Everything was threatened, everything had become unsure, even the menace itself, since the danger had changed, transposed from the zone of incidence to that of permanence. The night endured unshaken, coldly glowed the darkly transparent gold of its pinions spread over the human dwellings, which on all sides rested stonily upon the rigid earth, painted over by the arid light of the moon; and the rigidity, drinking in the light from the stars, was transformed into transparent stone unto its deepest, fiery depth, was turned into a transparent stone-shadow in the opened crystal shafts of the world, turned to a crystal echo of the inaudible, until it was like petrification’s last breathless struggle for breath, a stony gasp praying for the breath of life; shadow-petrified, shadow-petrifying, it roamed up and down, even the sentry’s steps beyond the wall, after marking off time as permanent, became part of it; they had turned into stone, a resounding, solemn shadow-tread of nothingness, growing out from the ringing pavement and back into it; and as the stiff-pointed, sharp-shadowed apex of the iron cupola surmounting the wall-turrets now became visible under the continual intensification of light, the shaft between the wall and house opened up no less candidly, its shadows sharpened and cleared by the light unto its final depth, silver-green from the flow of spheric brightness, light-petrified, light-dry, light-ringing, from very muteness down to the sandy grit of its floor, down to the absolutely immobile vagueness of the shaft-bottom where, in the dry shadow of some brush, all sorts of oddments, scarcely describable, became visible, half-hidden by the silver-green branchings of the thicket, with planking and tools, these also casting shadows, but in a fashion so terribly solemn that it was like a lonely and strangely unworthy echo of the stony, universal muteness, mirroring danger, revenge and threat, because here the nothing was reflected in nothingness, the transparent in dust, one like the other grazed by the motionless pinion, both paralyzed by melancholy and in both, hunted and torn, the unheard hissing of death—
— but the Ciconean women, whom he had offended out of love for her who was dead, had torn the man into pieces during their bacchantic orgies at the feast of the gods, and scattered far and wide in the fields the limbs wasted away; the head too was torn from its marble neck, but still it retained its voice and, already seized by the paternal Hebrus in its swirling eddy, the head called back with its failing breath, “Eurydice, thou poor one,” and from the bank of the stream came back the echo, “Eurydice”—
—yet he was echoless, a dead reverberation in the desert mountains of Tartarus which had shot up to remain there forever, he was a mute echo in both worlds which were fading out without moving, a mute echo of a breath-wringing gasp in the dry chasms and in the crystal shafts of petrification; he was a sightless skull, rolled out into the stone rubble on the shadowy shores of oblivion, rolled under the dry, dense shrubbery on the shores of the shadowy stream, rolled toward a void so totally without egress that it extinguished oblivion itself; he was nothing but a blind eye, without trunk, without voice, without breath, emptied of breath, and thus he was thrown out to the vacuous blindness of the underworld: his task had been the casting off of shadows, instead of which he had created shadows, the great pledge of allegiance to earth had been laid upon him and he had been perfidious to it from the first, oh, he had been charged with the task of moving the stones from the sepulchre once again, so that humanity might rise to rebirth, so that the living creation as law, manifested in an ever-recurring contemporaneousness despite all changes of time, might not be interrupted, so that the god might again be awakened to this eternal presentness by the everlasting now of the sacrificial flames and forced back to the pledge of self-creation,— the god shaken by the pledge, torpidity checked by the pledge, the flames kindled by the pledge, oh, this had been his task and he had not accomplished it, he had not been allowed to accomplish it; even before he had been able to move the gravestones in order to fulfill the unknown pledge, aye, even before he could touch them, even before he had been able to lift his arms, these had become heavy, paralyzed and transparent, grown into the stony petrification, grown into the motionless, heterogeneous, dry and transparent stone flood, and this immobile flood, petrifying and petrified, penetrating from all the spheres toward the middle and shivering back again as far as the borders of the spheres, absorbing the living and unliving in its shadowy crystal, became a single stone, the sacrificial altar of the universe, ungarlanded, unwarmed, unshaken, immovable, became the grave-stone of the world, denuded of sacrifice, covering the inscrutable and itself inscrutable. OH, THE LOT OF THE POET! LOVE’S POWER OF REMEMBRANCE HAD FORCED ORPHEUS TO ENTER THE DEPTHS OF HADES, ALTHOUGH AT THE SAME TIME IT PREVENTED HIM FROM GOING FURTHER, SO THAT, LOST IN THE UNDERWORLD OF MEMORY, HE WAS PREMATURELY IMPELLED TO RETURN, UNCHASTE EVEN IN HIS CHASTITY AND RENT IN HIS CALAMITY. HE, UNLIKE ORPHEUS, HE, LOVELESS FROM THE BEGINNING, UNABLE TO SEND FORTH THE LOVING RECOLLECTION AND GUIDED BY NO MEMORY, HE HAD NOT EVEN REACHED THE FIRST LEVEL UNDER THE IRON RULE OF VULCAN, EVEN LESS THE DEEPER REALM OF THE LAW-FOUNDING FATHERS, AND STILL LESS THE MUCH DEEPER ONE OF THE NOTHING, WHICH GIVES BIRTH TO THE WORLD, TO MEMORY, TO SALVATION, HE HAD REMAINED IN THE TORPID EMPTINESS OF THE SURFACE. The unmastering, once having taken place, leaves nothing behind to be mastered, and the great life-bearing tides of enkindling and extinguishing, absorbed by the vast silence of the perception-drained, law-drained ignominy, these too were silenced; likewise the tides of beginning and ending, the tides of blazing perturbation and mildly-trickling reassurance, their mutual regeneration, that turns one into the other, were silenced; the universal entity, having forever lost its breath, its substance, its movement, its cohesion, was now stripped down to a silent glance amidst the universal silence, stripped to an encompassing view of pure nakedness in its visible invisibility, stripped to its glanceless-glancing, unalterable, final non-existence: stony the staring eye above, stony the staring eye below, oh, now it had come, the long-awaited, the always-feared, it had come at last, now he beheld it, now he must look into the namelessly inconceivable, into the inconceivable namelessness, for the sake of which he had fled through a lifetime, for the sake of which he had done everything to prepare for a premature ending of this life, and it was not into the eye of night that he looked, for the night had vanished into the petrification, and it was not fear, not horror, for it was greater than any fear or any horror, it was the eye of stony emptiness, the torn-open eye of a fate, which no longer participated in any occurrence, neither in the passing nor in the annulling of time, neither in space nor in spacelessness, neither in life nor in death, neither in creation nor in discreation, an unparticipating eye in whose glance there was no beginning, no ending and no concurrence, released from subsistence and survival, bound to subsist and survive only through the threat and the looming suspense, only by the element of time in the waiting interval that still continued, reflected in the continuing existence of the threatened one and in his threat-fearing glance, the threat and the threatened cast out to one another in the dregs of time. And flight was no longer possible, only its breathless gasping, and there was no going on—whither could it have led now?—and the gasping was like that of a runner who, having passed his goal, knows he has not met it and will never meet it, because in the no-man’s-land of perjury, this perjured un-space, through which he had been driven, only to be driven on and on, the goal could not be pledged and remained unvouched-for, aimless the creation, aimless the god, aimless the human being, the creation without echo, god and man without echo in the lawless reabandonment that gives birth to un-space. That which surrounded him no longer symbolized anything, it was a non-symbol, the very essence of the unreflectable and beyond reflection; it had the dolor of symbol-impoverishment, the dolor of vacuity, that was spacelessly submerged into every thing created in space and even dreamily submerged into the dormant humus of existence, divested of all symbol and yet containing the seed of every symbol, voided of space, yet like a final trace of time-borne beauty conditioned by space, the dream-sadness that dwelt in the depths of every eye, in the eye of the animal as in the eye of the man and the god, indeed, shimmered even in the universal eye of emptiness like a last sigh of the creation, mourning and mourned in the throes of a scarcely remembered chaos, as if vacuity originated in sorrow and sorrow likewise continued to stem from vacuity, as if in their oneness were implanted the primal doom of all incarnation, the evil that threatened everything human and divine, their common fear of fate, their common punishment by fate; on the one hand the fear of the perjurer condemned from the outset to perjury, on the other hand the punishment with which fate overruled even the gods, the punishment for the deed undone, the uncommitted wrong, the punishment determined by the unknown law, which was the loss of perception, and languishing in the prison of a blindly-compelled drowsiness, the HOPELESSNESS OF IMPERCEPTION IN ITS IMPERCEIVABLE NECESSITY: near and nearer it moved, driven by the mutely-gasping, breathless, unredeemed sorrow, yet so slow as to be immobile, lost in sorrow and evil, lost in an emptiness which absorbed even the sorrow and the evil; stony and leaden it arose from all the shafts of the inner and outer worlds, as if the threat were about to be consummated, the peering emptiness mounting like a thunderstorm; more and more threatening became the not-yet-encountered, stonier the compulsion of the glance, pushed near like a wall of silence, pushed nearer in a stupefying muteness which was his as well as that of all the spheres, burdensome and more than burdensome, more and more oppressive, the glance-widening gaze of terror which approached the lifeless middle; and the ego, caught and encircled by the middle, caught between the glance-walls, forced into the indiscrimination of inner and outer worlds, stifling in this double sadness, in the boundless, universal sorrow of the still-surviving existence, which lifts all multiplicity and all duplication into the vastness of its own immensity, thereby annulling it, the ego, too, was annulled, absorbed and crushed by immensity with its doleful emptiness, with its terrible foreboding that carried the twofold fright and the twofold horror while dissolving them; the ego, too, was dissolved, dissolved yet frozen into the glance of the surrounding threat, the glance-threatened ego having long since become no more than a blank stare; the threat-subjected ego was compressed to the last trace of its existence, was annihilated to the un-space where it was inchoate and unthinking, was thrown back to the minimal point of life at its ebb, unresistingly delivered to the clasp of emptiness; oh, it was thrown back, hurled back, propelled into the abasement of itself, flung into contrition, into utter contrition, humbled to a necessity from which there was no escape, to ITS OWN NECESSITY FOR CONTRITION, humiliated in the abjectness of the void which is the sheer ceasing of existence; the ego had lost its selfhood, had been stripped of its human qualities, nothing more remained to it save the naked soul’s most naked guilt, so that even the soul, having no more selfhood though yet immortal as the human soul, existed only in its contrite and empty nakedness, forced down and absorbed by the unmirrored emptiness of the threat-silent eye, unwitnessed the contrition, unwitnessed the ego, unwitnessed the soul, blankly abandoned to the power of the extinguishing glance, itself extinguished—; silence, emptiness, vacuity, muteness, yet behind the black-crystalline walls of the universal muteness, in the distanceless utter-distance of unbordered immensity, fading, inaudible, like a most desolate sound-image of existence, already beyond existence, thin, bright and female, frightening in its unspeakable smallness, a single point took sound, vibrating from the most inaccessible point of the spheres, its core of terror taking sound in a tiny titter, the vacant titter of emptiness, the tittering of the empty nothing. Oh, where was there help?! where were the gods?! was this which had happened the last emanation of their power, their revenge and retaliation for their abandonment again by abandoned mankind?! were the women-kind of the gods exulting over lost humanity and the inescapable perjury of the world?! Deafened now to any answer, he listened into the chaos, but the answer did not come, for the perjurer was not able to pose questions, as little able to question as the animal, and the stone was dead, dead without an echo to the unasked question, dead the stony labyrinth of the universe, dead the shaft on the very bottom of which the naked ego, abased to extinction, divested of both question and answer, barely existed. Oh, back! back into darkness, into dream, into sleep, into death! Oh, back, just to be back once more, fleeing and fleeing backward once again into the sphere of recognition! Oh, flight! but flight again? if there was still flight, if flight were actually possible, if he was actually meant to escape? he did not know, perhaps he had once known but now he knew nothing, he was beyond all possibility of knowing, seeing that he was in a void without knowledge, in the universal emptiness, beyond the agitation of flight, alas, the penitent is already beyond escape—, but dejected by his perjury, as if the perjurer himself must be broken, as if he should nevermore be allowed to stand erect, he felt himself flung to his knees, and bowing deeply under the immense burden of the blind-unmoving, invisibly-transparent universal emptiness, flight-benumbed, flight-paralyzed, the laden shoulders bent down, he sought with dry and lifeless hands blind-fingered for the wall of the room, touching with blind fingers the blind-fingered shadow on its moon-lit, moon-dry surface, he groped his way along it, accompanied by his deeply-bowed shadow, gliding near him, groped his way with violent trembling back into the darkness, unmindful of what he was doing or not doing, he felt his way to the wall-fountain, allured like an animal by the water, hankering for what was still earthly, still living, still moving; with hanging head he crept like an animal through the benumbed aridity toward the most animal of all goals, toward water, so that bent over in the sheerest animal necessity he might lap at the silver-trickling moisture.
WOE to that man who has not shown himself equal to the grace again bestowed upon him, woe to the penitent who cannot bear his penance, woe to the creaturely remnant of existence who will not put off his existence, alas, who cannot do so, because the extinguished memory persists in its emptiness; woe to that man, who despite his contrition remains unalterably undelivered, condemned to creatureliness! about him the laughter breaks out anew, and it is the laughter of horror, a laughter neither male nor female, neither that of the gods nor the goddesses, it is the empty tittering of the void, it is the remnant of vitality in the void that does not disappear for the mortal, that titters and breaks into laughter, the remnant which unveils itself as existence in nothingness, nothingness in existence, as the union of sham-life and sham-death, as the hilarious knowledge of this sham-dead existence, as the terrible and fearful remnant of knowledge amidst the emptiness, maniacal and inducing madness, becoming more and more intense until the emptiness is turned into naked horror. For the more that remorse gains ascendancy over the human being and strips him of his human essence, the more directly it takes hold on the creaturely and the bestial in human nature, the quicker it comes to grips with animal fear, the horror-hounded fear of the human being who has been hurled back into his creaturely loneliness and like a strayejected part of the flock cannot find its way back to the herd; this was the horrible fear implanted in all the herd-born from the beginning of things, the fear of a discarnate death-emptiness, and—at the final peak of fright, in the final deliverance to fear, almost beyond death—it was the mute terror of the beast that, alone in its littleness, invisibly overcome, bereft of consciousness, creeps trembling under some dark shrubbery so that no eye may watch it dying. Woe to the penitent whose soul is incapable of bearing the little loneliness laid upon it, its smallness comes to be unconsciousness, and the grace of humility becomes an empty degradation for him. Had it gone so far? His thinking was lowly, insofar as it still existed, his actions were those of an animal, insofar as there were any, and laughter, blindly hidden, waited within the inaudible; suddenly and without deliberation he had reached the bed and was crouching in it pitifully, his throat constricted, a dry coldness in his limbs, surrendered unconscious to the black-invisible omnipotence spread out doubly over the contrite and the creaturely, surrendered unconscious to a realm beyond fear, beyond terror, beyond horror, beyond death, yet he felt fear, terror, horror and death break out anew, feeling the horror in the intangible, perceptible, even in imperceptibility; he was let fall while yet being held, still held, held into the empty space of horror, oh, he was held into the horror and at the same time filled with horror: first and last memories touched each other, both lost and locked in loneliness within the thicket of life, the thicket of voices, the thicket of images, the thicket of memory, the beginning never dimmed, even though overshadowed by so many years, never dimmed the memory of the straying herd-animal, the memory of its primal horror, the only one which had remained, all others being but transformations of this solely terrible one that sat on every branch in the thicket of memory, tittering scornfully, laughing scornfully, laughing over the motionless encirclement of him who was hopelessly lost in the thicket, encircling him, itself the thicket, itself the impenetrable; the journey of memory was without movement, a journey of ceaseless beginnings and ceaseless endings, a journey across the un-space of memory, across the un-space of stagnated straying, across the un-space of the unrecallable trance-life; it proceeded without movement, a whizzing journey through all the transformations of un-space, inevitably accompanied and encompassed by them, dimensionless in their trance-stagnation, dimensionless in their trance-movement, always however within the undimension of horror, because it was the inescapable, the ever-present, the never-forsaken prison of the leaden trance of death, in the shadow of whose horror the sham-life of mankind plays itself out—he was held into the undimension of a trance-death. And even though he lay still, without moving a finger’s breadth in any direction, and even though the room about him did not change in the slightest, it seemed to him that he was being carried forward, yes, that he was being carried forward, drawn forward into the invisible by the invisible, by his fore-knowledge, by his fore-remembrance; now memory in all its diversity scurried past him as if to lure him on, as if by its means the journey could or should be accelerated, he was being carried forward to the goal of horror which had been there from the beginning, and the room floated with him, unaltered and yet disarranged as in travel, time-fixed and yet constantly in flux. Rigidly the amorini released themselves from the frieze and despite this they remained a part of it, the acanthus leaves, freed from paint and plaster, became human-faced and the stem, grown out to the crooked claw of an eagle, floated near the bed, opening and closing its talons as though wishing to test the strength of its grip; beards grew out of the leaf-faces and were sucked back again, they floated on in immobility, often turning over, often rotating in a motionless whirlwind; there came to be more and more of them, far more than the wall-painting contained even though it renewed itself constantly, they fluttered out of the frieze, they fluttered out of the bare wall, they fluttered from a nowhere, vomited forth from the bubbling cold volcanoes of nothingness, which were erupting everywhere in the visible and invisible, within and without, they were the lava of these volcanoes, the breathy detritus of a former existence and disintegration, becoming more diverse as they increased, shapes forming and being formed out of emptiness and, for all that, changing into one another as they fluttered along, transformed and untransformable stuff, fluttering like leaves and butterflies, some like arrows, some fork-tailed, some with tails like long whips, some so transparent that they only floated about, invisibly-mute like silent shouts of terror, many, on the other hand, as harmless as an idiotic-transparent smile, as numerous as sun-motes, as cumberless as ants, they swarmed vacantly about the candelabra in the center of the room, nipping at the spent candles, making way immediately, to be sure, for things that came storming, buzzing and dancing in their wake, more than pushed out by a press of hollow shapes in which, next to faces and non-faces, next to the twin-bodied Scyllas, strange seals, and bristling Hydras, next to the bloodily-hissing, bloodily-bound heads of tousled, snake-like hair, all sorts of deformities were scampering, and all kinds of hoofed creatures, half-starved or unfinished Centaurs or fragments of Centaurs, winged and unwinged, whizzed past, the orcus-pregnant space bursting with grotesque animal-life; toadish, lizardish, dog-footed creatures emerged, reptiles with innumerable legs, with no legs, with one, two, three, a hundred legs, at times wobbling in the bottomless pit, at others sailing past woodenly, stiffly a-sprawl, often pressed close together as if, with all their sex-lessness, they meant to mate in flight, often entering each other with arrow-like swiftness, as if they were hollow creatures of air, ether-born and ether-carried, surely that is what they were, for their winged horde, staggering, creeping, tumbling over one another, although they covered and concealed one another, could be seized and held easily by the glance even unto the last single speck and into the furthermost limits of the room packed full of them; oh, they were ether-scaled, ether-winged, ether-bred, abruptly spewed up from the volcanoes of the Aeons, torrential, voluminous, constantly evaporating, constantly vanishing, so that the room became empty again and again, as empty as the spheres, as empty as the whole world, with an emptiness through which trotted only a single horse, stamping alone high in the air with bristling mane, through which floated only a single male torso whose flatly transparent head, turned toward the bed, was distorted by hollow, scornful, mirror-laughter before it was once again swallowed in a newly-risen vermin-flood of horror—and not one of these creatures breathed, for there is no breath in latency; the room had become a chamber of furies and it offered space enough for the whole terrible occurrence, even though this waxed without let or hindrance: the ceiling had no need to lift, although the candelabrum had spread out to a gigantic tree, the candle-holders stretching immeasurably to become the towering, moist-leaved branches of an ancient, shade-giving elm, and in its foliage, leaf by leaf, thickly gathered as dew-drops, sat the hypocritical dreams; the walls had no need to widen although all the cities of the world lay between them, and all of them burning, the cities of the remotest past and remotest future, man-blatant, man-tortured cities, cities with foreign names which nevertheless he recognized, the cities of Egypt and Assyria and Palestine and India, the cities of the dethroned gods, come to helplessness, the pillars of their temples crashed, their walls shattered, their turrets broken, the paving-stones of their streets cracked open; and the smallness of the chamber sufficed for the vastness of the whole world, although city and field and sky and forest had not lessened in size, and everything, great and small together, revealed itself in an almost overpowering sameness of significance, this sameness suggesting that under the elm branches, as if their leafy shadows were high-flying thunder-clouds, the most terrible of cities, the largest and most accursed, were rising up in immeasurable vastness in the midst of ever-returning havoc—Rome, but humiliated, through whose streets, sniffing for prey, the wolves strolled to take their city again into their possession; the room encircled the globe, the cities encircled each other, not one of them was either inside or outside, all of them floating, while overhead, high above the volcanoes, high above the petrification, high above the foliage, cut off from everything, in the lofty gray dome of the sky, with a furious clatter of motionless, iron pinions, glinting and whirring like contraptions of steel, noiseless the birds of hate soared in wide, deep circles over the lands of abomination, ready with grim cowardice, with joyful fury, to swoop down with opened talons and sink their claws into the bloody fields, the bleeding hearts of the peasants, tearing at their entrails and devouring them, prepared to take their place in the train of wolves and butterflies passing the bed, fleeing with them to the outposts of defencelessness and comfortlessness, to the edge of the fiery craters and dragon-plants, never recognized, never named but always known, the snaky borders of animality. What further volcanoes of the pre-creation had now to be opened? what new monsters would they still disgorge? was not everything stripped to its final nakedness without that? was not the high peak of every conceivable horror already inherent in the encircling beastliness? Or was the transparency of fear leading on to a fresh knowledge of fear, to new fear on inconceivably new levels of primitivity? Everything was exposed, nothing could be grasped, nothing was allowed to be kept, all that remained was the trance-movement of the things in flight, all that persisted was the dusky gray light of a cold aimlessness in which nothing near or far, above or below, could be seen, while he, fleeing with the train of monsters, flying with them through the cold light, through the aimlessness, he was seized and held, held by a bodiless, flying plant-hand with wild, untamable fingers, and he recognized the trance-death, the gray rigidity through the un-space of which he was being carried: icy horror, devoid of symbols, such were the images which floated about him, these tailed things that were not animals, these gaping jaws that did not clutch, this lifted crest that did not strike, this spraying poison that did not land, attacking and encircling from the rear, transparency assailing transparency, empty in their threatening and, despite that, more terrible than any shout or seizure; horror itself had become transparent, the organic nature of naked horror had revealed itself, and in its depths of depths, in its furthest well-spring lay the serpent of time, closed to a circle, icily coiling about the trickling of nothingness. Yes, this was the rigid horror of trance-death, and the animal face was scarcely a face now, all that remained of it was the transparency of plant life, sprouting in stems, entangled in stems, twisting in tail-stems, controlled by snakestems, shooting up from some immeasurable, undiscoverable lattice-work of roots, its subanimality incorporated in it, the animal-face denuded to the horror of blankness, fed by the nothingness of the middle. No horror of death could compare with this fullness of horror, for this was the horror of trance-death, surrounded by subanimality, by the pre-animal; no fear of being wounded, of pain or of suffocation could equal this stifling horror, in the very intangibility of which nothing remained to grasp, because in the not yet created creation, in its no-breath, in its breath-need, there was nothing which one could grasp: this was the breath-need of the unfinished, the unborn creation, its absolute transparency in which animal, plant, and human, all of them transparent, resembling each other to sameness, were forced to suffocate one another because of their breath-robbing terror, because of their undelivered and undeliverable bondage to the nothing, because of their unlived, transparent lack of identification, because of their extreme sameness and hostility—all of them filled with the horrible fear of the animal, which recognizes the utterly amorphous animalhood of its own non-being, oh, the stifling horror of the universe! Oh, had this fear always existed? had he ever been free of it? Had it not always been a vain defense against the storm of horror? Oh, it had gone on night after night, year after year, as far off as youth, as near as yesterday; night after night in idle self-deception he had thought to listen to dying, but it had been only a defense from the horror of trance-death, a defense from the images of trance-death which had appeared night after night and of which he wished to know nothing, which he had refused to see and which had remained for all that—
Oh, who wants to sleep while Troy is burning! again and again! now are the waves of the sea set to foaming, churned by the oar-strokes, cut by the furrowing ships, as their triple-beaked prows cleave the waters …
—, the images persisted and were not to be banished; night after night terror had lifted him through the silence of the spectre-filled craters, through the unremembrance of the pre-creation, through the re-abandoned, aeon-far existence reversed to immediate proximity, across the gnarled, weary fields of complete desolation, deserted by all men and all things, creation abandoned anew. Night after night he had been led up to the cold unshakeable force of reality, to that unreal reality that comes before all the gods and outlasts all the gods and that puts the seal on their helplessness; he had caught sight of Moira, waiting gruesome and three-bodied, she in whose images all forms of sham-death are suggested, and he had tried to close his eyes to her paralyzed-paralyzing, powerless power, blind in his distraction, deaf to the coruscating giggling scorn of the nothingness which the helplessly sobered one is nevertheless unable to escape, deaf to the fateful, flat laughter of the pre-creation which makes him aware of the impossibility of mastering the nameless, the indiscriminate, the unformed, and prompts him to contrition; oh, thus had it been, bearing the inevitable threat, warding off the inevitable; the years were like the flowing on of a single night, flooded with images, bedevilled with images, capering with images, borne along by images in a standstill of horror, and the thing that unremittingly and irresistibly had announced itself night after night could no longer be averted; it was a horror-cramp of tranced prostration in which he would lie, constrained by his coffin, constrained by his grave, stretched out for the immobile journey, he alone, without support, without intercession, without succor, without mercy, without light, without eternity, surrounded by the imperturbable, stony slabs of the sepulchre which would open for no resurrection. Oh, the tomb! it was here also in the narrow chamber, also touched by the elm-branches, danced about by furies, stormed by the fury-scorn, ah, even the tomb seemed to scorn itself as well as the self-deception to which he had clung, scorning his childish hopes which had betrayed him into believing that the quiet immutability of the Bay of Naples, that the serene sunny majesty of the sea with its far-reaching memories of home, that the power inherent in such landscapes would gently attend the act of dying and change it to an unsung, unsingable music, a music which would awaken life, forever hearkening, forever hearkened to, awaken it to death; oh, scorn and more scorn, now that the edifice stood devoid of space, devoid of landscape, with nothing opening beyond it—no sea, no coast, no fields, no mountains, no stone, not even the amorphousness of the primodial clay—nothing but the intangible waste, incomprehensibly horrible in its very nothingness, a naked scorn-edifice, surrounded by that ever-undulating flood in which he floated and was carried along with the grotesque animals on every side, swirled into and borne floatingly onward by the stuffy, breathless, parched, undrinkable ether-glair, which was neither air nor water, borne onward by the transparent fumes of every flaming fear, by this no-breath of the whole pre-creation which vanished like a sort of dry sifting between the fingers; and even in this terribly animal-sated, animal-pregnant, animal-dripping, ethereal element-absorbing him who had fallen back into animality—half-birds were perching on the roof-top, terrible grave-birds with fishy eyes in a crowded row, owl-headed, goose-beaked, pig-bellied, gray-feathered with feet that were merely human hands webbed for swimming, brooding birds flown from no countryside, whose flight was unfit for any land. Thus they crouched in the nakedness of terror, glowering and perching close to one another, and thus also stood the tomb crowned by them, as much within the bay-window as outside there in the unreachable, sought-for distance. Layer on layer, one above the other, the bareness of a no-heaven was covered by the round bow of the bay-window, both arching over the sepulchre, both permeated by un-space even though shot through by the velvet blackness of the whole star-studded round of the sky, and the domes of the universe were intergrown by elms in an immeasurable expansion of all discrepancies and distances which, at the same time, was an immeasurable contraction of them; the landscape-lack pierced the landscape and was pierced by it, the un-space pierced space and was pierced by it, symbolic in its lack of symbol, just as the animal element penetrated the trance-death and was penetrated by it in turn; the symbols of life had died away, spent like the starry animal formations of the heavens, their meaning fulfilled and full of meaning; they had grown cold under the bareness that covered them, but the symbols of death remained, if only in the symbolic bareness of the inexpressible, unthinkable, unimaginable pre-creation; they remained in the creaturely, expressionless, animal grimace, in these images of horror creeping out of trance as if stemming directly from emptiness, reflecting nothing and reflected in nothing, image and counter-image united in the nullity of expression inherent in every deep, primal loneliness which, never-comprehended, always known, always feared, coils in the aeonic depths of time and creaturely animality; the cycle of the symbolic closes itself in latency, closes itself there in the pre-creation’s mingling of the spheres, closes itself there where nothing has a connection with anything else and where the empty, aeonic distance revolves to become visible in the vacant grin of the animal, as if the conscious image of primal loneliness had been carried through endless cycles of images, from semblance to semblance, in order to reveal itself in ultimate nakedness at the very imageless end; and in this revelation, in this mutely thundering outbreak of the uncreated and its loneliness, breaking out with all the malice which corresponds to the baffled, displaced aggressive greed in the blank animal grimace, the evil becomes manifest, the evil behind all creation and uncreation, behind the pre-creation and all lonely distance, threat-boding and disclosed in the oppressiveness of the trance-death, implying ominously that all paths of reversion, that all ways of insensitivity, of dalliance, of intoxication lead unhesitatingly to animality, that all ways of beauty end squarely in the grotesque. And on the roof of the sepulchre which was to have transformed death into beauty sat the chain of evil birds. On every side the cities of the globe were burning in a landscape devoid of scenery, their walls crumbled, their flag-stones cracked and burst asunder, the fumes of decay on their fields reeking of blood; and the godless-godseeking lust of sacrifice raged everywhere, sham-oblation after sham-oblation was heaped up in a frenzy of sacrifice, men mad with sacrifice raged all about, slaying the next in turn in order to shift their trance onto him, razing their neighbor’s house and setting it in flames in order to lure the god into their own; they stormed about in evil vehemence and evil rejoicing,—oblation, slaughter, brand and demolition giving honor to the god in the way he willed it, in order to deafen his own horror and his own knowledge of fate, he who, to this end, being greedy for laughter and destruction, had unchained human belligerence, the belligerence of intoxication and of sacrifice and, having become impotent, participated in and enjoyed it, gods and men driven and more than driven by the same furiously destructive fear, the fear of being petrified in stony isolation, the fear of trance, the fear of insensibility, driven into a deadlock by the murderous, merry-making pandemonium of the gods, by the murderous game of men, by the volcano of nothingness in the soul, from which the fire flooded out in a flowing un-element and stood still; the cities burned without ashes, the flames licked like stiffly-erected tongues, like upstanding scourges lashing up from no depths, indeed, below the torn, frayed surface which had opened out of itself, there was no second surface, there was no depth at all, the flames being composed of the hard, serrated surface itself, and about them roared the stark-yelling thicket of paralyzed voices, their cries nothing more than terrible, fanglike shadows, roared the mute storm of the re-abandoned and shattered creation: rigid new structures rose out of the ruins on every side, they grew upward into the drab, gray light, into the lightlessness of the light-stripped waste, growing out of the emptiness and yet having always been there, hopelessly standing there since time out of mind for the glorification of lasting murder, for the perpetuation of evil, structures of spurious life, of spurious death, their cornerstones drenched in blood, leaning heavily on life, and no amount of blood was able to fuse the constructions, the encirclements, the petrifications of evil with the law and into the stream of creation, no exorcism was able to uncoil the icy serpent by the renewal of the pledge; pre-creation was stronger than creation: the trance was the state of the unborn, it was the obstacle in the orbit of creation, evading and opposing the creation, itself a state of uncreation, itself up as a monument and making itself into a tomb; it remained robbed of speech, conscious of guilt and with subsided breath; it remained despite its stony monumentalness unperpetuated and without permanence and, having shaken off the creation, it had come to be a grave from which there was no rebirth. Thereupon the dome of the un-space, the dome of the no-heaven itself became a single cavernous tomb, imbedded in the serpentine windings of the celestial viscera, imbedded in the god-rejected viscera which bear the humus of existence, where fate is astir and makes itself known regardless of time; and he was being carried into this cave as to a homecoming; the journey was leading there and, although he was cast out of heaven, himself intergrown with serpents, nevertheless he lay imbedded in the celestial viscera. What a shuffling of inside and outside! What a terrible reversion! On every side the tomb-streets and tomb-cities of the death-inhabited world were ablaze, on every side the stony aimlessness of human fury glared forth, as did the jubilation, the sacrificial madness of men; on every side the cold flames of human passion stood stiffly erect, and humanity was being discreated, the creative gods were being dethroned amidst the stony snarling of the dying creation, denuded by death—, the decree of the distracted gods confused by their belligerent fear, the decree which had to be enacted for purposes of their own. For creation demanded continual resurrection; creation consummated itself only in continuous rebirth, enduring only as long as there was resurrection and not a moment longer; oh, only he might become a creation, only he might be called a creature, who descended again and again to the fires of rebirth, taking unflagging care lest the unvanquished should rise again, lest the maternal uncreated should break out to stony muteness; oh, only he was created who gave issue to creation, who, in ascending, brought himself as offering, without reservation and absolved from reversion, without reverting to intoxication, aye more, without any turning back for verification or identification, putting off from himself all carnal fear, putting off also the last carnal desire; oh, only then are we creatures of creation, when we have stripped off all carnality, when we have learned to separate ourselves from even the knowledge of carnality and what lies behind it, when we have roused ourselves to accept our final penance with humility, when we are able to obliterate our own graves! And when, uneasily and dream-far, this realization came to him, who lay there as if in a dream, and when a voice from a second dream whispered into the first one, as if breaking once more through the fear, revengefulness, and impotence of the gods, as if yet again and perhaps for the first time they were exercising a bounteous mercy, as if that mysterious, wordless whisper issued directly from the horrible, once again shattered fear of the gods themselves, murmuring that he was to have courage—courage for extinction, courage for belittlement, courage for submission, courage for the redemption of contrition—he could hear in this whispering wordlessness, that was like a language beyond language, a much narrower condensation of meaning, a wordless word from a dream still more remote than the second one, a softer, more urgent murmuring, incomprehensible although summoning to action, scurrying off and dying away, yet being the strictest order, the imperative command that everything which had served a false life, and confirmed it, must disappear so completely as never to have been, evaporating into the inconsequential, disintegrated into the nothingness, divorced from all memory, divorced from knowledge, forced back from everything that had existed in men as well as in things, oh, it was the command to abolish everything that had been done, to burn everything that he had ever written or composed, oh, all his writing would have to be burned, all, and the Aeneid besides; that is what he heard within the inaudible, but before he had extricated himself from the stupefaction with which he had stared toward the motionless chain of half-birds crouching on the eaves of the building, a gradual wave seemed to flow over the blanched plumage, flowing and drifting airily, one wave and then another, and suddenly in a spume of noiselessness the swarm had flown aloft, as though lifted up without flight and dissolved to invisibility, so that the familiar housetop could be seen for a second, just for this single second however, for in the next one the building crashed down, not less noiselessly than the wing-beats of the birds which had flown away, not less airily transformed into invisibility; sucked into the nothingness. And when he had realized this the lack of sound began to change, and it changed to stillness; the torpidity turned to calmness, the motionless journey which had carried him on came to an earthly halt, the spectres—in the shapes of plants and animals, and finally in that of a single, flaming-haired fury with pale transparent body and streaming locks—no longer accompanied him, instead they glided past him; they glided thither where the sepulchre had sunk down and they sank after it, one after the other absorbed in the empty duskiness of the shadowy crater; and even though this emptiness stared back at him horribly like a threatening counter-eye, and yet his own, a final threat of horrible emptiness, when the last of the harpies had vanished within it, it too was seized by dissolution; the sucking force came to be an all-inclusive peace, came to be profundity, came to be the eye of earthly night, the eye of dream, large and heavy with ethereal tears, resting on him its dark-gray velvety gaze, lightly embracing him who was delivered from dream while yet in a dream; opened in returning, the night was again to be seen, and in the uttermost depths of its glance the small yellow-tipped flame of the oil lamp flickered up again—oh, a star, and near at hand—, beaming in the moonless, nocturnal peace of the chamber, its peace regained and in readiness for sleep, the frieze scarcely recognizable, the walls darkened which encased only the familiar earthly furniture as if it had never been otherwise; this was coming back though not homecoming, this was recognition without remembrance, it was a mild revival, and yet, it was an extinguishment even milder, it was deliverance and imprisonment indescribably merged into dissolution, becoming miraculous by being accepted. The wall-fountain drizzled softly, the darkness became mildly moist, and though nothing stirred in any shape or manner, the muteness was un-muted, the numbness un-numbed, time became more yielding, more living, released from the silvery-cold stare of the moon and free to move once more, so that he, likewise freed of his fixation, was able to raise himself slowly, albeit with utmost effort; resting on palms whose outstretched fingers probed into the mattress, with his fever-hot head sunk a little between his hunched shoulders, thrust slightly forward and trembling a bit from his effort, he listened into the softness, and his listening pertained just as much to the clemency of the returning life-stream, which was not to be checked by any fever, as to the scarcely-emerged, scarcely-captured, now scarcely-capturable command from the dream, the command which had bidden him destroy his writing and which he now wished to hear in reality, which he must hear, so that he might be more certain of salvation: much as he wished to hear and fulfill it, the hidden command was unfeasible, it remained unfeasible until a wording for the whispering wordlessness could be found, and in the mysterious, great uncertainty that encompassed him the command to get back to words was forcibly at work; the walls of silence still surrounded him but they had ceased to be threatening; the fright still continued but it was a fright without fear, it was fearlessness within fright; the innermost and outermost borders still turned in toward and into each other, but he sensed how his listening dissolved or united them, not, to be sure, to an earlier order of understanding, certainly not to a human order, an animal order, a material order, not to a world-order in which formerly he had moved and which, extinguished along with his extinguished memory, no longer existed and never would exist for him again; and neither was it the unity of the beautiful nor that of the world’s shimmering loveliness which disclosed itself, no, it was none of these, but rather that of a ringing tide within the incomprehensible, streaming in and out with the night, the unremembered-remembering of a sojourn in which the uncompleted had completed itself, connected with a longing for creation in a last arch-loneliness unspeakably beyond attainment, in an unimaginably fresh recollection of utter cleanliness and chastity; and that which his listening perceived was contained in the flood of longing, coming from the outermost darkness and vibrating simultaneously in his innermost ear, in his innermost heart, in his innermost soul, wordless within him, wordless around him, the hailing and humbling, quietly great power of the twofold, runic first-cause, holding him and fulfilling him as his listening became more profound; but soon it was no longer a crooning or a whispering but rather a mighty booming, a booming, however, which was carried to him through so many layers of present-experience, past-experience, future-experience, through so many layers of remembering and not-remembering, through so many layers of obscurity, that it did not even reach the strength of a whisper; no, it was not a whispering, no, it was the unison of countless voices, and beyond that it was the unison of all voice-herds, ringing up from all the reaches and recessions of time, singing and clanging and booming of safety and seclusion, perturbing by mildness, comforting by sadness, unattainable in its longing, inexorable, irrefutable, unalterable in spite of its great remoteness, becoming more and more commanding, singing more and more alluringly the more meanly his ego abased itself, the more his resistance gave way and he opened himself to the sound, the more he despaired of actually comprehending the greatness of the voices, the more his knowledge of his own unworthiness grew; and overcome by the bronze omnipotence, overcome by its gentleness, overcome by anxiety for his work that was to be snatched from him, overcome to desiring the judgment that would demand just that, overcome by fear as well as hope, overcome to the point of extinction and self-extinction for life’s sake, imprisoned and liberated within the compass of his own insignificance, unconsciously-conscious under the power of the unformable, yearned for, universal chorus, that which he had long known, long suffered, long understood was wrung from him, escaping him in a tiny, inadequate expression of the inexpressible, looming large as the aeons, escaped him in a moan, in a cry: “Burn the Aeneid!”
HAD THE words formed themselves in his mouth? he scarcely knew, he did not know at all, and yet he was not surprised by an echo, almost an answer: “You called?” sounding so tender and familiar, almost homelike, from a nowhere unbelievably near or unbelievably far, a sound floating into indistinctness if not into infinity, if not into the longed-for place of the universal chorus, and for a moment he thought it was Plotia, he thought he heard the floating darkness of her voice, as though he might, as though he must expect her in the re-calmed, re-dewed, reassembled night, perceiving, however, with even greater certainty and in the next moment, that it had been the voice of the boy, and the unsurprised naturalness with which he accepted his return was so lightly mundane in its nature, flowing so easily between earthly shores and for this very reason unconcerned whether they betokened joy or disappointment, that he became quite worried lest he should interrupt this flow by even a glance or turn of the head; he lay there with closed eyes and he did not stir. And he was unaware how long this lasted. But then it seemed to him as if again words were forming in his mouth, as if he said: “Why have you returned? I wish to hear you no longer.” Once again he did not know whether he had spoken aloud, whether the boy was actually in the room, whether an answer could be expected or not, this was a floating sort of expectation, like that when a lyre is being tuned somewhere before the song rings out, and again there resounded quite near and yet remote as if coming hither from the sea, encompassed and glistening softly in the moonlight: “Do not push me off.”—“But,” he countered, “you are in my way.
1 comment