Andreas (13 page)

Who could imagine him infinitely weeping, infinitely wooing?—he lacks that touch of the actor which is essential to the priest, the prophet, without which they cannot exist. How every faculty requires for its existence its own opposite latent in it: the unspeakable delight, for the modest, to think that they might overcome their modesty, for the proud, the cold, to imagine themselves glowing.—Thus, in every impulse to take, the profound impulse not to take (the secret in Grillparzer’s relationship to Kathi)—duality incorporated in Maria and Mariquita. Sometimes Sacramozo bewilders Andreas with disclosures of this kind, for instance, once after an evening together (supper, casino) when Sacramozo greeted a large number of people.

Sacramozo’s way of telling a story.—Instead of “I was once in Japan with pilgrims,” he says, “Go to Japan! You will walk three, five days with a band of pilgrims … the question is whether you will see the sun rise in purity …”

Knight: “Note that each of us only becomes aware in the other of what conforms to himself; we create statues round about us in our own dimensions. Problem: in what does union with a human being consist? in understanding, in possession, in first approaching that human being? …” (hint of Indian speculation).

Knight to Andreas: “Does a young man really know what he demands, what he wants?”—“all these connections, and whether they lead to anything—that requires guidance from above.”—The Knight possesses the conception of power, which Andreas has yet to acquire.

Knight and Andreas compared: Andreas: Faith in authority ramifying to the uttermost periphery of existence, so that he feels that everything he experiences is analogous to, but not identical with, something real, his actions too. The real doers are elsewhere; his inhibitions, his naïveté in face of life, are his own. Knight: doubts not himself but his fate. In suffering, in enjoyment, he had the whole,
t
wo-sided
, in one, but everything remained partial to him
(while Andreas feels that everything remained partial to him, not “the grasp to get it”). Knight knows: my command is a command, my smile has a general power to win—but,
en somme
, what is the good of it?—Knight has not Andreas’s wavering, his doubts, his fitfulness—he is sure of results, but it can often happen that he finds himself in a vacuum with them: “
Eh bien
! what now?” says his double. “Aha!—well, well, what now!”

Andreas’s dawning realization that there is for the Knight, who can speak to everybody, before whom all barriers fall,
one
barrier all the same. This thought has something of it which moves him almost to tears.

The affair with the letter. Chapter V.—Zorzi: “The Knight has left a letter behind.” Andreas: “Let me take it back to him”—almost as if his tongue had said it of himself: the fulfilment of his wish means infinitely much to him. Runs after him. Knight puts it in his pocket, unforgettable hasty gait. Knight returns a few minutes later. “You are mistaken. The letter did not belong to me.” Andreas: “And certainly not to me.” Chapter VI, a few days later. Knight catches him up. “I must ask you to tell me what could have persuaded you to give me that letter. There are coincidences that leave one no peace. The inside and the outside of the folded letter were in a different hand; I think it belonged to me.” He blushes as he
speaks; Andreas vows to use the words “beautiful” and “ugly” with caution.

Knight hails a gondola in order to read the letter, begins while the gondolier is getting the gondola ready—forgets to get in. The gondolier does not like to draw his attention. He stands up quickly and pushes the letter into his pocket. Gets in, tries to get over the letter. Mistakes several houses for his own, then feels his own then feels utterly restless at home, wants to burn the letter.—Foreboding of death through the letter.

He believes that one or the other of his two servants has done away with the letter—for what possible reason? the elder to protect him? the younger to injure the elder? At last he finds the letter, reads it over; he finds it among travel notes, where his hand has put it in a kind of somnambulism, at a particular place, next to a particularly significant note on Japan. Deeply and singularly shaken by this slight experience.—His degree of sympathy, and hence his comprehension of his two servants. He cannot possibly disturb the elder, who has relatives visiting him: it occurs to him that that is why he went up the front staircase. He reflects on this himself; his servants in Japan, where he had fourteen of them, men and women, come into his mind. He notices in passing that he is forming within himself a whole chain of
thought, always turning on this servant—his old servant: he and the servant always at cross-purposes: the young servant, who is always quarrelling with the elder. The Knight locks up the letter, and at once takes it out again.

After the letter: the Knight tries to bring reason to bear on in his inward tumult, to reduce to order (by Locke’s method) the associations unclaimed: he reveals in himself courtesy, grace, modesty. His inexhaustible inward powers—confident—hosts of angels which he summons. A man’s whole nature must come to light in such a struggle with inward disorganization: his wanted trains of thought, his favourite associations.—Subtle
association
with a memory of travel: pilgrimage with Japanese, perception of light. He had resolved to hail every day, the coming of the sun—why can he not always welcome it?—he tries now to marshal the associations towards a higher, purer order; he knows that only inadequacy opposes the Cosmos. He kneels, prays to the supreme being. Chaos and death breathe upon him: on the point of succumbing, he is like the delicate boy he was, with a fleeting colour on his cheeks.

A
MEETING BETWEEN
A
NDREAS
and the Knight on a ship at anchor. Invitations from the captain, rather mysterious. Courtesans—one completely veiled
(Mariquita). Sacramozo obviously embarrassed by the veiled woman: he certainly leads the conversation with assurance; he is deeply interested by an Indian, who takes part, but does not eat with them.—Everything has happened at Mariquita’s instigation: “I wanted to see you together for once.” This is the only time that Sacramozo and Mariquita meet. On the way home, they say nothing about the whole affair, nothing about the invitation. Andreas feels that the Knight believes it was the Countess. Their conversation turns on fate and death. That night, Sacramozo invites Andreas home for the first time.

The masque: a solemn symbolic festival. Andreas’s initiation. What costume Sacramozo wore at the masque remains a secret. Echo of Hafiz’s relationship to the boy cupbearer, whom he makes happy out of the flames of his love for Suleika.—Culminating point of the masque, a kind of meeting between Maria and Mariquita, or transmutation of Maria, who is brought in in a state of hypnosis: it ends badly.

The idea hovering before the Knight. The greatest magician is he who can work magic on himself. This his goal, since he is threatened by: confusion, the failure to understand those nearest to him, the loss of the world and himself—all this in his relationship to Maria.—At the same time, Maria unwittingly feeds
his knowledge of that other aspect of the world—Mariquita having taken it on herself to entice the Knight away from Maria by letting him suspect the side of Maria that is turned towards Andreas. (She keeps this game quite hidden from Andreas.) For Mariquita fears the Knight as Maria’s strongest support in life.

Knight: “In reality, we know only when we know little; doubt grows with knowledge” (Goethe)—“These are men who love and seek their like, and there are others who love and seek their opposite.” (Goethe)—But then are men like the Knight capable of having a like and an opposite?—That he no longer understands anyone—the less he understands, the more he feels how Andreas is growing in feeling, intuition and knowledge—is balanced by the arcanum: he has found one who will understand, loving. Thus his withdrawal becomes lovely, as one who passes into the mirror to be united with his brother. The circle comes to have profound meaning for him. The predominance of the circle in the works and notes of Leonardo.—When the sun is low, we live more in our shadow than in ourselves.

The allomatic: the meagreness of earthly experience. He is drawn to the Countess because the other element in her means so much to her—he suspects that here is a soul far advanced on the way of
transformation. What attracts him in Andreas: that he is open to influences from others; the life of others is present in him in the same purity and strength as when a drop of blood, or the breath exhaled by another, is exposed to powerful heat in a glass ball—even so the fates of others in Andreas. Andreas is, like the merchant’s son (in the
Tale of the Six-
Hundred-an
d-Seventy-Second Night
), the geometrical locus of the destinies of others. (The
lucerna
, or lamp of life: a ball of alabaster, in which the blood of one far distant shows, as it moves and glows, how things are with him: in misfortune, it swells or gleams, at death it is extinguished, or the vessel bursts.)

Sacramozo and Andreas: how each gradually set the other in his own place: this connected with Andreas’s repugnance of the continual recollection of his adventure with Gotthilff. Only he holds the past in horror who, remaining at an inferior stage, assumes that it might have been different. “Was I, when that being kissed me first, just anyone, everything turns stale; if I was singled out (with the anticipation of every hour till death) then all is sublime.” Love is the anticipation of the end in the beginning, and therefore the victory over decay, over time, over death—Novalis’s note on the mystic powers of
self-creation
with which we credit women, so that we expect them to love anyone (theme of
Sobreide
, also
of
Death and the Fool
). Love is the attraction exercised on us by those animate objects with which we are called to operate. To operate means to lead an animate organism to perfection by transformation—in relation with Maria: to find, of oneself, the power to feel, the chain of experience as necessary—of a higher stage of the egocentric.

The Knight no longer hopes to have children by Maria. Andreas might become his “son without a mother.”

Sacramozo says of Maria: “The earthly possibility that she might be united with me existed, but not the higher one.” For him, Maria is his collaborator by virtue of the purity of her being. The element of union with him—he wishes to unite Andreas with Maria. Now that they shall be a couple—then, Maria reborn with Sacramozo reborn (in whom Andreas will also exist).—He must know the truth, hence he knows Maria’s life—but the only thing of value to him is the life-secret of every being. And since life is both on the surface and in the depths, the life-secret can only be grasped by the union of the two.

He may have been mistaken in all he did, his attitude justifies him.—Self-enjoyment, the highest, purest—Sacramozo seeks it: the union with himself, complete identity, harmony of the idea of self
with the knowledge of self. He tries to impart this condition to Andreas, who is helped by love. The Countess participates in that condition, though for pathological reasons: every impulse which issues from Mariquita is saturated for Maria with the atmosphere of selfhood elevated to the state of mystery—in the same way, Maria is for Mariquita the only thing worth experiencing (she loves and hates her). Maria’s confession of the rapture she feels in merging into the “other,” the mere foreboding of that state (the first is a rapture mingled with horror)—that that is for her the life of life; that every sweetness, every anticipation even, of the union with God, threatens to plunge her into it. (Conversation with the Spanish confessor about this, her self-reproaches. She feels responsible for more than herself. The Jesuit sets her mind at rest.)

Ad
Sacramozo:
Quod petis in te est, ne quaesiveris extra
(That which thou seekest is within thee; seek it not outside)—To be master of our own self would mean to be aware of everything, even the subliminal.

A being of supreme awareness can never feel fear, except in actual danger, because all other forms of fear in all presupposes some element obtruded, not with awareness.

Magician who thinks he moves an invisible limb. What else is this but to feel one’s will, to look on
and feel oneself as one exercising his will, not in the material world (like Napoleon), but in the spirit.

Sacramozo: “The most sacred relationship is that between the appearance and the essence—and how constantly it is outraged! One might think that God had hidden it among thorns and thistles.—We possess an arsenal of truth which would have power to change the world back into a stellar nebula, but every arcanym is enclosed in an iron matrix—by our inflexibility and our stupidity, our prejudices, our powerlessness to understand the
unique
.”

The Knight and the world: to think that everything, everything, is veiled. The veiled image of Saïs stands everywhere. His ardent craving for the purity of all things.

His other aspect, which he alone sees: so childish, so weak, inadequate. Would like to wipe himself out of existence. Feels that Maria puts him to the test, sees through him. Her inhibition—in that he sees his own inadequacy. Loneliness and mingling with men are the same thing.

The antinomy of being and having: for him, in the spiritual world, where the important thing for him is leadership, election, as for Andreas in the human world. His great love for one of the most beautiful women he possessed.

In Sacramozo, more and more the belief that
his fictitious existence (as Sacramozo) prevents the ultimate unfolding of Andreas into the manly lover, of Maria (round whom he sees another element hovering like an aura) into the happy beloved.

Knight: “Kneel?—as one kneels to receive teaching from a master revered like a god—this gesture I shall have died without finding it on my way. Will this youth be he who is capable of kneeling?” (he leads the figure through all the vicissitudes which for him exhaust the content of the world). “And shall I find the way to be he?—Not by circumventing his inadequacy, but by absorbing it into myself?”