The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  Thus I had reasons to believe my exegesis of Torrentius’s painting was very probable. Wasn’t it clear, and logically cohesive? It had only one defect: precisely that suspicious simplicity.

  So the poem inscribed in the painting did not leave me in peace, a poem that possessed a stonelike compactness and the finality of a sacred formula. To reach its philosophical sources I started to leaf through treatises by esoteric writers contemporary with the painter, above all Johann Valentin Andreae. Fama Fraternitalis and Confessio are the basis for learning the doctrine of the Fraternity. Then the work of the English physician Robert Fludd11, who contributed much to popularizing the ideas of the Rosicrucians; the strange, intricate books of the alchemist Studion12, who searched for the ideal dimensions of the Mystical Temple; and of course works by Jacob Boehme and Theophrast Bombastus of Hohenheim13.

  At the beginning the reading of hermetic books has a taste of Great Adventure; it is a marvelous wandering of uninitiated thought through exotic lands. The gray abstractions of philosophers are replaced by graceful symbols and images; everything connects with everything else and moves toward the desired Unity. The world becomes weightless and transparent. Provided you accept the first frail premise, provided you only adapt to the secret language, do not ask for definitions, put trust in the Method. To submit means to believe. How strange that the most obscure ideological obsessions take a similar course.

  I think I had a sufficient supply of patience, even good will, but I lacked humility. It was my skeptical devil that guarded me from rapture and the grace of Illumination. I say this without pride, with a bit of regret. In the end there remained only a cool delectation. Without attaining initiation, spurned by the Mystery of the chosen, I fell into the hell of the aesthetes. Truly beautiful are those constructions of liberated minds: vertiginous pyramids of spirit, monuments of air, mirrorlike labyrinths of allegory, precious animals and stones; green jasper, the sign of luminosity; blue sapphire, truth; golden topaz, harmony.

  These peregrinations over so many treatises were not at all wasted. I received important information from them. It is known that sects and secret societies base their doctrines on the teachings of a prophet-founder who radiates the attraction of an old tradition. For the Rosicrucians it was Christian Rosenkreutz14, a German nobleman and knight-errant of gnosis who during a trip to the Holy Land, Damascus, Africa, and Spain acquired knowledge from Arab sages about the last things. As befits a prophet he lived long, 107 years (1378–1485). After returning to his country he founded a small order and devoted himself to occult studies. According to legend, 120 years after the master’s death his body was discovered, untouched by decay, in an underground tomb in the shape of a chapel-sanctuary. The description of this sepulchral construction of which no trace has remained is like a guide through an imaginary museum of symbols: sculptures, inscriptions, a lamp that would be extinguished when a noninitiated person approached, old books, complicated geometrical figures on the floor, and ingenious vaults. With these objects of cult it seems mirrors were discovered in which the symbols of virtues were affixed in a miraculous manner. Hence the content of Torrentius’s painting.

  For several score years the Order of Rosicrucians led the secret life of the catacombs. During this period it feverishly looked for influential protectors, princes, and scholars; it founded international “lodges,” gathered at secret conventicles, published anonymous tracts. Their caution was well-motivated, for the Fraternity was accused of close contacts with the Reformation, of decided hostility toward Rome, sympathies with the Arab and Jewish worlds, plans to overturn the established order, and of course contacts with unclean powers.

  After a long period of incubation the Rosicrucians decided to begin open activity on a large scale. It was believed the appropriate moment had come to accomplish the work of transforming the world. It happened in the year 1614. At this time a famous pamphlet appeared, Allgemeine und General Reformation der ganzen weiten Welt. Is it just an accident that the “Still Life with a Bridle” bears precisely this date?

  THIS IS HOW I finished the first version of my essay about Torrentius. I put the manuscript away in a drawer. I secretly counted that time would work to my advantage. Investigation of difficult subjects requires alchemical patience.

  A few years later, quite unexpectedly and without any action on my part, I received a parcel in the mail with a copy of a short, very learned treatise about my painter. A true gift from heaven and human good will. A letter sent from Holland had wandered senselessly through many countries and reached my hands in a pitiful state. Pages were stuck to each other or worn, sheets had greasy spots, the printing was smudged. I don’t know who maltreated this innocent work, probably official Peeping Toms of other people’s letters, and not gentlemen, which releases me from wasting time on an incident of menials. Luckily the text was bilingual; after difficult compilations I managed to understand its content. I could not get rid of the feeling that whoever falls into Torrentius’s snares must be ready for anything.

  The author of this treatise, the Dutch historian of art and music Pieter Fischer, draws attention for the first time to the musical page in the “Still Life,” those notes and a small score inscribed in the painting. Until now this was generally thought to be a decorative element—a simple ornament—and that there was no connection between the notes and the text below. Fischer proves that such a connection exists, and that it has to be discovered to better understand the meaning of the work.

  It is indeed surprising that no one noticed the evident mistake in Torrentius’s couplet. Everyone, absolutely everyone, read the word quaat (evil), while in the painting it is clearly, black on white, qaat. One could say the painter was not very strong in orthography, were it not for the fact that above this word is a note that breaks harmony (h and not b, as it should be). It is therefore an intended, completely conscious, double mistake of orthography and music, an infraction of the principles of language and melody. A symbolic violation of order. In the Middle Ages this musical-moralistic procedure bore the name diabolus in musica, and it usually accompanied the word peccatum.

  Fischer’s interpretation of the text itself, the couplet, seems less convincing. The author believes that the abbreviation “E R” opening the poem signifies Extra Ratione, which prompts him to reel off further bold hypotheses. A painter with such a scandalous life who challenged the world could not be an apologist of restraint. The “Still Life with a Bridle” should be understood as an apparent allegory of moderation, while in reality, in an intricately camouflaged way, it is the praise of a man liberated from bonds, uncommon, standing high above the crowd of petty philistines.

  In the English catalogue of the Rijksmuseum I found a different version of the disquieting poem from Torrentius’s painting. It is not a literal translation, but one of the possible attempts to understand the hermetic text: “That which is extraordinary has an extraordinary bad fate.” It sounds too explicit, rather flat, and it is not certain why a prophetic gift is ascribed to the artist, a foreboding of his ill-fated end.

  Finally, one should pose the question whether Torrentius’s work—so splendidly substantial and classically self-enclosed—really demands complex explanations that overstep the framework of its autonomous world. It is indifferent to us which spirits, good or evil, wise or reckless, inspired the painter’s work. After all, the painting does not live by the reflected glow of secret books and treatises. It has its own light, the clear, penetrating light of clarity.

  IT IS TIME TO part with Torrentius. I studied him long enough to admit my ignorance with a clear conscience. I suspect I put a defensive mechanism into motion, as if fearing that from this truly tragic history a figure of an ordinary adventurer would emerge. I did not want it, so I collected proofs he was an unusual man bursting measures and standards, systematically and with stubbornness worthy of a martyr’s palm.

  As a legacy he left us an allegory of restraint, a work of great discipline, self-knowledge, and order, contradicting his
reckless existential experience. But only simpletons and naive moralizers demand exemplary harmony of life and work from an artist.

  We will probably never learn who he really was. A victim of a political conspiracy? The flagrant disproportion of crime and punishment, the resonance of the trial and diplomatic intervention, all indicate this. Could the vindictiveness of the husbands and fathers of seduced women go as far as judicial murder? What was his connection with the Rosicrucians? One cannot altogether rule out that his scandalous excesses were a misleading maneuver, a mask concealing the conspiratorial activity of a member of the Fraternity. Perhaps he was a peculiar ascetic à rebours—they appear not only in Russian novels—who by his fall and sin aims in a roundabout way at the highest good.

  So many questions. I did not manage to break the code. The enigmatic painter, the incomprehensible man, begins to pass from the plane of investigation based on flimsy sources to an indistinct sphere of fantasy, the domain of tellers of tales. Thus it is time to part with Torrentius.

  Farewell, still life.

  Good night, severed head.

  THE NONHEROIC SUBJECT

  DUTCH PAINTING SPEAKS many languages, it tells about the matters of earth and of heaven. It lacks only one thing: the immortalization of the moments of its defeat and glory, the apotheosis of its own history. After all, it was a history abundant in dramatic episodes, insurrections, terror, sieges, struggles with powerful adversaries such as England, Spain, and France.

  When Dutch artists painted war it was the war of light and darkness, also the smooth water of the canals with a solitary mill on the shore, an ice rink under the pink sky of sunset, the interior of a pub with shouting drunkards, a girl reading a letter. If other testimony had not been preserved we could think that the inhabitants of this low-lying country led a truly sweet life—they ate richly, drank copiously, and enjoyed cheerful company. In vain do we look for works by prominent painters that transmit to posterity the execution of Hoorn and of Egmont1, the heroic defense of Leyden, or the assassination attempt against the Prince of Orange, William the Silent2.

  In his beautiful book The Old Masters Eugène Fromentin draws our attention to an unusual fact. In times pregnant with historical events, “a young man painted a bull on a pasture, another one who wished to please his friend—a physician—painted him in a dissecting room surrounded by his pupils and with a scalpel stuck in the arm of a corpse. These two paintings covered their names, their centuries and the country where they lived with immortal fame. What is it then that wins our gratitude? Is it dignity and truth? No. Is it greatness? Sometimes. And maybe beauty itself? Always beauty.”

  This is very nicely said, but it is doubtful that the pacifistic spirit of Dutch painting can be explained in purely aesthetic terms. What, then, is behind this peculiar predilection for scenes from everyday life? Why did the Dutch avoid war subjects that exalt patriotic feelings? It seems the problem is much more profound; we must summon the aid of history, which molded the psychology of this nation.

  Let us recall one of the most famous episodes in the Dutch struggles for freedom, the defense of Leyden, as it was described by a chronicler of the times, Emanuel van Materen3.

  Six years of the rule of the Duke of Alva4, of terror and violence, did not succeed in breaking the resistance of the Netherlanders. The northern part of the country defended itself with particular fierceness. With the help of mercenaries, the Prince of Orange organized armed expeditions against the Spaniards, and the fighting continued with changing fortunes. After the long, drawn-out, heroic defense of Haarlem, when all means and supplies were exhausted, he capitulated to Alva’s army. But the invaders did not manage to seize Alkmaar; they were compelled to end the siege of the city ingloriously.

  The war in the Netherlands did not follow the usual course of events, or the traditional ritual of pitched battles on a large plain ending with only victors and those who beg for pity. Rather it was a general rebellion, a levy en masse of the entire nation—peasants, bourgeois, and nobility—against Spanish violence. It burst out like fire in different spots, died down but not completely, and flared up anew. The powerful army of occupation was constantly taken by surprise, and unable to deal a decisive blow.

  In the beginning of the war a Spanish officer, unaware he was challenging fate, called the Dutch insurgents beggars (gueux). These mendicants proved to be dangerous and invincible adversaries. Insurgents from the forest and ocean, especially the latter, whose bravery would be celebrated for centuries in folk song, attacked enemy convoys and even conquered ports, slaughtering the Spanish crews. “The red sun blazes over Holland,” said one of the poets of the times.

  Toward the end of 1573, Philip II recalled the Duke of Alva to Spain from his position as Commander in Chief in the Netherlands, the equivalent of disgrace. Always and everywhere the politics of terror proves to be the politics of the blind. His successor, Don Luis de Requesens5, tried to win the rebels over with acts of grace, tax reductions, and amnesty, but he never gave up his intention of forcing the unyielding North to its knees.

  In May 1574, the Spanish Army came to Leyden. The fathers of the city unanimously decided to defend themselves, issuing a series of indispensable military and administrative decrees. The question of a just distribution of food was regulated at the beginning; during the first two months of the siege, every inhabitant of Leyden received half a pound of bread and milk (separated milk, as the scrupulous chronicler reports). At the time Leyden was not a large city. It had certain rustic features—for example, large stables and barns with more than 700 cows. The problem of feed for the animals was solved very cleverly; taking advantage of the Spaniards’ inattention the cattle were led to nearby meadows, but as soon as sounds of war and shots were heard the animals galloped back to the city. During the entire siege only one cow and three absentminded calves were put on the list of losses.

  The commander of the Spaniards, General Valdez, waited for the city to fall into his hands, captured either by hunger or a stratagem. It seems he trusted diplomacy more than artillery, at least in the initial phase of the clash. He sent letters to the defenders assuring them they could count on his magnanimity and forgiveness, and that the Spanish Army would not remain in the city for long. At the end he perversely argued that the submission of the fortress would not bring shame or loss of honor to anyone, while conquest by force would disgrace the unfortunate defenders.

  Vain efforts. The inhabitants of Leyden were resolved to persist in their noble resistance. Valdez received a Latin poem in reply; its translation reads as follows:

  The flute of the fowler luringly sings

  Until the bird falls into the net’s strings.

  In September, after four months of fighting, the situation of the city became more critical each day. Witty poems no longer occurred to anyone. This time the defenders answered the repeated proposal of capitulation with a pathetic letter: “You place all your hope on the fact that we are hungry, and no relief comes to us. You call us eaters of cats and dogs, but as long as the mooing of cows is heard in the city we do not lack food. And when we will lack food, each of us has his left hand; we can cut it off, preserving the right hand to push the tyrant and his bloody horde away from the city walls.”

  At Leyden as at Troy there were speeches by leaders, brilliant replies, and deadly insults. All this flowery rhetoric seemed to be destined for the authors of future history textbooks. The truth was prosaic, banal, and gray—to persevere and survive one more month, one more week, one more day.

  An acute lack of currency was felt in the city, so they decided to adapt the monetary system to the exceptional situation. Special paper banknotes were issued that would preserve value only during the period of siege. These new means of payment were decorated with slogans intended to comfort the defenders’ hearts: a Latin inscription, Haec libertas ego, a picture of a lion, and a pious sigh, “May the Lord protect Leyden.”

  It was evident to everyone, however, that the city could be saved on
ly with help from the outside. Hunger was increasing, there was no more bread. Meat, or rather the skin and bones of emaciated animals, was still rationed at half a pound per person; people hunted dogs, cats, and rats.

  To make things worse, a plague broke out. Within a short period it swallowed up six thousand victims, which was half the population of the city. The men were so weakened that they had no strength to keep guard on top of the walls; when they returned home, they often found their wives and children dead.

  As if these misfortunes were not enough, rioting broke out in Leyden. The chronicler speaks enigmatically about disagreement, muttering, and disputes. We can easily guess what was concealed beneath these euphemisms. It was simply a rebellion of the city’s poor, the ones who felt the burden of the siege the most painfully. They had only two alternatives—death from hunger, or slavery—and they were choosing the latter.

  The mayor called all the population of the city to a public meeting. In a great, pathetic speech he announced that he was ready to offer his body to feed the hungry. Luckily, his statement was taken as it should be, not as a concrete offer but as a rhetorical figure.

  The Estates General and William Prince of Orange, Commander in Chief of the Dutch Army quartered in nearby Delft, were aware that the situation in Leyden was fatal. The land army of the Prince of Orange was too weak to relieve the city and wage a battle with the enemy on firm ground. The strongest and most competent part of the armed forces of the Netherlands was the navy, but there was a serious obstacle: Leyden was not a port, it was situated inland. For aid—this rings almost magically—it was necessary to call on the element of water.