In that night the ardent desire to see such things with my own eyes, touch them with my own hands, investigate their genuineness and understand the secrets that must lie behind them blazed up inside me to a scorching intensity which has remained with me ever since.
I took the gun — temporarily superfluous to requirement — and locked it in the drawer. I still have it: it has died of rust and the cylinder will not revolve, will never revolve again.
Then I went to bed and slept, a long, deep, dreamless sleep. Dreamless? Dreamless only in the sense that I saw no images or scenes I was involved in. But there are other, more profound experiences in deep sleep than dreaming in forms and figures; it is word and speech coming alive in some curious way when there is no mouth to speak apart from one’s own. It is a dialogue in which two separate persons speak and hear, and yet are one and the same. When we wake after such a dialogue, we have always forgotten the words themselves, but in the course of the day their meaning will appear in our consciousness in the form of thoughts that suddenly occur to us, behaving as if they had just emerged from the womb of our brain.
That day I woke with the feeling that someone in the room had just said something out loud; the next moment, however, it became clear to me that it was I myself who had spoken in my sleep and for a fraction of a second I caught my lips murmuring — along with incomprehensible things that sounded as if they were in a foreign language — ‘That is not the way to cross the Styx.’
For many years I was convinced that it was the Pilot who had said that to me and I developed many theories: false, semi-false, three-quarters true, spiritualist, superstitious and religious (the most dangerous of all) theories about who the Pilot might be. It takes a long time, a terribly long time before one realises what powers can disguise themselves as a pilot, it is an agonising journey through swamps full of will-o’-the-wisps.
‘The solution is very simple,’ say those ‘profound thinkers’ who know nothing at all. ‘Schizophrenia,’ say those who like juggling with words such as psychoanalysis, hysteria, mysticism, soul, magic, seeking God, spiritual rebirth, inner life — and cannot distinguish between growth and decline.
‘Jesus Christ’ is the ‘Pilot’ say others, the ‘devout’ Christians who have to let go of God’s hand when they want to light a cigarette.
‘The control spirit is the Pilot,’ say the spiritualists, who have to ask a table when they want to know what things are like on the other side instead of learning how to cross over themselves.
When I woke from the deep sleep I called ‘dreamless’, I was overcome by an obsession which sometimes seemed childish. In the first two years I was driven solely by the compulsion to experience spiritualist phenomena. Any crank, fortune-teller or fool running round in Bohemia attracted me as an electric rod attracts scraps of paper. I invited dozens of mediums to my apartment and at least three times a week spent half the night in sessions with them and a group of friends I had infected with my monomania.
I continued this labour of Sisyphus tirelessly for seven years. All in vain. Either the mediums failed or they turned out to be deliberate or unconscious swindlers. But I was never fooled, not even one single time.
Even after the first two years I was beginning to have doubts, which grew stronger and stronger: could all the famous investigators in this area be wrong after all?
I could not believe that. The Pilot kept whispering to me when I was fast asleep not to give up the search. It was as if, night after night, I felt the lash of the whip from an invisible hand driving me on through new swamps full of strange will-o’-the-wisps. I bought any books on mediumism and similar topics that appeared: English, American, French and German books. One mirage after another appeared before me. Many, many times I decided to rid myself of this urge to seek out the unfathomable, by force if necessary, but every time I realised after only a few hours that it was too late, it was no longer possible. I was horrified, and yet secretly glad.
My brow grew more and more fevered, I was tormented by all sorts of ambitions; a lust for life, such as I can hardly understand today, flooded my whole being. But when I woke late in the morning after a night of wild excess (strangely enough such bouts of riotous living often followed immediately on spiritualist sessions, as if I had been plugged in to psychic batteries of the worst kind) I was never affected by the dreariness of the day, neither by disgust nor remorse — during the hours of sleep the mysterious bellows of the underworld of the soul had fanned the yearning for the world beyond the Styx to renewed ardour.
With the frivolity of youth I probably believed it would continue like that my whole life through. I had no idea that I was being torn apart. My destiny began to move at a gallop and I didn’t notice. I did not notice that my whole being had gradually lost sight of any grey, that soon all it saw was bright white and deep black, all it could do was love to the point of self-abandon and hate utterly. I didn’t hate people because they did me harm — for no reason at all I often felt them to be friends — nor did I love others, even though they were good to me; whole types of people literally made my hair stand on end just to think of them; it wasn’t racial difference that awoke the hatred in me, it was above all that category of people who somehow remind one of the serene detachment that expresses itself outwardly through hair combed down over the ears or through a well groomed full beard and a ‘dependable’ expression. A psychoanalyst would say, ‘The type of which it says in Revelations, “I will spue thee out of my mouth.” This clearly must have its origin in a psychological complex and experience from earliest childhood that has been erased from your memory.’ Perhaps he’s right. But I do not think so. I suspect it is rather a warning from the Pilot, a warning of some event that will happen in the distant future, perhaps even in another — incarnation. Perhaps the devil will appear to me then, so that, in the habit of a pastor, I can not throw the inkwell at him.
This division into black and white grew stronger with the years, which was striking enough, since with increasing age the opposite usually happens: the contrasts blur in that banal grey that poets praise as the golden mean.
I have said that for a long time I did not realise that I was being torn apart. I did see, with growing fear, my ship of life being drawn into treacherous whirlpools from which it looked as if it would soon be impossible to escape. I won’t describe them; given the calamitous situation under which everyone is suffering today9 they would seem petty. ‘Is that all? I wish I had those worries,’ people would say. All I will say about the whirlpools and cyclones I was drifting towards is that at the time whenever I read in the newspaper that someone had been found in the woods, starved to death, or had hanged himself, I would say to myself, ‘Is that all? Suicide — what an easy way out!’
Whenever I could see no way out in my everyday life, I would think, ‘The Pilot, who is guiding me across the Styx in his special way, will help me.’And the more fervent my hopes, the more certain they were to be dashed. That was the most awful part of it.
People who had experienced a severe earthquake told me there was nothing more terrifying, more spine-chilling, than to feel the ground, which from earliest childhood you have believed to be absolutely unshakeable, shifting under your feet.
No! There is something even more terrible: to see one’s last hope fade.
But at last I thought I had found what I had so long been looking for: an association of people, Europeans and Orientals, in central India, who claimed to possess the true secret of yoga, that ancient Asian system that shows the way to the steps that take us far above everything that is weak, incomplete, everything that is mere powerless humanity …
Note
9 Probably 1915.
The Transformation of Blood
For thousands of years mankind has directed its efforts towards escaping our earthly suffering by finding and understanding the laws of nature in order to make use of them. The discoveries and inventions that have been made in this area are extraordinary; even more astonishing is the loss in everything
connected with our instincts. The Germans in particular seem determined to become the nation most lacking in instinct, they showed it before the War, during the War and after the War. Unfortunately! Anyone nowadays who prefers to obey the voice of instinct, instead of listening solely to that of reason, and does not stick faithfully to the conventions derived from previous experience, which are often no longer valid, is dismissed as a fanciful dreamer at the mercy of chance. Humans are relying more and more on their reason gland and since that does not tell them anything connected with magic and other hidden powers of the soul, they imagine such things do not exist, or are of little value. It is an old misapprehension to assume a person guided by feeling is more or less the same as one who follows the guidance of their soul — proof of how shallow our knowledge of the soul has become! That explains the open contempt of the cold, rational person when others talk about ‘soul’. The emotional type, he tells himself, is not up to the demands life makes on us and therefore has no right to exist. Perhaps in many cases he is right. ‘My kingdom is not of this world,’ the other will reply; but he is only saying it, inside he would very much like to do as well in this world as the rational type. He is, therefore, deceiving himself, the worst thing anyone can do. What both have in common is that they delude themselves that it is activity in the outside world that will let them prosper. Their hopes are vain, they are like a fool who thinks he can get rid of the shadow on the wall by covering it with whitewash. It is good fortune and a kindly fate alone that bring success; a superficial person, who sees only immediate causes, never those in the innermost depths of our being, is mistaken when he assumes that competence and efficiency are the sole key to success. Anyone who has learnt to observe life with a sharp eye and is not blinded by vanity knows that you cannot just grab competence like an object whenever you want if it is not already there in your blood; it is not even something you can acquire by training, it is a piece of good fortune that brings further good fortune, perhaps inherited in some cases or, as believers in the Asiatic doctrine of reincarnation say, a reward for things you have done in an earlier existence.
It is astonishing how indifferent this generation, so greedy for invention, is to the question of whether we can consciously become master over chance, fortune and misfortune, directing them at will. ‘Because it is impossible,’ comes the answer from millions of mouths.
Have you tried? Have you ever tried, tried and tried again to defeat even minor bodily illnesses and pain? Not by stuffing yourself full of medicine and following the advice of the doctor, whose science often fails? Embarrassed silence, a contemptuous smile; and they continue busily whitewashing the shadow on the wall. Any attempt to change oneself heart and soul into a person who is master not only of illnesses and minor trials and tribulations, but of chance and misfortune, is looked on as utter madness. Especially by those who proudly insist they are masters of their own will, but are in reality the most miserable slaves of an alien will-power, which secretly directs all their doings without them having the least suspicion it is so — they especially refuse even to try. They are slaves of the demiurge, which they look on as their god, as the one who determines their fate. And for them he does. Anyone who relies on others, even if those others are gods, is lost.
Philosophical knowledge alone can save us from the treadmill our life has become, and probably always has been from the very beginning — thus say those of the human race who possess understanding. But have our philosophers escaped the treadmill? Was Kant able to rid himself of so much as a toothache? One could object that he didn’t try. I do not believe that. I am sure that at one time or another he will have thought: how odd that I know so much, yet am no farther forward in the ability to do things. And even if the idea did not occur to him, it must have to the man of ‘sound common sense’. Our European philosophers have thought up incredibly profound theories about life, existence and the phenomena of the visible world, and they have demonstrated the correctness of their discoveries logically, with mathematical precision even; but they have not shown how to become master over fate. Their insights have remained kiwis: flightless birds. There is a yawning gap separating theories from practice, they are like women who have no children. Simply transposing knowledge does not produce a change in destiny. You cannot think away the shadow on the wall; to change it you must change the position of the object between the light and the wall. Anyone who can do that — figuratively speaking— will become master of their fate. Of course it is possible that it will only make the ‘shadow’ uglier than it was before, but that is the fault of the person, who performed the operation wrongly. The deed must be preceded by knowledge.
Is there such knowledge? It is there, proof against rust like gold; rare and covered in filth, it still comes to light again and again, seemingly worthless to those who have eyes yet cannot see. Glittering mica it is for those who are alive yet know not why; foolishness for the numberless herd of humanity which, mindless and indifferent to everything that has not been drummed into it or secretly poured into its ears as the poison of the snake from the Garden of Eden, forever follow the same dreary road towards the realm of the dead, in a never-ending stream, like the migration of the eels down the river to their spawning grounds and into the fishermen’s nets. This behaviour, in both eels and men, would be incomprehensible if their stoic equanimity did not rest on the inner assurance, secretly gleaming beneath the threshold of consciousness in both man and beast: ‘I will not die, death is an empty phantom.’ That is the only possible explanation why, if a person falls in the water, dozens of others risk their own lives and jump in to save them. If, on the other hand, they could save them by handing over money they wouldn’t do it! Bürger’s ‘Song of the Honest Man’ who refused payment for his bravery, has never been true. People fear life, only they don’t realise it!
Many decent people delude themselves into thinking we humans are all, without exception, doomed to perdition unless we ‘search our soul’, repent, put the world behind us and all the other admonitions of pious zealots. The result? Many listened to them, beat their breast, then went off and spilt the blood of those who didn’t believe in the same things as they did. Later, customs became less violent, but not because people had become better — just more indolent, less fanatical. They go to their churches on Sunday, behave as if they were taking to heart the things some well-meaning man reproaches them with from eleven to twelve, then they go back home, hang up their Sunday suit in the wardrobe and the Code of Civil Law continues to take precedence over the Book of books. Not least because it’s got a flexible binding. And it’s always the same in the Tragedy of History: each act ends with Bolshevism, the ‘religion’ of despair; followed by the interval, a new act, which you’d say was exactly the same again if the actors weren’t wearing different costumes. And, as always, knowledge, the true knowledge that really matters, remains behind the scenes, ignored. It’s not allowed on stage, the actors won’t let it appear, they’re afraid it might steal their applause.
It is thirty-six years since I first had an inkling of the mysterious Masked Figure behind the scenes of life. It only gave me mute signs, which for a long time I did not understand. I was still too young to comprehend what the figure was trying to tell me, I was still too captivated by the play being acted out on the stage. I imagined the play was important and had been written specially for me. Then, when I wanted to take part myself but found the role assigned to me unsatisfying, I was overcome with a furious, unbridled hatred for the players in their make-up. I saw their ‘soulful’ eyes, which in reality were trying to spot where their neighbour kept his purse, realised that the marvellous set was not a real palace, just painted cardboard, and poured out my fanatical hatred of all these histrionics in satires, or whatever you might call them.
The Masked Figure had only given me brief hints, but they were like an inspiration; they were enough to turn a businessman into a writer overnight. I will describe how that was possible in more detail later on. It happened through the
transformation of the blood. A few quick, mute signs from the Masked Figure brought it about. For a long time I was convinced that all those beside me and around me in their make-up and costume were professional actors, until I gradually realised that some of them were so firmly convinced of the genuineness of the character they were playing that they had turned into it without being aware of it. They play their role, having forgotten that they were sent to join the actors against their will, that a hypocritical gang of directors engaged them when they were very young. Then my hatred began to fade, especially when I saw that they only just managed to attain their goals and very often they were other goals than the ones I was aiming for. Then I started hinting, in novels and stories, at the Masked Figure behind the scenes. Many pricked up their ears, others shook their heads and muttered, ‘What’s he on about? There’s no one behind the scenes.’ Did those who pricked up their ears spend long enough staring into the darkness, where I told them they could see the Masked Figure standing? How can I know? Some will have lost patience and turned back to the colourful satyric drama on the stage of life with its bright, artificial lighting. ‘Crazy!’ is probably their assessment of me and those I once wounded with my hatred join in, saying, ‘He lied deliberately! He’s a hypocrite, he has no ideals.’ In one way they are correct: their ideals are not mine, I have an absolute hatred of make-up and bombast.
From the very beginning I interpreted these brief hints from the Masked Figure correctly. The more important signs and signals I only came to understand slowly, for life placed other images before my eyes; it interposed itself as an interpreter between myself and the veiled figure when I proved incapable of understanding his gestures by digging deep within myself. I was faced with the poisoned heritage of all humans, the belief that we can only enrich ourselves from the knowledge of others, we can only drink our fill from mankind’s past. The interpreter, standing between myself and the Masked Figure, spoke a different language from the one intended for me, lying and sometimes, so that I would not notice the lies, telling the truth. I clung on to just one absolutely clear hint from the Masked Figure, despite the interpreter’s scornful expression: wherever and whenever I could, I pointed to the figure behind the scenes. Whether people I spoke to about it believed me or not, whether they laughed, listened attentively, suppressed a smile or made an effort to keep a straight face, it didn’t bother me. Often, even today, perhaps today more than ever, I cannot stop myself thinking, ‘What’s the point? Let the eels continue on their merry way!’
The Dedalus Meyrink Reader Page 12