Frost: A Novel (35 page)

T
HE
R
AVINE

“The way the brain reverts to being a sort of machine, the way it hammers out everything once more that it was hit and knocked with hours and days and weeks previously. The way a word can trigger a whole avalanche of logic, sending whole settlements of verbal constructions into the depth, without the least exemption. As if some runtish dictator, invisible, unapproachable, at least for humans, threw a vast machinery into action, with horrendous noise that one is helpless to oppose …” The painter continued: “You must imagine a rocky ravine in the prettiest colors of the universe, most especially watercolors, the colors of putrefying flesh, a ravine which a man enters, following orders. If you like, you can press a suitcase into his hand, set a hat on his head, give him tight clothes to wear, whatever your fancy might be, or your inner virtue, because such are the dreams, opposed to my
version, that I now impose on you: a man with the fantastic on his back, with disappointment at his society, which, far from any social groupings, has done everything to set him on the road to ruin, a man with a monstrous memory, with an imagination that is majestic and unalterable, not capable of heightening, not capable of shrinking … This man, and me, his inventor, you now drive into the ravine, you yell at him, you smack him in the face, you simplify him, you imagine him as rustling leaves on trees, as crumbling of rocks, as teeth ground in fear, so that you can join him; you introduce yourself as terror, and slowly you take from him his fear by concentrating his mind on his last will … He senses his departure, but he no longer opposes it … he is lulled by the impossibility of actually feeling his pain, and by your stratagems … Well, now we have set someone en route to hell, created him and set him going, at a time one would have to call the seventh day of discreation, the seventh and last day of discreation … You must imagine that only the air still exists, everything else in this person is just a laughable extravagance, a feeling his brain—already dissolved into nothing—is limping in pursuit of … the man may still retain certain bearings in a fixed world, a sense of father and mother for example, of cities, of scientific experiments, notions of manual work, rudimentary anthropophagous impulses of an animal sub-brain, that we should imagine in the name of science … a designation occurs to me, a pitiful, a scandalous designation, a so-called cemetery name floating over his tomb, his cement tomb … can you guess the name? Can you guess the horror of horrors? I can see that my instruction, which makes up a fourth of my being (one fourth is the notion of instruction, one fourth is the notion of repugnance, one fourth is the
notion of futility, and one fourth the notion of no-longer-and-not-yet), I have given you the pleasure of bewilderment, which is completely what I had in mind, and completely what my invented character would have had in mind as well, whom we should think of as a teacher, to my mind teachers are the best characters, the teacher is
the
made-up character par excellence … well now, this teacher enters the ravine, and gets to his destination, which is of course a schoolhouse. But what is a schoolhouse? A house where things are taught that someone doesn’t yet know, can’t yet know … I don’t want to go on, I say: the teacher understands that nothing can be learned anymore, that everything is ignorant, that everything is finished, everything is beginning, and so on: he unpacks, he unpacks his bags. Do you get the scene?” I say: “Yes, I get the scene.”—“Hold on to the picture: the teacher unpacks his bags, he discovers that it’s cold in the school. He turns on the heating. He arranges his books. He finds the classroom, he suddenly knows the names of the children he will teach—you were thinking of children as well, I hope? He says to himself: I wish I had my books in my head! Did you think of that too? You see: the teacher is thinking of the past, he can only think of the past because he can only think in the past. There is nothing very remarkable about humans,” said the painter. “The brain believes in the progress it aims to make, but the brain cannot make progress. The flesh is different there: it consists of the progress that is denied the brain … What would you say to this: the teacher has been ordered to the ravine to perish … in an obvious, a simplistic way, nothing obscure, in a form of butting forward … Even though he knows where his obedience has got him, namely into the ravine, he is still thinking in terms of teaching and
the possibilities of teaching: because I am a teacher, he may be thinking to himself … Do you still see the teacher? As I’ve presented him to you in my art? In the perspectivelessness that I master, because I am so full of different perspectives? So, you see him: the polarity going from the animal to the animal … I don’t ask myself what else shall I do with my teacher, not anymore … As it’s winter, I have the pleasant conviction that I shall have snow fall, the holy snow of holy winter, I shall have the earth covered with snow, the ravine stuffed full of snow, the schoolhouse roofed with snow, I feel like proceeding with the delicacy of impotence, to make everything in this teacher impossible, to prevent his blood from circulating, to weld his brain to the freezing point, to the absolute freezing horizon … If you’re still there, where the teacher is unpacking his bags … If you still picture him standing in front of the stove … on the way over to the hunting lodge, as it might be, yes, even before the onset of the great frost, I ventured to imagine a vicarage with all the ingredients of earthly felicity … Now, you see: the teacher, shut in his destructive fantasy, slowly he is forced back in on himself by his thinking, into the idea of ‘never-ending snow’ … One should be careful not to refer to such a procedure as ‘story,’ ” said the painter. “You see: I am now involved in the falling snow, in the even falling of the snow … the world around, our idea of the world around, becomes softened to the degree that it is forced to assume demonic traits … a devilish silence makes concentration impossible, all the while it prompts him to raise his performance, suggests the unrepeatableness of all feelings … Now I know only too well,” said the painter, “given my possibilities, you would have dealt very differently with the teacher, you would
have integrated him in an idyllic peace, in a daily routine, in the vibrations of youthful sensitivity, into mutilated vices, into mutilated sorrows, into the mutilated notions of end and departure that typify youth, that youth makes possible, and not into the great vices, the great sorrows, not the great imaginings of end and departure that age allows … You would have enclosed the teacher in your petty lie, you would, shall we say, have let him live! But I will not let my teacher live, I must not let him live, I cannot let him live, my teacher will not live, he has never lived, he must not live, the living teacher is anathema to me, it denies itself to me: I must kill him, I must let him die a fearful death, a second death, because as far as I’m concerned, the teacher has always been long since dead … So, now I’m listening to the falling snow and the cracking of tree trunks … the beginning of the ice age, the crumbling of human melancholy … now I have a monstrous landscape of death crystals before me, for the teacher to walk into.—I see the occasionally moving way his being opposes extinction, how his head denies the summonses of death … how his feet suddenly falter, how everything about this man fails as fail it must … how this man, this teacher, is extinguished, is dead … the teacher is dead … Now, you see,” said the painter, “I make my world anew: now I am once again on the first day of creation, on the second day of creation, I am busy imagining all the days of creation I need … the teacher is dissolved in the air of my exemplary conditions, the teacher is dissolved in the lack of an answer, the lack of a face. The teacher has fallen prey to a wild transmogrification of intellectual dread, to a resurgent animal intellectualism … Did you manage,” said the painter, “to follow in every little detail the scenery I tried to lay before you?”
I didn’t reply. “You see,” said the painter, “the brain is capable of nourishing itself on the inventions, the great inventions of little and lesser and infinitesimal dread … it can make itself roar … make itself a world, an original world, an ice age, a vast stone age of organization … One proceeds from a very small and insignificant instance, from a little individual who falls into one’s hands … From the principle of some desecration, the justness of such desecration, into the desecration itself … one leaves the victim lying there, one has snow fall on him, one has him decompose, dissolve, as an animal might dissolve that one once might have thought oneself to be … Do you understand? Life is the purest, clearest, darkest, most crystalline form of hopelessness … There is only one way to go, through the snow and ice into despair; past the adultery of reason.”

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 …

My Letters to Assistant Strauch

F
IRST
L
ETTER

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.

S
ECOND
L
ETTER

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.