Pictor's Metamorphoses (23 page)

After that, I would meet the jackdaw Jakob almost every day; now by myself, now with my wife, I would greet him and talk to him. One day my wife was wearing a pair of shoes whose uppers had a pattern cut out of the leather, allowing a bit of stocking to shine through the holes. These shoes, and especially the little islands of hose, interested Jakob a great deal; he alit on the ground, and with sparkling eyes he took aim and pecked at them with gusto. Many a time he would sit on my arm or my shoulder and peck at my coat, my collar, my cheek, and my neck, or tear at the brim of my hat. He did not care for bread; still, he would get jealous and sometimes downright angry if you shared it with the gulls in his presence. He accepted and adeptly picked walnuts or peanuts from the hand of the giver. But best of all he liked to peck, pluck, pulverize, and destroy any little thing—a crumpled ball of paper, a cigar stub, a little piece of cardboard or material; he'd put one of his feet on it and rashly and impatiently hack away at it with his beak. And time and again one perceives that he does all this not for his sake alone but on behalf of the onlookers, some of whom always and many of whom often gather around him. For them he hops about on the ground or back and forth on the railing of the bridge, enjoying the crowd; he flutters onto the head or shoulder of one of the members of the audience, alights again on the ground, studies our shoes, and forcefully pecks at them. He takes pleasure in pecking and plucking, tearing and destroying, he does all this with roguish delight; but the members of the audience must also participate, they must admire, laugh, cry out, feel flattered by his show of friendliness, and then again show fear when he pecks at their stockings, hats, and hands.

He has no fear of the gulls, who are twice as large and many times stronger than he; sometimes he flies on high right in their midst. And they let him be. For one thing, he who scarcely touches bread is neither a rival nor a spoilsport; for another, I suppose that they, too, consider him a phenomenon, something rare, enigmatic, and a little bit uncanny. He is alone, belongs to no tribe, follows no customs, obeys no commands, no laws; he has left the tribe of jackdaws, where once he was one among many, and has turned toward the human tribe, which looks on him with astonishment and brings him offerings, and which he serves as a buffoon or a tightrope walker when it suits him; he makes fun of them and yet cannot get enough of their admiration. Between the bright gulls and the motley humans he sits, black, impudent, and alone, the only one of his kind; by destiny or by choice, he has no tribe and no homeland. Audacious and sharp-eyed, he sits watching over the traffic on the bridge, pleased that only a few people rush past inattentive, that the majority stop for a while, often a long while; because of him they remain standing, and gaze at him in astonishment, racking their brains over him, calling him Jakob, and only reluctantly deciding to walk on. He does not take people more seriously than a jackdaw should, and yet he seems unable to do without them.

When I found myself alone with him—and this happened only rarely—I could talk to him a little in a bird language which as a boy and youth I had partly learned from years of intimate discourse with our pet parrot and had partly invented on my own; it consisted of a brief melodic series of notes uttered in a guttural tone. I would bend down toward Jakob and talk things over with him in a fraternal way in my half-bird dialect; he would throw back his lovely head; he enjoyed both listening and thinking his own thoughts. But unexpectedly the rogue and the sprite would come to the fore in him again; he would alight on my shoulder, dig in his claws, and rapping like a woodpecker he would hammer his beak into my neck or cheek, until it was too much for me and I would shrug myself free, whereupon he would return to the railing, amused and ready for new games. But at the same time he would survey the footpath in both directions with hasty glances, to see if more of the tribe of humans were on the march and whether there were any new conquests to be made. He understood his position to a tee, his hold on us great clumsy animals, his uniqueness and chosenness in the midst of a strange ungainly people, and he enjoyed it enormously, tightrope walker and actor, when he found himself in the thick of a crowd of admiring, moved, or laughing giants. In me, at least, he had gained favor, and those times when I came to pay him a visit and did not find him I was disappointed and sad. My interest in him was a good deal stronger than in the majority of my fellow human beings. And much as I esteemed the gulls and loved their beautiful, wild, fervent expressions of life, when I stood in their fluttering midst, they were not individuals; they were a flock, a band, and even if I looked back to examine one of them more closely as an individual, never again would I recognize him once he had escaped my field of vision.

I have never learned where and by what means Jakob was estranged from his tribe and the safe harbor of his anonymity, whether he himself had chosen this extraordinary destiny—as tragic as it was radiant—or whether he had been forced to do so. The latter is more plausible. Presumably he was quite young when perhaps he fell wounded or unfledged from the nest, was found and taken in by people, cared for and raised. And yet our imagination is not always satisfied with the most plausible explanation, it also likes to play with the remote and the sensational, and so I have conceived of two further possibilities beyond the probable one. It is conceivable, or rather, imaginable that this Jakob was a genius who from an early age felt himself to be very different, striving for an abnormal degree of individuality, dreaming of accomplishments, achievements, and honors which were unknown in jackdaw life and the jackdaw tribe, and thus he became an outsider and loner who, like the young man in Schiller's poem,
*
shunned the coarse company of his companions and wandered about by himself until through some lucky chance the world opened for him a door to the realm of beauty, art, and fame, about which all young geniuses have dreamed since time out of mind.

The other fable I've made up about Jakob is this: Jakob was a ne'er-do-well, a mischiefmaker, a little rascal, which in no way rules out his being a genius. With his impudent attacks and pranks, he had at first bewildered and at times delighted his father and mother, siblings and relatives, and finally the whole of his community or colony. From early on, he was considered to be a little devil and a sly fellow, then he became more and more impertinent, and in the end he had so provoked his father's household against him, as well as the neighbors, the tribe, and the government, that he was solemnly excommunicated and, like the scapegoat, driven out into the wilderness. But before he languished away and perished, he came into contact with human beings. Having conquered his natural fear of the clumsy giants, he drew closer to them and joined them, enchanting them with his cheerful disposition and his uniqueness—of which he himself had long been aware. And so he found his way into the city and the world of human beings, and in it a place for himself as a joker, an actor, a main attraction, and a wunderkind. He became what he is today: the darling of a large public, a much sought-after
charmeur
—particularly of elderly ladies and gentlemen, as much a friend to humans as one contemptuous of them, an artist soliloquizing at the podium, an envoy from a strange world—one unknown to clumsy giants, a buffoon for some, a dark admonition for others, laughed at, applauded, loved, admired, pitied, a drama for all, an enigma for the contemplative.

We the contemplative—for doubtless there are many others besides myself—turn our thoughts and conjectures, our impulse to understand the fabulous, not solely toward Jakob's enigmatic lineage and past. His appearance, which so stimulates our imagination, compels us to devote some thought to his future as well. And we do this with some hesitation, with a feeling of resistance and sadness; for the presumable and probable end of our darling will be a violent one. No matter how much we may want to imagine a quiet and natural death for him, something on the order of his dying in the warm room and good care of that legendary lady in Ennetbaden to whom he supposedly “belongs,” all probability speaks against it. A creature that has emerged from the freedom of the wild, from a secure place in a community and a tribe, and has fallen into the company of human beings and into civilization, no matter how adeptly he may adapt to the foreign surroundings, no matter how aware he may be of the advantages his unique situation provides, such a creature cannot completely escape the countless dangers concealed in this very situation. The mere thought of all these imaginable dangers—from electric current to being locked up in a room with a cat or dog, or being captured and tormented by cruel little boys—makes one shudder.

There are reports of peoples in olden times who every year chose or drew lots for a king. Then a handsome, nameless, and poor youth, a slave perhaps, would suddenly be clad in splendid robes and raised to the position of king; he would be given a palace or a majestic tent-of-state, servants ready to serve, lovely girls, kitchen, cellar, stable, and orchestra; the whole fairy tale of kingship, power, riches, and pomp would become reality for the chosen one. And so the new ruler would live amidst pomp and circumstance for days, weeks, months, until a year had elapsed. Then he would be tied and bound, taken to the place of execution, and slaughtered.

And it is of this story, which I read once decades ago and whose authenticity I have neither occasion nor desire to verify, this glittering and gruesome story—beautiful as a fairy tale and steeped in death, that I must sometimes think when I observe Jakob, pecking peanuts from ladies' hands, rebuking an overly clumsy child with a blow from his beak, taking an interest in and somewhat patronizingly listening to my parrotlike chatter, or plucking up a paper ball before an enraptured audience, holding it fast with one of his clawed feet—while his capricious head and his bristling gray headfeathers simultaneously appear to express anger and delight.

 

Books by Hermann Hesse

Peter Camenzind

Beneath the Wheel

Gertrude

Rosshalde

Knulp

Demian

Strange News from Another Star

Klingsor's Last Summer

Wandering

Siddhartha

Steppenwolf

Narcissus and Goldmund

The Journey to the East

The Glass Bead Game

If the War Goes On …

Poems

Autobiographical Writings

Stories of Five Decades

My Belief

Reflections

Crisis

Tales of Student Life

Hours in the Garden

Pictor's Metamorphoses

Soul of the Age: Selected Letters of Hermann Hesse

PICTOR'S METAMORPHOSES.
Introduction and translation copyright © 1981, 1982 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY. 10010.

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Translated from the German. “Lulu,” from
Hermann Lauscher,
copyright 1948 by Fretz & Wasmuth; all rights reserved by Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main. “Hannes,” “Der Meermann,” “Der Verliebte Jüngling,” “Drei Linden,” “Der Waldmensch,” from
Diesseits/Kleine Welt/Fabulierbuch,
© Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1954. “Der Traum von den Göttern,” from
Bilderbuch,
© Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1958. “Der Maler,” from
Kunst des Müssiggangs,
© Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1973. “Märchen vom Korbstuhl,” “König Yu,” “Vogel,” from
Traumfärte,
copyright by Fretz & Wasmuth 1945, renewal copyright Heiner Hesse 1973; all rights reserved by Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main. “Gespräch mit dem Often,” from
Betrachtungen,
© Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1957. “Die Fremdenstadt im Süden,” “Bei den Massageten,” from
Materialien zu Hermann Hesse ‘Der Steppenwolf,'
© Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1972. “Nächtliche Spiele,” “Bericht aus Normalien,” “Die Dohle,” from
Beschwörungan,
© Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1955. “Weihnacht mit Zwei Kindergeschichten,” from
Späte Prosa,
© Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1950. “Piktors Verwandlungen,” © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1954.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hesse, Hermann, 1877–1962.

     Pictor's Metamorphoses, and other fantasies.

     ISBN 0-312-42264-4 ISBN 978-0-312-42264-6

   Contents: Lulu (1900)—Hannes (1906)—The merman (1907)—The enamored youth (1907). I. Ziolkowski, Theodore. II. Title.

PT2617.E85A6 1982

833'.912

81-12616
AACR2

First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

eISBN 9781466835146

First eBook edition: November 2012

*
See
Avis montagnolens,
res gestae ex recens. Ninonis, p. 285 ff.

*
Pictoris cuiusdam de mutationibus,
Bibl. av. Montagn. codex LXI.

*
“The Lay of the Bell” (
“Das Lied von der Glocke,”
11.66–69).—Ed.