24
VIENNA. MY ILLNESS
MY BODY was so fatigued, my soul in such a state of hypertension, that I closed my eyes in the railway car and did not so much as raise my lids to see the countries I was traversing. The bow had been so greatly overdrawn that I already heard the creaking of the cord stretched from one temple to the other inside me; it had reached the breaking point.
My temples ringing, the veins in my neck pounding, I felt the strength pouring out of my brain, loins, ankles—and perishing. I kept thinking to myself, So this is what death is like—calm, exceedingly compassionate; like entering a warm bath and slitting your veins. A woman, infant in arms, opened the door to enter the compartment where I was stretched out full length all alone. Seeing me, she immediately closed the door and fled in terror. My head must already have become a skull, I reflected; that’s why the woman was frightened. Still, it’s good that death did not strike me in the mind, as it did you, my master.
When we reached Vienna, I amassed all my strength in order to get off the train and buy a newspaper at the kiosk across the platform. But I slipped, struck an iron post, and collapsed unconscious to the ground.
After that I remember nothing. When I opened my eyes, I found myself in a large ward with rows of beds. It was night; a small blue light was burning above me. My head was bound in cotton and gauze. A white shadow with two great white wings, one at each temple, flitted weightlessly between the beds. It came up to me, placed its cool, gentle hand on my pulse, and smiled.
“Go to sleep,” it said softly.
I closed my eyes; sleep descended upon me again, a strange, dense sleep. I felt submerged in tepid molten lead, my hands and feet so heavy that I could not budge them, as though my soul’s wings had stuck together.
A dense sleep was what my entire sojourn in the sickbed seemed to me. For many days I refused to open my mouth and eat. I had melted away, was unable to lift myself up or move. Each day I felt myself sinking continually further and further—at first to the waist, then to the breast, then to the throat—into a tepid, soft mire which smelled of rotted leaves. I sensed it must be death.
From time to time I raised my head out of its torpor. My mind having issued once more into the light, I called the nurse. She, the white wings at her temples, came knowingly with pencil and paper in hand, ready to write. My mind was working, resisting, trying to keep itself from sinking into the mire along with the rest of me, and I had accustomed the nurse to coming so that I might say a few words to her—a haikai, whatever rose from chaos—and have her write them down. Many of those haikai went for nought; others I subsequently inserted in my writings after I emerged from the mire of death.
“I am ready,” the sister said, taking my hand and smiling.
She always wrote with the paper resting on her knees—I remember her slim, brilliantly white hands. Closing my eyes, I dictated:
“Hello there, man, you little two-legged plucked cock! It’s true—never mind what people say—that the sun won’t rise in the morning unless you crow.”
The nurse laughed. “What things you concoct in your fever!” she said.
“Write: A worm sleeps in God’s heart and dreams that God does not exist..
“Write: If you open my heart, you’ll find a steep, forbidding mountain and a man, all alone, climbing it.
“And write this also: ’If you blossom now in midwinter, scatterbrained almond tree, the snow will come and destroy you.’ ‘Let it!’ replies the almond tree every spring.”
“That’s enough, enough for today,” the sister declared, seeing me grow pale.
“No, no, this too: I enjoy seeing the mind knock at heaven and beg, and God refuse to open the gates and give it a piece of bread.”
“Enough! Enough!” the nurse insisted.
“No, no, this too, so they’ll know down there in Greece in case I die: Wherever I go and wherever I stay, I hold Greece between my teeth like a laurel leaf.”
I closed my eyes; my brain had been emptied.
“I’m tired, sister. . . .” I murmured, and I sank back down into the mire.
My life’s joys and vicissitudes, the people I loved, the countries I had seen: all floated across my mind like clouds, halted momentarily, then immediately scattered and vanished, whereupon other clouds rose, sometimes from my right temple, sometimes from my left, according to how the wind was blowing.
In the midst of my fever one day, I remembered the Virgin of the Golden Steps, a Cretan monastery jutting over the Libyan Sea. What a day that had been, what a tender springtime sun, how the sea glittered as it made off toward the Barbary Coast! And the abbot, a squat, broadish, well-preserved, succulent old man with a forked white beard and twirled mustachios like a soldier, how full of good humor he was, how his mind scintillated! He took me for a stroll to view the monastery graveyard, where he showed me the tombs of the monks carved into the rock over the water. The sea spattered the black wooden crosses whenever there was a storm, and all the names engraved on them had been worn away. I started to turn back, since I found ambling among the tombs extremely unpleasant. But the abbot seized my arm, squeezing it until it hurt. “Come, come, my brave lad,” he said to me laughingly, “don’t be afraid. It’s said the human being is the animal that thinks about death. But I disagree. No, the human being is the animal that thinks about life everlasting. Come and see!” He halted at an open, empty tomb. “Look, this is mine. Don’t be afraid, lad. Come near. It’s still empty, but it will be filled.” He broke into peals of laughter. He himself had dug it out of the rock with a mattock and had also prepared the tombstone. “Look what I’ve engraved on it,” he called to me. “Well, why don’t you bend down and read? Stop being afraid, I tell you!” He knelt, brushed the dirt off the carved letters, and read: “Eh, Death, I’m not afraid of you!” He glanced at me; even his ears were laughing. “And why should I be afraid of him, the old impostor! He is a mule; I’m going to mount him and have him take me to God.”
Some of man’s richest hours, I believe, some of the freest, the most completely liberated from time, place, and rationality, are the hours of fever.
It was May when I was finally able to leave the clinic and emerge into the light. The lilacs were blooming in the parks; the women wore diaphanous dresses with floral designs; girls and boys exchanged whispers beneath the newly foliaged trees, as though they had great secrets to tell. On the afternoon of my discharge a gentle breeze was blowing, carrying with it the scents from the women’s hair and powdered faces. I kept repeating to myself that this was the earth, the upper world. How very nice it was to be alive with all fives senses—the five doors through which the world enters—working well. How very nice to say, The world is fine, I like it.
The sun-washed earth aroused a feeling of tenderness in me, moving me greatly. I felt that I had just been born, had descended to the nether world for a moment, seen the horror, jumped up, opened my eyes, and found myself once more in the familiar, hallowed light, walking beneath the trees and listening to human laughter and talk.
I walked slowly. My knees still trembled; a colorful giddiness as sweet and tender as morning mist enveloped my mind; behind this mist I observed the world, half solid, half composed of dreams. I was reminded of an icon I saw once in some church, I don’t remember which. The painting was divided into two levels. On the lower level a strong, blond Saint George mounted on a frenzied horse was nailing his lance into the horrible, writhing, frothing beast, which had its vermilion-colored mouth open and ready to eat him. The identical struggle raged on the upper level, except that Saint George, the horse, and the beast were made of delicate cloud ready to scatter and vanish into the air. As I walked with sagging knees through the parks and streets of Vienna, this upper level represented in the painting of the world was the one I saw, and I trembled lest a wind should blow and disperse it.
How was I to know that in just a few days this very wind would indeed blow and indeed disperse it!
Vienna is a charming, e
nticing city; one always remembers her as a beloved woman. Beautiful, flighty, coquettish, she knows how to dress and undress, how to surrender herself, and how to act perfidiously, not from hate or love, but in jest. She does not walk, she dances; she does not call out, she sings. She is stretched on her back along the banks of the Danube. The rain drenches her, the snow covers her, the sun warms her. You see her—she hides nothing—and you exclaim: Thalia, Aglaia, Euphrosyne, Vienna—the four Graces!
The first few days after my return to life I enjoyed this laughing city, including the light, the earth’s fragrance, the conversations of men, and even more than these the refreshing water, the delicious bread, the fruit. I used to close my eyes on the balcony of my room and listen to the world’s bustle. The world seemed like a beehive full of workers, drones, and honey, the springtime breeze like a tender, cool hand on my face.
But as my body filled out and my soul took up the reins again, all this gaiety gradually began to strike me as extremely shallow and frivolous; it went contrary to my deepest needs. One felt that all the men and women here were being tickled—this explained their constant laughter. But I considered man a metaphysical animal, so he seemed to me at the time. Laughter, insouciance, canzonettas, were treason and impudence. I reverted to my father, who deemed laughter a form of insolence, though without knowing why. I, however, knew why, and this was the only step the son succeeded in taking beyond his parent!
Beginning to sound inside me with ever-increasing clarity was the stern, merciless voice of the tragic prophet I loved. “For shame!” bellowed this inner voice. “Is this the solid, leonine mind I fed you? Didn’t I instruct you not to stoop to consolations? Only slaves and cowards have hopes—you’d better become resigned to that fact. The world is a trap laid by Satan, a trap laid by God. Do not condescend to nibble the bait. Instead, die of hunger!” And then confidentially, in a softer tone: “I turned coward and failed. You succeed!”
At other times this voice rose up hissing and ironic: “What do you mean by swaggering about and proclaiming that you want whatever is most difficult, that you believe in the faith which won’t stoop to consolations, while all the while you go on the sly and get drunk in those taverns of hope, the churches, bowing down to worship the Nazarene and beg ‘Lord, save me’ with extended hand! Take to the road—alone! March! Reach the end; there you’ll find the abyss. Regard it—that’s all I ask of you, to regard the abyss without becoming panic-stricken, that and nothing else. I myself did so, but my mind collapsed. You keep your mind firm and unshakable. Surpass me.”
The human heart is a dark, unyielding mystery. It is a perforated jug with a mouth forever open; though all the rivers of the earth pour in, it will remain empty and thirsting. The greatest of hopes had not filled it. Would it be filled now by the greatest of despairs?
This was the direction in which the merciless voice kept urging me to go. I divined whose steps it was toiling to make me follow, steps which proceeded firmly and unhesitatingly to the abyss with neither delay nor haste, but a noble, majestic regularity. “He is the final Savior,” the voice kept saying to me. “He delivers man from hope, fear, and the gods. Follow him! I myself failed to do so in time, for along came the Superman holding out a great hope for me, and I went astray. I had no chance to push him aside. But you push aside your superman, the Nazarene, and attain what I had no chance to attain—the utmost freedom.”
The rasping voice kept urging me in this pitiless obstinate manner, and little by little the prophet of absolute, total redemption began to rise up noiselessly inside me. My entrails became a lotus flower upon which he sat cross-legged with two mystic wheels engraved on the soles of his feet, his fingers skillfully intertwined, and a black spiral between his brows, like a third eye. His mischievous, disquieting smile extended from his narrow lips to his monstrous ears, thence to his forehead, and then slid down like honey from that high cliff to invade his entire body, reaching clear to the soles of his feet, where the two wheels moved as though anxious to depart.
Buddha! I had read about his life and proud message of despair many years earlier, but had forgotten everything. Apparently I still was not ripe, and thus I failed to pay attention. His voice struck me then as an exotic bewitching sound issuing from the depths of Asia, from a dark forest filled with snakes and dizzying orchids. But I did not grow dizzy. Another voice, a familiar one of the utmost sweetness, kept calling inside me, and I marched forward with confidence to meet it. But now, in the midst of this city’s cachinnation, here again came the sound of this exotic, bewitching flute! How I closed my eyes and welcomed it! The voice was more familiar now, as though it had never grown silent inside me, but had simply been covered over by the Christian trumpet of Judgment Day.
I had been strengthened without a doubt by the satanic prophet’s leonine nourishment, for I began to feel ashamed of my attempts to cover the abyss with a gaudy stalking-blind. I still dared not confront it point-blank as it truly was: naked and repulsive. Christ, his arms held out compassionately, had placed Himself between the abyss and me to keep me from seeing it and being frightened.
I began to provoke my soul, to torment it. Although it desired to become entangled with the flesh and be granted a mouth and hands with which to kiss and touch the world, although it no longer desired to regard its envelope the body as an enemy, but rather to become friends with it so that the two could journey hand in hand, separating only at the grave—although the soul desired all this, I stood in its way. Which “I”? A demon inside me, a new demon—Buddha. This demon kept shouting, Desire is flame, love is flame, virtue, hope, “I” and “you,” heaven and hell are flames. One thing and one thing only is light: the renouncement of flame. Take the flames that are burning you, take them and turn them into light. Then blow out the light!
In India, when the day’s work finally ends and the shadows fall upon the rooftops, the village lanes, and the people’s breasts, an aged exorcist leaves his hut to make the rounds of the village. The magic reed between his lips, he proceeds from door to door playing a melody sweet and lulling, like the charm which cures souls. It is the “tiger’s melody,” that is the name given it, and it is said to cure the day’s wound. This was the melody I wished to hear more clearly, and in order to do so I locked myself in my room and leaned day and night over huge manuals, studying the sermons and teaching of Buddha.
“In the flower of my youth, with my curly black hair, at the very acme of contented youthfulness’s joy, in the first pride of manly strength, I shaved my hair down to the roots, donned the yellow robe, opened the door of my house, and entered the desert. . . .”
Here began the struggles of ascetic discipline. “My arms came to resemble dried-out reeds. For nourishment I took only a single grain of rice from sunrise to sunrise, and do not suppose that rice was bigger then than now; it was exactly the same. My hindquarters became like the legs of a camel, my spine like a chaplet; my bones protruded like the framework of a dilapidated half-timbered hut. As water glitters at the bottom of a deep well, so gleamed my eyes. Like the gourd which dries in the sun and cracks, such was my head.”
But salvation did not come from this harsh road of ascetic discipline. Going back to his village, Buddha ate and drank, seated himself beneath a tree, at peace, neither happy nor sad, and said, “I shall not rise from this tree, shall not rise from this tree, shall not rise from this tree, unless I find salvation.”
His sight limpid, his spirit pure, he saw vanity, saw life emerge from the earth and disappear, saw the gods disperse like clouds in the sky, saw the entire cycle, and leaned back against his tree. And as he did so, the tree’s blossoms began to fall upon his hair and knees, the Great Message upon his mind.
He turned left and right, before and behind; it was he himself who bellowed in beasts, who bellowed in men and gods. Love took possession of him, love and pity for his own self that was scattered and struggling throughout the world. All the suffering of earth, all the suffering of heaven, was his own sufferin
g. “How can anyone be happy in this pitiful body, this skein of blood, bones, brain, flesh, mucus, sperm, sweat, tears, and excrement? How can anyone be happy in this body governed by envy, hate, falsehood, fear, anguish, hunger, thirst, disease, old age, and death? All things—plants, insects, beasts, men—proceed toward perdition. Look behind you at those who no longer exist; look ahead of you at those not yet born. Men ripen like grain, fall like grain, sprout anew. The boundless oceans grow dry, mountains crumble away, the North Star wavers, gods vanish. . . .”
Pity—that is the Buddhistic journey’s unfailing guide. By means of pity we deliver ourselves from our bodies, demolish the partition, merge with Nothingness. “We are all one, and this one suffers—we must deliver it. If but a single trembling drop of water suffers, I suffer.
“The ‘Four Noble Truths’ dawn in my mind. This world is a net in which we have been caught; death does not deliver us, for we shall be reborn. Let us triumph over thirst, let us uproot desire, let us empty out our bowels! Do not say, ‘I want to die,’ or ‘I do not want to die,’ Say, ‘I do not want anything.’ Elevate your mind above desire and hope—and then, while yet in this life, you shall be able to enter the beatitude of nonbeing. With your arm, you shall halt the Wheel of Rebirth.”
Never had Buddha’s form towered up before me bathed in such brilliant light. Formerly, when I considered nirvana identical with immortality, I saw Buddha as just another of Hope’s generals, leading his army contrary to the thrust of the world. Only now did I realize that Buddha urges man to give consent to death, to love the ineluctable, to harmonize his heart with universal flux, and, seeing matter and mind pursue each other, unite, beget, and vanish, to say, “That is what I want.”