Frost: A Novel
Page 30
SECOND LETTER
Dear Assistant Strauch,
You taught me what shock therapy is, what it is to oppose madness with lunacy till the midpoint of the two is in uproar. I must say, what your brother is going through here is perhaps another and not inharmonious type of shock therapy, as you once briefly described it, which has nothing to do with technology, which is the countervailing suffering of a deranged nature, against which its exorbitant and misanthropic opponent mutinies. “He might be a person,” you once said, “on the brink of millennia.” If you hadn’t said it yourself, I might have supposed your brother would have come up with it, he seems to say such things all the time. The shock therapy in question is Weng, one of those therapies you darkly and conscientiously described as fiendish, that pursue absolute healing, not healing as physical or mental process, what is described in Koltz as “therapy of the inward detonation.” Weng is a shock. For your brother, of course, a totality involving a pitiless and brain-corrosive recipe, which you once, in the course of one of our evenings in your room, described as “flood damage in the individual.” I think the case in question is an extremely unscrupulous—unscrupulous toward anything at all—condition fed back (from some initial hereditary weakness) that is incapable of registering anything but itself, its own embodied idea of itself. Is it possible to speak of an internalized inheritor disease? As I increasingly have come to see, I occupy no point of view at all. All there is is “the energy of different perspectives.” Do you remember something you said in the course of our only walk together earlier this year: “The connections in the blood are suddenly irreparable.” This, I believe, is where your brother, from out of some now forgotten place that it would be important to learn, is currently placed. “My head could be somewhere where I have no access to it,” he said today. I must say, it’s the most I can do to reach a secondary precision where it is a matter of presenting a sequence of events that have become rigid and quasi-autonomous. This now is the time of availability—where your brother is concerned. But all the possibilities behind so many open doors exhaust me already, and suddenly, it seems to me, I am no longer up to the linearity of procedure that you called for, or to any cerebral activity that insists on the lack of any fixed point of view. It will make you suspicious: on occasion, I move in the same mysticisms as your brother, in that “prescientific thought, the unrevealing mysticism of one who is on the run from clarity.” It is an extraordinarily compelling thing for me to observe how the only lately shamelessly dark world of your concepts is now suddenly opening. As though it were just a matter of stepping out and leaving behind whatever gets in the way of bold thinking; and I must tell you: of medical thinking too, because your thinking is a medical thinking, unlike that of your brother, which, as he says himself, is “an amoral interstitial thinking without any declared purpose.” Basically, both the simple and the demonic sides of your brother’s nature are headed in the same direction (his direction), everything “inhumanly bestially elevated”—as your brother says—in effect, toward death. But all that is a long way from diagnostics, from persuasiveness, from the linearity that, as you always say, must be in sole charge. Nothing so depresses your brother’s spirits as the absence of contact with you. It would be too simple to talk of a brother complex, by analogy to the father complex that we would seem to have put behind us. But there is one piece of news that I must break to you today: it’s as though your brother suffers from interjections, from “an army of hecklers,” that “plunge a brain perhaps overly set on logical consequence into continual disorder.” My thinking, yes, my feeling, based on my thinking, is that this constellation probably affects your brother’s entire constitution, but it would be completely mistaken to think of any sort of conclusion to that effect, assumptions at this stage are rapidly overthrown, but what is tangibly there one might classify as a highly self-confident misanthropic degeneration. Everything turns microscopic. I am trying to be clear, but I am compelled to see that I understand very little about this type of thinking: rather, I seem here to be governed by my own intuitions. And yet I think on the basis of my impressions I may be of some use to you at the proper time. At worst I am an attentive, if occasionally mendacious (at least on a banal level: I claimed to be studying law) stenographer, characterized by submissiveness and obedience. It’s like this: everything here makes me ponder, in this case. Colors, smells, temperatures—the ubiquitous and almost daily advancing frost here strikes me as being of the very greatest significance. I must simply forbid myself to lose myself in particulars, and point out to you details of this climatologically (remember “flood damage in the individual”) interesting, climatological and clinical whole. And I must not in writing to you become involved in questions concerning my observing function. I don’t believe there is any chance of altering your persuasion that your brother is lost. I don’t believe in normalization (healing), rather it is my constatation that the case is deteriorating with each passing day.
THIRD LETTER
Dear Assistant Strauch,
Your brother is living in the delusion that he is several beings at once, and in the delusion—to him, a terrible thing—that he is oppressed by these various, simultaneous, unpredictably fluctuating beings, whom he himself views as “the unthinkable raw material of (his) episodes.” He has spoken of the “scourge of chromatic humiliation” and of the “philosophy of the exacerbated bird’s-eye view of impure thought.” This explains the compelling nature of his constitution, his development, his unfruitfulness. It is this unfruitfulness, understood as the adoption of inhuman rights, that allows him to live—and of course condemns him to death.
I have made the observation that your brother’s existence is fundamentally (“creating themselves in steady negation”) on two planes: the political, and what you call the “dream of a relationship.” These two lives course through the rigid geometry of his pre-established positions, and also through the commotion of his inner life, which you describe as “the interconnected void.” In the person of your brother, I think I have found a notable instance of the political man as dream and the simplifying dreamer as political, and the mutual drama of the two. You yourself spoke once of an essay you proposed to write, to be called “The Dreamer and the Political Man.” Your brother would furnish you with the most outstanding manifestation of the subject; what you wrote would be the reflection of a consciousness, of a thought, that seems, or is, complete. I believe the relationship between dream and politics as exemplified in your brother to be something utterly masculine. The dream of such a person knows neither day nor night, knows nothing political, just as the politics of such a person knows neither day nor night, nor anything dubiously dreamlike. And all that without boundaries, yes without even the thought of boundaries. The way each thing, dream and politics, exists as a separate whole in such a person, makes for complete equilibrium. I would say that a person who is equally a politician and a dreamer ought to be the one we classify as nearest to perfection, if he didn’t refuse any categorization: he would be, yes, he is, the most self-evident human being! But in such a “divine binary,” which represents a summit of human development (though without beginning and without end), the sickness of separation is not just a tough adversary but a step comprising “all deaths at once” that continually requires to be taken. And your brother is just such an “object of all deaths at once.”
To return briefly to the area where I saw the full human potential of someone like your brother, the political and the dreamlike, being united: while his political side may be as much invested in his day-to-day existence as in his dreamlike (or as his dream), I would still describe it as the night of his life, and the dreamlike as his day; the day and night of his self, but without boundaries, and hence his night without a day, and his day without a night. But what is a political person? What is a dreamer? Still, that is what happened to your brother, and in him, the deadly stasis of an entropic vehemence. Together we go on long walks, from one forest to another, into one ravine and out of a
nother; the cold is such that it is impossible to remain motionless for long, to remain motionless out of doors, not even to stop and think, he and I if we stopped and thought, we would immediately freeze, we would die in midthought, as the animals die if terror prompts them to stop in this extraordinary frost. There is an “extraordinary seductiveness of frost” here. I am currently quoting your brother with the dispassion of someone assigned to report on him, to whom “the lines of the world memory” fit together. Today your brother said: “My brain has gone to be set.” I find that an extraordinary pronouncement. Imagine if he had said: “My whole brain has been taken away to be retyped.” He mentioned you only once; one of those dark places in his darkness appeared, in which from time to time “he mindlessly weeps down into.” He has the oddest connection to your sister, who is now living in Mexico. He is one of those people who refuse to say anything at all, and yet who are continually driven to say everything. Who tie tourniquets round the arteries of their thought, but to no effect; who pour themselves out in suicidal word-spate, who hate themselves in truth because the world of their feeling, apprehended as enforced incest, daily smashes them to smithereens. I should like to say: attend to your brother.
FOURTH LETTER
Dear Assistant Strauch,
there is a perfectly ordinary dread, some way short of the greater dread that has your brother in its grip, pushing him into ever greater ruthlessness (ruthlessness principally toward himself). People avoid him. I avoid him myself, in my exhaustion, such exhaustion as I am incapable of describing, I avoid him, but then I am incapable of avoiding him. I am at his mercy. Forgive me! He thrusts his frailty at me and into me in the form of sentences, like slides into a projector, which then projects those terrors onto the blank and always available walls of my self (or his). Of course you want to hear more about your brother, and I will try to keep up my strength. Do you know about the Far Eastern languages he speaks? About his “Asiatic character”? About his time as a substitute teacher? These are all great and completely self-contained darknesses within his perpetrated existence. He was attacked as a child. By you. Do you know about that? Your brother is the opposite of you in everything, and then he became the opposite of that again, you are your brother, and then again you aren’t … He lives in a “world of conceptless concepts.” His stick in his hand has great significance for him. Far from being systematic, I want to draw attention to the fact that even today he is frightened of doors that slammed shut in his childhood. He also suffers “for generations of insomniacs”! His intellectual world always took place in cemeteries, “hung around cemeteries a lot.” Do you understand? Also of interest: his relationship to music, his horror of the state, the police, order. His outrageous pleasure in turning a question into a mutilated reply. Always the thought of the “hideous accidents on the street,” of “lurking family disasters” in the distant past. A liking for circuses, for revues, for all sorts of oddities. He talks of his “kingdom of merriment.” Did you never try to get close to your brother? By ruse? Because you are a doctor, and I think contact with him would have been important to you as well. Or did you, as I fear, never have any contact with your brother? He gets over his night by day, and vice versa. He always carries the Pensées in his pocket. I thought I would be spared your brother’s aggression. But now I feel the contagion of his logically galloping illness. What illness is it? Your brother grows darker in the measure in which he thinks the world and everything in and around him is also darkening. “The world is a progressive dimming of light,” he says. And, tonight: “Everything in me is dried out like the bed of a stream, like the bed of a stream of blood.” As the notion of insanity is not clear to me, but merely familiar, I am unable to say whether I think your brother is insane or not. He is not insane! (Mad?) No, not mad either. “Echoes of death” go making noise in his head. Today I saw him sitting on his bed, stark naked, and preoccupied with his body.
• • •
You will suppose I have been neglecting my duty, because I haven’t written to you for so long. You may imagine I am using your money to buy myself a nice holiday! Whereas in fact my stay here is a terrible chastening, chastening in the double sense of the word. The fact is that I am steeped in your brother’s thought. In his complaints against everything. I don’t—yet—have his illness, but I am steeped in ridicule. He shows me “the malformations of the earth’s surface, created by the malformations of the cosmos.” At this moment, everything looks pretty dark to me as well. You must excuse me, this letter is dictated by a rambling for which I am not responsible. It’s late. But I would still like you to think about the “childhood punishments” you imposed on your brother. About the “childhood lies” you spread about him, all the years of your growing-up and young manhood. I don’t know whether my task can simply be abrogated at the end of thirteen or fourteen days.
Since you have failed to reply to any of my missives, I must assume that, even if you cannot be satisfied with me, you nevertheless do not desire any particular change to the current pattern, and do not insist that I immediately go back. Besides, such a move would be entirely pointless. Of course, I am thinking in terms of taking up my internship in Schwarzach in due course …
FIFTH LETTER
Dear Assistant Strauch,
medicine is dark, these are only dark paths I follow with “exposed brain” through the byways of our science, which I should like to term the glorious one of the sciences, as the ruler of terror among all the sciences, which, unlike ours, are pseudosciences, even though ours is no better than a protoscience itself. I can’t imagine its knowledge, it is only possible to feel it in all its presumed evolutions from our thinking. Medicine seems to me like a concatenated sequence of darknesses, intimately connected to superstition, bold incisions in the perhaps already lapsed geometry of the world. In the process, the substance, flesh, the nether possibilities of the organic, appears more and more insignificant against the only true natural, which is the illimitable dark. Our science is the one from which all others proceed and take their being. And, to quote your brother, with whom I feel an ever closer connection, founded on the stimulus of reversible ideas: “The study of sickness is the most poetic of the sciences.”
I don’t want to go without writing down a few of your brother’s really remarkable sayings. Of course I won’t proceed systematically. That’s not possible for me. It’s a stage, which I am going through as well. Among other things your brother today said: “The tragedy is connected to all the other tragedies.” Also: “Worth is worthlessness, the calamity of worthlessness is the worthlessness of one’s world and of the world unconnected to one’s own.” He said that after coming round from a protracted period of unconsciousness, I found him lying in his room, you can imagine my consternation, my initial reaction was that he had suffered a minor heart attack. He said: “Everything is nearly black.” He was going through the “nitrogen of the primal condition of the devil.” In the evening he said: “The earth, the world, is bloodshot.” This is unusual. He had always led an existence that “was both above and below any other existence, and had never approached his own existential minimum.”