Ahead of All Parting (26 page)

Thus, a year later, I found you grown up and consoled.

For those, nevertheless, who will see you forever tearful at the end of your book, I have composed the first—somewhat whimsical—part of this preface. So that I could say at its conclusion: “Set your minds at ease: I am. Balthusz exists. Our world is quite solid.

There are no cats.”

Berg-am-Irchel Castle
November 1920

At a meeting last Thursday, some of your poems were read to us, Monsieur V.; they keep returning to me; I can’t help writing down for you what is on my mind, as well as I can.

The day after that reading, I happened to attend, by chance, an event sponsored by a Christian group, and maybe this was really the impetus which caused the explosion, which unleashed such commotion and urgency that I find myself rushing toward you with all my might. It takes an enormous act of violence to begin something. I can’t
begin.
I simply jump over what should be the beginning. Nothing is as strong as silence. It would never have been broken, if we hadn’t each been born into the midst of talk.

Monsieur V.—I don’t want to speak about the evening when we received your poetry. I want to speak about the other evening. Something is forcing me to say: Who, yes (I can’t express it any other way now),
who
is this Christ who meddles with everything we do;—who has never known a thing about us, or about our work, or about our griefs, or about our joys, as we achieve them today, live them, and bring them forth—, and who nevertheless, it seems, constantly demands to be the
first
in our life? Or has that just been put into his mouth? What does he want of us? He wants to help us, supposedly. Yes, but he seems so strangely bewildered when he’s near us. His situation was so completely different. Or don’t the circumstances really matter; if he entered right here, into my room, or appeared over at the factory—everything would immediately be different, right? Would my heart burst open inside me and, so to speak, continue in some other realm and always in his direction? My instinct tells me that he isn’t
able
to come. That it would have no sense. Our world isn’t just outwardly different,—it has no access for him. He wouldn’t
shine
through a department-store coat, it isn’t true, he just wouldn’t shine through. It’s no accident that he went around in a seamless robe, and I think the kernel of light in him, the thing that made him shine so strongly, day and night, is long since dissolved, and distributed somewhere else. But if he was so great, this would, it seems to me, be the least we could demand of him—that somehow he should have vanished without any residue, yes, without any residue at all—traceless.

I can’t imagine that the
cross
should have
remained
, which was, after all, just a crossroads. It shouldn’t be burned onto us, all over our flesh, like a brand. It should have been dissolved in Christ himself. For isn’t the truth
this:
he simply wanted to create the higher tree on which we would be better able to ripen. He, on the cross, is this new tree in God, and we were supposed to be the warm, happy fruit at the top of it.

Now we shouldn’t always talk of what was
before:
the
after
should already have begun. This tree, I feel, should have become so one with us, or we with it,
on
it, that we wouldn’t have to be continually concerned with it but, simply and peacefully, with God, since Christ’s purpose was, after all, to more purely hold us up into God.

When I say: God, this is a great conviction in me, and not something I have been taught. The whole creation, it seems to me, says this word, without thinking, though often out of a deep meditativeness. If this Christ has helped us to say it with a clearer voice, more fully, more genuinely—so much the better; but leave him out of the question. Don’t force us to always fall back into the trouble and affliction that it cost him to, as you say, “redeem” us. Let us finally enter into this redemption. —Otherwise the Old Testament is a much better resource, it is full of fingers pointing to God, wherever you open it, and whenever someone becomes heavy there, he always falls right into God’s center. And once I tried to read the Koran, I didn’t get very far, but I understood this much, that in it too there is a powerful finger, and God stands at the end of the path it is pointing to, grasped in his eternal rising, in an East that will never end. Christ surely wanted the same thing. To point. But the people here have been like dogs, who don’t understand pointing fingers and think they are supposed to snap at the hand. Instead of taking the crossroads, where the signpost was raised high into the night of sacrifice, instead of taking this crossroads as a point of departure, Christianity has settled there, and claims that it is living there in Christ, although there was no room in him, not even for his mother, and not for Mary Magdalene: as in every guide, who is a gesture and not a dwelling-place.—And that’s why they aren’t living in Christ, these stubborn-hearted people, who keep bringing him back again and live from the raising of a tilted or fully blown-down cross. They have this mob on their conscience, this standing around on the overcrowded place, it’s their fault that the
journey doesn’t continue in the direction the cross’s arms point to. Out of what is Christian they have made a career, a bourgeois occupation, an alternately drained and refilled pool. Everything that they do themselves, according to their unsuppressible nature (insofar as they are still alive), is a contradiction of this remarkable tendency, and thus they muddy their own waters and have to renew them again and again. In their zeal they keep making the earthly, which ought to be a source of joy and trust, evil and worthless,—and thus, more and more, they hand over the earth to those who are ready—failed and suspect as it is, and undeserving of anything better—to wrest a temporary, quickly won profit from it. This growing exploitation of life, isn’t it a result of the centuries-long devaluation of the earthly? What insanity to deflect us toward a Beyond, when right here we are surrounded by tasks and expectations and futures. What a swindle to steal the images of earthly delight and sell them to heaven, behind our backs! The impoverished earth should long ago have called in all those loans that have been drawn on its blessedness so that an afterfuture might be adorned with them. Does death really become more transparent because of these lights that have been dragged into place behind it? And, since no void can continue to exist, won’t everything that has been taken away here be replaced by a fraud?—is this why the cities are filled with so much ugly noise and artificial light, because true radiance and song have been handed over to a Jerusalem that can be inhabited only later? Christ may have been right when, in a time filled with decayed and defoliated gods, he spoke unkind words about the earthly, although (I can’t help thinking this) it is really an insult to God not to see that what is given to us here is thoroughly capable of making us happy, out to the edge of our senses, if only we use it well.
The proper use, that’s the important thing.
To take the earthly in our hands, properly, in a truly loving way, with awe, as our temporary and unique treasure: this is also, to use an everyday expression, God’s great “instructions for use,” it is what Saint Francis of Assisi intended to write in his canticle to the sun, a song that on his deathbed was more glorious to him than the cross, which stood there only
to point
into the sun. But what people call the Church had in the meantime already swollen to such a chaos of voices that the hymn of the dying man, drowned out on every side, was only noticed by a few simple monks and infinitely assented to by the landscape of his graceful valley. How often must such attempts
have been made, to bring about a reconciliation between that Christian refusal and the obvious friendship and cheerfulness of the earth. But in other ways too, within the Church, even in its own crown, the earthly gained its fullness and its innate profusion. Why don’t people praise the Church for being vigorous enough not to crumble beneath the life-weight of certain popes, whose throne was loaded with bastard children, courtesans, and corpses. Wasn’t there more Christianity in them than in the dry restorers of the Gospels—that is to say, a living, irrepressible, transformed Christianity. I mean, we don’t really know
what
will come out of the great teachings, we just have to let them flow forth and go their own way and not be frightened when they suddenly burst into the fissured channels of life, and roll, deep under the earth, in imperceptible beds.

I once worked for a couple of months in Marseilles. It was a special time for me, I owe a lot to it. Chance brought me in touch with a young painter, who remained my friend till his death. He had lung disease and had just come back from Tunis. We spent a lot of time together and, because the end of my job coincided with his return to Paris, we were able to arrange a few days in Avignon. They were unforgettable. Partly because of the town itself, its buildings and the area around it, and also because my friend, during these days of uninterrupted and, somehow, heightened intimacy, opened up to me about many matters, especially about his
inner
life, with an eloquence that seems to be at times characteristic of people suffering from that disease. Everything he said had a strange prophetic power; through everything that burst out in often almost breathless talks, one saw, as it were, the bottom of the river, the stones on the bottom … I mean by that, more than something that is just ours: Nature itself, its oldest and hardest essence, which we nevertheless touch at so many places and which we probably depend upon at our most urgent moments, since its downward slope determines our inclination. In addition, there was an unexpected and happy love affair, his heart was in an uncommon state of exaltation, for days on end, and thus the sparkling fountain of his life shot up to a considerable height. To view an extraordinary town and a more than pleasing landscape in the company of someone who finds himself in such a situation is a rare privilege; and that is why those tender and at the same time passionate spring days seem to me, when I think back, the only holidays that I have ever known. The time
was so ridiculously short, for anyone else it would barely have been enough to gather a few impressions,—to me, unaccustomed as I am to spending free days, it seemed vast. Actually, it seems almost wrong to call it
time
, since it was rather a new condition of freedom, quite feelably a
space
, a being-surrounded by the Open, not a passing. I caught up with childhood then, if one may put it that way, and with a part of early youth, all of which I had never had time to achieve in myself; I looked, I learned, I understood—, and these days also gave rise to the discovery that saying “God” is so easy, so genuine, so—as my friend would have expressed it—so unproblematically simple. How could this house, which the popes erected for themselves there, not have seemed to me powerful? I had the impression that it couldn’t contain any inner space at all, that it must be built, through and through, out of solid blocks, as if the exiles’ only purpose was to pile up the weight of the papacy with such abundance that it would tip history’s scales. And in reality this ecclesiastical palace towers up over an antique torso of a Heracles, which was walled into the rocky foundations—“hasn’t it,” said Pierre, “grown up colossally as if out of this seed?”—That
this
is Christianity, in one of its transformations, would be much more understandable to me than to recognize its strength and its taste in the constantly weaker infusion of that herb tea which people say was prepared from its first, tenderest leaves.

But even the cathedrals aren’t the bodies of that spirit which we are now supposed to believe is the authentically Christian one. I could imagine that beneath some of them the fallen statue of a Greek goddess is resting; so much blossoming, so much reality sprang up in them, even if, as in a fear that arose during their time, they struggled away from that hidden body up into the heavens, which the sound of their huge bells was appointed to keep continually open.

After my return from Avignon I went to church quite often, in the evening and on Sunday,—at first alone … and later …

I am in love with a woman, hardly older than a child, who works at home, so that she is often in a bad situation when there isn’t much work. She is skilled, it would be easy for her to find a job in a factory, but she’s afraid of the boss. Her idea of freedom is boundless. It won’t surprise you that she perceives God too as a kind of boss, actually as the “head boss,” as she said to me, laughing, but with such terror in her eyes. It was a long time before she decided to accompany me one
evening to St. Eustache, where I liked to go because of the music of the May services. Once we went together as far as Maux and looked at the tombstones in the church there. Gradually she noticed that God leaves you alone in the churches, that he demands nothing; you might think that he wasn’t there at all,—and yet, Marthe thought, the moment you’re about to say that he isn’t in the church, something holds you back. Perhaps only what people themselves have for so many centuries brought into this high, oddly strengthened air. And perhaps it is only that the vibration of the powerful and sweet music can never completely get outside, it must have long since penetrated into the stones, and they must be remarkably affected stones, these pillars and vaults, and even though a stone is hard and almost inaccessible, in the end it is deeply moved by continual singing and these assaults from the organ, these onslaughts, these storms of song, every Sunday, these hurricanes of the great holidays. A lull. That’s what, strictly speaking, reigns in the old churches. I said it to Marthe. A lull. We listened, she understood it immediately, she has a wonderfully prepared sensibility. After that, we sometimes entered when we heard singing, and stood there, close to each other. It was the most beautiful when we had a stained-glass window in front of us, one of those old picture windows, with many partitions, each one completely filled with shapes, huge people and small towers and all kinds of events. Nothing was too strange for them, you see castles and battles and a hunt, and the beautiful white stag appears again and again in the hot red and in the burning blue. I was once given a very old wine to drink. That’s what it’s like for your eyes, this window, only that the wine was just dark red in my mouth,—but this is the same in blue also and in violet and in green.
There is really
everything
in the old churches, no shrinking from anything, as there is in the newer ones, where only the “good” examples appear. Here you see also what is bad and evil and horrible; what is deformed and suffering, what is ugly, what is unjust—and you could say that all this is somehow loved for God’s sake. Here is the angel, who doesn’t exist, and the devil, who doesn’t exist; and the human being, who does exist, stands between them, and (I can’t help saying it) their unreality makes him more real to me. What I feel when I hear the expression “a human being,” I can figure it out better in there than on the street among people who have absolutely nothing recognizable about them. But that is hard to say. And what I want to say now is
even harder to express. Which is that in regard to the boss, the power, (this too became clear to me in there, very slowly, when we stood completely in the music), there is just
one
way of struggling against it: to go further than it does itself. What I mean is this: we should strive to see in every power that claims a right over us: all power, the whole of power, power universally, the power of God. We should say to ourselves, there is just
one
, and understand the weak, the false, the defective kind as if it were the kind that rightfully grips us. Wouldn’t it become harmless in this way? If in every power, even in the evil and malignant, we always saw power itself, I mean that which ultimately has the right to be powerful, wouldn’t we then overcome, intact so to speak, even the unrightful and arbitrary? Isn’t this exactly how we stand in relation to all the unknown great forces? We don’t experience any of them in their purity. We accept each with its faults, which perhaps are adapted to our own faults.—But with all scholars, discoverers, inventors, hasn’t the awareness that they are dealing with great forces led them suddenly to the greatest? I am young, and there is a lot of protest in me; I can’t give any assurance that I act wisely every time impatience and disgust get the better of me,—but in my depths I know that submission leads further than rebellion; it shames that which is usurpation, and it contributes indescribably to the glorification of the rightful power. The rebel pulls himself out from the attraction of one center of power, and he may perhaps succeed in escaping from its field; but beyond it he finds himself in the void and has to look around for another gravitational force to draw him in. And this one is generally even less legitimate than the first. Why not then see in the power we live in, the greatest power of all, unperturbed by its weaknesses and fluctuations? Somewhere the arbitrary will of itself collide against the law, and we save energy if we leave it to convert itself. Of course, that is one of those long and slow processes which are in such complete contradiction with the strange upheavals of our time. But alongside the quickest movements there will always be slow ones, even ones that are of such extreme slowness that we can’t in the least perceive their advance. But humanity is there, isn’t it, to wait for what stretches out beyond the individual.—From its point of view, the slowest is often the quickest, that is to say, it turns out that we called it slow only because it could not be measured.