Pictor's Metamorphoses (12 page)

Not as a mere curiosity, but because many people may be inclined to think seriously about it, I present here that sketch from June 1914. [1924]

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I
WAS ALONE
and helpless and saw it grow dark and formless everywhere, and searching I ran to find out whither all brightness had fled. And I saw a new building whose windows were radiant, and over its doors light burned clear as day, and I went in through a gateway and entered an illuminated hall. Many people had assembled here and sat silent and attentive, for they had come to the priests of knowledge to find consolation and light. On a raised platform before the people stood one of the priests, a quiet man dressed in black, with wise, weary eyes, and he spoke to the large audience in a clear, mild, compellingly serene voice. But before him on luminous screens were numerous images of the gods, and now he stepped in front of the God of War and told how once, in times gone by, this god had arisen out of the needs and wishes of a people, who had not yet recognized the unity of all the powers of the world. No, these people from an earlier time could only see the particular manifestation, and so they required and created a particular divinity for the sea, and for dry land, for the hunt and for war, for the rain and for the sun. And just so had the God of War arisen, and the servant of wisdom explained clearly and distinctly where the first images of that god had been raised, and when the first sacrifices had been made to him—until later, with the triumph of knowledge, this god had become superfluous.

With a motion of the priest's hand, the image of the God of War was extinguished and vanished, and in its place on the screen rose a picture of the God of Sleep, and this image, too, was explained—oh, far too quickly, for I would have liked to hear much more about this benign god. After his image sank out of sight, there appeared in succession the God of Drunkenness, and the God of Joyous Love, and the Goddesses of Agriculture, of the Hunt, and of Domesticity. In its particular form and beauty, each of these divinities flashed like a salutation and reflection from the distant youthful days of humanity. And all were accounted for individually, along with the reasons they had long ago become superfluous. One image after another was extinguished and vanished, and every time this happened, a small and distinct exultation of the spirit, mingled with a feeling of gentle compassion and regret, pulled at our hearts. But a few people laughed continually, clapped their hands, and cried out “Away with it!” whenever another image of a god vanished at the signal of the learned man.

Listening intently, we learned that birth and death, love and envy, hate and anger no longer required special emblems, because, of late, humanity had had enough of all these gods, having recognized that no individual powers or properties resided in either the human soul or the interior of the earth and sea. On the contrary, there was only the great ebb and flow of the one original force, the investigation of whose essence henceforth would be the great task facing the human spirit. In the meantime, whether through the fading of the images, or as the result of other causes unknown to me, the hall had grown more and more dark and dusky, and so I realized that—even here in this temple—no pure and eternal source would illuminate me, and I resolved to flee this house and seek out brighter climes.

But before my resolve had turned to action, I saw the duskiness of the hall grow even murkier, and the people began to feel uneasy, to scream, to crowd and push one another like sheep frightened by a sudden storm, and no one wanted to listen to the wise man's words any longer. A horrible anguish and closeness had settled on the multitude; I heard sighs and groans and watched the frenzied people storm toward the gates. The air was clouded with dust thick as sulfur fumes, it had grown dark as night, but behind the high windows a turbulent incandescence—as of fire—flared muddy red.

My senses left me, I lay on the ground, and countless fugitives trod me with their shoes.

When I came to and raised myself on my bleeding hands, I was all alone in an empty, devastated house, whose crumbling walls split and threatened to crash down on top of me. And I could hear an indistinct din of distant thunder and desolate echoes raging. And through the shattered walls the luminous air, like an agonized, bleeding countenance, pulled away involuntarily from the glowing incandescence. But the suffocating closeness was gone.

As I now crept forth from the ruins of the Temple of Knowledge, I saw half the city in flames and the night sky suffused with pillars of flame and trails of smoke. The dead lay scattered among the debris; it was quiet all about, and I could hear the crackling and blistering of the distant sea of flames, but behind it, out of an even greater distance, I heard a wild and anxious howling, as though all the peoples of the earth raised their voices in one endless scream or sigh.

The world is going under, I thought, and this notion so little surprised me, it seemed as though I had been waiting a long time for just that to happen. But now, from amid the burning and collapsing city, I saw a boy come toward me. His hands were buried in his pockets and he hopped and skipped from one leg to another, resilient and light-hearted. Then he stopped and emitted an ingenious whistle—our signal to one another from Latin School days, and the boy was my friend Gustav, who had shot himself when he was a student. Immediately I too became, like him, a boy of twelve, and the burning city and the distant thunder and the blustering storm of howling voices from all the corners of the world sounded wondrously exquisite to our newly awakened ears. Now everything was good, and the dark nightmare in which I had lived for so many despairing years was gone forever.

Laughing, Gustav showed me a castle with a high tower, and just as he pointed, it all came tumbling down. Never mind if the things perished, no cause for sorrow. Newer and more beautiful things could be built. Thank God Gustav had come back! Now life had meaning again.

An enormous cloud had gathered above the ruins of the splendid buildings, and we stared at it in expectancy and silence; out of this dust cloud a monstrous form broke free, craning its divine head and raising its colossal arms, and it stepped, victorious, into the smoke-filled world. It was the God of War, just as I had seen him in the Temple of Knowledge. But he was alive and gigantic, and his face, lit by flames, smiled proudly in happy, boyish exuberance. And we followed him—our enraptured hearts beating wildly—as if on wings, above the city and the fire, rashly storming away into the broad, fluttering, stormy night.

On a high mountaintop the war god stood exultantly shaking his round shield, and lo—from all the ends of the earth remote gods and goddesses, demons and demi-gods arose and approached him, huge, holy, and splendid. The God of Love came floating, and the God of Sleep came staggering; the Goddess of the Hunt strode slender and severe, and on and on, gods without end. And when, blinded by the nobility of their figures, I cast down my eyes, I saw that I was no longer alone with my cherished friend, but surrounding us on bended knees were a new people, who knelt in the night to the returning gods.

The Painter

A
PAINTER
by the name of Albert could not in his early years achieve the effects or results he desired with the pictures he painted. He went off by himself and decided to rely entirely on his own judgment. For years he tried to do this. But more and more it was evident that he alone was not enough. He sat working on the portrait of a hero, and while he painted, time and again came the recurrent thoughts: Is it really imperative for you to do what you are doing? Do these pictures really and truly need to be painted? Wouldn't it be just as well for you and for everyone else if you merely spent your time taking walks or drinking wine? What more are you doing with your painting than dulling your nerves a little, forgetting yourself a little, whiling away the time?

These thoughts were not conducive to good work. In time, Albert virtually stopped painting altogether. He went out for walks, he drank wine, he read books, he took trips. But he was not content doing these things either.

Often he had to reconsider those wishes and hopes he had when he initially took up painting. And he remembered what they had been: he had hoped there would emerge a strong and beautiful connection, a current between himself and the world, something powerful and intimate that would perpetually vibrate and make gentle music. In painting heroes and epic landscapes, Albert had sought to appease and express his inner self, so that later—reflected in the appreciative eyes and sound judgment of those who viewed his paintings—it would gratefully shine back at him, invested with new life.

But this had not come to pass. It had become a dream, and even the dream gradually began to weaken and fade away. Wherever Albert roamed, in whatever remote place he sojourned alone, traveling on ships or crossing mountain passes, the dream returned to him more and more frequently, different from before, but just as beautiful, just as powerful, alluring, just as desirable and radiant in the new force of its wishfulness.

How often he had longed for it—to feel a sympathetic vibration between himself and all the things of the world! To feel that his own breath and the breath of the wind and the sea were one and the same, that brotherhood and fellowship, love and intimacy, sound and harmony existed between him and all things!

He no longer wanted to paint pictures that would bring him understanding and love, that would explain, justify, and celebrate him. He no longer thought about heroes and pageantry which—as image and empty smoke—would express and transcribe his own essence. He longed only for the feeling of that vibration, that power current, that secret intimacy, in which he himself would be annihilated and perish, would die and be reborn. Even now this new dream, even now this new, intensified longing made life bearable, brought something like meaning to it, transfigured and redeemed it.

Albert's friends, insofar as he still had some, did not find it easy to understand these visions of his. All they could see was that he kept more and more to himself, that he spoke and smiled more softly and more curiously, that he often disappeared, that he showed no interest in what other people held dear and important—neither politics nor trade, neither shooting matches nor ball games, nor clever discussions about art; in short, he took no part in any of those things in which the others delighted. He had become an eccentric and half crazy. He would go running through the cool, gray winter air, inhaling its colors and scents; he would run after a small child who walked along babbling to himself; he would stare for hours into a pool of green water, or at a flower bed; or he would lose himself—like a reader in his book—in the lines he found in a cross section of a small piece of wood, in a root or a turnip.

People no longer paid him any mind. In those days, he had gone to live in a town in a foreign country and one morning, while walking down a tree-lined boulevard, Albert looked out between the tree trunks and saw a small, sluggish river, a steep, yellow, clayey bank, where bushes and briers had taken root and dustily branched out over fallen rocks and bleak minerals. Then something in him began to sing, he stood still, there in his soul once again were the strains of an ancient song. Clay-yellow and dusty green, or sluggish river and precipitous bank, some kind of relationship between the colors or lines, some kind of tone, a peculiarity in the random scene was beautiful, unbelievably beautiful, touching and deeply moving; it spoke to him, was kindred to him. And he felt the sympathetic vibration and the most intimate relationship between the woods and the river, between the river and himself, between the sky, the earth, and the plants; all these things seemed to be there for the sole purpose of being reflected as a unity in his eyes and heart, at this hour coming together and bidding welcome. His heart was the place where river and plant, tree and air could conjoin, bond together, enhance one another and celebrate a banquet of love.

When this glorious experience had recurred a few times, a splendid feeling of joy enveloped the painter, thick and full as a golden evening or a fragrant garden. He tasted it, it was sweet and heavy, but he could not long endure it; it was too rich, it filled him to bursting, it made him agitated, anxious and frenzied. It was stronger than he, it carried him away, transported him, and he was afraid of drowning in it. And that was the one thing he did not want. He wanted to live, he wanted to live an eternity. Never, never before had he so intensely desired to live as he did now!

As if he had awakened from a spell of delirium, one day he found himself quiet and alone in a room. Before him were a box of paints and a small piece of stretched pasteboard—now, after years, he sat down once again to paint.

And so it went. The thought, Why am I doing this? did not enter his mind. He painted. He did nothing but see and paint. Either he would go outside and lose himself in the images of the world, or he would sit in his room and again let the abundance flow off. On his small pieces of pasteboard he painted picture after picture, a rainy sky with willows, a garden wall, a bench in the woods, a highway, or even people and animals and things he had never seen, heroes or angels perhaps, but things which were real and had their own existence, just like walls and forests.

When he returned to the company of men, everyone knew he was painting again. People thought him to be slightly deranged, but they were curious to see his pictures. He did not want to show them to anyone, but people would not leave him in peace. They tormented him and cajoled him. Finally he gave an acquaintance the key to his room, while he himself went on a trip, not wanting to be present when other people looked at his pictures.

The people came, and a great cry went up. A fabulous new painter had been discovered, an eccentric to be sure, but one whom God had favored—or those were the terms used by the critics and connoisseurs.

In the meantime, the painter Albert had ended up in a village and had rented a room at a farm and unpacked his paints and brushes. Again he walked happily through valleys and over mountains, and all he felt and experienced was later mirrored in his paintings.