out before perception had already ceased be-
fore that. He left no writings behind; where would he have found and not
stolen the words? and really, what else but good, quiet, attentive manners
in his dealings with all things? The hand here is not just, as I’ve said, the
housewife of the body, but the signpost to the right word, only after
which will things meet our extended index hand, word hand. Not much
more could be done with Kahler, but every attempted interpretation
could include a trace of such extended table manners, bedside manners,
and their courteous attention.
removed from the thrush a11d brought to the table with the other two, pre-
pared just as fastidiously.
But in the middle of their subsequent intake one of the literati became
painfully quiet, though not just withdrawn into himself; he chewed his
meal very slowly, all tip of the tongue and palate, with his eyes to the ceil-
ing, and said nally: I would hate to admit I’rn mistaken: it seems to me
that the turkey for this olive was not quite young. And his friends around
the table praised the not only erudite but unfailing tip of his tongue, al-
though it had broken the silence; praised the tongue as exceptional be-
cause it had discerned the aroma of a juice from the middle (not, say, the
smaller but nearer quail, nor the mighty, all—enelosing ox). So much for
the old Chinese tale, micrologically quite instructive for something more,
where 11ot just olives or playgrounds are in question. There is so much
that’s more important, at least just as important in the world, that’s
spoiled by untasted, undetected turkeys, even by sharks.
Making a Point
One hadn’t gotten to the point where everything had been talked to
death. Rather, in an age before newspapers, if not also before oratorical
overkill, this lovely rebuff took place in Sparta before the council of elders.
A delegation from Mycenae had appeared; their orator talked and talked,
broadly, vaguely, concluded only with effort. The eldest of the germzkz
replied: Your speech was too long. \When you were in the middle, we’d
forgotten the beginning; when you were done, we’d forgotten the begin-
ning and the middle. Don’t know what you want; send a new legation.
This legation, only two men strong, actually appeared a few days later;
their speaker: Crop failures, famine, need grain. Sat down. The eldest of
the gerusia: Understood; speech was short, request granted. Would have
been enough to show an empty sack.
Whereby the ceremonies ended, laconic down to the recommendation
of an empty sack as nonverbal sign, perfectly taciturn. Perhaps there’s a
mistrust of all speech here, not just of the bush they’re all beating around;
also against the impertinence and thoughtlessness of calling a thing some-
thing, giving it a name it doesn’t have, not even more or less, if it has a
name at all. The Mycenaean was in any case satis edto be answered so
13.4. The Reverse qfTlaings
objectively, as it were; withdrew. Since then the empty sack that extrava-
gant speakers especially bring with them has only become full of words
again; indeed the talkers themselves are only the empty sacks of themselves.
Better attention to ones own charter, a more eloquent reserve where one
has nothing to say, offer a simple remedy here. There are certain Myce—
naeans who, as they say in Berlin, are one single declaration [Anjrzfie], for
they never cease declaring themselves [ge/Jen immer so am]; only laconically
can one know what one hasf‘
“the same way” the next morning, that increases our horror at night, instead
of refuting it as a dream or whatever else. For many it is an uncanny feeling
from early on, seeing things omfy when we see if/rem.
The clock strikes six, and schoolboys open their textbooks. Now a train
is leaving Ulm. Perhaps a slave girl is dancing in a harem in Timbuktu.
But where there’s no clock, does everything pretend to exist? The stars
twinkle above the polar ice; do they really twinkle, and as stars? Does one
believe of the dark side of the moon that it has its night, and its rocks? of
Venus, that here potential forests lie beneath the enormous clouds of wa-
ter? even though one doesn’t see them and has only the analogy of the pre-
sent excerpt, which one sees while one sees it? Is it even credible that the
table is necessarily always a table, and does its best to be one—only ac-
cording to its visible obverse, which it turns to our view as soon as we look
at it? The world as mere representation (with totally different continents
from those of observable fact, which at the same time unceasingly crowd
us) is a very natural, entirely prescientific horror; Bishop Berkeley is nowa—
days its primitive stage.
Something else makes things suspect even while they stand before our
gaze. At the theater, if the candles in the last act of Wizllemtein are burning
on the table, say, and Wallenstein undersigns the treaty with Wrangel: then
the candles and the table are truly candles and table—they’re not play—act—
ing. They weren’t the same ones, but they were candles and table 110 differ-
ently when Wallenstein in fact signed himself over to the actual general. Yet
the people presently around the candles and desk—the present actors—ate
play—acting; why, then, does no ssureopen? Why does the audience, illu—
sion here, illusion there, sense no different levels of sincerity? D0 inanimate
objects players? On stage does their pretense, far from creating a ssure,
have a homogeneous space?
In any case, no mask can help against the healthy, childlike question,
not even at the great world theater: Dorft utensils, outside of their use, be-
long nonetheless to an oblique world from which they never come to us?
Fruit, roses, forests belong, by their material and by the course of their
lives, to human beings, but the candle of stearin, even of wax, the beauti-
ful cabinet of wood, even of steel, the stone house, the heat from the stove
and even the electric bulb belong to another World, one only interspersed
into this one. The sea, to which we entrust our very different purposes,
and which even serves them, crashes terribly in the night, which is not
night to it; the ray by which light falls onto the desk can find its Way in
136 Greeting and Appearance
the night where we can see nothing, and makes the way light only when
it travels it, has almost traveled it. Life has settled among and on top of
things, as on top of objects that need neither oxygen nor food, are dead
without decaying, always at hand without being immortal; on the backs
of these things, as though they were the most familiar scene, culture was
established.
That is why the childish impression of Wallenstei11’s candle and table can
easily be connected with an entirely different phantasm, with a legend. out—
side the theater, from the wide world itself that we inhabit: with the legend
of Sindbad the sailor, and a motif of his unlucky star. Here the hidden face
of things, a still “irrational” life of their own, revealed itself, even threaten-
ingly, as the X that it is beyond the masks of utility. The allegory is power-
ful: after Sindbad suffered a shipwreck, he and a few companions saved
themselves onto a small, fertile island full of fruit trees, coconut palms,
birds, game, and in the woods a spring. But as the survivors lit a fire toward
evening in order to roast their catch, the ground sank and the trees splin-
tered; the island was the body of a huge kraken. For centuries the monster
had rested on the ocearfs surface; now a fire burned on its back, and it dove
under, “so that every sailor drowned in the churning vortex.”
Many such possibilities——and still others perhaps less supernatural, yet
just as explosives-lie in the riddle of how the room looks after one leaves
it. In fro.nt its bright, or brightly lit, but no one yet knows wherein the
dark side of things consists that we alone see, let alone their underside, and
what it all oatsin. We know only the front or right side of their techni~
cal subservience, their benign incorporation; no one knows whether their
(often preserved) idyll, temptation, natural beauty is what it promises, or
pretends to hold.
So spoke the barkeeper, but the bright windows seemed no less warm.
The old square was indeed rent by all these horror stories, truer than the
square itself, about poor folks and their hard luck; yet the beauty re-
mained, even the idyll. A good deed doesn’t leave the house; a bad deed
walks for miles, the barkeeper now says, confusingly. Evil must in fact
13 8 Greeting andAppeeremce
have walked far; in any case, it had not returned to the green shutters and
the cheerful bay window. Small—town. facade and small—town reality were
different worlds, which could not be superimposed, even photographi-
cally, on this “dreamy” square.
Here we do not simply want all to be well, in other words; the windows
themselves seem to promise it. The idyll is clearly ahead of us with its
friendly greeting; its houses ensure a happiness (apart from their beauty)
that they do not in fact have. The cheerful greeting between people, back
and forth, the hasty forecast of well—being, perhaps comes out of mere
convention, which is inert distance; one does not want to be bothered,
nor bother others. The demands that we place on the well—being of others
too are usually quite modest. But in pretty little yards and peaceful houses
there is a rstvision of happiness that is not our vision at all, but instead
seems to come from the apparent thing itself. And persists like the image
of ones first encounter with others, with landscapes, even long after it’s
been corrected. The belief in an idyll remains much longer, above all
much higher; its disenchantment doesn’t even affect it.
It’s all the same what the barkeeper says; we ourselves already know
enough, to no avail, about the misery of small towns. How in a small town
every stroke of fate is surrounded by thunderclaps of gossip, every burst
pipe becomes a catastrophe that carries away the roofs and increases the
suffering by the thousand inquisitive eyes that watch it so maliciously—
first gossip, the11 suicide, then urban legends of misery down through the
generations. Yet none of this clings to the houses, and just as little to the
mysterious lie of their antiquity, their not only beautiful but good old
days. Behind these windows there once lived no less sn1all—town horror (as
the epigraph often affirms); and the semicircle of houses adorned the
Weekly public burning. Even so, sheer idyll predominates. It places itself
(and not only aesthetically) before existing as before past reality. The old
marketplaces offer an exception to every rule of pessimism; they seem like
a forecourt of peace.
But why do we believe it so easily, even enchantedly? Whence the pe-
culiar happy ending of the obverse? Such that we want a thing to begin
well, to look good~not only to end well. Here is a need for comedy, as it
were, for the cheerful facade, not only for the cheerful nalethat encloses
the Whole world. Indeed the cheerful facade is even stranger than the
usual happy ending, for the sign that beautiful houses set out is somehow
“realer” in appearance than the conciliation of the end or ground into
Greeting and Appearance I3.9
which they are ostensibly built. Then why does this appearance greet us so
pleasantly? Indeed it almost lures us, and even peevish types respond to it.
What is that sweet taste that things give off on travels, where one sees
them on parade? What does the related fraud of antiquity signify-—Which
is not only beautiful, but which itself traveled to us through the centuries,
and is thus greeted, or greets us through its patina? Schopenhauer once
explained the magic of travel, extremely subjectivistically, as the joy of see-
ing as such: to see is blessed, to be is awful. In the most beautiful places
one doesn’t want simply to see, but to stay; no longer travel, travel on, but
live. Here happiness lures us as existent, as existent on the aejeetiee front,
not only as observed. It is not a blessing to see everything, perhaps even
others’ misfortune; what delights us is obviously only the detached facade,
which takes on none of that.
Psychology, then, more psychology, can never grasp this phenomenon
that could be based at least as much in the objects as in the observer. The
latter must certainly be present, even rapturous (the more he is so, the
more boundlessly will he respond to appearances, above all to bad, merely
emotionally enveiling or decorative appearances); but among things,
facade corresponds to rapture all the better, and empathy then functions
only as the vehicle to it. Even objectively, the face of the water is a mirror
of the heavens above, not the fishy depths below. The sea smiles while the
sharks make other faces, and the fish they devour do not believe in God.
How and still more why does so much good radiate from certain things?
So much pleasant appearance, not only the dazzling one that lures us but
also the dangerous one we have not yet discussed. Tear wz bien, say certain
views, as though this auxiliary construction were also not unknown to
things. As though they used this auxiliary construction" on their facade, so
courteous and abstract, benign at least there, and not false. The carpet finds
it easier to be colorful than the painting, the painting easier than the house,
the house easier than the life inside; does it then seem, on travels, as though
one were seeing an attempt at a carpet, an attempt with the beautiful
facade the traveler sees foremost, after all?“ That would be a deception
that
of the beginning; long live, in any case, its eryaperitif. But if this also
drives mere psychology out of the glamour of travel, the tour va bien still
humanizes the world too much. The World is not so well ordered, nor in
its being so congruent with thought, let alone with a Coue’-an conception
of the tout va bien, as though the world were a hypochondriac and heaven
the “Keep smiling!” that it tells itsel£7
140 Moryf caffémptation
Motifs of Temptation
We long for it, and then again we dont. Want something that means
nothing to us, but then were in the middle of it. To others it seems pecu-
liar; to us, perhaps, empty. Yet morosely we go on; we ourselves seem to
be this rnorose persistence. Finally We turn around, miserably, fallen out
precisely with ourselves. This is how things tempt us when were used to
them; we cannot leave them be. They evoke those foolish desires whose
ful llment gives no pleasure, but whose renunciation hurts. A person
tempts us, a party, a night; we know that such things have always been
petty before, but a lazy urge still makes us snatch at them, and we plunge
again, without ever learning. We aren’t actually weak in the face of these
temptations, but impatient and imaginative; its just what they live on.
Many? r2f?Zwiptation 141
It began early for a certain boy. He looked forward to how beautiful the
meal would be the next day. The holiday arrives, all the guests sit about
the table, the children are dressed in white. The soup course is over, and
the great roast appears, an entire haunch of beef on the Tiscbiein den/e
dicfas His father stands, says a few pleasant words, and begins to carve the
roast. But as he sticks the fork into it, the meat sputters, a little column of
pus shoots out. The animal was sick, and since its haunch was roasted in
one piece the cook noticed nothing amiss. Only the table brings every-
thing to light; the boy sees for the first time beneath the crust. Whell he
142 Mon offémpmtion
hears that one should beware of slimy things, he no longer imagines, as he
did before, that frogs are meant; rather, he knows where and how it is.
Further behind, and yet one can never know that without going back
there oneself.
Or a youth, goes another story, strolls jauntily down the street.9 Then
an old woman says to him: Tarry a hit, my good lad, and follow me; I
want to show you something you’ll enjoy. The youth understands, and
follows her down many streets up to a splendid house where a lady wel-
comes him, richly adorned, young and beautiful. She greets the youth as
her lover returned from a long journey, and draws him onto the cushions
with her. They drink and laugh until the sunlight in the wine rises in their
heads; the youth kisses the rapturous woman and presses against her. Yet
in the middle of the kiss she leaps up, out of the room, down the long,
dark, empty hallway, the youth after her, into rooms along the side from
which her voice seems to sound, back into the hallway, into a new room
where he chases her around tables and cushions, until she ees to a mat-
tress in the darkest corner and stretches against a pillar on the wall. Still in
full stride, the youth trips on the soft rugs, into the hanging lamp over the
fair woman—and the rug gives way, and the lover falls stark naked onto
the bustling marketplace, past the balconies, into the tanners’ bazaar, who
are calling out their prices, buying and selling in the sunshine around
noon. And as they see him, drunk and in such a state, they shout and
laugh out loud, begin beating his naked body with skins; he still cannot
understand what has happened to him, and nallya friend comes along,
gives him clothes and has him taken home.
Thus ends this pastoral, with a trap door into the completely ludicrous;
plunges right out of this tale from the Arabian Nights into screeching real-
ity. It is almost this lover’s good fortune that he guessed nothing about the
woman’s motives during all their irtatious, that he experienced joy and
plunge one right after the other, not simultaneously and ambivalently, like
another fellow whose story we now tell. Here the victim no longer escapes
with just a nasty shock; instead the interplay tickles him to the bone.
This lad was working as a farm hand, didnt have it easy. One day a troop of
mercenaries drew through the village; they took what they needed and
marched off, yelling. The lad after them, caught up to them in a prosperous
village, went before the commander: the commander told him he could
follow along in the baggage train, where he could put on some weight for
Mot ofiémpmtion 143
the march to France. Before a barn on a hill lay the entire troop, among
barrels of schnapps; up there the lad was taken. The peasant clothing off
and the colorful mercenaryis scarf on; so the lad boasted and drank, or lisw
tened to the coarse battle cries, rumbling about blood and women. But
for a while the commander had been watching him, quite peculiarly, and
bit down his laughter behind his beard.
Now he said something to the mob. Immediately two mercenaries
grabbed the lad, and the whole troop behind them, with the pipers in the
lead, into the barn. The ceremony must still be performed, said the corn-
mander, and from his pocket drew a short rope. The half—drunk lad thought
he would be thrashed before his admission, as he had heard, so that his
friends could have some fun and he prove his manhood. He pulled off his
motley himself, so that one could see that he was not afraid, but could put
up with all of war, with all the flesh wounds, as a mercenary should. Now
the commander took the rope and tied one end over a roof beam; on a
signal, the troop rolled an old barrel with cracked staves out of a corner,
and set it u11der the beam. These men were no mercenaries at all, but ban-
dits, called “cowboys,” with no intention of clashing with an army; in-
stead every one of them had deserted from some regiment. Come here a
minute, my lad, said the commander very calmly, laid the other end of the
rope around his neck, and bade him climb up on the barrel. That thing
could collapse, said the lad, laughing, and climbed up on it, the noose
around his neck. Now the commander pulled his end so hard over the
beam that his body was already pulled upward. The lad cried out, grin-
ning, and stood on his toes, but the commander pulled the rope harder
yet, and the mercenaries laughed. Have I got What it takes? bellowed the
lad, and threw up; thereupon the commander gave‘ the barrel a shove,
sending splinters ying, and the lad jerked in the air, snatched upward,
held on to the rope, swaying. Now, my baggage carrier, laughed the com-
mander, that’s how you get to the heavenly hosts. The lad still tried to
laugh along, gasping and red as a side of beef. But no one was listening to
the jokes that the lad gasped out, believing that he was just being initiated
into the warrior caste; the commander was already out of the barn, and
the cowboys after him. Only the groaning of the casks still pierced the
roaring silence.
Vainly he tried to get his hand inside the noose, pull himself up to the
beam; with his teeth he gnawed at the rope, screamed for help. Then he
let go, the beam creaked, and the lad was still.
144 Mott}? qflémptatian
Now, assuming that there is life after death, a11d the young mercenary
does awaken, this scalded child should still avoid not so much hell re as
the heavenly light, so promising. The poor lad may not have had a lucky
star for milita1'y service, but certainly a talent for being tickled to death, to
experience what was so to speak equivocal about his friends in the samein—
stant, very differently from the deceived lover with his shock of mere sur—
prise. What the lady alone enjoyed there—the ambient, undivided unity of ,
off the spell, a11d showed his face ever more seldom among other people.
Mostly he whittled, and tried to imitate what he’d seen in that room, or
he carved ddles that were supposed to resemble the subterranean ones.
Day and night he sat in a little garret stuffed from top to bottom with un-
nishedcarvings and all kinds of strange things whose purpose and use no
one could ever learn. In the end he worked only on a wooden doll with
the fairy’s features; but he could never get it right, kept starting helplessly
from the beginning, whittled just a few strokes, threw the wood away in
order to resume the same ordeal with a new piece.
And so Lars descended into ever more solitary reverie. According to one
report, he wandered back under the mountain; according to another like-
lier report, he was found one warm summer night in his garret, hanged.
In short: for this man too, the illusion was strong at the beginning and re-
ceded terribly; he tried to recreate what had led him astray into the moun-
tain, and he failed, probably not because it was too great for his ability but
because here too was a trap door into bottomless disillusion, a snare over
the void, because the sought—after music, or womanliness, or wisdom of
the mountaiifs interior tur11ed to. ash o11 awakening, like Riibezahl’s gold
the next day.“
The fatal madness of farmer Lars is related to the plunge into the tan-
ner’s market, the disappointment of the strangled mercenary (apart from
the madness of infatuation, which might also be in it) in a very high
sphere: in the sphere of melancholy and of chthonic magic, the empty,
Christless brooding downward and inward, the hopeless digging after a
treasure that does not even exist" in the temptations of such external depth.
In related tales the victims, spellbound by the prehistory of the mountain,
turn eighty after three days; their life slips away after they listen to a glow
from a mountain cave, buzzing as though “glorying in its wisdom.” The
sage was of course only the fiery-eyed owl, and the wisdom of the cliff was
only the impasse of a great, mad, stereotypical .cleath—as the ground of
mountains and the temptation of nature.”
But not every temptation leads so hopelessly into the void. Instead the
world is on the march in just this mixed light, and the ordeal must first
withstand the splendor, or sometimes divide it. Many an. illusion is not yet
an illusion forever; conversely every kind of fulfillment still has potential
illusion in its knapsack. Above all in food, women, war, melancholy, mere
temptation is mixed with the brilliance of the real thing, which seethes
here, and is not yet out: neither as nothing (as with mere illusion and
146 Mot fcfiémptzzrim
plunge), not already as something. There are clearly different paths, even
different ends. Mere temptation rouses the desire one will suffer for, that al—
ways demonic craving and curiosity that trusts in the wide road to hell that
so quickly shrinks to a narrow gorge. In the path of substance, conversely,
the bitter toil of the beginning and the surprising salvation of the end pre-
dominate; its signs or its pledges are at first slight and grow only with the
laborious progress, as the ripening and emergence of the thing itself.
But these distinctions are not so clear that one could spare oneself the
path, or the test of the sun that first brings everything to light. Temptation
and substance can appear combined even when under way, on the terms
of a still undecided world that itself is not so neatly sorted that siren song
and ‘X/agner’s, even Bach’s music, or the separate grades of melancholy
could readily be distinguished in advance. The judgment of history has
been fooled often enough; even Socrates and Christ were regarded as de—
ceivers. A dialectic is above all at work here, struggling, observable only in
process, which can bring substance too, very close into the range of temp-
tation, the real into the range of illusion, precisely because neither has yet
been fully decided.
Neither reality nor illusion; often the one merges into the other in this
seething world. The lily’s perfume intoxicates and is still, at the same time,
the image of purity; woman, around whom there is always a seething,
even a phosphorescence, is, like music, the highest as well as the most un-
decided thing in the world. The secret of mountains has not yet come to
light, let alone to night. Even the most obvious deception at least apes its
splendor, or anticipates it with reckless assurance, in a mendacious way
that must even so be inherent in the tendency of life, in its mere but
nonetheless available possibilities. in itself the deception is pointless; there
would not even be a Fara Morgana without palm trees far away in space
and time. In this way the deception can even become a sign, against its
will but not ours; then we no longer drive helplessly into it, even to the
bitter end, but certainly do not fall back completely. Rather, its appear-
ance is there to be defeated, and its reflection concretely to be inherited.
This too has been wonderfully anticipated in a legend (a Greek one of
the kind Aristotle meant when he said that a lover of wisdom would al-
ways be a friend of legends and fairy tales). When Odysseus had himself
lashed to the mast, he still evaded the sirens—capitulated to temptation at
the outset, in other words. But when Orpheus passed by and the sirens
sang, he himself played the lyre. His music forced the sirens to stop and
Appendix: No Mani Land 14.7
liste11. He not only survived temptation but defeated it, and outdid it with
white magic. The Argos passed by uncaptivated; indeed, the dispossessed
sirens threw themselves into the sea and became boulders. In woman, sea,
rock, in the empty temptation of caves and distances, they have of course
remained, in the entire, still bottomless, at least undecided, ambiguous se-
cret of nature: of her springtime, which is just as external as it is nearly
ours; of her mountain music and her sun, wl1ich is as much an unintelli-
gible radiant body around which the earth barely revolves correctly with-
out falling into it, as it—Without yet being the human sun—p1'esents the
'
remains but never opens up. We are not also speaking of devices here, for
we animate them, after all, and they seem to acquire something from it.
So they are in any case more dogs tl1an cars; they seem faithful, and so are
We, no more than that.
In contrast, truly alien dead things can withdraw remarkably into them-
selves. Crystals have faces that will not let us go, radial, in little towers that
do notstand near us. Their colors are from a depth wl1ere no one sees;
light makes them colorful or dazzling, but they still hold. something back.
Only the blue of old enamel has something of this night by day; otherwise
crystals are distant, yet so strikingly near that they have never been felt to
be demonic, in co11trast to orchids or snakes. Much coarser, but perhaps
more embracing, enticing, crushing, is the great landscape outside us, es-
pecially where “dead” matter flows in masses, or rises into the sky and
draws our gaze upward. Young people often feel themselves strangely de-
jected before it, not with a feeling of worthlessness before equals or supe-
riors; instead the devaluation strikes everyone, affects the human as such.
Before mountains and stars,.our entire striving can seem small; everything
here is turned away even from the human mystery, and the mystery of our
goals. To play human greatness and works off against them seems espe-
cially futile, quite truly out of place; for already the appearance of great-
ness comes from outside, is immediately defeated by the tall mountain, let
alone the infinite universe. The struggles of life then appear like those in
a drop of water; a comet with prussic acid in its tail suflices to dissolve all
the consciousness that glints faintly in its little corner, and it is itself just
one of many riddles, as much i11 that it is, as in what it sees.
Every trace of our days on earth is framed by an enormous night, back-
ward as well as forward, individually and above all cosmically. An eighteen-
year—oid wrote a letter to the cosmos shortly before his suicide—that we
can well understand, given the contrasts between this dwar shlife and the
gigantic silence around nearly everything but a few plants, animals, and
humans. Pan calmly, quietly cast the young man down; his gaze can be
Gorgonian. Certainly we refresh our bodies in him too; on the plane
between the body and the Alps appears a wonderful healthy feeling, as
though they were built for us; expanse cleanses us of the four walls. But all
those lovers of nature are setting out into dead matter; it enters them as
though they were devalued, rigid with intoxication. The spell of merely hu»
man content, the desperate situation, the irresolvable complication: it is
what it is, it does not mask itself, one can rebel against it. Yet the eighteen-
A Russian Fairy Title? 149
year—old was really under a very different spell: that of the starry frame,
not of the content; an enormous Er!/eimig beckoned; all of life became
meaningless to him. In particular, the fear here is the reverse of that in the
Erlkonig, namely, attraction: storm, fog, old willows draw us, even the de-
sire to become like river, heath, mountain, sea, death, starry sky, no man’s
land. Human beings have done everything to keep this monstrosity from
swallowing them up. They have atteredit as heathens; as Christians they
have placed a child above it. Nonetheless the huge number stuns, even
when we see through it: the inflation of the light years that, in gold, will not
even buy us a piece of bread; the void that already begins in the thin moun-
tain air, and is alone properly in nite—namely, nothing, over and over.
Someone said to his wise friend: Our talk may be neand profound,
but how mute are the stars, and how they remain unmoved by us! How
great is the universe and how pitifully the heights of our cathedrals stand
before it. What would the earth itself say if it opened a mouth from Lis-
bon to Moscow, and only a few primal words thundered forth, Orphi-
Cally? To which his Wise friend replied, as a partisan of cultur-e: A slap in
the face is an argument? And the earth? The earth would probably talk a
lot of nonsense, for it has read neither Kant nor Plato.
the young scientists was in sight. Then they were helped when the Cyclops,
after killing two men at a stroke, put aside the second (who still showed
signs of life) and, sated, stretched out before the exit and Went to sleep.
Along with some little knives and shovels, usually for unearthing and
digging out antediluvian remains, the Englishmen kept a bottle of alcohol
to quickly preserve their nds.This alcohol they now placed before the di-
gesting beast’s rnaw, and he gulped it all down. Meanwhile, however, one
of the men had trepanned his dying cornrade’s skull just before his final
breath and removed the brain. Another did the same to the monster, un-
conscious from the alcohol; they then set the human brain into the empty
cavity. The Cyclops had not even stirred from the spot, the exit remained
blocked, but after some time there came from his maw the same terrible
and yet different howls; instead it almost began to seem that they were
trying to form words. English, almost intelligible, and as it got more in-
telligible it even came out with a distinct Oxford accent.
It was now their companion who was speaking here, so horribly trans-
planted, and they could barely separate themselves from him, even after
he showed them the exit. Until he implored them to abandon him, he
could feel that the old juices in the gigantic animal’s body were beginning
gradually to dismantle its human brain. Only as the words in which their
friend implored them became ever more howling, unintelligible, indeed at
the same time more menacing, and his eyes ever more those of the former
saurian, did the men flee to their boat before the cave, and they reached
their ship out in the deeper water just as they saw the familiar beast dive
after them between the rocks. From the eeingship they could still hear
that Cyclopean thing for a long time on the shore, all the more terrible as
they still thought they heard voices like their late friend and colleagues
surging up, falling back, reviving.
If the young scholars had been solid in more than paleontology, they
could perhaps have remembered the more recent fate of much greater fau-
mmmm in an. undefeated, resurgent basis of reaction.” But their allegori-
cal thinking didn’t extend that far; how should it, with such a fictional in-
cident, and from something so prehistoric? Yet if one weren’t near the
coast of India but instead before the time—honored stake where ]an I-Ius
ended up, and in Siberia as a whole, then one would already know better
what new wine in old skins can mean.” When they later consulted their
sextant more precisely, and the kopecks had dropped, they saw that they
had been along not just the Indian coast.
The Clever W/cry Out 151
The teller of this very old anecdote adds that the prior, upon hearing of
the matter—and also that the monk had broken his vows out of the
purest foolishness, indeed had confused the Gospels—pardoned him and
prayed for him: that he might enter Paradise with the asses.
Tire Cleveril zy Out 153
How different again, how cunningly serious, when feminine and Jewish
evasion go togetherl The Eva of whom the last story tells in this connection
was the second, very young wife of a rabbi who had remarried i11 old age.
After many years of happy marriage, the rabbi fell sick for the first time
in his life, and said to his young wife: I won’t rise again from this bed,
Hannah. Sooner or later the Angel of Death will come and take me to
my ancestors. Hannah sobbed, and cried: Don’t say such things, my rabbi,
I wont hear them. I will lock all the doors and windows against the Angel
of Death. Or ifhe does come, I will say, Angel of Death, let my rabbi live,
and take me instead.
The rabbi took her hand: You will not say that, Hannah; you will not
sin against your own young life. But as Hannah would not cease lament-
ing and swearing, the rabbi said no more, and simply turned toward the
wall, as though from great Weariness, and shut his eyes. His young wife
kept watch over him until evening, when she went into town to shop; and
no sooner was she out of the house than the rabbi rose and went into the
kitchen, where two geese were being fattened behind a screen. He opened
the gate, strewed breadcrumbs from the screen across the floor into the
bedroom and up to the bed, and lay back down just at the right moment,
as Hannah came through the door and into the dark room to the sleeping
invalid. All of a sudden one could hear the strangest sound coming from
the kitchen, a tapping as though of quiet, hard, inhuman feet; even the
rabbi started. Do you hear? he said to Hannah, Do you hear the Angel of
Death, how he comes?
Hannah trembled. Now the steps were already at the door, in the room,
now right by the bed, where Hannah sat. And as the tapping brushed
against her feet, she screamed and pointed to the rabbi: Angel of Death,
here he lies!
Now the rabbi struck a match, the geese peeked away, and the rabbi
spoke: Well, my Hannah, what did you say? Did you say: Angel of Death,
take me in his stead, let my rabbi live, the light of my eyes? Hannah
looked at the geese, at her husband, and replied: If it had been the right
Angel of Death, I would have said it, too. But you can’t expect me to say
it to a goose.
And this is also a proof, concluded the storyteller to whom we owe this
story, very unexpectedly, that Jews should have nothing to do with animals.
In another version, Hannah is supposed to have said: Do you want to em-
barrass me in front of this goose? The crisis wasn°t there for this woman.
154 Dimppointrnent with Amusement
If there were no ways out, where would the weak go, who were so witty?
Since they are ways out, they go in very different directions, though always
into a third term, even where every escape seems blocked. From now on,
said a Chinese sage, whose servant one morning wove his braid out of three
hairs, and after a time it happened that another hair fell out in the servanr’s
hand, and then another; he threw himself to the ground before his master,
yet the sage said calmly, From now on I’ll wear my hair down. A
only stamping and angry whinnying. One, two, then three particularly
brawny men came to the ringmastefs aid, pulled expertly at the cable, in
vain, could only bring the cable to a standstill. Until a fourth came along
and grabbed the cable, a very heavy boxer, come to help them from the
next number, and now he nallymoved the cable from a standstill and
pulled it ever more back.
A nal tug, all together, one could hear the clatter of mighty hoofs
outside, triumph—~and a wooden horse was visible at the end of the ca-
ble, rolled into the ring on its four wheels. The audience now laughed
with relief at this great sight gag, laughed wholeheartedly, as we like to
say. And not at all so disappointed at such a Bucephalos at the end of the
tether. Even objectively, it was rather relieved by the humor, perhaps also
because anticipation is not only joyful, but much more often fearful——
and look, there was nothing to it! At least not in fairy tales; or even when
something less childish comes, does not come out like a wooden horse,
nevertheless fairy tales, the circus, all the way up to farce, all mean that
the soup is always cooler when you eat it than when it was boiling.
Whereas iii the life as we still have it, the cooks in charge expect us to eat
the soup even hotter.
He was a man like others, who did quite well for himself. Dealt in silk,
and once a year took a trip, including a small detour. He never failed to
spend some days in pious discussion with the rabbi of Michelstadt. The
latter was known as a miracle rabbi, and was called Baal Shem, of whom
there were many near the end of the eighteenth century, in Germany too.
Now as Herr Schotten visited the Baal Shem again before making a busi—
ness trip to St. Gallen, and the coach stood outside, he said: Rabbi, I have
the strangest feeling; I dont want to go on this trip. Whether I had a bad
I56 T/ye Irzvzlriéie Hand
157
Shem burned brightly. Finally he understood the rabbi, and knew what to
do. He dragged his dead friend from the trench, onto the bed, under the
covers, as though sleeping; he himself crawled into the grave among the
bodies, his head above. Many hours, nothing stirred. _
Now the key turned quietly in the lock, and men crept past the bed;
with three, four blows of the axe they split Herr Bacharach’s skull for the
second time, dragged the chest in front of the door, and again locked it
from the outside. De nitely the houseboy, perhaps also the innkeeper:
Herr Schotten thought he could hear them among the voices. Finally he
crawled out of the crypt to the barred window, where, after great effort, be
was nallyable to pry a pane out of the caulk. There he awaited daybreak
outside, peered out carefully to see if someone might show himself on the
little alley behind the inn. Market folk appeared first, and Herr Schotten
wanted to call to them, but the innkeeper might hear him, and perhaps
there were accomplices among the people down there.
Then as the clock struck six in the morning su11, Herr Schotten saw
Herr Goldstikker from Frank trtturning the corner toward the house of
murder, to visit his Friends in the trade. Herr Schotten called only a few
words to him in the sacred language, so that no one else would under-
stand him, and his friend turned around. Minutes passed, the room grew
light, and the police arrived. Up the stairs, the door was crashed, and Herr
Schotten stepped out, so that the innkeeper and houseboy were stopped
in their lies.
He remained in the city just long enough to give testimony; veweeks
later he stood again in the Baal Shenfs chamber-—You are surprised to see
me, Baal Shem, with gray hairs?~—and told of his rescue. But why should
I tell you all this? You already knew just what you were doing when you
gave me this candle. Otherwise I would be lying next to poor Bacharach,
and you would be saying a prayer for the dead.
The rabbi took the candle, set it without ceremony back in its stand on
the table, and said: I know only that the Lord can save whom he will. The
candle helped you, like the sacred tongue, and yet remains a candle; the
sacred tongue helped you like the candle, and always remains a miracle.
God does not make it easy to know what we should thank him for.
As we said: one day, maybe, it will be better outside, all the way outside.
The story is bloody, but there’s a light in it; the candle glowed, and
burned correctly. The rabbi made absolutely nothing of it, neither of him—
self nor of the candle. He did not claim to be magical or prophetic, and
I 58 The Invisible Hsmd
decisively
Jewish kind of enlightenment that doesn’t doubt, say that there are ghosts,
but does not acknowledge that they should come before people and
their
undemonic God. So there is in this horror story a remarkable twist that
undoes it, or rather a moment that is still alive today, already familiar to
every businessman: the invisible hand. The practical intuition that does
not massively shift things but only twists them the right way a little,
and
puts them in place, with this 0rgan’s quiet sense of touch. It lets itself be
guided by fortune, by the same fortune that is buried, yet is the believei-‘s
obscure foundation in his world.
Here is no technology in some quanti ablesense, but also no old magic,
into which technology otherwise often extends. When the rabbi, awkward
and quite insttuetively nervous, reaches into the things of this world in or-
der to break off a talisman, he is hardly trusting in cosmic powers and '""'"':
laws that already inhere in the world. Instead he is testing a strange, al-
most messianically selective hand so as to bring things out of their disper-
sion, and brie ymake them Edenic, as it were. Then of course the candle
must serve us; it always tsthe needs of the situation, whatever it may be,
in a reversed, fo.rtunate irony of fa.te—so the candle would have burned in
Paradise, not as a thing but as a good.”
So acted the rabbi, and finally Herr Schotten, as he used the candle cor-
rectly, and even made of the sacred tongue at the necessary moment a
password. He pointed up only this about it: that no vendor would under—
stand it. Here the means are consecrated or de ied,depending——strangely,
in this uncertain world. No thing is bad in itself, none already good. It all
depends on the grip that guides it, that even sometimes penetrates into
the darkness, distortion, and uncertainty of the backgrounds.
Another rabbi, a true Kabbalist, once said: To bring about the kingdom
of freedom, it is not necessary that everything be destroyed, and a new
world begin; rather, this cup, or that bush, or that stone, and so all things
must only be shifted a little. Because this “a little” is hard to do, and its
measure so hard to nd,humanity cannot do it in this world; instead this
is why the Messiah comes. Thereby this wise rabbi too, with his saying,
spoke out not for creeping progress but completely for the leap of the
lucky glimpse and the invisible hand.
]2;[g5 ofW7bite Magic 159
set
things will t1‘11Y 3
‘-mgf=_ : P5 But as
.
rigl11:.No dog. t heY get up fromh 6 h . th for P
_.
1 F Th ,_-more, philosophy could
Hegel obse1~4es,.that Leally nto; tpp:(.msi1:1Co:1d
I
this If Eowodd
, ut exist Without Philoso-
exist without
Where Something can be transformed,
phi?‘ Thoilght ltsclhcfleaéi_ jliéetll s
tendency was expressed as the claim to
I10: L1€:u[:;E bottl‘, -d
and e
of that. The sense of such
magic; c aust egen' is the last manifestation
an ultimate office of wisdom often ec
hoes i.11 fai ff tales In them there lives
- the f Kasperle, Clever Hans, 01-‘ '3 50 id'16r who tricks
Ptanlcse
(“I
(not only in
to lift the enchanted World
the devil) an antimythical streak, oi t h e W1.11
‘
-e
t e
l°V°fY Palal e.11? (iuriShCfhh: $(:€dfe:)i:h::iines
,
dudes man)’
that How
surplus _ - value, the allegogyl; ti;e1:1oi6,d.or e tere
his youngest daughter, buying his freedom at this great price, and the next
morning the snake would come for her.
The king raced hack to his castle, ordered the drawbridge pulled up,
and meticulously sealed every entrance; his daughters he locked up by the
l
spinning wheel, the hearth, the youngest in a chamber in the keep, high
up by the battleinents, with thick walls. But no sooner did morning break
than a grand train of knights thundered up the rise and dismounted be-
fore the gate. The bolts were drawn back, the drawbridge came down,
three young knights entered the castle, and turned back, the trembling
girls in their arms. Before the king and his men could even stir their limbs,
the splendid Cavalcade had already thundered down the slope and disap-
peared into the distance, toward the enchanted forest.
From that time on the king, utterly broken and tormented, spent nearly
every day in penitence and prayer, locked in the castle chapel, taking only
slight pleasure in playing with his son Reinald, who had been born to him
shortly after the disappearance of the three princesses and had cost his
mother her life. The boy was now left to himself and dreamed of what he
had heard, and what his father did not order to be kept secret from him.
As he grew to manhood, the house grew ever more silent; the young no-
ble was driven to ndhis stolen sisters and free them. In vain the old king
sought to hold him back; he saw his unbreakable will, tried to force on
him at least an entourage, horses, squires, porters. Yet the prince sensed
that perils of a higher sort had to be faced here, and so he went, free and
alone, on a beautiful spring morning, into the enchanted forest.
He penetrated deep into the wilderness, tangled vines everywhere block-
ing his way. Often he had to cut a path with his sword, but finally the ter—
rible woods opened up, and the prince entered a long, still valley, toward
a hut in front of which three women sat spinning. The women shouted as
they spied the knight: Young man, what misfortune brings you into this
forest? Here live three terrible creatures, the bear, the eagle, the snake; at
nightfall they return, and you will never see morning if they find you here.
Then the prince knew where he was, and told his sisters who he was,
and that he had come to break the spell they were under. The women
stared at the knight in silent wonder. Then they embraced their brother,
kissed him again and again for joy; but their knees trembled at the clear
danger. It was the spell that held not only his sisters but—as Reinald
learned in the still valley——their husbands as Well, such that every second
day the bear, eagle, and snake would take human form again as noble and
Slides ofiWaz’t.«.= Magic "161
grand knights; in this form they had celebrated the wedding, and the wed-
ding night. Yet on the following day they would have to assume animal
form again; thus they had met the old king and today would meet Prince
Reinald. .
Dusk had already broken; every footfall in the forest meant certain
death. Trembling, the women prepared a hiding place for their brother in
When
the furthest corner of the hut, behind pungent roots and
darkness fell, the animals returned; the prince heard them howling and
herbs:
screeching. Close by the bear groped with his paws in the Shallow l'00t
pile, the sisters cajoled and sang; it grew silent in the musty room, and the
prince fell asleep. _
As he awoke and sat up to peer out of his hideaway, he found
on soft pillows, well rested. The morning sun shone cheerfully into his
himself
richly decorated chamber. At the bedside stood a page, who held out mag-
ni cent clothes to the prince. Astonished, he went out the door
great hall, and now saw his sisters surrounded by nobles in waiting, her-
into a
alds, and foot soldiers in great number, and at their side three knights of
royal visage, who embraced Reinald and bade him a brotherly welcome.
But how the prince was amazed as he stepped outside and saw the utterly
changed landscape: in place of the hut stood a summer castle, at a great
distance he saw the mountain fortress of the knight of the white eagle,
and somewhat lower the knight of the snake showed him his water castle
by the sea. As Reinald saw all this and understood the spell he
pected ever since his childhood in the forest, he could not rest until he
had.sus—
discovered from the knights the secret of their enchantment, and the key
that would break it. His pleas to reveal the secret were more ardent and
persistent than the fraternal misgivings of the knights.
which path he must take, and by the setting sun he
Thus soon
took his
he
leave in
knew
order
to set out against the spell.
Seven days he wandered through the endless forest, always toward the
East, where he would find the key, until on the eighth day the trees cleared
and Reinald saw a cliff before him, a portal hewn into the cliff side, and be-
fore it a monster with the body of a serpent, eagle’s wings, and the head of
a beat. The prince strode toward the mute structure and the ceaselessly
watchful chimera, which, as it spied him, roared up to tear him apart from
the air. But as Reinald drove his first stroke overhead at the bear’s throat, the
sword went right through, as through air, and the chimera hung there mo-
tionless; as the prince leapt forward to take his second stroke, the monster
162 Tales afVr'7/cite Magic
the devout woman went on hesitantly: I speak of the golden water, of the
talking bird, of the singing tree. Twenty days’ journey from here, in the land
of I-Iind, is where they can be found. Who would seek these three things
must ask the first man he encounters on the twentieth day. _
After the devout woman had gone, the princess fell into a disquiet as
never before, and a perplexity. She was greatly startled when she heard the
tread of the prince returning from the hunt. But no sooner had she told
her beloved her wish than he too began to grieve as though over a loss,
and swore that he would win the three wonders.
Sleepless he spent the night; at the break of dawn he set off Tenderiy he
took leave of his beloved, rode into the dawn toward the land of Hind, ac—
companied only by his personal slave. They met ever fewer people, and ii-
nally they encountered no one in the deserted valleys and steppes, on the
dusty caravan routes where the desert began, and the mountain passes up to
the snowy peaks, until on the morning of the twentieth day the prince saw
a dervish, mutely withdrawn into himself at the side of a mountain path,
and he now understand the old woman’s words. He bowed deeply and
hailed the saint with a pious salutation, yet the dervish did not answer. The
prince called down Allalfs blessings on him, yet the dervish did not even
thank him; he beseeched him for a blessing, but the dervish gave no sign
that he even heard or saw the prince. The prince was uncertain if he should
ask the marabout, who was with Allah, for the way. Then the dervish an-
swered by himself, in a Hat voice and as though from a great distance:
Turn around; do not ride up the mountain. A confusion of voices will strike
your ears that will llyou with terror, or deafen you. Beware of turning your
head, and again I say beware! If you nonetheless attain the peak, you will nd
yourself on the cliff with the talking bird. He will show you the way to the
golden water and the singing tree. The way is dangerous, and the black stones
are death. If you do not return that day, you will never return.
The dervish fell back into his trance, yet the prince, with no desire to pen-
etrate the meaning of these mysterious words, suddenly sat up, com-
manded his slave to wait for him one day, and raced away over the shift-
ing debris, up the desolate mountain.
It was deathly still, and the further the knight went the more heavily
the mountain was strewn with boulders, black and strange in shape. The
peak was already visible, and the rnan’s heart felt no fear. Then there sud-
denly rose in a flash, roundabout the path and behind him in the deathly
164 Files of'l}l’/hire Magic
quiet air, a whistling and hissing as though the air were full of snakes and
worms, with a screaming confusion of voices, as the dervish had pre-
dicted. The doughty prince rode forward and would not hear the magical
cries that called him by name in vanished voices from his childhood, the
voices of friends; he remained deaf to the iron chariot that seemed to roll
right next to him. Already he sensed the whinrnying of the racing horses;
the whip cracked next to his face, a11d angrily the prince whirled about as
though he had been struck by the whip. Yet just as he was turning his
head to the side he thought of the dervish’s mysterious words—«in vain.
Night fell, and the prince turned suddenly to black stone.
A day or two the slave waited; then he rode back as his master had com-
manded. The princess heard the news of his certain death as the slave re—
peated the words of the dervish, and she mourned i11 deepest sorrow. But
soon she began to doubt, out of a love that would not die, and she resolved
to go forth herself to search for her beloved. Unaccompanied, she set out
on the path her beloved had taken, considering the words of the dervish
well, long. and precisely. On the twentieth day she too saw the saint; dis—
mounted, bowed deeply before him, who silently raised his hand; and
strode without a question up the path to tl1e screaming mountain. But the
princess heard no sound in her deep melancholy, her bitter longing for the
beloved whom she had sent to his death; sorrow, regret, boundless love let
her hear nothing else——only this one thing, at which she herself screamed,
that she found by the talking bird. Already she could see the bird in a cage
on the highest peak. The princess snatched the struggling animal. Then
complete silence fell, and the bird said: O brave lady of noble birth, be of
good cheer; no evil shall befall you. I shall obey your commands on my
very life; tell me what I should do that I may ful llyour wishes. The
princess replied: I want to hear of my lord and husband whether he is alive
or dead, and where I can find him. The talking bird answered: Your word
is my command; take this flask and go to the other side of the mountain.
There fill the flask with the golden water, and you will see the branches of
the singing tree over the water. Sooner you cannot find your beloved, for
he is neither alive nor dead.
The princess followed the birds directions and soon stood under trees
and bushes before a small, remarkably pretty domed house; there a foun—
rain owedwith drinkable gold, over the dome arched a tree with a lumi-
nous crown, and all its branches sang. Princess Parizade filled her flask to
the brim from the magical fountain and broke a twig from the tree, so
Title: ofwlyite Magic 1 6
that she now possessed all the three wonders of which the old woman had
spoken, but she cared for nothing, and longed only to see her beloved.
Then the bird spoke again: 0 great lady, go down the mountain again,
sprinkle a little of the golden water on the stones that lie about there, and
by its magic they will all return to life, your beloved along with others.
Now the princess nallyturned back, poured some of the water onto
each stone, onto the dark debris all over the path: and as the first drop fell,
the men who had been stone arose, the beloved whom she had almost lost
stood and embraced her; the valley was full of people come back to life.
Some had slept for many centuries, others only a few days. All ages and all
history stood on the dreamless mountain, but now they were all equals by
Allah's grace, and heaped praise and honor on the princess’s head.
She led the awakened men, triumphing in their new life, down the
mountain to the holy (lervish, and past him. But as they came to his site,
the dervish had disappeared, and only the water in the flask churned. Of
the awakened men_, everyone now went down the road by which he had
come, one this way, another that way, but the prince and princess went
their way, arriving at the palace with their treasures on the twentieth morn-
ing. They gave the talking bird a home in their garden. The magical brook
sang in the pool into which they poured it; it began to jet and spray by it-
self, and thus the How of the water remained unbroken and unchanging.
The strange twig sent our roots, sprouted new branches and buds, sud-
denly became like the tree of life in the magical forest garden itself; its
singing echoed the bubbling of the fountain, the birds tales of the moun—
tain journey of the heroes and the perils they withstood.
On the seventh day Princess Parizade remembered the holy woman and
had her summoned, led her to the treasures. The good woman stood in
utter amazement, threw herself to the ground, and spoke the sum: “The
water sent from heaven, with which we awaken our lands, in this measure
you will one day go forth, on the day of reckoning, from your graves.”2°
The princess bade the good woman spend her last years with them, and
they remained united in the manner of their praying. For along time they
heard the splashing of the water, the singing tree, the legends told by the
bird, until one day death came to them too, and took them from all
earthly consolations to the fullness of Paradise.
Should one act or think? was the question. We have heard some fairy tales
where white. magic was used. That is no longer possible for us, yet we remain
16 6 721163 0fV(7f9z'te Magic
in the old realm of transformations, with other means. In these fairy tales,
one thinks in order to act, to thereby alone do the right thing; thought
goes before action, action proves thought. Therefore when metaphysical
thought above all bears none of the water of life with it, of which the Ori-
ental fairy tale so wonderfully reminds us, then it is useless, for it cant be
used for anything. From this standpoint the [Oriental tale, because the
princess goes further forward than Prince Reinald, would nallyneed a
remembrance of the origin, or rather the new dream where it still lives de-
spite its ancient language and provenance. The Thousand and One Nights
exists or existed in many versions, after all, already mixing the speech of
simple camel drivers with the declamation of rhapsodies at the Caiiph’s
court, and sometimes a signi cantalchemical tradition. “The Story of the
Two Sisters Who Were ]ealous of Their Younger Sister,” as the story we
have retold is called, refers unmistakably to this tradition. -
There are much lighter tendencies in the original, however; the sister
princess (for here she is the sister of two brothers, to whom the same thing
happens on the mountain) in her colorful dress stuffs cotton in her ears so
that she only now and then hears an echo of the deadly voices, and ad-
vances unhesitatingly where so many brave knights had foundered before
her. Even the dervish must laugh heartily here when he hears of this fern-
inine wile, and truly, in the original of this story, it belongs among all the
cheerfully exact, evasive tricks that are played on the foolish devil in so
many fairy tales, by means of which the new, slender power of freedom
and human understanding might not conquer the principle of evil but
nevertheless escape from it to unfamiliar regions inaccessible to the an-
cient forces. Meanwhile the strange, ironically submissive motif of stop—
ping one’s ears, familiar from the saga of Odysseus, is obviously in a dif-
ferent category from the mere tricks, in themselves meaningless, used by
Children and soldiers against witches and stupid devils. In fact, in the Ori-
ental fairy tale of rescue, the evil power is not evaded somehow subjec-
tively, with stopped ears, but overcome substantively, Orpheus—like, indeed
Orphically. Here, then, right between comic hero and alchemy, sounds a
fairy tale in the highest style, turned toward the epapcsirz of salvation; there
is a creatively constitutive, not merely cunning power in the princess’s deaf-
ness, in her profound deafness for love, that is more rigorously directed,
more radically anamnestic, than the power of the mere will to possess, let
alone the empty curiosity that exposes all our creaturely vanity. The ad-
venturers before her, as well as Prince Bahman, knew only this grasping,
this curiosity, at most a still noble but almost purely theoretical interest in
Elsi ofWhite Magic 167
the old woman’s story; the bird, the fountain, the tree, these close relatives
of Novalis’s blue ower,they longed only to see, to own. Princess Parizade,
however, no longer remembers her initial curiosity, nor any merely abstract
or somehow inexpressible desire with its endless uncertainty of purpose,
meaning, or content. Her heart is full of the concrete will of a restorative
love, and in this integrity the mysterious voices do not frighten her; she is
deaf to any of the temptations of mere curiosity, indeed of the terror of the
desire to know.
Love here becomes the essential instrument of discovery, or in a rabbinic
metaphor quite applicable to the princess: “Someone who has wisdom
without charity is like a man who has the key to the innermost chamber,
but has lost the key to the outer one.” The princess was as far from any
merely intellectual curiosity as the dewish; so she was also spared the vain,
aimless looking about that lulls and kills as it did Lot’s wife, and that in
every myth of fatal enchantment leads to death or petrifaction as the pun—
ishment for curiosity and the forgetting of Jerusalem. An element of Eve
herself is reversed in the princess, for this fairy tale is il llednot only by
death as the wages of sin, but also by the antideath of white magic—in
short, by the ransom of knowledge, by the water of life as such, against the
pillars of salt and stone behind.
Nonetheless, even here, after such great signs, two people come to the
end within a coherent everyday. As in the quest of Prince Reinald, in the
(much more profound!) quest of the princess it is still only the previous
form that is regained from the spell. Here is what is ultimately still prob-
lematic in the conclusion of both stories, even the positively magical and
Oriental story. Bird, tree, and fountain become merely the garden orna-
ments of a comfortable life, unless the sisters in the original were to rec—
ognize themselves as abandoned princesses, unless the talking bird were to
lead them back to the sultan, their father. But whether the sura on the wa-
ter of life or the return to the father appears, all that is only an allegorically
simple, elegantly inadequate, impersonally sincere circumlocution of the
ultimate meaning posited here. For the three treasures, the talking bird
like the golden water like the singing tree, are alchemical symbols of the
purest kind. Consequently they would be committed to the creation of a
second life, something truly different and wonderful, which is not merely
retrieved from stone and restored to a prince but is obliged to overcome
precisely the illusion of change and the death at its end, to execute the real
sonhood of the highest king, indeed the becoming like Allah and eyomi
Alla!/9. The original leads only up to the sultanic threshold, in spite of all
I
the identi able mystical meaning; in the original too, the bird brings
them only as far as their royal inheritance, which still belongs to this
world. The water of life that is the greatest of the three treasures concludes
its transformations by turning stones back into the human beings they
once had been. It does not transform the regained prince, let alone the
stones that were never princes; the mountain as
arwhole still remains sealed.
In its basin it forms geometric shapes from mere “nature,” and makes only
itself like itself Such transparent unknowing consequently grounds what is
still problematic, obviously incomplete, in fact signi cantly unsatisfying
about the end of this little story of salvation: with death still in view as
though nothing had happened, nothing yet. The fountain might yet leap
up differently, the singing tree contain the music of other spheres; the talk-
ing bird in the legend means the answer that will make us all whole, and
every stone free. The princess found the prince again, anyway, and at the
end perhaps the abundance of paradise (which is likewise already there for
her, complete); yet the water of life means more.
Coda: How much the water of life means something else can be mea-
sured wherever it seems to have washed away the here and now. At least
with images and visions that are lived as though they were already beyond,
and told of what awaits us. In his “Voyage to Hades” Schubert sings, in a
pale and solemn voice—as quietly shattered as though he were still at the
spot—these words: “Already I see the pale Danaids, accursed Tantalus." If
we take this case as real—that after death or at the end of time we will
truly see the Dana'1'ds—they will then exist not only as though one ex-
pected them (“already I see”); rather they and what is related to them, as
well as the brighter places in Greek mythology, will be the only thing that
remains. Then the sagas of antiquity will also be the most exact guide
through the world to come", or for Christian believers, the legends of heaven
and hell——in the event that the myths of Valhalla, against all expectations,
were not the better cicerone——or the Islamic Paradise. In this case, how—
ever, it is not the choice Schubert gives us but he himself that is blasphe-
mous; worse yet, to the point of inconceivability, absurd as blasphemous,
for what would in fact be or happen if one really saw Danaids and ac-
cursed Tantalus or demon armies and the heavenly host at the end, as real
as trees are here, and realer? The shock would be unspeakable; even be-
lievers {and they in particular) would be driven crazy by ndingthe care-
chism, and greater yet would be the horror that this was already the end
of it. The nowadays massive unbelief in things unseen (or rather the still
unseen) is certainly as mad as the massive belief in heavenly esh and
W/under 169
blood; but in the latter there is still a dissatisfaction with spatial thinghood
again—indeed, a sense that the images of the nalawakening, in short the
true water of life, could not be the Dana'1'dean sieve or Olympus or a
crown if there truly is such an awakening, and if it will be the last.
Sheer amazement at the unseen today shows us more profoundly what
would happen metaphysically if the living and dead eldswere awakened;
these lights are of course always momentary or incidental, show the un-
rei ed, unenchanted, nalhomesickness in everything, and have no great
site. Bahman the mere prince is not there, not even as prince, anymore
than the palace to which the lovers and their partial water of life and su-
per cialgarden treasures go back, just go back. The vision of such things,
even of divine things, does not yet concern the last thing in us, or no longer
does. Yet—a garden of what now and again amazes, even shatters us, and
what the princess herself had as it sounded so restless and severe from the
old woman’s words: of this, even unbelievers in the traditional end could
believe that it was still there within people and stones, questioning every-
thing, solving everything, and unfound.
Wonder
“Just think! Now and then I see the blue fly. I know, it all sounds so
paltry, I don’t know if you can understand.” “No, no, I understand.”
“All right! And now and then I see the grass, and maybe the grass sees
me, too; what do I know? I look at a single grass blade; maybe it trembles
a little, and it seems to me, that’s something; and I think to myself: here
this blade of grass stands and tremblesl And there’s a rIobserve, and
maybe there’s a twig on it that makes me think. But now and again I
meet people on these heights, that happens. . . . ” “Oh, yes,” she said,
and stood up. The rstdrops of rain began to fall. “Its raining," I said.
“Yes, just think, its raining," she said, too, and was on her way.
%K.nut Harnsun, Pan
Yes, just think, its raining. She who felt that, suddenly wondered at it,
was far back, far ahead. She actually noticed very little, and yet she was
suddenly before the kernel of all questioning. In our youth, of course, we
often feel so empty and pure. We look out the window, go, stop, fall asleep,
wake up; everything’s always the same, seems to “be” only within this same
dull feeling: how uncanny it all really is, how overwhelmingly strange it isl
17o Wade?
Even that formulation is already too much, looks as though it were only
being that is not quite canny. If we try to imagine that nothing were, how-
ever, that is no less mysterious. There aren’t the right words for it, or we
turn our initial wonder around.
So above all later, just when one questions more precisely, seemingly, and
notices. VX/hen one claims to know why a flower blooms, and the truly des-
perate even visit fortune tellers and speak of elves who bring about (or are)
this blooming. Science especially debilitates our questioning, our bottom-
less wonder; “explains” how this or that came to be, how this becomes that;
does.its abstract race with past K306 and pmpter fact. Theosophical stopgaps
resort not only to elves, to archangels, to all sorts of grandly named forces;
the rosy dawn of the trembling beginning becomes the cheap gravy of in-
ept fabulation. Yes, even given elves, archangels, hypothetically if unwill-
ingly: are they really anything but another way of being next to, above,
this one? Would it not be just as dark if they existed, like the blade of grass
or the branch of a fir? Doesn’t the branch still give us so namelessly much
to think about, this bit of everything that we cannot name? Does it not,
with its “being,” extend just as well into the “nothing” where it would not
be, or would not be so, and that makes it doubly strange? Does not the
question of simple wonder likewise lead into this nothing where it hopes
to find its everything? \With a shock at how dark and uncertain the
ground of the world is, with the hope that just for this reason everything
can still “be” otherwise, be so much our own “being” that no question is
still needed, but instead the question is completely posed in this Wonder
and ultimately becomes happiness, an existence like happiness. Philoso—
phers are somewhat more concerned here than real or occult science; since
Plato, wonder has been for them a done deal, or the beginning: But how
many of them have kept the direction of the beginning? Almost no one
kept up his questioning wonder past the rstanswer. No one measured
the problems that concretely arose against this Wonder; no one grasped
them as its refractions or transformations. It was especially hard to hear in
wonder not only the questions but also the language of an answer, a res-
onating self—wonder, this seething nalstate within things.
Yet the beginning could never quite be expelled from philosophy; it
echoes significantly in the great systems, which separates the metaphysi-
cians from the actuaries of cosmic explanation. It also ties philosophy again
and again to youth, makes metaphysics at every point impatient again,
conscientious—the wisdom of age in the early, unerring freshness of ado-
lescent, primordial Wonder. So we might surely meditate on the few casual
Dead and Llmrble
T
I71
words between a girl and a boy, from time to time, as a sort of morning
exercise of instinct. Then the many great riddles of the world will not en-
tirely conceal their one inconspicuous mystery
The Mountain
One summers day in the year 1738, reports a local almanac, a hunter by
the name of Michael Hulzogger went into the forest on the Untersberg.
He did not come back; not was he seen anywhere else. it nallyseemed as
though he had gone off the trail 01‘ fallen down a rock face. After several
weeks his brother had a mass said for the missing man, on the Grnain,
where there was a pilgrimage church near the_mountain. But during the
mass the hunter entered the church to thank God for his miraculous re-
turn. Of what he had experienced and what he had seen in the mountain
he spoke no word, but remained quiet and solemn, and explained that
people would hardly learn more from him than what Lazarus Gitschner
had already written about it; nor did his grandchildren and great—grand—
children learn much more.“ This Lazarus Gitschner, however, had seen
no more than a tu11nel under the mountain, the Kaiser Friedrich who
used to appear on the Welserberg, a book of prophecies, and whatever else
was already part of the legend.
Nothing more could be got out of the hunter; indeed, in a great change
from his earlier personality, he soon grew entirely mute. Archbishop Fir-
mian of Salzburg had also heard of the hunter’s mysterious disappearance
and return, and sent for him. But Hulzogger again remained silent before
the prince of the Church. To every question he replied that he could and
would say nothing; only Confession was permitted. After confession the
bishop laid down his robes and remained silent until his death. It came
soon for both; it is supposed to have been peaceful.
The Pearl
On the way from the inside out, and back, nothing should be passed
over. And the advice—*let everything go, and it will all come back to
you—is false not only inwardly but actively too. A king, says an Indian
legend, lost a very beautiful pearl; he ordered the entire land to be
searched for it. Soldiers and Brahmans, all were set on the march together,
in vain; the pearl did not return. Until one day the king found it him—
se1f—as we said, on the path of unintentionality. The inactive man, in
other words, who had perhaps forgotten his desires, and who was no
longer driven to ful llthem, saw them ful lled.
So much for this fable that abandons all temporal striving, just as if the
outside had already come so far that it gives us what is ours all by itself.
And grants it only then when we do nothing for it; which is definitely too
good to be true, and too sterile to bear fruit. Similar things have also been
claimed not only for action in time but for the spatialization of the out-
side in and of itself, and its dispersed juxtaposition, as though it were not
a dispersion. Thus there is the story of a very wise man for whom the
World had so achieved itself, and was out of the cutter of multiplicity, that
he now and again had to put on eyeglasses, or else he would see all things
as a unity. Then again, this pearl is also never a gift, of course, if only be—
cause there would no longer be anything next to it but this unity. At least
in the mystical view, which can certainly display the most banal offshoots
The Peer! 173
in the pensioned longing for quiet, or the return of the eternally same.
Yet how mockingly often, and then again how variously, does the desire
for an end of striving, of diffusion, of distraction, nditself fulfilled not
by the One but by the monotone~in other words, not denied but be—
trayed. We see it here, too: just as there is no true way without a goal,
there is no goal without the power of a way toward it, indeed one pre-
served in the goal itself. So we should look around here and now, with
actively set time in actively reconstructed space; the traces of the so—called
Ultimate, indeed even of a hospitable Becoming, are themselves just the
imprints of a Going that must still be gone into the New. Only very far
beyond will everything that one meets and notices be the Same.
Notes
Situation
L fa mi; pzzzwre: “I am poor”; Que voulez your . . . : “What do you want, sir?
Poverty, its already halfway to lthiness."
2. The royalist opponents of the French Revoiution took the Bourbons’ white
lily as their symbol. Opponents of the Russian Revolution were thus “Whites.”
3. Nana is the Second Empire courtesan of Emile Zola’s (1840-1902) 1880
novel of the same name.
4. Jean Anthelme Brillat—Savarin (1755-1826) is Franee’s most famous gas-
tronorne. His 1825 Physiology cy”Tzzsze was translated into English by Fisher.
5. Bloch uses a German idiom for stinginess: Bei 2'/mm in‘ Sc/Jmalkam K1Jic/aen-
meirter (“Even their cook is starving”).
6. Caliph Stork is the hero of Wilhelm Hauff’s (1802-27) fairy tale of the
same I'1€lIIlC.
Fate
I.Ferdinand Lassalie (1825-64) was a German socialist politician with an ex»
travagant lifestyle. He challenged a romantic rival to a duel and was killed.
2. Lucas .2 mm lmenda is a byword for a perhaps deliberately illogical etymol—
ogy or other explanation.
3. Wenzel Strapinski is the poor tailor of Gottfried Keller’s (1819-90) novella
“Clothes Make the Man.” Others mistake him for a Polish noble because of his
waistcoat.
4. This story appears as “The Master of Prayer” in Martin Buber’s 1906 col-
lection, The 12:13: afRa6&i Nacfsmmz.
I75
176 Notes
23. The entire sentence is a montage of names from May’s works. Nscho-
Tschi is the name of the Apache woman (supposedly “Beautiful Day”) who mar-
ries May’s Old Shatterhand in lwimetau, book IV.
24. From "Eine Renaissance der Sinnlichkeit” (A Renaissance ofSmsuaIZitj/),
I
Existence
I. This was a favorite joke of Franz Kafl<a's, and Walter Benjamin retells it in
his essay on Kafka.
2. Des Krmben W/under/aom (literally “the boy’s magical horn”) is the epochal
Romantic anthology of German folk verse.
3. From the German idiom for hypocrisy, “to preach water yet drink wine."
4. A story from Johan Peter Hebel’s (1760-1826) Der Rbeiniscbe Hau.s 'em2d,
in which a visitor to a Low German area is told "K;z22it1)ersm:n” (“I don’t under-
stand") when he wants to know who owns a certain business, who lives in some
great house, and nallywhose funeral is passing by; he concludes that all Kan-
itverstan’s great wealth could not save him from death.
5. A popular ballad by Friedrich von Hagedorn (1708-54).
6. Alfred Klabund (1890-1928), German poet, novelist, essayist, translator, pacifist.
7. Kmutwic/.’er!: cabbage roll.
8. Hedwig Courths—Maler (1867-1950), in whose romance novels virtuous pe-
tit bourgeois women nallymarry rich or aristocratic men.
178 Notes
9. The Isar runs through Munich; numerous cafes and inns on its banks are
called Isarlust.
1o. Bloch’s retelling of ‘(Wet ist der Siinder” (W110 Is the Sinner?), number 4
in Richard W/ilhelnfs (1873-1930) anthology C/yinasircfae Val/esmdrc/am (Chinese
Fcziry Titles). Willielm, a Protestant missionary in China, is also famous for his
translations of the Tao and the I C/sing into German.
11. Bloch’s retelling of “Der Rossberg—Geist” (The'Dernon on Horse Moun-
tain), number 48 in Wilhelm’s anthology.
12. Bloch is quoting, from memory, James Fenimore Coopcr’s 1821 The Spy: A
E13 aft/ae Neutral Ground. In the original, W'ashington’s note reads: “Circum—
stances of political importance, which involve the lives and fortunes of many,
have hitherto kept secret what this ‘paper now reveals. Harvey Birch has for years
been a faithful and unrequited servant of his country. Though man does not,
may God reward him for his conduct!”
13. "The widow’s pitcher”: see I Kings 17.
I4. Bloch is referring to Tolstoy’s “The Three I-Iermits: An Old Legend Cur-
1'ent in the Volga District.”
13. ”Saxo11” here seems to be pejorative, perhaps because the Saxon dialect has
been consistently mocked as awkward for centuries.
16. ”The Story of the Blind Man, Baba Abdullah,” from the Thousand and
One Nights, 606th night.
17. 1934 film by Thea VOI1 Harbou (1888-1954), based on the play by Gerhart
Hauptmann (1862-1946).
18. Bloch uses tmpisc/9 and m'eL’2)'m to correspond to Lit/mrieb, “drive to the
light” or “(pl1oto)tropism.”
19. ”Ali the Cairene and the Haunted House in Baghdad,” from the Thou-
sand and One Nights, 425th night.
20. Die Grzrtmlaabe, published from 1853-1944, was Gern1any’s first success»
ful r11ass—circulation journal, emphasizing sentimental, moralistic, and national-
istic content.
2.1. An allusion to Paul Gerhard’s 1656 poem “O Haupt ml! Blur and Wan-
den," set to music by J. S. Bach. Gerhard’s poem is based on Bernard of Clair-
vaux’s 1153 Salve cape: cmentaram.
22. ”The Ruined Man Who Became Rich Again Through a Dream,” from
the Thousand and One Nights, 351st night.
23. From Mann’s 1925 essay “Goethe und Tolstoi.”
2.4. Francis Gayot de Pitaval (1673-1743) was a French attorney who, between
1734 and 1743, published popular collections of true crime stories; a “Pitaval"
designates such a collection.
25. Paul Ernst (1866-1933), Neoclassical writer, essayist, playwright, and
journalist.
Notes 179
Things
1. George Stephenson (1781-1848) is credited with the invention of the steam
locomotive.
2. Johannes V Jensen (1873-1950), 1944 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
3. An allusion to the “makanthropos," or rnacrocosmic man.
4. Bloch spells Anga e as it would be pronounced in the Berlin dialect,
though Berliner impude11ce is more important here than Berliner pronunciation.
5. ”At its goal” is a characteristic phrase for Bloch. The Latin phrase is com-
monly inscribed above -doors and means, ‘Tire found a haven; greetings, Hope
and Fortune!"
6. Bloch takes “carpet” as an aesthetic term from Georg Lukacs’s 1910 Soul
and Farm. It appears in Blocks 1918 Spirit cf Utopia (q.v.). -
7. Emile Coué (1857-1926), French psychotherapist whose therapy of auto-
suggestion (“Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better") was in
vogue in the 192.05.
8. ”Tischlein deck dich” is both a dumbwaiter table and the incantation from
the Grimm’s fairy tale about the table that magically sets itself.
9. ”The Barber's Tale of His Second Brother,” from the Thousand and One
Nights, 31st night.
10. This is one of countless Norwegian tales in which a supernatural being
teaches someone the tuning for the Hardanger ddle,yet 11ot the technique.
11. Riibezahl is a mountain gnome, familiar from folktales and from Johann
Karl August Musa'.us’s (1735-S7) more literary renderings. The treasure he be-
stows turns to dry leaves the next day.
180 Notes
Crossing Aesthetics