Telegrams of the Soul (12 page)

For some time now I've judged people by the objects they lug around, hold dear and find attractive. These things comprise a “biographical essay” about their entire being! For instance, I am highly suspicious of men who tote around walking sticks with oxidized silver handles that represent something or other, like a dog's head, a snake or even a ravishing little curly headed damsel. Of course, these fellows can resort to the excuse that they got it as a gift from a dear friend; but first of all, no one ought not to have such tasteless friends (two negatives, alas, make a positive), and second, you can also take a friend's gift and knock him on the head with it. In any case, among cultivated people, I'm for the exchange of “coupons” in any given transaction! I'm also suspect of pink, light blue and screaming red silk, whereas satin, velvet or damask are to be counted among the “mild infractions against common decency.” Printed, not woven, ties are cause for considerable concern, although the “nature-peasant pattern” is a pardonable sin. To be dressed “in a single color” from head to toe is the “latest Aristocratic craze,” 1913! An open neck is highborn. High collars are nonsense, except for storks. Not to be able to make all the twists and turns of a first class acrobat from the “Apollo Theater” in any given garb is positively low class! Trousers can never be wide enough and are still far too tight! To leave the bottom button of a waistcoat open is a miserable lapse of etiquette. To anyone who claims he doesn't want to appear too conspicuous I respectfully reply that even Beethoven's Adagios were conspicuous, conspicuously beautiful! “In all things we must distinguish ourselves from the horde!” “That's what they're wearing these days—!” is dirty low-down drivel.

“Good morning, Sir, how's the world treating you?!” I said to a stranger strolling up the “Upper Semmering Pathway” in a top hat.

“Very well indeed in this lovely mountain terrain; but from where, may I ask, do you know me?”

“I know you like the back of my hand since the day you were born, as I see you've donned a top hat here—.”

“I owe that to my position in the world, my good man—.”

“I was immediately struck by that too, that you owe something or other to someone or other—!”

“The ‘most perfect woman' on earth came to see me today at five
P.M
. at the café! Miss Mitzi Thumb.”

“Oh, I already discovered that number, two years before you on the Lido, Hotel Excelsior. So don't flatter yourself in that regard!”

“Discovered, discovered? How did you accomplish such a feat? Wherein did your discovery manifest itself?!”

“Manifest itself?! It manifested itself quite simply in that I saw her in her silk bathing singlet with the red patent leather belt, and was enchanted by her perfection!”

“So that's what you call discovery!? You kept it to yourself, swallowed your enchantment, deliberately made sure no one else noticed, especially not the lady on account of whom your pitifully cowardly instinct for self-preservation compels you to restrain yourself! You did nothing for this discovered perfection, just turned your head away from such splendor, which could only rock the boat of your paltry relationship! Do you know what it means to discover?!? To discover means to beat the drum for someone so that the whole world absolutely must take notice; it means to go all out for her so that everyone else grows pale, sick and poisoned with envy; to scream, cry and declaim, to disavow, demean, blot out and obliterate all others! That is: an exceptional, singular, complete discovery!”

“Peter, you're the carnival barker of life! Not everybody is so inclined. It's a profession like any other. But you have to have the nerve for it. You've got it.”

“Discovery means: to make the blind see, the deaf hear, to make the callous feel, and turn the greedy into squanderers! It means: to take the gamble that this goddess you discovered turns her attention to those who without you would never have ‘discovered' her. It means: to see yourself all too soon abused and abandoned, the sole mark of gratitude that the discovered one will dish out! To suffer the destiny of the discoverer, ignominious as it is, that's: discovery!”

Is it already the preliminary sign of a persecution complex if I take along on a trip twelve of my special mother-of-pearl shirt buttons, just in case? This premonition of a possible catastrophe concerning my perfectly flawless brand new shirt?! In any case, the brain that does not concern itself under such circumstances with this distressing eventuality is the healthier one, the less irritable, the less upsetable by life's little ups and downs.

The obsession with “possible unpleasantries in the coming days” is indeed a consequence of persecution complex, weakening our resilience for life. Consequently every truly discerning soul suffers from persecution complex. He is always and in every situation a profound pessimist. Only in this way does he compel himself to elude conceivable perils. He need not dwell on fortuitous events. They happen by themselves. But to smell the pitfalls in every affair, that's the important thing and that at the same time is what makes you mentally imbalanced!

“To step with the left foot on every sewer grating brings good luck, avoids bad luck. I don't really believe in it. But what does it cost me to do it?! From that moment on, you're in the snare of that unlikely trap. For if but once you fail to follow the rule, you will relentlessly trace each and every misfortune that befalls you back to that lapse. That's why you concentrate with an almost feverish frenzy to make sure to tread on every sewer grating with your left foot. But this, in turn, makes you irritable, nervous, consumed by the fear that you might, nevertheless, if but once, have missed a grating. You put yourself to the test, try intentionally to overstep a grating, and soon enough you're consumed by a curious disquiet, uncertainty; you reproach yourself, bemoan—the slightest mishap, and there you have the pernicious “logical consequence”! If only I'd stepped on the sewer grating with my left foot!

With every woman of whom you're sincerely fond you run a billion risks at every hour of losing her for whatever reason. But the man not inclined to persecution complex, that is, the idiot, the nincompoop, doesn't sense the danger, it does not enter his clear
consciousness. He is blessed with the good luck, the healthy disposition to suffer an eventual catastrophe when it comes, but not the imperceptible and, therefore, all the more awful, things leading up to it. Any man not prone to a “persecution complex” in regard to a beloved never for a moment actually truly loved that person!

An old lady once said to me: “I am compelled from year to year to follow the solemn dictates of religion all the more strictly. For the closer I find myself to the final reckoning the more I fear it!”

Religion is a kind of “ideal application” of persecution complex on the human nerves!

I once said to a businessman: “You shouldn't overextend your business out into the sticks, it's financially dangerous, risky—.” Whereupon he replied: “But our whole business depends on that. You've just got to have the nerves to tough it out—.”

A year later he went bust. I reminded him of our conversation. Then he said to me: “You were right. But if I'd followed your advice I'd have gone bust long before!”

“My dear friend, you really ought not to leave your lovely young wife alone so long in the country—.”

“You're right; but if I didn't let her go I'd lose her all the sooner—!”

Persecution complex, in any case, has one advantage, at least you can't accuse yourself of having been “a dunce.” And in these tough times that's not something to sneeze at!

Perhaps the intellectual assurance of being able to avoid certain dangers in life provides a greater happiness than the heroism of leaping head-first into life and courting one's imminent demise! Heroism and persecution complex are the absolute opposites. The one heeds nothing, the other everything! The one sees victories everywhere, the other nothing but defeats. The one is a nincompoop and the other is a wise man! But can the wise man ever really be unhappy and the nincompoop ever really happy?!?

Persecution complex within reason is the capacity to foresee coming misfortune and the capacity by the force of intelligence, wherever possible, to avoid it! The opposite of that is the certainty of stupidity, that is one's so-called “quiet good fortune!”

January 25. The sun is trying to melt the snow. Here and there the snow fades to gray and dissolves, readying the way for spring. In Glognitz, Christmas roses poke through the snow. Everything, every thing else is buried under, silent. With the steel tip of my alpenstock I trace a girl's name in the frosted glass of a shop window. Who's name?! What do you care?! My soul is suffering. For four days now I've sheltered a little lady bug. It lives on the condensation under a glass. It even spreads its wings. I'll buy it a bouquet of mimosa, yellow, sweet-scented blossoms with little gray-green leaves. How did it manage to weather the winter until now, to live through all of winter's perils? I don't know. The temperature already hit 18 degrees Celsius, without its protector P.A.?! How did I myself manage to endure it all?! I don't know. I write a girl's name in the frosted glass of a shop window on the main drag. Who's name?! What do you care?! My soul is suffering, so it's still alive, it's still alive! The little lady-bug under the glass thinks: “Ha, ha, ha, it's warm here but there's not much to eat; we'll just have to wait it out till February; we're bound to find something then—.” Little creatures always find what they need.

__________________

*
A popular mountain resort in Austria

I love the steamboat landings on the Salzkammergut Lakes, the old gray-black ones and the newer yellow ones. They smell so good, as if from years of soaked-up baking in the sun. In the water round their thick pylons scores of minuscule gray-silver fish are forever scuttling here and there, suddenly swarming in one place, suddenly dispersing and disappearing. The water smells so delight ful under these landing docks, like the skin of fresh fish. When a steamboat docks, all the pylons rise and the landing gathers all its strength to endure the shock. The steamboat engine with its red paddle-wheels fights a stubborn battle with the obstinate landing holding it off. The landing will not yield, defending itself, so it seems, only insofar as it is absolutely necessary, while trembling with the force of its inner resolve. At last its quiet perseverance wins out and the boat lets loose, gives way, sails off again.

For hours and hours the landing lies in wait for steamboats, withering in the heat of the sun, lonesome, shunned.

All of a sudden agitated people in light clothing approach and amass themselves on the landing. “Don't step too far forward,” the parents warn and look at the landing as an imminent danger. I could well observe with some justification: “Somewhere, apart from the rest, two figures silently lean body to body against the railing.” But that's an observation of the old school and so it's best to keep it to oneself. Still I can't deny that an obstinate stare of extended duration down into the depths from the railing, while standing in the close proximity of a young lady, often elicits its own loud and clear, albeit unspoken, response. On the landing boards, fish too small to eat are sacrificed. You catch them, hurl them against the wood, gloating over their dance of death. It's true that between the teeth of a little pike dying is hardly a pleasant spectacle. But who after all ever dies peacefully in bed. Sometimes the landings are also crowded with the committees and the presidiums of yacht races. Sailboat regattas. For hours on end they peer through binoculars at a mysterious spot in the lake, and nobody else has the vaguest idea what's going on. Still, everyone's excited.
Here and there a technical remark is overheard. Suddenly the crowd cries hurrah and notes are frantically scribbled. Now the landing is like the hilltop perch of a field marshal surveying a battle. Everyone follows the outcome with his binoculars. And the landing lies right there in the thick of things. But then again, on moonlit nights it lies like a dark leviathan, reaching forth, stretching its blackness out over the silver lake.

I love the steamboat landings on the Salzkammergut Lakes, the old gray-black ones and the newer yellow ones. They are for me a sort of sign of summer freedom, summer serenity, scented as if from years of soaked-up baking in the sun.

For several days now I've been in Munich for the very first time. I haven't seen a thing yet, not a thing listed in the little guidebooks, no monuments, no paintings. I'm not interested in the things that were. I'm interested in the things that are, that will be! Look! The new art is beaming out at me from the show windows of the fine stores, the stuff that would transform the lot of us shriveling in life's stranglehold into visionary artist-folk if only we could spend hours and hours gazing at it, each in our own cubicle back home. Europeans, where are you stuck in the mud?!? Joylessly you still display your Meissen figurines and vases in your hand-carved cabinets! You're deceiving yourselves!

You live without any real affinity for the wondrous colors and forms of nature itself, say “ah!” to odd and unappealing things, feed off catch phrases and history, buy vases with blossoms that never bloomed! You've got eyes that can't savor what they see in and of itself, but are, rather, swayed by names and pre-set patterns! Which is why, since you take no advantage of these most precious organs, you fail to plunder the treasures of these two inexhaustibly rich eyes, you remain miserable, empty, sad, try to soak up the pleasures of other organs, fleeting pleasures gone in a flash! Then come the long gaping hours, time that needs to be killed with the poisons “drinking,” “gambling—!”