‘A double Flemish bend’, he repeated. ‘Take a look, it might be of use to you while fishing, too.’ Thereupon he took a piece of cord, threw over one of its ends and wrapped it three, four times around itself until it became the axis of a spiral, whose windings tightened with a jerk into a knot.
‘Actually’, he continued, ‘it is only a variation of the double galley knot, preferable, looped or unlooped, to the timber hitch.’ He accompanied all this with swift windings and loops. I became dizzy.
‘Whoever ties this knot’, he concluded, ‘in one go, has come rather a long way, and may retire in peace. I mean that quite literally: retire in peace, for knotting is a yoga-like art; maybe the most wonderful of all means of relaxation. One learns it only through practice and more practice – not only on the water, but at home, in the calm, in the winter, when it rains. And best of all, when one is grieving and troubled. You would not believe how often I found solutions to questions that burdened me through this.’
In conclusion, he promised to teach me this discipline and to induct me into all its secrets, from carrick bends and reef knots to spider knots and Herculean knots.
But it came to nothing; for soon it was increasingly rare to see him on the water. First he stayed away three, four days, then whole weeks. What he was doing, no one knew. There were rumours of some mysterious occupation. Undoubtedly he had discovered some new devotion.
Some months passed before we lay beside each other in the boat again. This time the catch was richer, and when we finally found a large sea trout on his rod, O’Brien suggested that I come to his place the next evening for a little dinner.
After the meal, O’Brien said, as he opened a door: ‘My collection, of which you have certainly already heard.’
I had heard of the collection of Negro masks, but actually only that they had perished. But there they were hanging, twenty to thirty pieces, in an empty room, on whitewashed walls. They were masks with grotesque expressions, which revealed above all an austereness driven into comedy, a totally relentless rejection of everything unfitting. The raised upper lips, the curved ridges made of the eye’s lid groove and eyebrows seemed to express something like boundless resistance against anyone approaching, indeed against any approach per se, while the staggered crests of the forehead decoration and the struts of plaited strands of hair bulged like markings that evinced the rights of an alien power over these features. Regardless of which of these masks one looked at, nothing about its mouth seemed designed to let sounds escape; the flaring pouts or tightly closed lips were barriers before or after life, like the lips of embryos or of the dead. O’Brien had stayed back.
‘This one here’, he said suddenly behind me and as if to himself, ‘was the first I found again’.
As I turned around, he was standing in front of an elongated, smooth, ebony black head, which featured a smile. It was a smile that, right from the beginning, actually seemed like a regurgitation of the smile behind closed lips. In addition, this mouth was set very deep, as if the whole visage was nothing other than the spawn of the monstrous domed forehead, which flowed downwards in an unstoppable curve, broken up only by the sublime rings of eyes, which obtruded as from a diving bell.
‘This was the first that I found again. And I could also tell you how.’
I simply looked at him. He leaned his back against the low window, and then he began:
‘If you look out, you will see the cactus hedge in front of you. It is the largest in the whole region. Notice the stem, how it is woody until quite high up. That is how you can tell how old it is, at least 150 years. It was a night like today, except the moon was shining. Full moon. I don’t know whether you have ever tried to take account of the impact of the moon in this region, in that its light does not seem to fall on the site of our daily existence, but rather on a counter or parallel earth. I had spent the evenings poring over my sea charts. You should know that a hobby horse of mine is to improve the maps of the British admiralty, and, thereby, gain a cheaply acquired glory, for wherever I occupy a new place with my nets, I take new soundings. So, I had marked out a little hill on the seabed and thought about how lovely it would be if I were to be immortalised deep below by someone giving one of them my name. And then I went to bed. You will have seen earlier that I have curtains in front of my windows; back then I did not have any, and the moon advanced, while I lay sleepless, towards my bed.
‘I had yet again resorted to my favourite game, knot-tying. I think I’ve mentioned it to you before. It goes like this, I tie a complicated knot in my head, and afterwards put it to one side ostensibly and bring a second one into being, again in my thoughts. Then it is the first one’s turn again. Only this time I don’t need to knot it, rather I have to undo it. Naturally it all depends on retaining the form of the knot in one’s memory quite precisely, above all the first must not merge with the second. I do these exercises, at which I have managed to attain quite some skill, when I have thoughts in my head, and can find no solution, or I have fatigue in my limbs and cannot get to sleep. In either case, the result is the same: relaxation.
‘But this time, my proven mastery was no help, for the closer I came to the solution, the closer the blinding moonlight moved towards my bed. And I took refuge in another remedy. I thought back over all the sayings, riddles, songs and poems which I had gradually learnt on the island. This went much better. I was feeling my internal cramp subside when my gaze fell on the cactus hedge. A old mocking line came into my mind: “Buenas tardes, chumbas figas.” The peasant boy says “Good evening” to the cactus pear, pulls out his knife and makes a parting, as they say, from the crown to the bottom.
‘But the time of the cactus pears was long over. The hedge stood bare; before long the leaves jabbed askew into the void, before long they remained only staggered, thick shells, waiting for rain.’
‘No fence, but fencesitters’, went through my mind.
‘In the meantime a metamorphosis of this hedge seemed to have taken place. It was as if those outside in the brightness, which now surrounded my entire bed, were staring in; as if a shoal were hanging there with bated breath, attached to my glances. A turmoil of raised shields, pistons, and battle axes. And when falling asleep, I realised the means by which the figures outside held me in check. They were masks, which were staring at me!
‘And so slumber overcame me. The next morning, though, it granted me no peace. I took my knife, and then I shut myself in for eight days with the block, out of which arose the mask, which hangs here. The others appeared one after the other, and without me ever having taken my eyes off the cactus hedge. I wouldn’t claim that all look similar to my earlier ones; but I would like to swear that no expert could tell these masks apart from those which took their place years ago.’
That is what O’Brien said. We chatted for a little while longer, and then I left.
A few weeks later I heard that O’Brien had shut himself away again with a mysterious task, and was inaccessible to everyone. I never saw him again, then soon thereafter he died.
I thought no more about him for quite some time, then one day, at an art dealer’s on the Rue La Boétie, I discovered to my surprise three Negro masks in a glass case.
‘May I’, I addressed to the boss of the house, ‘congratulate you on this incredibly fine acquisition.’
‘I see with pleasure’, was the answer, ‘that you are able to appreciate quality. I see you are an expert! The masks here that you rightly admire are but a small sample of a large collection, whose exhibition we are currently preparing.’
‘And I could well imagine, sir, that these masks will inspire our young artists to a few interesting experiments of their own.’
‘That I hope very much! By the way, if you would like to know more I could get you from my office the reports from our leading experts from the Hague and London. You will find that this is a matter of centuries’ old objects. In the case of two of them, I would even talk of millennia.’
‘I would be very in
terested indeed to read these reports! May I enquire as to where this collection comes from?’
‘They come from the estate of an Irish man. O’Brien. You won’t have heard of his name. He lived and died on the Balearics.’
—
Translated by Sam Dolbear and Esther Leslie.
First published in Vossische Zeitung, 8 January 1933; Gesammelte Schriften IV, 748–54.
CHAPTER 31
Reviews: Landscape and Travel
Possibilities at Sea, 1932.
Johann Jacob Bachofen, Greek Journey, ed. Georg
Schmidt, Heidelberg: Richard Weißbach, 1927
In 1851, eight years before the appearance of his first major work, The Grave Symbolism of Antiquity, in the year 1851, Bachofen undertook his great Classical journey to Greece, through Attica, the Peloponnese, Argolis and Arcadia. This journey is Classical in a threefold sense: in respect of the sites, in relation to their canonic significance for him (his other Greek journeys paled in the face of this one) and, finally, in respect of its Goethean attitude. Ludwig Klages, who was one of the first to be furnished with the manuscript of Bachofen’s travel journal, quite rightly placed it in the orbit of Italian Journey. If what is meant thereby is that in this volume the German is enriched by several great pieces of descriptive prose, and the German longing for Hellas is enriched by one of its sweetest fulfilments, then it also means that these pages contribute nothing new or crucial to the form of Bachofen’s teachings nor to our understanding of them. In this regard, they confront the researcher with an interesting alternative: were the fundamental thoughts of his later works still unknown to the traveller himself at this time? Or does that strange ambivalence, so characteristic of Bachofen’s essence, operate here too? As with Wilhelm von Humboldt, the most Swiss among the great German thinkers, the most penetrating insight into the incomparability and irreducibility of any language is perpetually locked in a conflict with the dogma of the absolute superiority of ancient Greek. In Bachofen’s mythologies penetrating insight into the ethnological primal phenomena of the mythical is in struggle with the cavalier affirmation of the Apollonian right up into Christianity, which was probably nothing more for him than the last world-historical victory of Apollo.
Seen from the outside, this diary falls into two parts. The middle section of the journey, which leads from Patras via Corinth to Epidauros, appears in a literary treatment. The remainder, beginning and end, is in note form. Of these notes, the editor has included only the first, marking the route of the journey from Basel to Patras. It is rather telling that, in the first twenty pages of the book, something like a subterranean groan rings from the interior of the traveller into the bliss of the southern heavens; disturbing noises, one might say, which will yet be dear to Bachofen’s best readers, because they tie this youthful travel epic to his later didactic Grave Symbolism, Maternal Right, Tanaquil. But such reflections, as compelling as they appear, would be in the wrong place if they hoped to narrow down the rights of this book to be taken for what it is: the journey through a Greece that was by then still barely accessed archaeologically, a ride by horseback through isolated high mountain valleys at the side of a handsome Greek peasant boy, accommodation in remote villages, where under a festive night sky girls’ laughter beats against the ear of the lonely traveller.
Count Paul Yorck von Wartenburg, Italian Diary, edited by Sigrid von der Schulenburg, Darmstadt: Otto Reichl Press, 1927
It is certainly not a pure pleasure to relate something about this book. It is impossible to berate the author, who, in the manner of a conscientious German traveller of the old stripe, renders an account of a stay in Italy that lasted several months in note form which he never intended to print. And of the editor, who in a modest, matter-of-fact preface attempts to forestall all thinkable objections against this publication, one might confirm perhaps only his innermost feeling, if one contends that these jottings possess only a few rare passages of interest that is more than private. If the personality which speaks from them were not so particularly cultivated and congenial, they would be flatly repudiated. But even as they are, the unprejudiced reader will find little striking in them. Yorck von Wartenburg was on the point of freeing himself from the inherited templates for viewing Italy. That, and how he does it, is made manifest in a historical and factually highly interesting excursus on the mosaics of Ravenna and Cefalu. But he proceeded too shyly along what was a new route for him, such that today – now that the renovation of the image of Italy, which he intimated, has long been completed – his diary divulges little of much significance. It is all the more easy to say this, given Wartenburg’s correspondence with Dilthey was already strikingly overestimated, and the publication of this diary with a publisher close to Count Keyserling justifies the suspicion that the new feudal school in German feuilletonism might count Yorck von Wartenburg as one of their own. That would be a claim, however, which would commit a greater injustice against this sober-minded and gentlemanly dilettante than if not one word of his literary remains had come to press.
Georg Lichey, Italy and Us: An Italian Journey, Dresden: Carl Reissner, 1927
One would have to have a card index of linguistic and thought chaos to hand, like the one Karl Kraus once had at his disposal, to locate this book in its correct context.
‘Christ or Caesar … wrestled over a soul that was equally receptive to both parties.’ It is the speech from the soul of Mr Lichey, which we can bequeath to the aforementioned without envy. Unfortunately it attends the play fight on a rubbish tip, which takes on the shape of a book.
But it is good that this book was printed. Now for the first time we possess the ideal portrait of the ‘fellow traveller’, avoidance of whom has always been the best and most difficult part of all techniques of journeying. But will we ever manage to shake him off, and escape the sigh: ‘It is something quite undreamt of, this Sistine Chapel’; and the admission: ‘And thus something else came along to join the shock of living watercolours’; and the proud qualification: ‘Even the dome … did not get close to what I had seen of it in my dreams’. The travelling mob itself here attains the voice of a choir. All who ‘seek connection’, who ‘push their way through’, ‘carve their names’ – in short, ‘for whom it has been an experience’ – have once and for all found a voice in this book.
‘Italy! Is to attempt this theme not like taking owls to Athens?’
It is, however, astonishing how the author would care to attune the reader harmonically to everything that is distant through a single motto:
If even things take on many thousands of forms,
For you, there is only one, mine, proclaimed.
Goethe: Faust
The verse is by Stefan George, Faust is by Goethe. The whole, though, is by Mr Lichey, to whom, as he himself explains nicely, ‘only the whole and always only the whole’ floats before his eyes.
We will furnish him with a whole!
Rudolf Borchardt, ed., The German in the Landscape, Munich: Publishing House of Bremer Press, 1927
The series of anthologies from the Bremer Press takes on ever more clearly a great, uniform character, which appears as a most pleasing contrast to almost everything which had existed in this form until now. For if the odium of plundering – the unauthorised exploitation of a virginal stock – always sticks to the usual florilegia and selections, whether they are popularising, modernising, aestheticizing, on this one there rests a visible blessing. Visible in the sense that these volumes, and what they bring, connect a greatness to a new form, which is now not in an abstract sense ‘historical’, but an unmediated, if also a more considerate, well-fortified continuation of the blossoming of antiquity. What is effected here is the effectuation of original literature itself, and it belongs in the sphere of the lives of the great, just as much as translations of their writings and commentaries on them. Nothing in them serves the abstract vagueness of education, and in the grounded consciousness of it here Borchardt pronounces for the first time on the sp
irit of this collection:
They are not objective, as one says, or a listing of objects, without time, without style, without will, and fundamentally without cause; cause and time, will and style are unremittingly at work in them in the stillness, they are a part of them. We bequeath to the nation, as we sons of the nineteenth century believe in the powers of the personality, never objects as objects, but always rather only illustrations of objects, illustratively, only forms, which the object in its passage through the organic spirit has received transmutingly, and bequeath thereby, in ever-new modifications and applications, ever-new images of this organic spirit itself. Therefore these collections cannot have intended to compete with any others that currently exist, and they are moreover not at all to be compared with them.
They are anthologies in the highest sense, wreaths like that of Meleager of Gadara, whose blossoms, whether or not we even know them all by name, we now no longer think of them as dispersed.
To communicate this higher unity outside of the book, in which it is perceptible, as fundamentally distilled, that would of course be not, and all the less for the volume under discussion, a matter of an obliging improvisation. The four main views of the body of the earth which revealed themselves to Germans in the nineteenth century – the strictly geographical, the description in terms of natural philosophy, portrayal as landscape and the historical – are all combined in this book. To develop how this is done would mean writing a second one. Here it must suffice to pronounce how certain passages of the work recombine into a spiritual landscape (the loveliest one of which, perhaps, is towards the middle, where Kleist, Immermann, Schinkel, Ludwig Richter and Annette von Droste follow each other). Indeed the whole is a Platonic landscape, a topos hyperouranios, in which lie perceptibly and as primal images towns, provinces and forgotten corners of the planet.
Like the predominance of such general concepts as sclerotization, the form of viable opinions (ideas) makes itself felt within the linguistic as enlivenment. Therefore here, as elsewhere, the cultural historical work of this press is so little separable from its literary output. In this volume, whose linguistic niveau represents a high plateau without threshold, however, the poetic prose retreats so much in the face of the scientific descriptive, the scientifically constructive, it is the case that of all the remarkable sections the most brilliant might be the ‘Curland Spit’, a sketch of the homeland of the lawyer Passarge. Certainly those poets are not lacking here who have forever combined their image with a landscape, unless they had, like Eichendorff or Jean Paul, lost their outlines against the lyrically glowing skies. But precisely a reader who completely overlooks these isolated appearances of poets might yet ask himself whether the stylistic and sensuous peculiarities of French, English, Italian prose writers just as clearly emerge from the landscape book. So clearly do they emerge from these texts, as from these German self-portraits, the head of the writer appears blessed and peaceful, with a gazing eye, in front of a fine background landscape, and collecting all of its features in his. Did he never think about how thoroughly safe German reflection on landscape and language, and how heatedly that on state and people, has always turned out? And, he might ask himself, is the obvious isolation of the best Germans everywhere – who lack an environment of like minds, a popularly rooted, established perspective on the past – not so much a reason for his strict existence in a landscape overstuffed with experience as it is an expression of it?
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