Douglas Mercer
December 20 2024
Continue from Empyrean (Part Five)
With the advent of Friedrich Holderlin the flame first begin to truly light us, truly call us, to wander at first in uncertainty and then in noble assurance down the path which we are on, the path from which there is no return. His story is one of the pure spirit uprising and is full of tragic turns; known to all but shunned, outcast, living out his pure dream of the ether on his own; considered mad and deranged, he did a series of translations from Sophocles that pierced so far down to the root of the Word, swam so far back towards the mouth of the philological river, that they feared for his sanity; but in the year he had left he rocked in a cradle of perfect serenity and brought the fire of the gods down to men; he was the unbreakable one who descended into the madness of the gods and reported the fate that awaited; the heavenly fire was his invariable theme, the fled gods and their inevitable return; this return is occasioned first and foremost by the Poet, the one who stands on earth unprotected before the gods and beckons their imminent arrival. The poet is the select of gods who must withstand and be exposed to being in its fullness and must continually cross and re-cross the border between sanity and madness; above all the poet must listen and be open to the call of being so that in the end he can call being into existence. He does this by copying the image of god and engraving it in words given to the people. The gods condition, print, forge and construct and reconstruct the poet’s soul and, should the poet lapse, they will even guide his fingers by force so that he will give up his heart to them. Every god requires a sacrifice and the poet is that; but for Holderlin living in the lovely blue of his mind it was no sacrifice but a the gift freely given—grant him only more time and then he would gladly descent into mental darkness. For he knew that what the gods most want of the poet is that he keep the sacred letters in his care and properly interpret them. When he had lived through his vocation he was nurtured and cared for by the lovely Zimmerman who saw to his every need; and then his reputation sunk in black darkness until Hellingrath and then of course Heidegger with a diligence bordering on mania brought him back to his rightful place. He now sits peerless in the land of the poets, in the isle of the blessed, at the table of the immortals; and in the Things his words echo free and clear and every listener is sure the fire of a million majestic hearts beat as his own.
Jesus Kleist they used to say to lampoon him; but with Heinrich Von Kleist we get the total German man, a warrior and poet of the first order; and we begin to get not just the depths of German thought but it’s double reflecting mirror as well; his idea of producing thought as one speaks and his attention to error in speech give us hints of the trap doors of illusion that will come to the fore as the spirit reaches its culmination, when the asymptotes like skew lines just miss the target; for no linear process does the spirit go by, particularly as it reaches its end, but rather strange oscillations, backturnings, and eerie transformations before the open and transparent sight of the final abode.
Now, my excellent friend, said my companion, you are in possession of all you need to follow my argument. We see that in the organic world, as thought grows dimmer and weaker, truth emerges more brilliantly and decisively. But just as a section drawn through two lines suddenly reappears on the other side after passing through infinity, or as the image in a concave mirror turns up again right in front of us after dwindling into the distance, so truth itself returns when knowledge has as it were gone through an infinity. Truth appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god. Does that mean, I said in some bewilderment, that we must eat again of the tree of knowledge in order to return to the state of innocence? Of course, he said, but that is the final chapter in the history of the world.
This is a funhouse mirror world and was the sine qua non of our thought; for what started out as the search for the light became over time quite dark; or, better, it became more complicated and knotty and it is this which led to the fracturing of modernism, the splitting apart and the alienation; the mistake was that when the veer and the swerve happened people lost their belief in the “big ideas” and the “grand narratives”; but the big ideas were always there and the grand narrative though it began to appear to be a grand illusion was just a serpentine way of arriving; no, the much derided home truths they were always right as rain; what was happening was that it was challenging us to go deeper and deeper and down the rabbit holes and to shoot the gaps of the labyrinths; most just gave up and said that one thing was as good as the next, and one could draw a nose where an eye went or say that a toilet seat was a work of high art; but these are the cowards and snivelers of civilization; Kleist in this statement shows he is as wild as any surrealist but just because chaos enters does not mean he is going to lose the plot; he speaks of things traveling through infinity and appearing right and proper on the other side; and of things getting lost in byzantine mirrors and compounding and ramifying reflections and then showing up at our feet. I call this nonchalance and insouciance or what the great Nordic Poet calls negative capability, of keeping your head amid the storm. He then echoes Shakespeare’s to be or not to be and compares death (the puppet) to God. Are the lights on or is no one home? Or both and neither? But as a member of our vaunted race he sees that it will be nothing but knowledge which sets one free; and that, as he laconically avers, is the end of the world.
With Hegel we get the true master of German thought. He never lost his belief in the intelligibility of being; while other dabblers were lost in thought saying perception is reality (reality is reality) or that the thing in itself would forever be hidden from us he kept the sacred letters and interpreted them aright; first off he was a systemizer who believed above all in the system. That it was a moving system and a system that was constantly changing and shifting and organizing itself and mobilizing itself dismayed him not; he was under no illusion that he would be the philosophical thinker who would see beings in their pure visibility but that mattered not to him; as everyone on the path is he was but cog in the machine and it was the machine that matters; and that the secret carriers had only to stand up and write it down and pass on the letters and one day the letter would reach its destination and that then the race itself would be immoral; and the owl flown from its nest must be its herald.
With Wagner and Nietzsche great strides were made but great mistakes as well. Hitler was correct when he said that one could not understand National Socialism if one could not understand Wagner. His total work of art, with his majestic music and his choral voices, gave us the glimpse of eternity; Nietzsche’s notion of the coming race, that man would be superseded gave us the idea and gave us the impetus; naturally with Parsifal Wagner was trying to purify the Christian religion of its Judaic component which is an impossible red herring; and Nietzsche turned his back on Germany and has more than admiring remarks to say about Jews; but this is by the by now; the way the Spirit works and onrushes is that only what has merit from the past survives; what is superfluous or wrong is jettisoned; time is a tuning fork and an instrument of refinement; and time is a funnel which sifts and through which the only truth flows; as perspective is laid on top of perspective the wise ones of the final ages can weigh and judge; I was lucky enough given my initial questioning of Heidegger to have struck up an acquaintance with him that was never quite that of acolyte to master and never quite that of friend; I think more than anything he wanted to see what the younger cohort was thinking; I told him forthrightly that where we held him most in question was his relation to the will; his notion of letting be misread the power of the mind to alter reality to its specifications; and that once war was abolished the will to domination would not be a will to power but a will to the right; and the will to an abstract and creative future. I must say he was a bit taken by this argument but never quite came around to it; the last thing he said to me was he hoped we knew what we were doing; I assured him that we did; that we had attended well the letter and now would make it appear in the flesh. After all just because reality is not what you suppose does not mean reality is an illusion; it just means what you take to be an illusion is reality; for once you master time and space reality is what you think it is. That’s what the psychiatrists on the staff are for.
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Needles to say aside from those high water marks the German spirit was held tight in special enclaves; all of High Modernism was little more than tossing a stone in a canyon and listening for the echo; Joyce, Proust, Kafka were all of them driven into a cul-de-sac of concepts and words; Rilke alone with his concept of the Open and that one must change one’s life (metanoia) was near the trail; and even more needless to say the various avante garde and surrealist cubists were doing little more than muttering in the corners; for to be an advanced guard one must be aware of what is current, what is live on the wire, what is best, and follow it through to its conclusion. The whole of Weimar was little more than play actors with pink rouge on their faces sashaying down the boulevard of Berlins with their acerbic pens dipped in vainly satirical ink. For every ponderous Magic Mountain and picayune Karl Kraus we had the patience to wait and see it overthrown; the Futurists could never dream of a real future and even a Pound or an Eliot were unable to grasp the nettle. But there were a few of us, not the secret Germany, but the real Germany, who heard the ancient call of our race in the current tone of our words. And I am reminded that we had our Breker and our Thorak to put in stone what might have seemed monstrous to the world, but to us seemed in pure harmony and proportion to the what we were dreaming and the world we wanted to and have built. It was Wagner who came on to the stage after the first Ring and with the royalty and literati of Europe before him said this is what me and my musicians can do. This is the music of the future. If you want you can do it too. If I am proud of anything it is that we heard this music and have made it; that is we took him up on his offer
Continued at Empyrean (Part Seven)
