Writing by anarchistbanjo on Monday, 18 of August , 2008 at 6:08 pm
Anthropoovaropartus
A Word Pro Domo for the Professional and the Amateur
By Hanns Heinz Ewers 1910
Translated by Joe E. Bandel 2008
Copyright 2008 by Joe E. Bandel
Protected under United States Copyright Law as a derivative work of a foreign Author originally published prior to 1923
The 2nd December issue of the London “Medical Review” contained the entire short notice. It found its way into all the newspapers of the world.
The two Edinburg Doctors, Professor Paidscuttle and Dr. Feesemupp after long experimentation and several attempts had finally invented the “Anthropoovaropartus”. It would take the egg from a human female and grow it in accordance with nature. This technology would be suitable to bring about an eerie change in the life of mankind.
Both gentlemen were carefully guarding the secret for the present but it stood to hope that it wouldn’t be long until a public announcement would be made.
I was looking over this interesting announcement and a compelling urge came over me to publicly explain the truth, that the idea of the “Anthropoovaropartus”, a machine that would grow the eggs of the human female, belonged to me and they should have talked to me first.
Unfortunately I had been such an ass that instead of a patent I only had a pattern for protection. For the sake of my Fatherland and for myself I wanted to see this eerie machine that grew human eggs in accordance with nature and determine if I had been robbed. I wanted to know if the materialization of my thought had been obtained.
At least I will preserve the glory for each of us. Both Scottish scholars likely put down everything about their invention of the “Anthropoovaroparatus” so there can be no dispute over it. I am compelled to name unique witnesses that can prove my side of the story.
They are:
Superintendent of Public Schools Dr. Schulze of Kőpenick and the foreign maiden Frida Knäller.
(Current whereabouts unknown by the police)
On the night of 4 to 5 November 1903 I traveled with the Superintendent for three hours through the early morning down Friedriche St. On the corner of Orianienburger St. we met up with F. Knäller whom he wanted to strike up an acquaintance with.
I had felt the need to bring these two different people together as matchmaker in an unceremonious way to see if they would like each other. I observed explicitly a possible annoyance and unpleasantness in the air and didn’t push it. On the contrary, I felt compelled to pay for some food and drink.
I find that subtlety is a precondition of the Law when you can’t get what you want. You can gather from this that I am as good a lawyer as a distinguished physician, which gives my discovery certain characteristics of both.
Around 117 Friedriche St. I entered the pub “Hulking Hound” with them for the aforesaid purpose of warming the pair up a bit toward each other. I can say that Superintendent Dr. Schulze went out of his way to be pleasant while F. Knäller showed a remarkable dislike toward him in her behavior. In her opposition she was determined to break the lively and vivacious spirit of the pedagogue.
I ordered a quantity of stimulating beverages in the hopes that it would lighten things up a bit and we gradually became engrossed in deeper, more scholarly questions.
F. Knäller had read in “Mine-Haha” of the fetal movements of the unborn child and its transformation. She wanted to know from the educated Superintendent if there was a solution to the female question wherein some steps could be taken in consideration of the financially distressed farmer and the academic youth to make their lives easier.
We talked all around this subject of pregnancy and always kept coming back to the main point of inadequate health care. The Superintendent finally said in conclusion “The only way the egg could get the nourishment it needed was through its connection to the mothers womb”.
I would like to say in that moment as he spoke this fateful sentence, a hundred words that had up till now only been phrases to me became palpable reality. I recognized the symbol in the painting from Sais and it ripped the veil from my eyes. I held the Philosophers Stone in my hand. I had laid the egg of Columbus. I sighed deeply three times and felt that in a single second I had found the solution to the social question and to everything else.
Then the Superintendent to whom I was indebted raised his hand but I pressed it back down and ordered the 17th round of grog. While the beverage was being brought I calmed myself a bit while another wretched witness, Taxi driver 2nd Class No. 7468, came up and sat at a nearby table.
Category: Uncategorized
Writing by anarchistbanjo on Wednesday, 13 of August , 2008 at 6:23 pm
The pastor stared horrified into the grave.
“Is this a Christian burial?” He stammered.
“No,” I said. “This is a modern burial with Red Riders.”
I sat on my crate, jammed my eyepiece into my eye and glared at the people. I was in pajamas but had been afraid of getting too cold in the grave so I had brought my fur coat along as well. That made quite an impression on the gentlemen since it was the middle of summer. No one was paying attention to the funeral of the secret government advisor, that was for certain.
“Get out of here, go away!” I started. “I paid for this grave and it belongs to me. I am legally dead and can have a little fun if I want! Go away! Here in this hole and in this crate I am Master of the house and I advise you not to trespass.
“This is a scandal,” said the gentleman with the medals. “This is a malicious scandal.”
Then the Public Prosecutor came.
“There must be an end to this foolish charade,” he hissed at me. “I arrest you in the name of the Law. I request the guards do their duty.”
The guards climbed into the hole and laid their wide paws on my shoulders, but I looked at them sharply and said.
“Have you lost all respect for the sanctity of the dead?”
“He is not dead! He is a fraud!” The very angry Public Prosecutor cried.
“Really?” I laughed. “Just a moment, I will offer the guards my death certificate. Here, satisfy yourselves. And by the way,” I went on. “If this slip from the county doctor is not enough, prove it yourself, you old ass!”
The gentleman with the medals stuck his nose in the air, sniffed, and moved back.
“The Devil!” He cried.
“Please keep the boundary of decency and good manners my friend,” I admonished. “Bear in mind where we are. It is a torrid red-hot July day and almost noon. I am a corpse. I have a right to stink!”
But the Public Prosecutor wouldn’t calm down.
“That means nothing to me,” he declared. “I see only that a rude public nuisance has begun and the public nuisance demands legal atonement. I request the guards lay the gentleman in his crate and bring him along. Everyone else, please follow me!”
The guards grabbed me. I attempted to offer resistance but they were much stronger than I and quickly stuck me into the crate and carried me out of the cemetery to the carriage. Everyone followed. The gentlemen climbed into their light carriages and the Red Riders sprang onto their bicycles. Even the gravedigger came with.
The only thing I was happy about was that the secret government advisor whose old fashioned funeral I had so disturbed was now all alone and lying abandoned. The stupid fellow must really be annoyed.
My crate sat on a beam of wood and a fat policeman sat up on top. Thank God I could see a little through a knothole. We traveled back through the city at a sharp trot, and then we halted in front of the court building.
“Room 41,” cried the Public Prosecutor.
The guards carried my crate and me inside. Everyone else pushed hastily into the room. The District Court Judge sat above between his lay magistrates.
The Public Prosecutor stopped a long speech. He apologized for so suddenly interrupting the proceedings but some very urgent, pressing, really brooking no delay business needed to be dealt with. Then he told the entire course of events and what had happened.
“The fellow claims to be dead,” he closed, “and is in possession of an authentic legal death certificate.”
The District Court Judge let me get out of my crate.
“Is there a doctor in the audience?” He asked.
Three gentlemen came forward, an ordinary Doctor, a staff Doctor and a Psychiatrist, the Director of the State Lunatic Asylum. They examined me while holding handkerchiefs over their noses. They made it really short.
“He is most certainly a corpse!”
I had won.
“I would like to charge the Public Prosecutor with violation of a corpse,” I said.
“Let the accused stand here for the time being,” moved the Chairman.
“Not any longer dear Sir,” I replied. “I am in a condition of— “
“Observe the dignity of the court,” he interrupted me. “I would like you to be fined.”
“Permit you to— “
“Be quiet!” He yelled.
“No,” I said. “I will not be quiet. As a Prussian I have the right to freely express myself in word, writing or image.”
He laughed. “We are not in Prussia any more! And besides, you are not a Prussian, you are a corpse!”
“I’m not a Prussian any more?”
“No.”
“Then I am a dead Prussian.”
“And a dead Prussian,” he trumped me. “absolutely has no civil rights. Even you must understand that!”
I thought about it. He was right. I was vexed but quieted.
“You stand here,” he began again, “accused of gross misconduct, resisting arrest and contempt of court. Do you have anything to say in your defense?”
“I am a corpse,” I whimpered downcast.
“That is no excuse,” asserted the Judge. “It would be nice if corpses and especially Prussian corpses could go unpunished for all misdemeanors. But that would be contrary to what is said about corpses, that they are quiet to the highest degree, well mannered and take great pains to be well behaved. You should, so to speak, be setting a shining example of virtue for all living citizens. As a former Prussian you should know that is the first duty! And that goes for all types of so-called corpses.
This case is entirely unheard of, that a deceased individual has become indignant and even more, openly stands in front of me. Nothing like this has ever happened in all my long years of practice. Have you ever been convicted?”
“Yes,” I stood straight. “Seventeen times. For contempt, for two fights, for spreading malicious pamphlets as well as for all the misdemeanors I stand here accused of!”
“You are back sliding,” he stressed. “It appears that you don’t want to remain quiet!”
“I was always innocent,” I stammered.
“Always innocent,” scorned the Judge. “I wonder, will you quit these misdemeanors? Will you learn from this?”
I sealed my fate.
“I don’t care about any of that at all. Leave me in peace! I am a corpse, and you are an idiot and all of you are idiots!”
The Chairman raised his hand, but before he could say a word the Public Prosecutor stood up.
“I propose the accused should be transferred to the Insane Asylum for six weeks and his state of mind observed.”
The Psychiatrist, the Director of the asylum, came forward quickly and declared.
“Under these circumstances the Insane Asylum must refuse to take the accused for six weeks. I can’t risk the danger of keeping him that long!”
There was a small pause; then one of the jurors asked.
“Yes, but what are we going to do with him?”
“We are going to give him a fine,” said the Judge.
“That won’t do you any good,” I remarked. “I am dead and don’t have any more money than when I was alive. I gave out my last coin for a proper burial! The Chief of the Red Riders made a contract with me.”
“Then he must certainly not go free under any circumstances,” said the Public Prosecutor.
“But the prison won’t take him any more than the insane asylum!” The Chairman objected.
He was very inconsolable. I believed I had won when suddenly the unctuous pastor came to their assistance.
“I think I can make a suitable proposal gentlemen!” He said. “I believe it would be best if the deceased, the accused, were given a Christian burial.”
“I don’t want a Christian burial!” I cried wildly.
But the pastor paid no attention to me. “A very Christian and very civilized burial.” He went on, “I believe in this case it would put things right for the charity and honor of the court and for all decent thinking people. It would also to a certain extent cause this confused spirit of the accused to be punished and regret his actions. This is dangerous but if I am permitted to inter the deceased in this way I believe he will remain quiet, unmoving and won’t cause any more problems in the future.”
“Very good! Very good!” The Chairman nodded, the Public Prosecutor nodded, both jurors nodded, everyone nodded.
I screamed furiously and turned in my despair to the Chief Red Rider.
He shrugged his shoulders. “I am very sorry,” he said. “We were only paid for two hours and they have run out. The Red Riders will do anything— That is our highest principle— But— only when we are paid!”
No one sympathized with me. I defended myself the best I could but was quickly overpowered. They stuck me in a black coffin and carried me out.
The pastor held a eulogy for me free, without pay. I don’t know what he said because I plugged my ears.
Brute force has conquered. What is the use of turning over three times whenever a Public Prosecutor or District Court Judge walks past my grave?
Category: Uncategorized
Writing by anarchistbanjo on Friday, 8 of August , 2008 at 10:20 am
My Burial
By Hanns Heinz Ewers
(Mein Begräbnis 1910)
Translation by Joe E. Bandel 2008
Three days before my death I sent a postcard to the “Red Riders”. Even so, this story should really have occurred in Berlin! The “Berliner” is refined. They say “lift” instead of “elevator”. They are “Gents” and on no account “Gentlemen”. When they want something done they send a dispatch to the “Messenger Boy Institute”.
You can gather from that why this story never happened in Berlin. I wrote to the “Red Riders” because they sounded very nice and not to the Messenger Boys because they would have thrown my postcard away.
My card announced:
Three days after receipt of this card please pick up a crate for the cemetery. The presence of all Red Riders is required. Payment and further instructions will be with the crate.
Then my name and address.
The Red Riders came promptly and with them came the Chief Rider. In Berlin you would say the General Director of the Messenger Boy Institute. He was inspecting a large coffin sized crate on which I had painstakingly painted “Glass”, “Fragile”, “Caution” and “Do Not Drop”.
Naturally my corpse was in the old crate but I had not closed the cover because I wanted a beautiful funeral and needed to pay attention to make sure everything went right.
First the Chief took the gold and counted it. “Forty five Red Riders for two hours—it fits”. He put the gold in his wallet and looked at my instructions.
“No”, he said then. “It doesn’t. We don’t do this.”
I made my voice real hollow and answered from out of the crate, “The Red Riders will do anything”.
The Chief Rider was not certain where the voice had come from. He scratched his nose.
“Should I?” He said. “Should I?”
His conscience hit him. On all his advertisements it explicitly stated “The Rider Riders will do anything”. One of the boys wanted to nail the cover down but the Chief waved him back.
“Forward!” He cried and pointed to the directions. “It specifically says here the cover must stay open. I will do what I’m paid to do. There will be no black marks on my account even if it would be allowed.”
“First we say a short prayer. Do any of you know a short prayer?”
None of the Red Riders knew a short prayer.
“What about a longer one?”
But they couldn’t get a longer one right.
“The Red Riders will do anything!” I said hollowly from out of my crate.
The Chief Rider looked around. “But of course!” He cried quickly.
“There is still a beautiful one if the Red Riders can’t come up with anything else.”
He turned to all the youngsters.
“Frtiz, you certainly know a prayer?”
“I know a prayer all right,” opinioned the urchin. “But not ordinarily for…”
“That doesn’t matter!” The Chief Rider interrupted. “Whether it is an ordinary prayer or an unordinary one, the important thing is that we pray! So say your prayer and everyone else say it with him.”
Fritz prayed and the others shouted along as loud as they could.
“Come Lord Jesus, be our guest and let these gifts to us be blessed.”
“Amen,” said the Chief Rider unctuously. “That is really an excellent prayer. Remember it for the future.”
He followed my orders completely. Then they loaded the crate on a cargo tricycle that the strongest youth drove. Fritz needed to sit on top so the cover wouldn’t fall off. All the Red Riders sprang onto their bicycles and went as fast as they could through the streets. The people cheered at the lively train of Red Riders. In my crate I thought how different is was to be so enjoyably rushing to the churchyard instead of going slowly in a black funeral carriage with ghastly mourners trotting alongside.
In twenty minutes we were there. They leaned their bicycles against the fence and the four largest carefully unloaded the crate. The Chief Rider looked at my instructions and directed:
“2nd crossroads, 8th corridor left from the main road! On the right side! Grave #48678!”
That is where the solemn procession brought the old crate. The grave was already open; a pair of large shovels were stuck in a pile of loose dirt. A single Red Rider crept into the grave and carefully placed the crate. Then they stood in a wide circle around the grave.
“Everyone light a cigarette!” The Chief Rider commanded.
Most of them had their own cigarettes and offered their tins to those that didn’t.
“I can’t smoke,” said Fritz. “It makes me— “
But I interrupted him, “The Red Riders will do anything!”
The Chief glanced around his company deeply insulted.
“Who said that?” He cried. “I will not tolerate any more useless words from any of you. Obviously the Red Riders will do anything! You, Fritz, smoke! A Red Rider must smoke as well as they can pray!”
Fritz lit his cigarette and so did the others.
“Now,” said the Chief Rider looking again at his slip of paper. “Now we begin the funeral service. We sing a melody like we are in a dark gloomy forest.”
“All together—this verse:
The Red Riders will do anything— for the living and the dead— it is our job!”
They all sang so that it resounded and I sang along with them in my crate.
“Now comes the eulogy,” he continued. “Today we have the honor and great pleasure of being permitted for the first time to escort someone to their final resting place. We don’t know any more of his virtues except for the fact that his last request was to permanently set a memorial in the hearts of all Red Riders by paying them each 3 Marks and 45 pennies for two hours work. Friendly patronizing aside, on these grounds let us all join in a cheer to the blessed deceased.”
“Hurrah, Hurrah, Hurrah!”
And the Red Riders screamed, “Hurrah, Hurrah, Hurrah!”
“Very good,” said the Chief Rider. “If I were in that crate I would gratefully applaud! Now to close we will sing the favorite song of the deceased and let him sleep in the Lord.”
“Daughter of Zion be glad; Jerusalem rejoice!”
It sounded out across the cemetery to where another group was singing at the 3rd crossroads, 8 corridors down and left from the main road. That is to say, to where another funeral was taking place at grave #48679 on the left side diagonally across from me.
They were burying some honorable secret government advisor and there was a horrendous number of people, Professors, Judges, Military Officers and wealthy industrialists—all refined people! But it was still only an old style funeral without Red Riders.
The Chief Rider waited politely until the people finished singing. Then he cried anew, “Now we sing the favorite song of the departed.”
“Daughter of Zion be glad—,” but he couldn’t finish because the fat pastor began a droning eulogy over at the other funeral.
The Chief Rider waited another five minutes, ten minutes, but the pastor would not stop and was making it bad for me.
“Such speech will speed the decomposition of my corpse considerably,” I thought to myself.
The Chief Rider thought so too and looked at his watch. But the pastor talked and talked.
Finally it was too long for the Chief Rider. He had only been paid for two hours. He commanded anew and all forty-five Red Riders let out once more:
“Daughter of Zion be glad!”
The pastor fought on and would not give in. But what is the power of a preacher against forty-five Red Riders? I felt solid satisfaction that the youths were winning and my modern funeral would clear the battlefield and put the old middle class world to shame.
The pastor stopped. But the clergy can never really be defeated. That will not do. He spoke to a couple of gentlemen in top hats and they in turn spoke to some guards. The guards put their helmets on their heads and came over to my grave. They were eager to speak with the Chief Rider but he held his position.
“We are doing our job,” he said coldly.
“Do you have a permit?” One of the guards asked.
“Certainly!” The Chief Rider answered and reached into his wallet. “Here it is. An official permit for my Red Riders!”
“Hmm,” remarked the guard. “A permit for burials?”
“The Red Riders will do anything!” The Chief declared bravely.
“Bravo! Bravo!” I cried in my crate.
“No one here shouts Bravo!” The guard yelled.
He demanded that all the Red Riders leave but the Chief Rider would not. He was not yet finished with the celebration that he had been commissioned and paid for. He was an honorable man and his highest principle was a strict sense of duty. He requested that the guards leave in an orderly way.
“Such a shrewd citizen!” I thought. “Now it will get into the press and make good publicity for him.”
The guards yelled but the Chief Rider yelled even louder. Slowly all the Professors, Judges, Military Officers and wealthy industrialists came over from the other funeral and mixed in. When the pastor came it was entirely too late.
He saw the Red Riders in their red caps and jackets with cigarettes in their mouths.
“Pfui!” He said.
Then he took his glasses off and set them on my crate.
“ ‘Fragile’, ‘Do not drop’, What’s going on here?” He asked sharply.
It was little Fritz that gave him the dreadful answer. He really couldn’t smoke and the cigarette was making him sick. He bent forward and then back and then forward again in even faster motion. That’s when the accident happened all over the black gown of the pastor.
At first he was speechless, but then everyone was trying to give him his or her handkerchiefs. He got hold of himself and declared seriously:
“That really oversteps all boundaries. I am publicly offended.”
“I am also publicly offended,” voiced a gentleman with twenty-seven medals.
“We have jurisdiction because we are publicly offended,” said the guards.
Things were getting much too colorful for me. I saw that I must come to the help of my hard-pressed Red Riders. I shoved the lid open, stood up and cried in wrath.
“And I, gentlemen, for your disrespectful participation in my burial, I am publicly offended!”
Category: Uncategorized
Writing by anarchistbanjo on Saturday, 2 of August , 2008 at 6:58 pm
What was Edgar Allen Poe like?
There are people that give out a strange magic. Under their spell you have to believe in their personality. There is something that pushes back and makes you notice. No one knows what but it is there. They are marked with the sign of the artist. Oscar Wilde was one and so was Edgar Allan Poe. His manner was high; his gait was light and his demeanor always harmonious. He was always refined despite his poverty and had a romantic chivalrous manner.
His proud features were regular, yes, he was handsome. The pure dark gray eyes held a strange violet glint. The high confident brow had marvelous symmetry. His complexion was always pale and shadowed by his dark locks. Edgar Allan Poe was beautiful in body and in soul. His gentle voice was musical.
He was a strong supple athlete, a persevering swimmer that once swam over seven English miles upstream against the current from Richmond to Warwick without getting tired. He was an experienced jumper, elegant rider and excellent fencer that more than once demanded a duel from a hot-blooded opponent.
He was a gentleman from top to bottom; his social manner was cool and though entangled was charming. He was sensitive and tender, earnest and solid. He was a scholar with an almost universal education. It was an equally great pleasure to see him or to listen to him. He was always sharing and his curse was that so few, so few to whom he gave his great riches were worthy enough to understand.
Did a few beautiful women understand him? No, but they could sense the nobility of his soul, instinctively the way all women do.
Only three people lived in his time that were capable of grasping him completely. Baudelaire and the two Brownings, but they lived over in old Europe and he never saw them.
The poet was alone in his exaggerated dreams. He was beautiful, loved beautiful things and needed to surround himself with beauty. He created glorious beauty in his dreams that were real to him. The expensive country house in Landors or the marvelous estate at Arnheim.
But in his poor modest life the penny mattered. He knew how to create things around him that excited the admiration of the rich. His small cottage at Fordham where he endured a paradise of agony with his death marked spouse had a precious harmony flowing through it that charmed every visitor.
Stuff and clutter filled it. But it was attractive and beautiful. It was a miserable cottage on the top of a small hill but blooming cherry blossoms stood out of the green meadow. In the early dawn small songbirds enticed the poet out into the nearby pine forest. There he walked through his colorful Georginian bushes breathing the sweet perfume of wild Mignonettes and Heliotrope. The light morning air kissed his moist temples and stroked the weary eyes that had kept watch through the long night over his beloved.
He visited the high bridge over the river Harlem and the rocky cliffs in the wilderness where he dreamed under the shade of ancient cedar trees.
Now he rests somewhere. On the day after his death he was buried in the Westminster Church Cemetery in Baltimore. You have read of the poet dying like a vagabond and buried in a hurry like a dog found on the street.
His grave will be near that of his grandfather, General David Poe, who made a name for himself in the Civil war. It should be there somewhere, there is no cross or gravestone to mark the site. No one bothered. His countrymen had other cares. Why should they worry about one dead poet!
For one week they were employed with various miserable ways to soil and vilify his memory. All the false stories that have been invented since are still in circulation, a whole flood of poisonous ink sprayed over the dead lion. The mediocre fell upon him, the jealous torrents of small writers which he had so relentlessly pulled to pieces.
Voiced the battle cry of the lying moralist Griswold, “He went mad in a drunken fog! He drank too much! He drank too much!”
Then he was forgotten and that is all right. His countrymen are not yet mature enough to recognize the genius of their great poet. After another century they will gather his decayed bones together, erect a mighty monument and inscribe on it:
“The Greatest Poet of the United States”.
Allow them to keep his bones over there. What we want is to listen to the poet’s soul in the call of the nightingales that live here in the Alhambra.
The best English edition is by J.B. Lippincott Company in Philadelphia. A complete German edition (only the critical studies, humorous short stories and a few poems are not included) appeared by J.C.C. Bruns in Minden. Individual novels are in the Reclam and Meyer’s public library.
Poe’s biographer, the moralist Griswold does not hesitate to say; “In the entire literature we find only shadows and no example of Poe’s missing conscience.”
It is completely mistaken for van Vleuten to state as fact that excessive alcohol consumption will lead to Bachus being the enemy of Venus. His remark, “Every doctor knows that alcohol is the enemy of physical love, it seems that in Poe it has also destroyed its psychological equivalent.” (Tomorrow”1903 page 189)
For me to hear this from the mouth of a serious psychiatrist like van Vleuten is simply inconceivable. I have often had the opposite experience and several psychiatrists have confirmed to me that chronic alcoholics during intoxication often enough, sometimes even regularly, show an extraordinary increase in sex drive.
This is not the place to question this detail. At the least every police officer will confirm and van Vleuten will certainly not deny that three quarters of the nightly patrons of Bordellos spend much of their time one way or the other in a highly intoxicated condition.
Van Vleuten’s hypothesis is wrong and his conclusion completely absurd.
“Alcohol seems to have destroyed in Poe the psychic equivalent to have and the feminine was banished from his deliriums.”
“That is why the entire sphere of the feminine and human sexuality finds no root in the deliriums of this poet.”
The sphere of the feminine is not missing and Poe has of course in the purest and most noble form related it often. By the way, van Vleuten contradicts himself when he notes that the “Raven” seems to come from a delirium.” (Ibid. page 189) Well, woman plays the main role in this poem how can he claim the feminine has been banished from Poe’s deliriums?
The sentence that “Alcohol is the enemy of physical love and even of its psychic equivalent” is certainly inaccurate; the effect is individual and entirely different in this case.
Baudelaire, in writing of the sexuality in Poe’s work, noted van Vleuten’s comment in his own remark, “I can find no real explanation for this finding.” Baudelaire, the artist of intoxication par excellence, did not avoid this well known remark and responded intentionally because he recognized its hollowness.
Unfortunately not one word of the sociality as well as the sexuality that leaps to the eye of Poe’s readers seems to touch van Vleuten. Does he claim these psychic equivalents did exist before they were destroyed by alcohol?
Logically he must because there is no other way to explain his negation of something that is so obviously there in the internal context of Poe’s work.
It is also outrageous for van Vleuten in his otherwise intelligent work to take the poet and attempt to force him into a time deposited Procrustean bed with its pre-established template.
He claimed, “Poe’s landscapes are schematic and uniform, they show no illness and are not liable to remind one of amnesia.”
This psychiatrist, who himself is a gifted poet, takes these songs of a high landscape, the fifty pages from Poe’s “Landor’s Cottage” and “The Domain of Arnhiem” and calls them nothing more than scenic beauties of speech!
I can only conclude that van Vleuten has only a fragmentary knowledge of Poe and has never read the two aforementioned cabinet pieces, or the majority of his poems with their scenic images.
I can do this safely without making false allegations but I can not save him from another more serious allegation. That he has prefixed a work for an elite audience without sufficient knowledge. While it is largely in the whole certainly laudable, it contains serious errors in detail that reduce the all-encompassing image of a great genius for future readers.
Category: Uncategorized
Writing by anarchistbanjo on Monday, 28 of July , 2008 at 5:41 pm
The Pit and the Pendulum
I slowly walk for a long time through the park at Alhambra under the ancient Elms that Wellington planted. On all sides I hear the babble and rustle of flowing water mixed with the sweet songs of a hundred nightingales. I stride between the high towers into the luxuriant valley of Alhambra.
Who does this magic palace, these dream gardens belong to? The destitute Spanish nation that I despise? The vulgar strangers with their red books that I must take ten steps to avoid?
Oh no! It belongs to me, to me and the few capable of receiving this beauty into their souls. There is a voice in these stones, in these bushes that lends life to the spirit of beauty and brings an understanding of truth.
Everything around me and everything that is beautiful on this earth is the sacred everlasting property of the Nation of Culture that stands above the masses. It is ruler. It is owner. The beauty does not speak to anyone else. Understand this command and dare to live. Edgar Allan Poe did.
I sit on a stone bank where Aboul-Haddjadj once dreamed. In front of me a spring gushes up out of the hill and flows into a marble basin. I wonder if the Sultan ever sat alone here in the dawn hours. Oh, it is so sweet to dream here.
There was once a poet that wrote only of his conversations with the dead. He chatted with all seven Sages, all the kings of Ninevah, with Egyptian priests and Thessalonian witches, with Athenian singers, with Roman Commanders and with the knights of King Arthur’s round table. Finally he didn’t want to talk with living people anymore, the dead were so much more interesting!
Certainly anyone can chat with them. Every dreamer knows this and everyone that believes in dreams as the ultimate reality.
Have I not today wandered there above through the halls with my favorite? Have I not shown the world a beautiful piece of the dead that living eyes have never seen before? Now he stands before me leaning against an elm.
“Any questions?” He says.
He looks good, my caressing eyes question him and he speaks. Soon clear words drip from his lips, soon his voice babbles out of the fountain and sings out of the throats of the nightingales and rustles in the leaves of the ancient elm. The dead are so clever.
“Leave my poor life alone.” He says. “Ask Goethe about his. He went hunting around the world with a prince that paid him with six stallions. I was a solitary.”
I never let my gaze leave him. “Tell of your life and of your love!”
“I forgot life, forgot that I lived.” He says. “Oh, not now since I’ve been dead, as the children say. I forgot every day on the next day. Could I have lived any other way? My true life, the one in my dreams you already know about.”
A light mist rose from the ground and scurried away into the evening; a sweet cool fanned my temples. I certainly knew his dream life; it poured through me and through the world. Through his poetry his life has slowly unfolded before me.
William Wilson. Naturally this is Poe, so very much Poe that the moralist Griswold deemed Wilson’s birth year as the poet’s own. The boy ruled over all his schoolmates in the old boarding school at Stoke-Newington, all except one, his own self.
Those good things that he inherited as a boy, youth and man would always turn to rags because his conscience was not free of the other Wilson, his own self.
Pigheaded conscience pushed against his fascination with crime in the world and he became his own punishing judge.
This is how the poet’s childhood poisoned his youthful years. What he inherited along with his education awakened still more feelings for good and evil so exaggerated in him that he went here and there trapped in an eternal struggle that nearly destroyed him.
Every little wrong he had ever experienced grew in his dreams into enormous crimes that tormented him, tormented him. Still more was the sinful thought of playing with the idea of evil in his dreams until it became real as well. He, himself, is the hero in all his gruesome stories. As the last of his kind he rights the sins of his father and like his Friedrich von Metzgerstein rides a demonic horse into the flames of hell.
How the elm leaves rustle! I hear this luckless voice in the wind. “If I had not been a poet I would have been a murderer, a fraud, a thief and a cheat.”
The elm leaves clang and his voice continues, “and perhaps I would have been happier.”
I think, who knows?
How is it that this tormented poet never became a criminal? Where he really lived, in his dreams, he was not only a murderer but at the same time a victim. He entombed his enemy alive in the cellar and it was himself that he entombed. (A Cask of Amontillado)
He murdered the man with the vulture eyes because he had to and buried him under the floor. The heart kept beating and beating and gave the deed away. It was again himself. (The Tell-Tale Heart) His evil twin, the double, William Wilson everywhere.
Seldom has an artist toiled so much for so few results, never has anyone so immersed themselves in their work. A German or Frenchman could more easily have freed himself from this morality. But the poet was so encumbered with a crushing religion of the soul from early childhood and in his education that he could never entirely free himself. When he was finally able to distance himself it was too late.
He was never able to stand on the other side of good and evil. The old English curse oppressed him. No fortune would spare him and like Breughel, Jean van Bosch and Goya, this poor soul had to suffer insane anguish and drink the bitter cup to the last drop.
Oh yes, if he had been a criminal he would have ended his life on a gallows instead of in a hospital for the poor. He would not have shared his thoughts and his life would still have been miserable and full of agony but not as dreadful as it was.
But a temple stands out of Golgotha, lily fields grow out of blood fertilized meadows, and we are fortunate to partake of these glorious flowers that grew out of the poisoned heart’s blood of this poet.
The spring fed brook splashes through the park at Alhambra. Small lively rivulets prattle and chatter. It rushes in the narrow gravel plastered bed, rushing like the good hours of this poet’s life. The hours, minutes perhaps that he was able to spend in harmless enjoyment.
In those times when he dreamed they were amusing dreams. About the man with the wonderful nose so huge that all the world sat in amazement. Painters painted it and Duchesses kissed it. This precious little story in a bizarre way is in advance of the talent of Mark Twain. Only in this one by Poe the exaggerations are finer and expressed more naturally so that no where is word play over emphasized.
Or his funny one about Hot Beggars Soup dished up in the weekly paper for good natured readers, or the instruction of Miss Zenobia with her capable and gripping Blackwood article and lastly the Honorable Thingum Bob from the World Lantern with the sublime delightful chat over his literary career.
So light, so kind is the poet’s wit like the lively splashing brook babbling through the park at Alhambra.
But how the nightingales sob his dream of longing! And his soul appears to sing in the voice of the nightingale, so pure, so without blemish that the divine Cecilia would be jealous and break her violin and Apollo would smash his lyre. In his criminal dreams there was no hell deep enough for this poet but in this divine song there is no heaven high enough.
No where do we find a single sentence or gentle thought by Poe speaking of sexual love. The erotic is so completely alien to him as to no other except perhaps to a virgin. There is little to be found where he expressed social feelings as well and while he does have a heart in his breast that yearns for love it is never permitted to be expressed.
He was not able to love people and always took a small view. He pushed away the caressing hand and the endearing words died on his tongue unspoken. This is when his addiction helped and proved his ability to love animals, to pet the hound and feed the starving cats. Then he was grateful for the faithful gaze and the contented purring.
The poet was aware of this and expressed in his novel Black Cat how this love of animals was his richest source of joy. The higher love of his dying spouse gave him joy mixed with horrible pain and was certainly not the richest source of happiness in his poor life.
Edgar Allan Poe is Roderich Usher and like him has a lute from the angel Israfel of the Koran in his breast instead of a heart. When he looks at his beautiful beloved his heart stops and the lute sings. Its high song of longing sounds such sweet tones in his ear in the pure manner of Morella and Berenice, of Eleonora and Legeia. That same inner music flows through The Raven and Ulalume and is perhaps the highest art there is, this intoxication expressed through poetry and prose.
And in the poet’s world song Eureka it is accompanied by these sounds, “They can not die: or if by any means they be now trodden down, so that they die, they will rise again to the life eternal.”
Yes, in the short space of time that he lived he achieved what men call immortality, the highest man can ever reach now or in the future.
The worth of Edgar Allan Poe is at no time higher than in our day. Our time can learn so much from him and it has. Poe is not a problem today; he is a beacon whose clear light shines the way for others.
The awareness of his art through intoxication, the significance of stress and technique, the clear recognition of the Parnessian principle of art in the broadest sense. The strong sweeping back of the borders and the extreme significance of the inner music for all poets.
These are all moments some of which others individually stress but in their entirety and pervasive connection no artist has recognized and applied as much as the New England poet. And these moments in their entirety represent what is demanded by the modern spirit of cultural art expressed in a way that can be comprehended and studied. No artist or layman should be as grateful to any other poet as much as to Edgar Allan Poe.
When an artist is really stuck and can’t make a translation there lies at hand a way to learn and enjoy being a poet by forcing a way into his inner being and bringing out the needed original translation. No other poet can show this process more than Poe can.
Now the nightingales flute and out of their small throats sings the voice of the artist I love. The light wind stops beating its frenzied wings on the leaves of the elms. The trickling brook quiets its chatter as the park of Alhambra pauses to listen to the song of the nightingales.
For a hundred years the old towers and mortar have experienced these familiar sweet evening sounds but today is different, so different. The loud beating of a dead poet’s heart and the little birds are singing his soul song. The brook and the trees listen, the square red stones listen, the purple glowing snow capped mountains listen. And an infinite sigh sounds through the huge garden as in the west the warm sinking sun mournfully takes its needed parting from the poets raised song.
The twilight breathes through the elms and light misty shadows rise out of the laurel bushes to climb up toward the Moorish Palace. In ancient times long gone they sat round these marble banks. I know well who they are. Gabirol now sits next to me, now Ibn al-Khabib and Ibn Esra, and Jehudah ben Halevy and Mohammed Ibn Khaldoun and Ibn Batouta. A hundred dead poets listen hushed to the song of the nightingales. How clever are the dead.
They hear the heart of the angel Israfel whom the Koran told of, and give thankful praises to God that such music has awakened.
“Ouala ghaliba ill’ Allahta ‘ala” murmur the misty shadows. And the nightingales sing of dark mysteries, of the immense longing that is the pure source of life.
They sing of the greatest secret of all, that all things created and brought through eternity are filled with the breath of infinite love. They sing of beauty as the truth that comes before truth. They sing of dreams that are the life that comes before life.
Poe’s soul sings and a hundred dead poets listen to the clamor and from their lips arise once more the ancient words “Ouala ghaliba ill’ Allahta ‘ala”.
So thankful are the dead.
And the night sinks deeper here. The nightingales hush and the east wind rises and comes from the Sierra. The misty shadows disperse. I am alone again in the enchanted park of Alhambra. Alone with a great poet’s soul. And how the wind blows through the ancient elms rustling the leaves and singing of Ulalume, the very same ballad in the poet’s dreadful dream.
“The skies they were ashen and sober
The leaves they were crisped and sere
The leaves they were withering and sere
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year.
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber
In the misty region of Weir
It was down by the dark tarn of Auber
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir
Here once through an alley Titantic
Of cypress, I roamed with my soul.”
I know well that the verse speaks of me. But I perceive my lips are not saying anything different than that of the rustling elms. I perceive that it is the grief of the October wind howling in distress at the poet’s unearthly longing enspelled in human words and being pulled out of me.
It is the spark of his peculiar thought or essence that emanates from his corpse as the divine breath of nature penetrating everything. The original spark of his being is in all things and a small proof of the poet’s highest law, that the source of all things is unity.
My mouth speaks the mysterious words that the wind has carried to my ears. I am becoming afraid in the dark loneliness, in this living fairy tale. I want to leave out of the valley of Alhambra. Groping in the darkness I lose my footing and miss the path. Finding a trail in the ancient cypress I come up hard against a low door. Oh, the terror that comes upon me in the darkness. I know, I know well whose grave this is. And against my will my lips speak to my soul.
“What is written, sweet sister
On the door of this legended tomb?”
She replied, “Ulalume, Ulalume.
Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!”
Again and again the fear rises up within me. The dead poet’s soul that rustled through the elm trees, that resounded in the nightingales song, that babbled in the spring fed brook, that howled such a dreadful song in the wind, has taken possession of me.
Only a small mote of dust with the divine breath of nature has pierced through me, through me. I know there is no escape and he will destroy me. He does not crush me. And strangely I am quiet, so quiet as if I have been completely filled by him.
The human fear gently fades away.
Now I find the path again. I stride through the gate of vines in the place leading to the Aljibes. I go in the Alcazaba, climb up the Ghafar, the mighty watchtower of the Moorish rulers.
A glowing crescent moon shines now between two moving clouds, it is the true mark of Arabian greatness that no God in heaven can wipe away.
I glance deep down into church happy Grenada, noisy and swarming with nightly street traffic. They run into the coffeehouses, they read the newspapers, polish boots and get their boots polished. They look into lit shop windows, travel in streetcars, call out, “fresh water!” and collect cigar stubs. The noise and bustle annoy me but I try to tolerate it. No one raises a glance; no one looks up to the singular splendor that is here above.
Over there on my right resounds the river Darro, behind me I hear the rushing of the river Geni. Bright campfires penetrate out of the caves of the gypsies and in another direction the snow capped Sierra glows silvery in the moonlight.
From where I stand between two watchtowers and the purple towers of the Moorish Mountains lies the park hidden in the darkness deep in the valley. Behind me lies the magic palace of Alhambra, hall on hall, courtyard on courtyard.
There below is the small life of this century; here above is the land of dreams. That down below in the distance is so infinitely far from me and this here above, is not every stone a part of my soul?
Haven’t I been in this world of ghosts, that the living blind down below can not see? Haven’t I been a part of this dream? It is the almighty beauty that makes these dreams come true. Here life blossoms and the reality down below is only a shadow game.
The deed is nothing. The thought is everything. The reality is ugly and not justified to exist. The dream is always beautiful and is true because it is beautiful. That is why I believe dreams are the only true reality.
Category: Uncategorized
Writing by anarchistbanjo on Thursday, 24 of July , 2008 at 5:04 pm
The Raven
Poe did not need this ancient fabrication any more. He saw how threadbare and tattered it was and boldly threw it aside. In Eureka he defined the concept of intuition in a few words as a “realization of truth” grounded in inductive and deductive reasoning so hidden in shadows that consciousness retreats from getting a grip on it or understanding of it and mocks our inability to put it into words.
Here lies a clearer understanding of the way art is created than that of his contemporaries. Those Poet-philosophers that claimed so-called “Intuition” was the opposite of philosophy. This is true in the limited narrow untheological and thoroughly modern sense and a special place has been made for the opposites, Aristotle and Bacon, placing them side by side together at the same time.
He was the greatest of these first men of modern spirit. He was a romantic, a dreamer, and a worshipper of reason who never let his feet leave solid earth.
Edgar Allan Poe was also first to openly speak on the technique of thinking a decade before Zolas’s “Genius is diligence”.
Edgar Allan Poe wrote of this in his forward to Eureka.
“To the few who love me and whom I love; to those who feel rather than to those who think. To the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities—I offer this book of Truths, not in its character of Truth-Teller, but for the beauty that abounds in its truth: Constituting it true. To these I present the composition as an Art-Product alone; let us say as a romance, or, if I be not urging too lofty a claim, as a poem.
What I propound here is true: –Therefore it can not die; –or if by any means it be now trodden down so that it die, it will rise again to the Life Everlasting!”
Poe stood completely independent from Th. Gautier and his “L’art pour l’art” principle. His claim was more than Gautier’s, who only saw beauty with the eye of the painter and also lower than Gautier’s in that the external form alone revealed the beauty. First beauty, then truth. To truth, that was his correction without negating beauty. That is the highest claim of any art that has ever been framed. He spoke in waking life of the longing for true value and reality, the simple reality that only the dream could fulfill.
Also here is Poe-the Romantic- Pathfinder; revealed here as the first of the modern spirits. His claim was so ultra modern that even today only a small portion of the many great writers can understand this radical spirit that sprang out independently fifty years before Zola coined his technique of creation principle and more widely than Parnassier’s principle of art.
Among civilized people the fertilization of literature through Poe’s spirit is now in full bloom in this century. The past saw him only as an outsider like the ridiculous pair, Puke and Snot. Certainly as someone fortune has turned her back on unlike Jules Verne and Conan Doyle who made fortunes.
It is entirely certain Poe wrote these things for his daily bread. The travels of Gordon Pym and Hanns Pfaall …ect. It was only through the need for a hot noon meal that the criminal novels (for example: Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Purloined Letter, The Gold Bug) originated. Poe knew what it was like to starve! So he wrote these things, made translations and scientific collaborations whenever possible.
Really, every single story, even his weakest, make all the adventures of Sherlock Holmes fade in comparison. Why does the large public, especially the English speaking, devour Doyle’s ridiculous Detective stories with enthusiasm and lay Poe’s aside? It doesn’t make sense!
Poe’s characters like Dostojewskys are so genuine, his composition so complete that the reader’s imagination is held captive in his net. That’s when the reader is helpless against the painful murderous horror and seized in cruel suspense. They are continuously white with tension.
In his popular imitators this is merely pleasant titillation. The reader always knows that it is all stupid nonsense. They stand apart from the story and prefer it that way!
But Poe takes the poor drip by the hair, drags them to the abyss and catapults them into hell! They lose hearing and vision and don’t know where they are anymore. That is why the average person that likes to sleep avoids Poe’s horrific nightmares and is attracted to the scenic heroes of Baker Street.
He wanted to write for the large masses and set his goal way too high. He wrote way over their heads and thought they would like to read him! Then he went from publisher to publisher trying to market intelligent works to people that only wanted to buy straw!
There will come a time when the world is ready for this poet’s gifts. There have already been many promising starts and we recognize the singular ways that Jean Paul, Th. Hoffman, Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe have contributed to the culture of art.
Such art can no longer be dressed in nationalistic colors. First of all we need to realize that Poe’s art was not for the people of America, but for the thin cultural layer whether it be German, Japanese, Latin or Jewish. We all wish and believe that no artist creates just for his people but for the entire world.
Velazquez and Cervantes are as completely unknown to the large masses in Spain as the English writers, Shakespeare and Byron, the French Rabelais and Moliere or the Dutch Rembrandt and Ruben are.
The German people don’t have the slightest idea who Goethe and Schiller were and have never even heard of Heine. We hear the small blunt questions of soldiers in the regiments, “Who was Bismark? Who was Goethe?” When will blissful blind trust finally open its eyes?
Entire worlds separate the people of culture in Germany from their fellow countrymen, which they see daily on the street. There is only water that separates them from the people of culture in America.
Heine perceived that Edgar Allan Poe was great and threw it in the faces of the German experts. Even in our day most artists, scholars and experts of national culture have such little understanding that they misinterpret Horaz’ refined “Odi Profanum”.
The artist that tries to create for his people strives for the impossible neglecting something much more accessible and higher, to create for the entire world. Over the Germans, over the British, over the French stands a higher nation to create for, the Nation of Culture. It alone is worthy of the artist. The awareness of Poe is as solidly grounded there as Goethe but in a different, not as modern sense.
Category: Uncategorized
Writing by anarchistbanjo on Tuesday, 22 of July , 2008 at 2:34 am
Poe’s Cottage at Fordham
Edgar Allen Poe would sit here. How he dreamed. How the colorful stories would fly lightly around his head before landing. With a few quick words he built an Alhambra whose thick towers would withstand the rain and endure for centuries.
There might have been another way for him to reach ecstasy if he hadn’t drank. If he had been on the other side of New England this poor poet’s soul might have strongly penned more realistic prose in the manner of Washington Irving, the English model of morality.
With the magic of moonshine the dream of Alhambra was created and his stories have become world famous. Day by day I see strangers enter this sacred place, in their hand reviews and in their jacket pockets his book. This is how they read The Fall of the House of Usher or the Dionysian Last Days of Pompeii!
Can’t you perceive the influence of Lord Lytton or Irving’s spirit within this pair of beautiful stories? No, a whisper from a Catholic cemetery flows through the haunted Moorish palace in his soul. Although he was no famous poet, although he was only a common journalist, not Bulwar, not Irving created these beauties. He created Pompeii and the Alhambra in spite of them.
Poe’s ability was not enough for his burning desire. The only method that worked was to gather up everything he had inside using it to awaken and carry him into ecstasy. The entire amount of stimulation he surrounded himself with was barely able to lead him to this condition.
If this unhappy poet only once in his life received a kiss from the Muse it was through his beautiful wife, Virginia Clem. The moralists want to call this intoxication holy and divine while forcefully rebuking the poet’s other ecstasies, those from alcohol and from Opium, as unholy and devilish. They are equal! The valuable art that came forth from them was no less glorious.
The agony from the divinely consecrated ecstasy was scarcely inferior to the devilish! Where another was in paradise he was in hell, a passionate blissful hell whose flames were no less scorching. The hand of the poet was rich and Morella, Ligeia, Berenice and Lenore are all owed to the dying eyes of Virginia before her death was certain. He knew the gleaming red of her cheeks lied, knew it was a deception and that within the depths of her moist, shimmering eyes an unrelenting illness grinned out at him.
In the evening when he stroked her beloved locks he could sense, “She won’t live many more days” and in the morning, “Another day less”.
It was a dying person that his lips kissed, a dying person whose beautiful head lay next to him nights when he rested. When he was awakened by the rattle and laborious wheezing of her hard working lungs he would see the white linen shroud, see the cold drops of death sweat on her brow. The visible long drawn out death of his beloved took a year. That was the only “fortune” this luckless poet ever had.
Oh yes, the coronation of his dead spouse gave him fame, but it was the fame of fear, of silent grief, the despair behind the smiling mask: A paradise of torments. Virginia sank deeply into his soul and came out in his finest stories. Who can perceive which nameless agonies gave birth to her whisper?
Before the last thread of life snapped and the still wife was laid in the tomb Edgar Poe wrote his masterpiece The Raven. Nothing like that poem or like him had ever been seen before in world literature. I would like to scream in the faces of the English hypocrites.
“His ecstasy came out of the divine intoxication of a lost bleeding heart as well as the common intoxication that comes out of a wine bottle.”
Any psychiatrist that works with alcoholism can prove with ease that The Raven originated from a delirium. It’s just as easy for a psychologist to prove Lenore is owed to the poet’s other intoxication, Virginia.
Then compare the origins of these poems to the candid, wonderfully clear essay that Poe wrote. Every apostrophe, every line, every single syllable is founded in amazingly simple logic. It is almost as if he were solving a binomial equation! The theme certainly gives no mention of ecstasy and its origins out of his divine and not so divine intoxications.
He wrote his essay for New England magazine readers that wanted to know how to become poets and learn the speech of ecstasy. The massive hard work, the pure technique, the ability to edit, that is what art amounts to. It has never been more clearly stated than in this essay, American Poetry. It is a master example. Really.
Admittedly Godfather Schneider and others like him would never use the guide but for the artist it is the most valuable information there is. What he shows is that the divine ecstasy alone is not enough to create a perfect work of art. Hard work, despised technique, deliberation, the weight and tone of words are all indispensable.
The magnificent Alhambra was not created by the great ideas of Arab architects alone. Masons, donkey drivers, gardeners and painters each played their part.
Edgar Allen Poe was the first poet to speak with such candor and moderation of the pure craft of writing. Yes, and I will also say that even though he was an American, he was the first on the threshold of modern thinking. The shining proof of the full value of this artist is that he only speaks of technique and with no word mentions the intuition always mouthed by amateurs. Perhaps if he could have written more in the magazine for others to read, he might have been happy to tell about the intoxication technique. Never had anyone before him so analyzed their peculiar craft in such anatomical detail until each fiber was taken apart.
This is an alternative to the faith of the masses in the inspirational fables that persist in our days. Of the divine voice that dictated the Bible and the Master Artist’s inspiration made possible through God’s grace. When the Holy Spirit came upon them, they painted, they wrote poems and more or less composed an immaculate spirit child that was placed into this world. That was so nice, so comfortable, that certainly some great artists themselves believed in this mysterious consecration.
The Thracian singer was called “Drunk with God” even though he was sober as Socrates. This idea in its original Dionysian form nearly coincides with our modern view of intoxication and ecstasy which became in the later Apollonistic view, “The Divine Anointing” of the Christian belief that has been in a position to take over and with great enthusiasm cloud clear thinking.
All the beautiful phrases from the square in Mount Olympus, the kiss of the Muse, the divine intoxication, the Artist’s “Grace of God”, and so on. Thank God we no longer in the slightest think of these and where they have originated.
It took courage to scatter such a luminous fog. Few, very few poems in world literature could tolerate such relentless scrutiny. Poe could dare take this step because he had created in The Raven a poem that was so pure, so complete. All others not as perfect, the small, the ridiculous, the sublime, are ripped to pieces.
My glance falls to the plaster on the walls of the hall. The eye can not follow all these arabesque and Kufic proverbs. It gets swallowed up and lost in the fantastic harmonies of the Moorish style.
Now this Arabic miracle of art is created out of gypsum, common gypsum. How ridiculous, how small, how absurd! But although created out of gypsum it loses nothing from its composition and is a complete work of art.
The common materials have been given life by the breath of the Spirit.
Art triumphs over nature, and this art is so great that recognition of the ridiculous common materials of its creation mean nothing.
Category: Uncategorized
Writing by anarchistbanjo on Tuesday, 22 of July , 2008 at 2:14 am
Edgar Allen Poe
We admire the Tiger Orchid. Is the magnificent orchid less beautiful because it feeds on insects by slowly torturing them to death in the narrow way? We are joyed and amazed at the glorious lilies in the Park of Cintra. We have never seen any so large and so white! How does it happen that their exceptional beauty is owed to the clever gardener that fertilizes the ground not with pure water but with treatments of Guano, applied manure?
Sometimes a sympathetic smile comes at the wide country roads our art must travel by chance before it shines meagerly here and there like a lantern piercing the fog of intoxication. There are times when it only comes through the union of intoxication and art. Then it is the only way great inspiration can come out from within and make itself known. When this happens the highest place must be given to the scouts Hoffman, Baudelaire and Poe, who first worked consciously through intoxication to find their art.
Let’s be honest! Is there an artist that can go without stimulation? No one can do without their little stimulants, tea, tobacco, coffee, beer or what ever. Do these things hinder our inspiration of art or help shape its spirit more clearly?
They often help shape it more clearly.
Art is contrary to nature. A man that lives in abstinence keeping body and mind pure and whose ancestors also lived in abstinence for long generations has poisoned blood and can never become an artist! Not even God’s favor in life can awaken the ecstasy. Its spirit has been poisoned.
Nature and Art are the worst enemies. Where one exists the other is not possible.
In the best sense what precisely is an artist? A pioneer of culture in the new territory of the unconscious. In this holy sense how few deserve this proud name! Th. A. Hoffman deserves it and Jean Paul and Villiers and Baudelaire and most certainly Edgar Allan Poe. Griswold must admit to himself that this poet of the soul related in so many of his stories a secret land considered by no one before him and gave us a first glimpse of a new genre of literature.
This powerful land of the unconscious, the land of our eternal desire lies in gray hazy clouds. The beggar lies warm in the sun. The commoner crouches sated by the oven. But there are those whose desire is so immense that their inspiration must come bleeding out.
They must in triple protect their breast when they leave the land of consciousness and steer through the gray murderous flood back toward Avalon.
Many, many get dashed to ground without casting a single glimpse behind the clouds. Very few succeed at this journey. These discover new territory for the culture and the border of the unconscious is pushed back a little further.
The artists are these first great explorers. Then mankind may equip researchers to survey and investigate this new land. They send in officials and civil servants to organize and record-men of science.
It is certain that in addition to other ways the so-called poisons we call narcotics are capable of taking us across the threshold of consciousness. If anyone has success and gets solid footing on the “other side” they can metaphysically in a positive way create new works of art. They are in the finest sense an artist.
Maybe it is necessary to stress the truth that art can never converse naturally with self except while working through frenzy. Some form of stimulation is needed. Or another, that no intoxicant in the world can bring art out of a person that has none inside to begin with!
The Griswolds and Ingrams want less wine drinking, less opium smoking, less hashish eating. If they had their way no more art would be created!
But he who works through intoxication together with narcotics creates suitable conditions where ecstasy can be invoked. This highest level of ecstasy can be invoked in anyone according to his or her intelligence and capability.
Griswold was right. Edgar Allen Poe drank. And yes, he drank too much. His body reacted badly to alcohol. His addiction was hereditary, so he drank a lot. He drank too much. But his actions were deliberate. While in the intoxicated condition things came out in a frenzy that later, perhaps years later, were shaped into new works of valuable art. Such intoxication is no pleasure. It is a horrible agony where awareness is only of the yearning for the art blazing like the mark of Cain upon his brow.
It is a belittling lie of the narrow minded that artistic production is no work, that it is a joy. Those that say so and the large masses with their thankless thought chatter never have a hint or breath of the ecstasy that only the artistic condition produces. This frenzy is always an agony to experience even if the ecstasy at first brings delight.
It is said the mother cat has pleasure bringing her young into the world but they are only poor blind kittens. This may be the weekend chatter of the Buxtehuder Newspaper like the writer of “Berlin at night” who with pleasure puts his lines on paper.
A work of art is never born without pain.
I am going out. Through the enormous palace of the Roman Emperor Charles that led the German Nation. Cross through the mighty columned courtyard and out through the long avenue of white blooming acacia. Through the meadow covered with thousands of blue Irises.
A tower shows and the tomb of the princesses, the sultan’s daughters, Zayda, Zorayda and Zorahayda, appears at last before me. The Crusaders described these windows in song.
Over the valley on the hill I see the boundary where Boabdil gave his last sigh over the lost Granada. From the Generalife gardens I can clearly see the ancient cypress where the last Moorish king’s wife, the beautiful Hamet, brought disaster through her tryst with Abenceragen deep in the shadows.
Every stone here tells a sad tragic legend.
Down at the bottom of the valley the road continues on the long way to the cemetery. A pair of black goats graze on the green slopes. In back, under the prison tower sits a ragged customs agent in front of his filthy den. Long eared rabbits graze close to him and nearby seven cocks battle, pecking the ground or flying after each other, combs and black feathers plucked.
Far in the east glows the snow on the purple-red Sierra Nevada.
A troop of ragged Bengalis moves slowly across the valley bottom. Two carry a small child’s coffin on their shoulders open in the Spanish custom. Another shoulders the lid. The coffin is very simple, three yellow planks and two plain ones. But a small waxy face and dark hair appear out of the flowers, many flowers, red, yellow, white and blue flowers that have been placed inside.
No Priest, no relatives, no father or mother in the procession, only ragged Bengalis. Still, the dead child rests in such fresh blooming fragrance among so many colored flowers. How good they didn’t close her eyes! They look around curious at the colored flowers, at the old Moorish Palace and then back to the splendor of her flowers, this small dead maiden, so contented and fortunate to never again be alive.
Category: Uncategorized
Writing by anarchistbanjo on Monday, 21 of July , 2008 at 5:59 pm
Edgar Allen Poe
By Hans Heinz Ewers
First published by Schuster & Loeffler, Berlin/Leipzig 1906
(English translation 2008 by Joe E. Bandel)
This booklet is dedicated to
Gustav Meyrink
Drunken Artist, dreamer, he believed dreams are the true reality just as Poe did. He wrote what he dreamed.
In the Alhambra
April 1905
Hanns Heinz Ewers
My feet stride lightly upon the morning stones of the old way that I have so often traveled up through the sacred groves at Alhambra. I long for that vast world behind the jeweled gate where time flies. I wander so lightly in the dreamland, where the elms rustle, where the spring babbles, where a hundred nightingales sing out from the laurel bushes. I can certainly reflect upon my poet there.
You should not do it. Really not. You should not go there and read any book about an artist you love. How can a priest speak about God? You need to be careful, so very careful.
This is what you should do:
You love Firdusi? Don’t you know Goethe wrote about him? Good. First of all learn what he said about the Persian before you begin. Then after you have learned enough and are ready to write about your favorite, decide what he would have written, you will not be disappointed.
It doesn’t matter what the critics write about the artist you love. If the critics boast about him being a star or say he is only a wisp of mist- it doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter if the critics know enough because you know. You are telling the truth about your artist.
I haven’t done it this way. I’ve got a few drops of thick flowing German thoroughness in my blood, a sense of duty.
I thought:
Before I write about my favorite artist, what have others written before me?
I thought:
“Perhaps—“
Many have written about Edgar Allen. Only I’ve been disappointed, so very disappointed. There was just one able to grasp the spirit of him.
There was only Baudelaire. Baudelaire whose art came from hashish. How could he not grasp him, he who formed valuable art out of alcohol and laudanum.
Now I need to forget what the others have said. I must forget the horrible Griswold whose poisonous vomit is not a Poe biography.
“He drank too much, he drank too much, such a shame, he drank too much!”
Also I must forget the horrible fool Ingram who would defend my artist’s honor in return by stammering “He did not drink, really, he did not drink”.
Quick, before I forget I’ll put down the dates I have about him:
Edgar Allen Poe, born on 19 January 1809 in Boston. Irish family, long pedigree, Norman, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Italian blood. 1816 to England with his foster parents, a couple of years in a boarding school in Stoke-Newington, 1822 back to America, 1826 student in Richmond, then in Charlottesville, 1827 travel through Europe with unknown adventures, 1830 Cadet Officer at West Point, 1834 Head of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. 1836 married his cousin Virginia Clemm. He wrote. He lived in various places, in New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, and Fordham. He had a rough time. “He drank too much”, (said Griswold). “He does not drink”, (said Ingram). He died on 7 October in a hospital for the poor in Baltimore, forty years old.
So, these are the all-important dates. Now I can forget.
How difficult it is. For a long time I go along the elm lined avenue up to the royal palace. I turn left and enter the gate to the mighty tower of Justice. I am glad of the hand above that averts the evil eye. I think, this might keep my moralists outside. Now I am above, alone in the familiar spaces.
I know exactly where I want to go. Quick through the myrtle courtyard, through the hall of the Mocaraben into the courtyard of the twelve lions. Enter left into the room of the two sisters and through it to the Ajimeces. Now I’m there in Mirador de Daraxa, where Boabdil’s mother Aicha lived. I sit by a window looking out on the old cypress trees.
How hard it still is to forget! There go my moralists strolling in the garden. Two English hypocrites with round hats, short pipes, black jackets and reviews in their hands.
“He drinks too much”, hisses one.
“Oh no, he does not drink at all”, chimes the other.
I would like to knock their heads together!
“Go away you rats, go away! I’m sitting here dreaming about an artist I love. He sang in your language and you sticks know nothing about him!”
They left all right. Be certain of that. I am alone once more.
He drinks too much. He does not drink. That is how the Englanders argue about their poet. They let Milton starve, they steal Shakespeare’s entire life’s work, they scrabble with crooked fingers in Byron’s and Shelley’s family history, they vilify Rossetti and Swinburne, stick Wilde in prison and point their fingers at Charles Lamb and Poe. Because they drank!
I’m so glad that I’m a German! Germany’s great men are permitted to be indecent. Indecent—Certainly that means not as decent as the good citizens and moralists. The Germans say, “Goethe was a great poet.” They knew he had vices but did not consider them.
The Englanders say, “Byron was indecent, therefore he was not a great poet.”
Only in England could the repulsive moral preacher Kingsley create a household phrase about Heine.
“Don’t speak of him. He was a bad man!”
When no one listens, when people gather round to acknowledge the “indecent” English poet they love, the Englander is finally compelled to speak and then he will lie. He does not give up on his hypocrisy. He says then, “After further examination he was not at all indecent but of high morals, completely pure and completely blameless!
This is why the English liar could not take it any more and vindicated Wilde’s honor with a Saul to Paul conversion. The same with Poe and Ingram’s reply to Griswold.
“Oh no, He did not really drink!”
The English have only now after all this time officially recognized that Edgar Allan Poe was a decent man!
We however, never make a big deal of middle class and moralistic purity. We love him even if he drank. Still more, we love him because he drank. Even though toxins destroyed his body, great art sprang out of his life’s blood, that was his gift. The layman does not determine how great art originates. It comes from out of the artist himself. No one is permitted a say in this or a derogatory judgement or cut-down.
Only the few whose insight perceives the creative process because they love him, only they are permitted to watch in silence, to comment.
Wilde related the fairy tale of the lovely rose created from the heart’s blood of a dead nightingale. The fallow student looked and wondered, never had he seen such a marvelous blood red rose. But he had no idea how it was created.
Category: Uncategorized
Writing by anarchistbanjo on Monday, 21 of July , 2008 at 5:50 pm
I am a Hanns Heinz Ewers fan, what else can I say? Perhaps I’ve become jaded. When you’ve read as many books as I have it becomes hard to find material that sparkles with newness and with intelligence. It is even enjoyable to translate because I never know what the story is going to end up as.
This blog is limited to those stories published before 1923 but I am still translating others for my own enjoyment. To date stories that I have translated but will not appear in the blog are:
The Lost Monkey
How Eleven Chinese Devoured Their Bride
Eleven Thousand Virgins and the Four Three Kings
To date stories that will appear in this blog are:
Edgar Allan Poe
My Burial
Anthropoovaropartus
Both of these lists will continue to grow and I will be updating them as I finish translating new material. This is a labor of love but it does take time and I’m learning as I go.
If someone wants to email me please use anarchistbanjo@live.com
This is my personal email. Please don’t abuse it.
bright blessings
-anarchistbanjo
Category: Uncategorized
