The Big Book of Classic Fantasy

by The Big Book of Classic Fantasy (retail) (epub)

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  The Morgenstern (Christian) [The Morningstar] is, as everyone knows, the same as the Evening Star. It is only a matter of the time at which one gazes lovingly at the star, to name it as one thing or the other. In the morning, our Morning Star would have all sorts of beautiful and universal feelings, but in the evening he would no longer experience those moods. So, instead, he rehashed the same sentiments by means of satire, only to fall back into his stellar clichés the next morning.

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  The Mombert (Alfred). The Mombert is an invertebrate, and it is remarkable that this creature was able to transform its fairly small brain mass into ganglia. This exploit has had an influence on the animal’s vocal expression, which bears a striking resemblance to the babble of certain German lyricists. This peaceful and solitary animal has not taken any new nourishment since its first meal, and continues to ruminate only on that old food.

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  The Hansmüller. Thus the little Moritz Benedict called his kite, which he used to fly mostly Sundays on Firs Street. Since little Moritz had a lot of rope, the Hansmüller flew very high, so that children thought him a bird, while he was only a bunch of old newspapers glued together. Later on, the rope broke, and the Hansmüller fell on the roof of an old theater, where our kite is sometimes seen flapping in the wind. Now even the children know that the Hansmüller consists only of paper cuts.

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  The Thomasmann and the Heinrichmann. Both these animals belong to a family of medium-sized xylophages. They are of different colors but similar in their nature and mode of life. They are always found on the same tree, but living on the opposite extremities, since these two wood beetles cannot stand each other. If the Thomasmann drills from down up, then the Heinrichmann pierces from top down. If one finds the lime tree delicious, the other thinks it rotten, and vice versa. The strange thing is that they are always wrong about the tree. They believe they are exploring an oak tree, when they are sitting on a door made of pinewood. If they are convinced they are sauntering up a spruce, it might well be a limewood chest of drawers. Nonetheless, the fact remains that they loathe each other. It is only when the two beetles are placed on a wooden fountain pen that they cease scoffing, instead engaging in their preferred activity, diligently sliding up and down, always in opposite directions. As for their colors, the Thomasmann flaunts black-and-white striped wings, while those of the Heinrichmann are blue-white-red, with sometimes the red spots disappearing rapidly when humans approach. These red small dots can also be removed by rubbing lightly.

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  The Robertmüller. Providing an exact description of this ruthlessly hunted animal is rendered more difficult by the fact that the Robertmüller often changes his point of view, and does not always know exactly where he stands. To be precise, it should be emphasized, however, that his outlook is always from his own perspective. The Robertmüller is an American-trained racedog with wings. This dog flutters and runs in zigzags and nobody can catch him. Similar to the Celtic bloom of the Shaw, which grows on spectral Cymric shafts and changes its smell overnight, our animal is difficult to determine. Some say he is not an animal at all, but such impression might be one of his tricks. Others think that he descends from the Jensen, although his forepaws were not conceived for grasping, but were subject to a metaphysical tension that enabled the Robertmüller to spring into the air or into the future. Zoologists are still debating whether the deterioration of the beast’s forepaws is an advantage or a weakness.

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  Mencken (H. L.). This is the name of the most important living American zoologist, which means that—since Lowell was American, but not important—not only is the Mencken the most important, but also the very first one. Given his argute humor, it is regrettable that he has to deal with no better fauna than the mostly ridiculous North American, which is led by Presbyterian parishioners (and that is ninety percent of all U.S. citizens) into arid pastures.

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  The Meredith (George). This is an Anglo-Celtic synonym for unicorn. All the others, those that in this Christian age tried to assume this pagan beast’s allure, were pantomime costumes and cardboard cutouts. Only the Meredith was a natural unicorn, which like a god fathered gigantic females. The most famous among them is Diana. At times, the Meredith entangled his horn in telegraph wires, and had to free himself with many jokes, but without losing his graceful posture for a moment. When the Meredith was shown in Protestant Germany, the poetically trained Germany shied away from the mythical beast, for Germany only knew and loved the unicorn painted by Böcklin, with a virgin for good measure, and titled: “Silence in the forest.”

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  Munchausen. This is the name given to a heraldic joke which represents a creature composed of all heraldic animals. Inside the Munchausen has been inserted a music box which, activated by a string, makes a clarion melody.

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  The Musil (Robert). The Musil is a noble animal of powerful and harmonious build. Notable is the Musil’s habit to hibernate, despite its being appropriately assigned to the small family of the Fallow deer, in which hibernation is not customary. After every year of his life, the Musil sleeps for five years in an inaccessible forest. The lethargy seems to be necessary because of this animal’s unusual muscular power joined to the high-strung quality of his nervous system, which the Musil manifests during his waking year.

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  Nietzsche (Friedrich Wilhelm). He is perhaps the most important zoologist of the Natural History park. Not only because he identified George Sand as a creative writing handbook—“And how self-satisfied she may have lain there”—and Zola as “the delight in stinking.” Such sidelong glances at the insubstantial, in events of secondary importance, only demonstrate the impossibility of apprehending the incalculable distance between the animaliterate and the real writer, and fall like depth charges from an unknown surface into their own abyss. Hate against all that is prejudiced, when one has come to bring the sword, is what differentiates the positive person from the mere living being. And the positive person despises the art that arises from innate gifts, the talents, the art of the actor that moves across his space through continuous transformations, while time flows untapped by the gawkers’ souls as their minds cannot fathom how to grasp it. Thus, even the Europeans, and particularly the Germans, these gifted among the Jews, have become anything into which they can transform at the eleventh hour; they have become Christians, even Buddhists—but they are nothing at all. They do nothing seriously, these Germans. They play Nation and confession, war and peace, pit Potsdam against Weimar, Weimar against Potsdam, in accordance with the date in a symbolic Versailles: 1871 or 1918; and so they progress through purely external metamorphosis, by modulation, keeping their essential cores undisturbed, tethered to a still and stubborn time in space. But the fact is that they began somewhere with something, and to become serious in the end requires a life of paradoxes, for mere information does not suffice: Cesare Borgia as Pope. The zoologist Nietzsche’s evil reveals itself in the gladiatorial net in which the German buffoon ends up entangled, and it is the first concrete thing. Make this net a mirror, and one would look at one’s reflection and finally find pleasure in the thought of being imprisoned within the glass; this German who says “no” out of comfort, theatrical showiness, coquetry of the mind, would say “yes” to the very last things, in time. And Nietzsche, who makes fun of history, called this evil with the sweetest names, the most seductive for Nordic ears: he called it South, Italy, Bizet…And he was jealous of this south of the spirit, as of a geographical south—“I have seen broken lines in Sorrento.” Yes, the human being bending under the metaphysical guilt of the act of acting, Wagner or th
e German, or the European, to coalesce the flow of pure being into a concrete being, must do a very dangerous thing, a monstrous thing. How? Would this person’s conversion to the cross first happen in and through the Antichrist? (What did Nietzsche expect from Wagner?) In order for the ahasverish being to break out of his destiny, isn’t his first conscious “no” to Good, a latter-day saint, his first “yes” to life? The Cross as the premature, as the arrogated and the arrogance against an unknown life, as yet not possible, as yet historically not achievable, as the prejudice that we already have history, which should be baptized, as a religion, perhaps of the very last day, certainly not the present day: it remains as an impossible task the great rebus, against a perhaps already confirmed, yet premature, and thus immoral judgment on the instincts, a judgment from mouths singing on a Christian tone, making music before they have a language, there remains only the Herculean work of anticipating the Antichristian, in order to create a counter-antiquity in the liberal present, to allow a fullness of time, again and again.

  Nietzsche’s evil is the historical ens realissimum, which alone can receive its own reality and consistency; it is the Renaissance of the demiurgical ages, the same phenomenon of humanism and the Reformation, here as antiquity, resurfaced as the Old Covenant; Renaissance as the “mystical” idea of all “education” in order to repeat the demiurgical “fullness of time,” the individual’s self-knowledge and self-conquest, but as a historical act, not on the path of historicism: Cesare Borgia as a pope, Paul’s identity of both prosecutor and apostle, and even in the Judaism of the traitor and “most credulous,” and in the Antichrist! The experiencing and overcoming of the demiurgic period as a hypothetical negation of the Logos, here torn into the eternal moment and into the historical present, in order to prepare for the completed knowledge of his theological overreach in the Church, in order to render its danger with the indifferentism without which the Advent neither fulfilled its concept in time nor in the soul: this is at the same time the presumption of the most noble and profound eschatological mystery and its integration into the individual—the Antichrist as the provocation of Christ. The last things and forms projected into the future have been discovered by the boldest Protestant as heuristic principles for the highest need of faith, to be turned by the almost superhuman against himself, against the phantomatic quality within the Übermensch, those principles representing the only and foremost aphrodisiacs used to achieve the amor Dei.

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  Peladan (Joséphin). Peladans are called the cheap bazar articles that are sold in shops for tourists on rue Rivoli in Paris, particularly to Saxon couples on honeymoon. The things are made of undefined, but anyway cheap material. There is Richard Wagner’s head as a cigar cutter, the Flying Persian as a box for sewing spools, Siegfried who Blows the Horn as a cane handle, Isolde as a cigar holder, etc. The couples who purchase these items see in these Peladans a marriage of Gallic wit and German emotional depth.

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  The Polgar (Alfred). This is a fine, silent, silvery-gray mouse, particularly agreeable to behold when the wise animal runs over the tuneless lyre of time, carefree in a studied way, producing a little tinkling filled with longing and dust. Most consider the Polgar to be harmless, but our investigation has shown that the delicate powder gnawed by our animal from the house foundations contains, in a very finely dispersed and weakened condition, ecrasite (an explosive material unaffected by moisture, shocks, or fire). The Polgar viennensis builds small nests of thought called philigranitic works of art, because of their strange blend of fragility and long-lasting filigree, made of tiny absurdities and malaises, inevitable newspaper sheets, lyrism and witticisms, along with beautiful red-blood corpuscles of a better life.

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  The Ringelnatz (Joachim). He came swimming under the bordeaux-colored oceans, between bottle and battle, God only knows whence. He abruptly dropped in the deepest part of the ocean the highest peak of a joke. Perhaps the Ringelnatz descends from the wanderer Rimbaud’s loins, somewhere between Abyssinia, the Lower Rhine, and the rest of the world.

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  Rabindranatagore is the name of India reduced to the level of Europe. In the long run, the weak remainders of the Indian wall could not resist the onslaught of English Biblical societies, American theosophists, Saxon natural apostles, French Bergsonians, and Prussian monists. Dying India produces by herself that from which she died, and this process is called Rabindranatagore.

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  The Rilke (Maria Rainer). Zoologists and botanists are currently disputing among themselves whether Rilke belongs to the animal or plant kingdom. The Botanists, who do not wish to deal with the Rilke, assign the beast to Zoology. The Zoologists, who do not wish to deal with this creature either, assign it to Botany or to Agriculture; and the zoologists say that the Rilke lacks the right blood, which legitimates their turning the thing away, and again the botanists say that the Rilke has an animal’s dentition, which the species uses to repair lines of poetry of any length wherever there is no articulation, either melodic or rhythmic. And this strange part at least should be admitted. Strange, too, is the circumstance that the Rilke is only female, although certain external sexual characteristics, such as facial hair, have a male character. Still, these characteristics, like the Rilke’s beard, are gently, sadly downturned, as if they do not want to be there, as their presence can only cause embarrassment. These features are also contrasted by the high-pitched feminine voice of the Rilke, which tends to die out in a whisper. Like the Werfel, the Rilke is popular as a parlor pet, but more for older ladies because of the Rilke’s sexual cleanliness, a purity which triggers the delightful word “heavenly,” so loved by those ladies. Among seven such ladies you can always meet the Rilke as the seventh. In order to emphasize her gender, she likes to put on a bonnet, which, as the ladies exclaim, is “heavenly.” Because of this continuous exaltation, our beast has gotten into the pedantic habit of putting her nose into theological books, Marian legends, and the like.

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  Ruskin (John). This is the name of a prophet, who, sometimes, without any sexual motivation, would turn into an English nanny, and, as such, played out every ecclesiastical art against the Church. Governor Ruskin suffered from a chronic moral headache. The prophet wrote with his right hand what the governess’ left hand did not want to write. In Germany he is only appreciated in his capacity as a nanny, for here we are moral, honest, chaste, and so on and so forth.

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  Shaw (George Bernard). It is the name of a gardener who turned himself into a buck. The Shaw is, in fact, a zoologist who fancies the animal guise, although he always ends up transforming back into a gardener. While performing comical cartwheels, he takes the drollery out of them by trying to explain their meaning. For some time, it was debated whether “Shaw” was a pseudonym for Trebitsch, because of a certain philological incommensurability. Until it was ascertained that the Trebitsch cannot even pronounce the name of Shaw, let alone carry it.

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  Schnitzler (Arthur) is the name of a racehorse that runs in the Freudenau, out of the Fischer stable. This horse was in its glory days a favorite with all the ladies and the little darlings of Vienna because of his melancholy temperament. People would bet on Schnitzler out of sympathy, even if everyone knew in advance that he would not even place. Because Schnitzler was so popular, and the little darlings’ granddaughters continued to go to the Freudenau, it was agreed in the Jockeys’ Club, that Schnitzler, whenever he ran, in any race, would always be third, even if he gave up after the first lap. Long may he run.

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  Steiner (Rudolph) [der Stein: the stone]. “Saxa loquuntur,” claims that part of humankind who, after purchasing the pr
ice of admission cashed in by old Noah, climbs onto the ark, whose future lies not on water, but on the Steiner. The salesman lures: Quickly, quickly! It’s going to rain, and the flocks run. In hoc petro [sic]—“You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church”—capitalism was built, what he may call his church, and, behold, the stone multiplied and became the Steiner. And all the debris and the mud of the foundered, trodden souls gathered around him, or her, or it—this enormous joint stock religious company, which dismantled everything into pieces, everything that had ever been thought and formed as religious—distorted, diluted, baked, and chewed for toothless mouths. Such was Sophia, to whom Theos was to give his blessing. But God’s blessing was only for Steiner, as formerly it was for Cohn.

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  The Steffen (Albert). This is an apocalyptic animal and currently exists as only one specimen, more fabled than scientifically observed. But his existence is not to be doubted. The Steffen has only one eye, but can move it from a place on his strangely shaped body to any other place. He keeps his sex hidden. He has wings, but these are so attached that he cannot fly. He has legs but he does not make much use of them for reasons not yet ascertained. Most of the time the Steffen crouches, plants his one eye in the middle of his face, and lets a whole world reflect strangely in the pupil.