Frost: A Novel (35 page)

In order to pre-empt any unclarities in this “horror,” simply to rule them out, and to rule them out too in the mind of the reader once and for all, I would like to refer to the opening sentence of this attempt, I should say: let me begin again with the opening sentence of this report of an “unfortunate excursus,” which it seems to me I have simply copied from the painter, with all the ruthlessness of his own brain, with the sentence, in short: “The way the brain reverts to being a sort of machine …” I am so exhausted I need to go and lie down right away, I am incapable of writing down one more word, not one more word today, even though I have reason enough today to continue, to continue without end, with words and with “notions” and with “omissions” … I am so exhausted, I am so utterly exhausted …

Dear Assistant Strauch,
I have indeed succeeded in systematically inveigling myself into your brother’s life, not without a certain measure of ruthlessness and dishonesty, alarming to myself: in the course of the first few days it was comparatively easy to find myself in your brother’s society, truth to say, he forced it on me, if anything; which I might view as a stroke of especial good fortune, because you had the apprehension that your brother might have sealed himself off entirely, and that I might not be able to come anywhere near him. Great was my surprise, then, to find myself confronting a man, who, without the least reserve, speaks all about his condition. At this point I should say that everything I discovered here in Weng, in the person of your brother, and the conditions here, to which he is helplessly exposed, as exposed as they are to him, has exercised an extraordinary fascination on me, but one to which I am sure I will be equal. In my view it is possible, and in due course certain, that I will be able to adhere to the line of clarity and logic in my treatment of the prescribed subject (I feel naturally bound to the terms of our last conversation in Schwarzach). I want to emphasize at this point that I am sticking absolutely and in every respect to the agreed parameters, there can be no question of my
having pursued this assignment under false or misleading assumptions. From the very first moment, I have been at pains to exclude the purely medical aspects of the case, and confine myself rigidly and consciously to personal responses to the equally personal behavior of your brother. I think I may already have found the right scientific—not,
nota bene
, scientific in the medical sense!—approach, a way of connecting discoveries and angles of observation that should, I hope, in time, provide useful results. The only difficulty is this: your brother claims me entirely for himself, and the only remaining time to myself (and it is not nearly enough) is at night, for me to make notes, to record the inner and outer atmospheres, to compare him with my developing sense of him, from various, albeit inadequate angles, some more “acute,” others possibly “obtuse,” to do proximate justice to the always dual perspective of the case, to approach your brother, as it were, on a documentary footing—however fragile and occasionally even inadequate this strikes me as being. With this highly phenomenological and unassuming brand of failure, to try to order it and within its order to set it at variance to its order. So I write down at night what I take in during the day. It seems to me your brother is an instance of something it occurs to me to call a precipitous fantast. My thinking immediately arrows through such a notion toward its aim. The question is, how possible is it to advance into the
incommensurateness
of your brother. You probably will have no more from me than a suggestion of your brother’s superficial nature, over a conscientiously recorded protocol of the phosphorescences of this surface, and of some of the latent (and presumably dark) currents and countercurrents (changes), a sort of secondary report taking account of the lapidary optical, and
this will be what I will end up turning in to you, on the basis of my notes here. A secondary report of an extraordinary, delicate state of deficiencies, misguided, but I think no longer transferable. I take this assignment, given to me by you for whatever reasons, as a signal expression of confidence, as an, as I now already see, important episode of my increasingly medical life, indeed, of my entire development to date. As far as I can judge, this assignment is in many ways one of inestimable importance to me. However, it would certainly be a mistake if I were to present myself to you already as a grateful intern, before anything has yet been determined, before the first proper step in any direction has truly been taken … And this assignment has not yet entered the outer courts of reality. In view of which, and lastly, whatever I may have said in the past, I would urge you not to expect overly regular bulletins from Weng.

Dear Assistant Strauch,
You taught me what shock therapy is, what it is to oppose madness with lunacy till the midpoint of the two is in uproar. I must say, what your brother is going through here is perhaps another and not inharmonious type of shock therapy, as you once briefly described it, which has nothing to do with technology, which is the countervailing suffering of a deranged nature, against which its exorbitant and misanthropic opponent mutinies. “He might be a person,” you once said, “on the brink of millennia.” If you hadn’t said it yourself, I might have supposed your brother would have come up with it, he seems to say such things all the time.
The shock therapy in question is Weng, one of those therapies you darkly and conscientiously described as fiendish, that pursue absolute healing, not healing as physical or mental process, what is described in Koltz as “therapy of the inward detonation.” Weng is a shock. For your brother, of course, a totality involving a pitiless and brain-corrosive recipe, which you once, in the course of one of our evenings in your room, described as “flood damage in the individual.” I think the case in question is an extremely unscrupulous—unscrupulous toward anything at all—condition fed back (from some initial hereditary weakness) that is incapable of registering anything but itself, its own embodied idea of itself. Is it possible to speak of an internalized inheritor disease? As I increasingly have come to see, I occupy no point of view at all. All there is is “the energy of different perspectives.” Do you remember something you said in the course of our only walk together earlier this year: “The connections in the blood are suddenly irreparable.” This, I believe, is where your brother, from out of some now forgotten place that it would be important to learn, is currently placed. “My head could be somewhere where I have no access to it,” he said today. I must say, it’s the most I can do to reach a secondary precision where it is a matter of presenting a sequence of events that have become rigid and quasi-autonomous. This now is the time of availability—where your brother is concerned. But all the possibilities behind so many open doors exhaust me already, and suddenly, it seems to me, I am no longer up to the
linearity of procedure
that you called for, or to any cerebral activity that insists on the lack of any fixed point of view. It will make you suspicious: on occasion, I move in the same mysticisms as your brother, in that “prescientific thought,
the unrevealing mysticism of one who is on the run from clarity.” It is an extraordinarily compelling thing for me to observe how the only lately shamelessly dark world of your concepts is now suddenly opening. As though it were just a matter of stepping out and leaving behind whatever gets in the way of bold thinking; and I must tell you: of medical thinking too, because your thinking is a medical thinking, unlike that of your brother, which, as he says himself, is “an amoral interstitial thinking without any declared purpose.” Basically, both the simple and the demonic sides of your brother’s nature are headed in the same direction (his direction), everything “inhumanly bestially elevated”—as your brother says—in effect, toward death. But all that is a long way from diagnostics, from persuasiveness, from the linearity that, as you always say, must be in sole charge. Nothing so depresses your brother’s spirits as the absence of contact with you. It would be too simple to talk of a
brother complex
, by analogy to the
father complex
that we would seem to have put behind us. But there is one piece of news that I must break to you today: it’s as though your brother suffers from interjections, from “an army of hecklers,” that “plunge a brain perhaps overly set on logical consequence into continual disorder.” My thinking, yes, my
feeling
, based on my thinking, is that this constellation probably affects your brother’s entire constitution, but it would be completely mistaken to think of any sort of conclusion to that effect, assumptions at this stage are rapidly overthrown, but what is tangibly there one might classify as a highly self-confident misanthropic degeneration. Everything turns microscopic. I am trying to be clear, but I am compelled to see that I understand very little about this type of thinking: rather, I seem here to be governed by my own intuitions.
And yet I think on the basis of my impressions I may be of some use to you at the proper time. At worst I am an attentive, if occasionally mendacious (at least on a banal level: I claimed to be studying law) stenographer, characterized by submissiveness and obedience. It’s like this:
everything
here makes me ponder, in this case. Colors, smells, temperatures—the ubiquitous and almost daily advancing frost here strikes me as being of the very greatest significance. I must simply forbid myself to lose myself in particulars, and point out to you details of this climatologically (remember “flood damage in the individual”) interesting, climatological and clinical whole. And I must not in writing to you become involved in questions concerning my observing function. I don’t believe there is any chance of altering your persuasion that your brother is lost. I don’t believe in normalization (healing), rather it is my constatation that the case is deteriorating with each passing day.

Dear Assistant Strauch,
Your brother is living in the delusion that he is several beings at once, and in the delusion—to him, a terrible thing—that he is oppressed by these various, simultaneous, unpredictably fluctuating beings, whom he himself views as “the unthinkable raw material of (his) episodes.” He has spoken of the “scourge of chromatic humiliation” and of the “philosophy of the exacerbated bird’s-eye view of impure thought.” This explains the compelling nature of his constitution, his development, his unfruitfulness. It is this unfruitfulness, understood as the adoption of inhuman
rights, that allows him to live—and of course condemns him to death.

I have made the observation that your brother’s existence is fundamentally (“creating themselves in steady negation”) on two planes: the political, and what you call the “dream of a relationship.” These two lives course through the rigid geometry of his pre-established positions, and also through the commotion of his inner life, which you describe as “the interconnected void.” In the person of your brother, I think I have found a notable instance of the political man as dream and the simplifying dreamer as political, and the mutual drama of the two. You yourself spoke once of an essay you proposed to write, to be called “The Dreamer and the Political Man.” Your brother would furnish you with the most outstanding manifestation of the subject; what you wrote would be the reflection of a consciousness, of a thought, that seems, or is, complete. I believe the relationship between dream and politics as exemplified in your brother to be something utterly masculine. The dream of such a person knows neither day nor night, knows nothing political, just as the politics of such a person knows neither day nor night, nor anything dubiously dreamlike. And all that without boundaries, yes without even the thought of boundaries. The way each thing, dream and politics, exists as a separate whole in such a person, makes for complete equilibrium. I would say that a person who is equally a politician and a dreamer ought to be the one we classify as nearest to perfection, if he didn’t refuse any categorization: he would be, yes, he is, the most self-evident human being! But in such a “divine binary,” which represents a summit of human development (though without beginning and
without end), the sickness of separation is not just a tough adversary but a step comprising “all deaths at once” that continually requires to be taken. And your brother is just such an “object of all deaths at once.”

To return briefly to the area where I saw the full human potential of someone like your brother, the political and the dreamlike, being united: while his political side may be as much invested in his day-to-day existence as in his dreamlike (or as his dream), I would still describe it as
the night of his life
, and the dreamlike as his day; the day and night of his self, but without boundaries, and hence his night without a day, and his day without a night. But what is a political person? What is a dreamer? Still, that is what happened to your brother, and in him, the deadly stasis of an entropic vehemence. Together we go on long walks, from one forest to another, into one ravine and out of another; the cold is such that it is impossible to remain motionless for long, to remain motionless out of doors, not even to stop and think, he and I if we stopped and thought, we would immediately freeze, we would die in midthought, as the animals die if terror prompts them to stop in this extraordinary frost. There is an “extraordinary seductiveness of frost” here. I am currently quoting your brother with the dispassion of someone assigned to report on him, to whom “the lines of the world memory” fit together. Today your brother said: “My brain has gone to be set.” I find that an extraordinary pronouncement. Imagine if he had said: “My whole brain has been taken away to be retyped.” He mentioned
you
only once; one of those dark places in his darkness appeared, in which from time to time “he mindlessly weeps down into.” He has the oddest connection to your sister, who is now
living in Mexico. He is one of those people who refuse to say anything at all, and yet who are continually driven to say everything. Who tie tourniquets round the arteries of their thought, but to no effect; who pour themselves out in suicidal word-spate, who hate themselves in truth because the world of their feeling, apprehended as enforced incest, daily smashes them to smithereens. I should like to say: attend to your brother.