The Dedalus Book of German Decadence

by Ray Furness

  He was unable to recognise himself. The connections and correlations within his soul separated, the threads were sundered … nothing meant anything to him any more, he only lived in his sick dreams and his hands crumpled the ribbon which had once decorated the bouquet which had long since faded.

  It seemed to him that this ribbon had absorbed something of her being. He felt that it was alive. If he stroked it, it seemed as if his hands were caressing the velvet of her body; if he kissed it he was breathing in the perfume of her silken hair; if he tied it round his breast it seemed as though her limbs had wrapped themselves around his body …

  Greater and greater grew the pain and the longing within him. He tormented himself with an impotent writhing. She who had given him the bouquet became a vampire who sucked all the blood from his veins.

  And again he was wandering around the empty streets and squares, and when it grew dusk he crept into dark churches, for once it seemed as if a soft, loving, yearning hand had thrust itself in his with a passionate longing. He wandered amongst the trees in the park in Spring for once he heard footsteps behind him, her footsteps, like the beating of restless wings which seek to fly. For hours he stood at the window and peered out into the darkness for it seemed that he had once seen a pair of eyes – her eyes – seeking for his in fervent supplication.

  Till finally:

  Darkness was sinking heavily. Here and there, between the dark foliage of the trees, the restless flickering of the gas-lights was glistening like blood; the town was pulsing restlessly and a sultry, mournful brooding spread across the dark tree-tops. And suddenly he spotted her where two paths crossed.

  He knew that it was she.

  The same eyes that had burned into his soul that evening; the same face, for only such a face could gleam in the radiance which played about these eyes.

  He started, stood still, and she did not move, frightened and confused.

  Their eyes met, and fell silent.

  He wanted to say something, but could not squeeze out a single word: his whole body trembled, and she shuddered.

  She suddenly lowered her gaze; she stood for a moment, then walked unsteadily past him.

  He awoke.

  He walked behind her, quietly, carefully. He crept along the side of the trees, occasionally hiding behind a wide tree-trunk for he feared that she might look anxiously round and listen to see if he were following her.

  He saw her shadow extend and contract by each of the street-lights that she passed. Ah! If only he could tear her shadow from the earth … her shadow … her shadow …

  Suddenly he drew himself up to his full height and made the decision: reach her, seize her by the hands, stare into her eyes – long, deep, into her very soul, to crush her hands in his and ask her that One question: Did you give me the flowers?

  But suddenly she turned and disappeared before he could put his decision into action.

  He stared for a long time into the dark doorway.

  For a moment it seemed as though she were standing in the dark passage way, leaning against the wall, waiting for him and beckoning with her eyes – he could see the white of her hands, and hear the rustling of her silk gown – but no: he was wrong.

  Exhausted, dead tired, he wanted to go home.

  A heavy, unspeakable sadness spread across his brain, poured into his heart and spread throughout the finest ramifications of his nerves.

  He had never before experienced such tormenting sadness.

  The miracle was fulfilled.

  He loved her.

  And, terrified, he asked himself: Is this love then?

  He sat upon a bench and brooded.

  And suddenly there shot before his eyes an ardent torrent of female figures, women whom he had known, whom he had pressed to his own body and who, in a wild fanfare of blood, had become one with him …

  She, that one, unfathomable, enigmatic, with the glistening gleam of heavy silk, crouching, ready to leap as a panther …

  Or that one, with eyes as soft as a dove and obscenity in her heart, gentle as a roe and hungry as a beast of prey …

  Or that other one, whose body was as cool as a snake or the leaves of a water-lily …

  The other, slim and splendid, drunk with her own loveliness …

  Or the other, with the figure of a divine boy, like a flexible Damascus sword …

  He had had them all, yet had never loved them.

  He had left them without sadness, and had not been sad when they had deserted him, and when he looked back at his life he did not see a plucked and broken flower by the wayside, no shattered branch had spoken: Here a storm had raged.

  This is love then, he whispered. The hour of the miracle has come.

  Abruptly he flung from his mind the lascivious images of lubricious courtesans and innocent doves: with revulsion he gazed at the naked bodies receding into the distance, the chaos of arms and legs, lusting for fulfilment, the dying, twitching orgies of drunken sensuality, and with a child-like piety he gently murmured:

  The hour of the miracle has come, the hour of the miracle …

  And he brooded, endlessly …

  Yes, he loved her.

  Loved her as he had once loved the stream of light which poured out over the sea at night.

  He clearly saw the massive granite lighthouse which he had once inhabited, high up upon the highest point of the cliffs.

  And he could clearly distinguish the strange formation of the rock. As though a gigantic wave, hurling towards heaven, had suddenly become petrified at the very moment that its spray-lashed, spume-laden back should break and collapse into a monstrous abyss of water.

  And on the jagged, shattered mane of the petrified hell-stallion there reared the granite tower.

  For hours he would sit up there by the source of the electric light, gazing through the lantern’s enormous glass prisms at the miraculous light formations on the sea below.

  He saw the beam of light, like a wedge, cutting across the edge of the waves in the lost, dark, silent wilderness of water when the moon shone full.

  A hand, drunk with light, rested with a gentle gleam on the maiden’s lap, dissolved, slipped back and forth like longing, silent lips which wander on the trembling breasts of the beloved.

  For nights on end he gazed at this eternally gentle, trembling caress, the gliding and the wandering of this dreamy hand, suffused with light.

  And he saw again how the light spun golden threads into the wrinkled sea. As far as the eye could reach – nothing but golden gossamer, but the finest lace in an enormous opulence and splendour. The golden net spread into ever greater circles, and the rings enmeshed and entangled new and richer threads, wove new more complex patterns – and it seemed as if the lighthouse were a living creature, a sea-girt goddess, an empress who had spread the golden train of her nuptial gown across the sea.

  Then he saw the light from the lighthouse desperately seeking to eat into the dark banks of fog. Greater and heavier masses of fog fell upon the sea, growing darker, denser, until they became a black, impenetrable wall. And this black mass stormed the light. The light hurled itself with powerful wedges against the black ramparts, striving to tear them down with gigantic claws, to break the darkness with an even greater radiation, to rend it from the sea, but in vain.

  But he loved the light most tenderly when it performed a wild, insane St Vitus dance upon the foaming heads of the waves. When the foundations of the lighthouse were cracking as though shattered by an earthquake, and when the raving hurricane hurled monstrous masses of water against the prisms, then he wept with a boundless love for the light.

  This, oh this was the light which had shone from her eyes into his soul.

  Soft and caressing, like the white, gleaming hand which stroked the lap of the sea, longing with the ecstasy of silent lips brushing the chaste loveliness of virginal breasts, trembling and playing in the golden lace, the nuptial garments which were spread across the sea, stormy and despairing in the powerless st
ruggle with the black masses of fog, convulsed with pain in the battle of the Light-Dragon against the Loki of the ocean.

  And in the same second, in the hour of the great miracle the whole world was reborn within him. Every form, every shape assumed the slim, supple shape of her splendid body; the whole torrent of colour, the whole universal ocean of light poured into the dark, hot radiance which played about her eyes; from the immeasurable chaos of sounds, movements, harmonies, from flux and form there blossomed a wondrous song, a song that was she, the only one.

  Was this why the earth had brought him forth, so that her form should be etched into his soul, so that her lineaments should be incorporated into the one he sought, be poured into them like an entelechy, a predestined pattern?

  Was this why the miracle of moonlight over barren fields, the pain of light above the sea and the leaping, shuddering blaze of sunlight at midday over the roofs of home had poured itself into his eyes, was this why the colours of the sun-burned steppes, of poisonous marsh-weeds, had eaten into him, so that only her gaze should bore into the depths of his soul, awakening his most innermost and holiest thoughts, so that only the shine of her hair should curl caressingly around his nerves, so that the sound of her body should play upon the harp of his soul with such a unique, an unknown ecstasy of divine harmony?

  And that was why his earth was groaning and travailing in this unspeakably mournful lament, that was why the bells were tolling their sombre premonition, and the wind was moaning, telling of remote agonies in tune with the waving wheat, so that each tremor of her body, every fine and supple response should become one with the contours of his soul?

  He rubbed his brow, unable to grasp it all.

  That was why everything was alive around him, everything was shaped so, and exhorted his soul to create that shape which the Unknown One was to fill?

  He rose and left.

  His soul was filled with a silent triumph.

  He walked on proudly, his head held high, like a general in the knowledge of an endless victory. Did he not carry a sun within his breast, – the cosmos, the deepest and most mysterious riddle of all.

  He walked quietly, with greatness, for his soul had opened its deepest meaning to him, had let him read the most secret runes engraved upon its sheath, and he walked splendidly, glowing with the glory of sunlight within his heart.

  He walked with increasing swiftness up the steep path, but he walked easily, as though carried by some mysterious power, until he finally reached the top of the rise.

  He gazed down at the valley beneath his feet, this heaving sea of roofs that seemed to be bathed in a fine, light haze – this was his town.

  And in the distance, behind the town, there was a range of jagged mountains, twisted in contortions, a confusion of meandering hills, abrupt and terrifying precipices, mountains like monstrous waves, spraying up from the depths of the horizon, breaking, towering up one above the other … and the heights were covered in forests of chestnut trees. Green chestnut forests, covered by the snowy glory of blossoming candles. Ah! how the white requiem candles flickered on the green velvet which seemed to pour down from the sky on to the town below!

  And suddenly his heart expanded in a feeling of unknown power. He was growing into the skies, he stretched out his arms, a wild shriek burst from him, destined to show the cosmos that sun which he held within his heart; he sensed that he was radiating light, as though an ocean of light were roaring around him; he felt that he had transcended Being, and was celebrating Ascension.

  And, again, he collapsed.

  Everything changed.

  Home!

  It was late. The lamps had been extinguished, and he wandered as in a dream through the gloomy twilight of the avenue of chestnut trees. He was walking, and was scarcely aware that he walked.

  His soul was lacerated by raging desire; his brain seethed and boiled.

  And yet he was carrying her within him, the sun, the cosmos – all this was contained within his heart. What, then, was he longing for?

  He smiled quietly to himself.

  Her face, so strangely light and transparent … her eyes, so large and startled … her figure, so slim and supple, like a young reed in the winds of Spring …

  Fever devoured him.

  He reached home, and threw himself on the bed …

  The night grew rigid in the air. Night grew petrified, no ray of light could penetrate the heavy, granite vault of night, a massive black rainbow, bearing down upon the earth …

  In the blackness of night great flowers screamed in anguish for the sun, twisted in fearful torment, arose, rearing upwards in the convulsions of rigidity, hurling themselves upon the earth in St Vitus writhings, bending into spiral coils in the delirium of obsession, and vast fields of white narcissi stared with bleeding eyes in a senseless despair.

  White narcissi with eyes that burst, swelling with blood, blood that slowly ran down the stems in great black globules.

  And above this white wilderness, sprinkled with the stains of bloody tears, there arose two proud, slim stems; two white stars were dancing in the air, rearing higher and higher and, with a joyful burst of hope, they rent the thicket of darkness: they gently moved their two heads together and their eyes entwined in the silence of holy premonition.

  He stared for a long time at the lovely flowers, smiling, moving.

  He forced his way with difficulty through a tangle of the most monstrous flowers, growths that seemed to have sucked from the earth every known poison, every possible putrefaction.

  He was wandering through wet marshy weeds, beneath gigantic, dark-shadowing trees, exulting in a violet mournfulness; he walked past monstrous hedges of deadly nightshade, overladen with berries that gleamed like polished ebony, past bushes of hideous henbane whose dirty ash-coloured leaves shrieked with the horror of midnight; pale hemlock blocked his path; the thorn-apple terrified him with eyes that seemed glazed with grey glaucoma; tall bushes of belladonna whipped him in the face; he was blinded by ranunculus which was burning in the red glow of an Alpine fire.

  And deeper and deeper he bored into himself, into this hideous realm of poison until he stopped, suddenly, petrified with fear.

  The room narrowed around him; space hurtled towards him, constraining and constricting, closing in around him as a wall, and he suddenly found himself in a mysterious chamber, like the temple in Eleusis, where arcane mysteries were celebrated, or in a secret room of the cult of Isis, where the priestess offered her hymen to the consecrated goat, or in an underground vault dedicated to the goddess Kali, where the Thugs let poisonous snakes suck the eyes from their victims … or, rather, he was in a ruined catacomb where Satan, with his two-pronged phallus, forced his beloved to bleed in inhuman lust, or he was in the crypt of a medieval chapel where blasphemous priests celebrated a Black Mass upon the naked body of their chatelaine …

  Astonished, terrified, he looked around him.

  From the ceiling there hung a lamp, thickly clustered with rubies which looked like menstruating eggs, with diamonds as large as fists, suffused with the pale light of a watery goitre, with precious stones which adhered to the lamp like lumps of cystoid ganglia, onyx, beryl, chrysolite – and through the foul waters of the sick jewellery there poured a flood of light, light suffused with expiring rubies and the green jack o’ lantern of an emerald gulf-stream.

  And in the dreadful magic of the light, a light which once, perhaps, lashed the febrile earth at its genesis into a senseless rut of procreation, when it was still seething with fire and furnace; by this dreadful light he gazed around the wall at a curious ornament which formed its cornice.

  One and the same female countenance with an ever-changing expression, an ever renewed mourning, despair, passion, lust, longing …

  But it was her face, and the eternal song of her soul, he thought, astonished.

  He saw her, innocent and pure as a child with the eyes of a white tuberose, still as the reflection of pale stars in a dark stream, soft as t
he echo of a shepherd’s pipe in a Spring night, steeped in the intoxicating perfume of the lilac …

  But then again sad and sorrowing, like the blossom of a black rose in the suffocating heat of July – (and only occasionally does a wild cry burst from her soul, like the cracked tone of a broken chord which resounds across the sun-drenched, grassy sea of the steppes) -

  Or again abrupt, yearning, like the poppy flower dying in the sacrifice of lust: as though through the dream-heavy, sultry woe a serpent should crawl again, a snake of greedy, smouldering music, breathing out lust and torment.

  He once saw her eyes swimming in a haze of intoxication, then again bold and insolent as though they were in the grip of Indian hashish … In one vision he saw her mouth like the parted blossom of a mystical rose, then again gaping in the scream of an orchid’s open calyx, proud and inaccessible as the blossom of an aglaophotis, and scornful as antirrhinum.

  An endless row of heads – one and the same head – and all the expressions in an endless variety and alternation: an endless scale of sadness from the first trembling of desire down to the deepest whirlpool of manic despair – the whole eternal song of love from the first tremor of the heart which fills the veins with blood, through the glow of ardent passion, through blind, greedy longing down to the hell of lust, which cannot satisfy, cannot be satisfied – the whole hurricane of insane eroticism from the first blossoming of the thoughts of joy which, spider-like, enfolds the brain, to that last dark, shrieking, torment-tossing chaos, when the soul loses itself, bursts, and explodes in fragments.

  And suddenly: all these heads began to detach themselves from the wall and became alive, they started to form and assume shape, arms, lusting, drunken, shrieking arms stretched out towards him, naked female forms leaped from the walls, climbed down to him, threw themselves upon him and overwhelmed him with a sea of greedy bodies, bodies that promised the lust of the abyss; a hideous laughter, weeping, groaning, screaming burst from the room, echoing around the thousand corners and crevices, gasping arms embraced him, flinging him to and fro, and he was suffocating in the mad hysteria of flesh, in the rabid orgasm of an infernal rutting. He was enveloped in a horrendous orgy of tangled limbs which could not be separated, in the shrieking spasms of a hideous copulation – the most ghastly images of perverse sexuality blossomed before his eyes, a demented Sabbath of blood and sperm.