The Dedalus Book of Dutch Fantasy

by Richard Huijing

  'So you are my Juanito whispered back, still startled and looking askance.

  'I am your father whom you barely knew', said the spirit of Don Juan. 'Dear boy, at last I have appeared to you. Do not be afraid of me: truly, I'm busy Lately I have been as chaste as you on the Sabbath Night, and now, in my new surroundings, there's no such thing as living it up ... They are all very satisfied with me: all of them. But, you I must have a talk with you. Your mother - God have mercy on her boring soul! - was not the wife for me. However, had I been allowed to have a wife such as my darling daughter-in-law, such as Dona Sol certainly is to you...'

  Confidentially, Don Juan continued to talk at his son's ear without the occasional passer-by and the Sereno, who cried the hour of the night, seeing anything of the paternal spirit who walked with his living son ... And gradually it seemed to Don Juanito that his father, whom he had always disapproved of severely, had not been an entirely bad man ...

  'I,' Don Juan entrusted his son; 'never went to a Jesuit school, though I do believe that studies are good there ... What should I tell you, my boy. I was an unmanageable lad. My first love was my nursemaid and when my good old parents saw that, they did not think of the Jesuit school but they locked me up in that same cellar underneath the dining room through which I passed into Hell later That's very good in Mozart's opera; I mean, in the opera which, in a later century, a certain Mozart will write about me. But then there will be another artist who will compose a great poem about me: he shall be called Byron and his verses will excel in their Do you hear, my boy? About you no composer will make an opera nor a poet an

  'Still, I have been more virtuous than you, 0 beloved father,' asserted Don Juanito.

  'My dear man, what is virtue and what is vice?' the shade of Don Juan asked Don Juanito, and the one philosophised a long while at the other's ear during that evening walk through quiet nighttime Seville.

  Don Juanito listened attentively and occasionally would nod his head in agreement with a movement that this indeed might be so ... He asked his father to tell him about his second love now he had already told him about the nursemaid, after all. Don Juan told his son of many loves, though not of all which Leporello had once accounted for in the long list. Now, Don Juanito shook his head disapprovingly again the way a sensible and living human being does to an altogether too frivolous spirit who wishes to conjure up all kinds of things for him.

  'No,' said Don Juanito, 'so much waste of the vital force is not right, is not proper, and only granted to an epic soul such as you who will later be glorified in rhyme and rhythm and music. Though I might admit to you...'

  What exactly Don Juanito admitted to, I would not be able to give away, just like that; I do believe, however, that Don Juan's opinion on Marriage as being a divine and human, as well as religious and social institution did make Don Juanito think.

  You must not forget, my good fellow,' said Don Juan: 'that I had blown the lot. That last banquet for my Stone Guest ... cost fifty thousand ducats and ... those were my more or

  'My mother, Dona Elvira,' Don Juanito held forth: 'you left her behind almost without a penny.'

  'Your wife is rich, is she not?' asked Don Juan.

  We are comfortably off,' Don Juanito confirmed.

  'Did you know,' whispered Don Juan: 'that she can petition for divorce? And that she will do when the spirit comes over her?'

  Don Juanito gave a start.

  'Father!' he cried. 'Father! What was that you said? Truly?! Oh, what good fortune that you warned me, beloved father! That your spirit ... may come over me!'

  'Truly?' asked Don Juan.

  'I believe so!' cried Don Juanito. 'I'm almost sure!'

  'Then home at once, where your wife awaits you!' cried Don Juan and without Don Juanito having to take out his front door key, because of the supernaturalness of the mise-en-scene, the spirit of the father pushed the body of his son through the front door ... Moved, Don Juan remained, alone.

  'He will become a good husband,' he thought. 'A faithful husband. An impeccable husband ... There was something of his mother in him: there is also something of his father in

  And he disappeared in a glow of Bengal light through the paving in the street.

  That night, that little head, the sun-blonde one belonging to Dona Sol, was slumbering, turned towards the darkly outlined face of Don Juanito, Don Juan's son.

  And next day she gained her husband's permission to softfurnish their bedroom, instead of with black velvet, with pink muslin held up everywhere in soft pleats by gilded, fat-legged cupids. The Rococo period was just beginning at the time.

  Johan Andreas Der Mouw

  There was a monastery in the forest and the summer morning lit up in a distant haze.

  And a young monk emerged from the monastery, a prayer book in his hand, and he went into the forest.

  And a little white bird flew round him that settled on a branch and began to sing, and he listened.

  And the little bird sang, and he listened.

  And clouds came and clouds went and the little bird sang, and he listened. And the bird flew away, and he went back to the monastery with the prayer book in his hand.

  And the monk who opened the gates did not know him and the prior and the other monks did not know him.

  And there was an old man who lay dying, for he was very old, and he said that fifty years earlier a young monk with the prayer book in his hand had gone into the woods and had never returned, and in him-whom-no-one-knew he recognised the young monk.

  And fifty years had passed since he listened to the little white bird and to him they had been but an instant.

  For eternity is a second; time stands still to him who leaves the world of semblances and submerges himself in the Eternal Sea of Beauty and Rationality. Semblances are the many-eyed laughter of the Spring meadow and the weeping of denuded forest.

  The earth is but a semblance when, with green leaf-flags and green waving sea-robes, it swerves round the sun.

  The stars are semblances, distant fire-flies in the fields of the night. The time shall come when no meadow laughs any longer nor forests weep; when the earth sinks down with fatigue, like a child that has been playing a long time; when the fire-flies die. World-twilight is coming and Space disappears and Time disappears and Sorrow disappears. The World shall fall away like the cocoon round a butterfly, and God shall Think in sorrowless peace. I wish to dive into my soul. Down there, on soft-sanded soil, in bluegreen dusk, pale red flowers bloom; the finely scalloped petals are still and they muse. High above them, the waves roll and the storms gambol, and they do not notice; and Summer, with its lilacpurple steeds and its cracking fire-whip, rides past, and they do not notice; and slanting rain-squalls and white-whirling do not notice. They grow quiet and stand soundless in the peaceful dusk.

  Hunger for knowledge for my life-raft, I wish to descend into the dark country. Or do you think you know it because, when staring down, you see a strange reflection there where the green transparency ends?

  And when I caress your hair and say to you that I love you - when you hear unspoken words and can feel my thoughts come and go, do you believe that those binoculars will tell you what blooms unfathomably deep? They, who roamed for fifty centuries across the Asiatic plains and saw the silent stars migrate, remembered the returning changeability, the changeable regularity of their trajectory and bethought themselves to know what was their nature. And yawning telescopes sucked the light miracles closer by and mirrors and lenses stared through the universe; and the bundles of light, rarefied obelisks, told of distant worlds, of distant times, in multi-coloured hieroglyphics; like a child making a maybeetle fly in a circle, thus science showed errant comets the path they would follow. But does the child know which co-operating bifurcations of muscle and nerve-tissue make the beetle fly? Likewise, we do not know the power that carries and inspires the long-living light-beetles. Nor dost thou know what miracles grow in the mystical twilight of my soul.

  That which I s
hall find there, down below, I wish to show it to thee; reverently shalt thou stroke the tender petals and bend back with gentle finger that which is warped. For not every plant has grown the way its original nature wished and needed it to. There is a Power that lured the sprouting twigs away from the direction first embarked upon and forced them into capriciousness, that made the flowers bend round on their stems and made the calyxes point toward an identical spot. The way sunflowers look, ever look toward their ambulant ideal, the bright Sunflower: from the moment she is lifted above the horizon by the invisible stem until she ends her tremendous circle at the other world's end, thus my mysterious flowers stare at one single miracle image.

  For it was not always a quiet-happy field here, full of dreamy stillness and expansive peace; now there hangs a calm over the unmoved garden the way still-hovering sanctity mists around a golden autumn-forest; now the Hours have unlearned their rushing course and they lie in the calyxes like sleeping butterflies. A forest stood here once, great with heavy trunks; the rich primaeval power of the Being of things had raised them up and bore the weight of their growth; it nourished them all with equal love, the one into a fruit-cascading blessing, the other into an assassinating curse.

  For, to Him who is all, there is no Good and no Sin, nor is there day or night; He forces himself to create willing weapons with which to combat Himself; having abandoned eternal-pondering perfection, strifeless peace, he wages war on Himself.

  He has chased himself out of a spaceless, timeless paradise and wishes to make the wall, built by thoughtless striving, fall; this is why He took Time into service which slung humming centuries against the endless bastion and powdered it to star-rubble that he further wrenches loose with drilling seconds; and on this his Sacred Master set his triumphant foot, in order, at last, having blossomed into a human soul, to grow and enter the earlier sanctity.

  But his own work hampers the Mighty One and forbids Him to be what He wishes, and to attain that which He strives for, for as long as Time already is; it forces the Free to grow into an impediment to themselves and they ensnare themselves in Paradise-closing vines.

  Thus He grew into a forest of Hate and Anger and Pride and Love and Sorrow, which was I, and the wrestling trunks destroyed one another in a powerless crowding-in.

  And Pride spake:

  I wish to remain what I am; Time shall come storming with hurtling Years, but he shall not tame me; and his tireless showers, those gnawing hour-drops, shall not soak me loose.

  And Anger and Hate and Sorrow fumed and wailed in unvanquished rage. Love alone stood timid and still, fearful of the perceptivity of her stronger sisters.

  And darkness hung over the battle, blackened by the moon-pale magic glow of the Love-blossoms.

  And a butterfly, a Sacred Butterfly, thy Soul, came fluttering by and the darkness did not strike fear into her, nor did the muttering threat of destruction.

  She, God had sent, Who sped to His Own aid. And she perched on a Love-blossom and the wings trembled in strange light.

  And a rustling such as had never been heard before, hummed through the battling chaos - thus the evening star shines among the shards of cloud when November storms - And the tree upon which the Butterfly sat, began to grow and branches sprouted on all sides, and the blossom, curious, was coaxed out carefully.

  And the Butterfly sat quietly; only its wings trembled in golden light.

  And the tree shone with white-gleaming flowers, the Christmas Tree of my soul. For the Messiah had come, the Anointed One, the Christ, who makes blessed. The one who was lost, She sought out; She raised him who wept over the unwilling-willing fall. She was the pure child of God; She was the Law and the Prophets.

  But She had not come to bring the sword; She brought peace, for Hate and Anger and Pride could not grow in the white light, and they said:

  Who is it who hampers us in our most mighty growth? This is our domain; here our enmity reigns in unity. We tolerate no usurper.

  And they resisted and with tough root-joints they clamped themselves fast to their territory and sought to suck power from the soil that had been willing until now. But that which was meant to serve their victory flowed to the young tree. And the calyxes began to ring out: an Alleluia for the Christ, a dead march for the vanquished.

  And they cringed and withered, the tremendous ones; they recognised their weakness and their injustice, and their death honoured She Who Rules Alone. And there She stood, my sacred flower, singing light, white-glowing music.

  Thou hast saved me. Thy weakness is the strong shepherd who snatches the lost lamb from the jaws of the wolf and returns it to the warm stable.

  What dost thou wish to do with my life? The sky was dark and I was standing on a lonely heath; the spruces did not move and there was not a sound; the flowers were gone; November had washed them away and all was grey and drab-brown; and slowly the clouds slid forth across distant-sorrowing forests. And dusk came, and the silence became even quieter when the gloomy colour-music ceased. And the clouds travelled on, ever more new clouds, endless; and the woods vanished; the black absorbed everything into itself. Once upon a time they had been cheerful; the sun's rays had played tag among the tree trunks when July had been their guest, and high up among the crowns had hung a lively net of cheerful insects, marquetry in the blue sky, a living mosaic, buzzing specks of light. And now, all was gone. They no longer wished to live, the cheerless forests, and they dissolved themselves in the heavy void. And I alone still lived. Everything died away around me; Nothingness enticed to flee the sorrow in its endless quiet. For, there again stood she, never ageing Sorrow, the only damsel who stands outside of time's power. I saw her emerge from the mists and she came and stood and stared at me. And I pleaded with her and said: what have I done unto you that you persecute me? Have I not served you above all others, for many years? I was your friend when you were modest but my obedience rebelled against your stringent demands. Why do you desire that I do homage only to you? You are not God's sole daughter and Your greater dominion does not entitle you to exclusive claim on my loyalty. Black is your cloak and black your I am young.

  How can you wish that I devote my soul to dull-mute mourning? Your tread sounds like a dead march and I want wedding music. Let me go Sorrow regarded me and said with a voice that sounded like high winds rushing in indifferent progress over the earth:

  You are not free; my Eternal Father gave you to me in perpetual ownership. When he woke me from sleep and sent me abroad into the World, I asked him: how shall I rule, as everyone is hostile to me? Though my power is great, how shall I not be inferior to the hate of all and to gnawing fatigue? And then he spake: People will hate you and struggle against your kingship, but I shall prepare you a resting place in the souls of those who help others in their struggle. He who wages war on you for others, he shall be your property - And therefore I follow you, for you belong to me - Why should you honour my sisters? Beauty is not intended for you; she laughs and you have been in my company too long to join in with her laughter. And Reason? She is too rigid and too cold and cannot satisfy your feeling. Your heart is my home. And I wanted to flee; kindly, Death signalled me with serious-smiling face; he seemed to await me and he looked at me encouragingly. Oh, I longed for peace. I stared back down my life and sought for sun spots, and the road was a long and monotonous one.

  Thou know'st not how much I love thee: how could a girl feel the glow of a man? What do you wish that I shall do for you? Shall I pile Switzerland upon the Rocky Mountains and make the ocean flop down from the barely visible peak, a world-rending waterfall so that you say: isn't that charming? Or do you like fireworks? Shall I tie comets to Vesuvius, bright flags for our high day, and the Milky Way, vane of light-gauze? Shall I make green and red and gold suns whirl about in mystic figures, a multi-coloured shower of sparks, as a small tribute to you? Would you like wedding music? Then the storm shall howl an Appassionata and the thunder will roll the drums. Do you want bridal raiments such as no empress has ever
worn, raiments befitting you, radiant empress of my radiant soul? Out of the scarlet sun-down I will weave you a cloak and I will hang the Southern Cross upon your breast. But what shall I set around your hair, your dark-smooth hair? Shall I weave the rays of the sun into a bridal that is too dull. I will lay my mouth upon your head and I will whisper how much I love you: and flames in whose presence thunderbolts would cast a shadow shall crown you.

  What shall be our bridal couch? Come! The cloud-shore is hilly, full of bright valleys there where the sea of moonlight dreams. No, those are not stars; those are golden waterlilies; no, those are not meteors: it is the radiance of the sea -

  Behold how I have furnished our bridal apartment, worthy of our love.

  The walls I have covered in blue light and pondering sea-roses, and cushions await in twilight, and the sea hums Fingal-melodies and the South Wind - there, in that grotto - plays the harp.

  Oh, I love thee, thy hair and thy shoulders and thy breast; I wish to kiss thee unto intoxication and sink away in God. I feel how thou dost tremble with desire; thine eye glitters my festive light to gleamlessness. What flames are those that thou see'st? Those are the flames of thy love which shall shout with joy around thee in sacred glow - And those noises humming in thine ears?

  It is the organ-playing in thy soul, it is the hymn singing of thy love. Come - I wish to drink thy soul from thy lips and breathe unconscious sanctity into thee; the fire-flower of bliss shall bloom in us, the wonder-flower which grows in the caressing glow of thine eyes, in the scorching coolness of thy mouth. Thy dark plait shall I wind around my throat, for I wish to be the happy prisoner of thy Beauty; I lay my right arm around thy soft shoulders, my left hand around thy tender breast.