B007P4V3G4 EBOK (19 page)

She began to worry fretfully about those thousands of things.
She had realised that her spouse, Don Juanito, was a most proper
and virtuous human being, man and son, doing penance for his
father's sins; he was blameless and faithful as no other. Faithful? Most
certainly: every night Don Juanito's conjugal back would curve
next to hers in the dark velvet half-light. Until Dona Sol's thoughts
and feelings became confused, confounded-confused, and one fine
day, kneeling on her prie-Dieu, she directed her morning prayer
not to the Mother of God to Don Juan, whom, in secret,
she bore such a great devotion.

This was a sacrilege of which this sweetest, now rather fretful
little woman did not become aware. But the one who did become
aware of it was Don Juan himself - his soul, I believe - who after a
time of punishment in Hell, through heavenly compassion had
been given entrance to Purgatory in order to have the chance to
be purified. Don Juan, still by no means turned into a saint in the
no longer bright-scarlet but sulphurous yellow flames of Purgatory,
heard Dona Sol's prayer and quiet lament, and decided, having
consulted the purgatorial authorities, to help his daughter-in-law.
Don Juan had probably been too sinful: Don Juanito was probably
too virtuous. It's curious, this issue of sin and virtue: on earth,
nobody seems to have cracked it; earth, heaven and hell between
them don't quite seem to have cracked it either. In any case, that
sinful Don Juan was given permission by his purgatorial superiors
to go and debauch that virtuous Don Juanito, his son, just a little
bit. And one fine evening, when Don Juanito was returning home
along the dark streets of Seville after his game of
dark very early in the virtuous intention of laying
down his back to rest beside that purest contoured little back of
Dona Sol, there emerged from the paving supernatural
seemed to shelter quite frequently below ground in those days -
the ruddy-red spirit of Don Juan.

Son took severe fright from father. Father did look rather
scorched and Bengal-fire-surrounded yet he was still the same
dashing cavalier, though no longer such a superb Don
Juan truly had purged much of his sublime ill-doing already, in order to prepare himself to be received by Saint Peter - some day.
Even so, son took severe fright from father, but Don Juan calmed
Don Juanito down. After the first, ruddy appearance, he made
himself invisible and walked on alongside his son. His phantom
arm, however, was curved across Juanito's shoulder. And he was
whispering in Juanito's ear ...

'So you are my Juanito whispered back, still startled
and looking askance.

'I am your father whom you barely knew', said the spirit of Don
Juan. 'Dear boy, at last I have appeared to you. Do not be afraid of
me: truly, I'm busy Lately I have been as chaste as
you on the Sabbath Night, and now, in my new surroundings,
there's no such thing as living it up ... They are all very satisfied
with me: all of them. But, you I must have a talk with you.
Your mother - God have mercy on her boring soul! - was not the
wife for me. However, had I been allowed to have a wife such as
my darling daughter-in-law, such as Dona Sol certainly is to
you...'

Confidentially, Don Juan continued to talk at his son's ear
without the occasional passer-by and the Sereno, who cried the
hour of the night, seeing anything of the paternal spirit who
walked with his living son ... And gradually it seemed to Don
Juanito that his father, whom he had always disapproved of
severely, had not been an entirely bad man ...

'I,' Don Juan entrusted his son; 'never went to a Jesuit school,
though I do believe that studies are good there ... What should I
tell you, my boy. I was an unmanageable lad. My first love was
my nursemaid and when my good old parents saw that, they did
not think of the Jesuit school but they locked me up in that same
cellar underneath the dining room through which I passed into
Hell later That's very good in Mozart's opera; I mean, in the
opera which, in a later century, a certain Mozart will write about
me. But then there will be another artist who will compose a great
poem about me: he shall be called Byron and his verses will excel
in their Do you hear, my boy? About you no composer
will make an opera nor a poet an

'Still, I have been more virtuous than you, 0 beloved father,'
asserted Don Juanito.

'My dear man, what is virtue and what is vice?' the shade of Don
Juan asked Don Juanito, and the one philosophised a long while at the
other's ear during that evening walk through quiet nighttime Seville.

Don Juanito listened attentively and occasionally would nod his
head in agreement with a movement that this indeed might be so
... He asked his father to tell him about his second love now he
had already told him about the nursemaid, after all. Don Juan told
his son of many loves, though not of all which Leporello had once
accounted for in the long list. Now, Don Juanito shook his head
disapprovingly again the way a sensible and living human being
does to an altogether too frivolous spirit who wishes to conjure up
all kinds of things for him.

'No,' said Don Juanito, 'so much waste of the vital force is not
right, is not proper, and only granted to an epic soul such as you
who will later be glorified in rhyme and rhythm and music.
Though I might admit to you...'

What exactly Don Juanito admitted to, I would not be able to
give away, just like that; I do believe, however, that Don Juan's
opinion on Marriage as being a divine and human, as well as
religious and social institution did make Don Juanito think.

You must not forget, my good fellow,' said Don Juan: 'that I
had blown the lot. That last banquet for my Stone Guest ... cost
fifty thousand ducats and ... those were my more or

'My mother, Dona Elvira,' Don Juanito held forth: 'you left her
behind almost without a penny.'

'Your wife is rich, is she not?' asked Don Juan.

We are comfortably off,' Don Juanito confirmed.

'Did you know,' whispered Don Juan: 'that she can petition for
divorce? And that she will do when the spirit comes over her?'

Don Juanito gave a start.

'Father!' he cried. 'Father! What was that you said? Truly?! Oh,
what good fortune that you warned me, beloved father! That your
spirit ... may come over me!'

'Truly?' asked Don Juan.

'I believe so!' cried Don Juanito. 'I'm almost sure!'

'Then home at once, where your wife awaits you!' cried Don
Juan and without Don Juanito having to take out his front door
key, because of the supernaturalness of the mise-en-scene, the spirit
of the father pushed the body of his son through the front door
... Moved, Don Juan remained, alone.

'He will become a good husband,' he thought. 'A faithful husband.
An impeccable husband ... There was something of his mother in
him: there is also something of his father in

And he disappeared in a glow of Bengal light through the
paving in the street.

That night, that little head, the sun-blonde one belonging to Dona
Sol, was slumbering, turned towards the darkly outlined face of
Don Juanito, Don Juan's son.

And next day she gained her husband's permission to softfurnish their bedroom, instead of with black velvet, with pink
muslin held up everywhere in soft pleats by gilded, fat-legged
cupids. The Rococo period was just beginning at the time.

Johan Andreas Der Mouw

There was a monastery in the forest and the summer morning lit
up in a distant haze.

And a young monk emerged from the monastery, a prayer book
in his hand, and he went into the forest.

And a little white bird flew round him that settled on a branch
and began to sing, and he listened.

And the little bird sang, and he listened.

And clouds came and clouds went and the little bird sang, and
he listened. And the bird flew away, and he went back to the
monastery with the prayer book in his hand.

And the monk who opened the gates did not know him and the
prior and the other monks did not know him.

And there was an old man who lay dying, for he was very old,
and he said that fifty years earlier a young monk with the prayer
book in his hand had gone into the woods and had never returned,
and in him-whom-no-one-knew he recognised the young monk.

And fifty years had passed since he listened to the little white
bird and to him they had been but an instant.

For eternity is a second; time stands still to him who leaves the
world of semblances and submerges himself in the Eternal Sea of
Beauty and Rationality. Semblances are the many-eyed laughter of
the Spring meadow and the weeping of denuded forest.

The earth is but a semblance when, with green leaf-flags and
green waving sea-robes, it swerves round the sun.

The stars are semblances, distant fire-flies in the fields of the
night. The time shall come when no meadow laughs any longer
nor forests weep; when the earth sinks down with fatigue, like a
child that has been playing a long time; when the fire-flies die.
World-twilight is coming and Space disappears and Time disappears
and Sorrow disappears. The World shall fall away like the cocoon
round a butterfly, and God shall Think in sorrowless peace. I wish
to dive into my soul. Down there, on soft-sanded soil, in bluegreen dusk, pale red flowers bloom; the finely scalloped petals are still and they muse. High above them, the waves roll and the
storms gambol, and they do not notice; and Summer, with its lilacpurple steeds and its cracking fire-whip, rides past, and they do not
notice; and slanting rain-squalls and white-whirling
do not notice. They grow quiet and stand soundless in the peaceful
dusk.

Hunger for knowledge for my life-raft, I wish to descend into
the dark country. Or do you think you know it because, when
staring down, you see a strange reflection there where the green
transparency ends?

And when I caress your hair and say to you that I love you -
when you hear unspoken words and can feel my thoughts come
and go, do you believe that those binoculars will tell you what
blooms unfathomably deep? They, who roamed for fifty centuries
across the Asiatic plains and saw the silent stars migrate, remembered the returning changeability, the changeable regularity of
their trajectory and bethought themselves to know what was their
nature. And yawning telescopes sucked the light miracles closer by
and mirrors and lenses stared through the universe; and the
bundles of light, rarefied obelisks, told of distant worlds, of distant
times, in multi-coloured hieroglyphics; like a child making a maybeetle fly in a circle, thus science showed errant comets the path
they would follow. But does the child know which co-operating
bifurcations of muscle and nerve-tissue make the beetle fly?
Likewise, we do not know the power that carries and inspires the
long-living light-beetles. Nor dost thou know what miracles grow
in the mystical twilight of my soul.

That which I shall find there, down below, I wish to show it to
thee; reverently shalt thou stroke the tender petals and bend back
with gentle finger that which is warped. For not every plant has
grown the way its original nature wished and needed it to. There
is a Power that lured the sprouting twigs away from the direction
first embarked upon and forced them into capriciousness, that
made the flowers bend round on their stems and made the calyxes
point toward an identical spot. The way sunflowers look, ever look
toward their ambulant ideal, the bright Sunflower: from the moment
she is lifted above the horizon by the invisible stem until she ends
her tremendous circle at the other world's end, thus my mysterious
flowers stare at one single miracle image.

For it was not always a quiet-happy field here, full of dreamy
stillness and expansive peace; now there hangs a calm over the unmoved garden the way still-hovering sanctity mists around a
golden autumn-forest; now the Hours have unlearned their rushing
course and they lie in the calyxes like sleeping butterflies. A forest
stood here once, great with heavy trunks; the rich primaeval power
of the Being of things had raised them up and bore the weight of
their growth; it nourished them all with equal love, the one into a
fruit-cascading blessing, the other into an assassinating curse.

For, to Him who is all, there is no Good and no Sin, nor is there
day or night; He forces himself to create willing weapons with
which to combat Himself; having abandoned eternal-pondering
perfection, strifeless peace, he wages war on Himself.

He has chased himself out of a spaceless, timeless paradise and
wishes to make the wall, built by thoughtless striving, fall; this is
why He took Time into service which slung humming centuries
against the endless bastion and powdered it to star-rubble that he
further wrenches loose with drilling seconds; and on this his Sacred
Master set his triumphant foot, in order, at last, having blossomed
into a human soul, to grow and enter the earlier sanctity.