by Morris West
Then Emma was prodding and shaking me. I had frightened her with my shouting and bruised her as I flailed about in the nightmare. I settled her back to sleep and then came down to spend the rest of the night in my study.
Let me write down now what I dare not say to Emma or even to Toni. This dream has frightened the hell out of me. In my clinical work at the Burgholzli Clinic, I noted that chaos dreams, visions of world disorder and destruction, are almost always a symptom of the schizoid state associated with dementia praecox.
The patient is aware that his personality is fragmenting itself, exploding into pieces as a circular saw will do when it is driven too long and too fast; but he cannot define the experience in words. He dreams it. Gradually the borderline between dream and reality becomes blurred. Finally he cannot distinguish one from the other. He abandons himself to a state of permanent delusion, which nevertheless has its own logic – the logic of schizophrenic insanity.
The mere fact that I am writing these lines tells me that I can still distinguish dream from reality; but the warning is there. It may not always be so – witness my dialogues in the garden with Elijah and Salome, who are figments of my unconscious, but who are sometimes as real to me as Emma and Toni. I cannot face this fear alone in my study in the cold hours between midnight and dawn. So I begin to dissect the dream, phrase by phrase, like a grammarian:
I am travelling in a train.
A traveller is mobile, rootless. He has no anchorhold in time and space. He is isolated, in his own conveyance, from which he sees the world but can make no contact with it. This is exactly my case, since I gave up my appointment at the clinic, my lectureship at the university. I have travelled much, in Europe and abroad. I have attended many conferences, but I am deprived of daily contact with my peers.
Outside the land is engulfed in a great flood.
Ever since Bulgaria invaded Serbia and Greece in June this year, all Europe has been haunted by the fear of hostilities between the Great Powers. Switzerland would of course remain neutral; hence the dream image of the Alps heaved up as a barrier against the flood. So, in contrast with my journey backwards to meet Elijah and Salome, perhaps this dream is a prophetic experience, a clairvoyant glimpse of the future. Even as I toy with this thought I am uneasy again. This is exactly the kind of spurious logic which the schizoid patient constructs for himself in dementia praecox. I pass quickly to the next image:
I see dead bodies of people I know.
This is a less frightening symbol. It expresses desire but not intention. Like every married man who has ever embarked on a love affair I have fantasies about being single and free again. My wife, my family, are obstacles to that freedom. My unconscious harbours the thought that, if they were to die, all my problems would be solved. Freud and my father are conjoined in another context. Father is dead. I am freed from his dominion. If Freud were dead I should inherit his mantle of authority.
I am oppressed with shame because I do not want to leave the warm carriage.
This is almost a mirror image of the moment, only a few days ago, when Emma, driven to desperation by one of my rages, accused me bitterly.
“You think of no one but yourself, Carl. It is always what you want, never what we may need of love and care and simple kindness. You lock yourself in your study like an ogre in his cave. You share your secrets with your mistress and not your wife. Perhaps you think you’re achieving something that will make it all worthwhile – but not for us, Carl! Not for us! Children live for today, not for tomorrow. I want today as much as they do. Most times I feel as though I’m waving you goodbye at a railway station, and I’m not certain you’ll ever be back.”
I made all sorts of protestations, but in my heart I knew she was right. I am a selfish man – the more so because I am frightened of the cracks and divisions in myself. I need the reassurance Toni gives me. I flee the responsibilities family life lays on me because I am so far from the fulfilment of my personal ambitions. I am loud and disputatious because I have so many uncertainties. So, however glib my analysis of the nightmare, I know it is a chaos dream and sooner or later I shall have to recognise its secret warnings.
I fill my pipe and bring out the brandy bottle. I see a certain risk in this habit of tippling in the small hours of the morning, so I limit myself to one, generous measure. If Toni were here, or if Emma were more eager sexually, I wouldn’t need to drink at all. I’m still only thirty-eight, and I’m damned if I’m going to live like Simon Stylites.
The image of that old curmudgeon, perched on his pillar in the desert, living on bread and water and dried dates, performing all his natural functions in full view of his devotees, intrigues me. I see his strange existence as a parody of my own. I want to withdraw from the commerce of people. I need to exhibit myself, to have the merits of my work recognised. The two needs never quite reconcile themselves. My colleagues regard me as an arrogant eccentric. My patients – some of them at least – make gossip about my lecheries.
Simon Stylites reminds me of our own Swiss hermit, the Blessed Klaus of Flühli. When I was a boy, I visited his shrine with my father, and that same day met a young girl who haunted my dreams for a long time. Brother Klaus the Blessed seems to have discovered the formula for beatitude in his life and the next. He was married. He had children, but he spent only half his life with his family and the other half happily communing with himself and his Creator in a hermitage.
Perhaps this is the answer for me. Find a piece of land, build myself a hermitage and go into retreat whenever home life becomes intolerable. Toni could join me there. I don’t think Emma would raise too many objections – especially if it took Toni out from under her feet at Küsnacht.
I open my sketch pad and begin to draw a stone tower, set foursquare on the lakeshore. I surround it with a wall, inside which I can live my hermit life. There will be a well in the courtyard and wood, cut and corded for the winter, a stele upon which I will carve the cryptic record of my works and days. The furniture I shall make myself, with simple country tools – an adze, a spokeshave, a bow saw, a wooden mallet and a plane honed on a whetstone. There will be flowers and a spice garden and onions hung from the rafters in my kitchen. There will be lamplight and candlelight and an iron stove to bake bread and country meats.
When I draw the ground plan for the whole edifice, I notice that it consists of two geometric figures: a square enclosed within a circle. I remember that it was from a circle that Elijah and Salome stepped into my conscious life. I invoke them, but they do not answer.
Nevertheless I sense a presence in the room. It is more powerful, yet somehow much simpler, than theirs. I invoke this one too. There is no answer, but the silence seems to intensify around me, as if the presence is becoming more solid.
Involuntarily I pick up the pencil and retrace the outline of the square – one, two, three, four. In the same automatic fashion I write a letter by each side of the figure, as if I am setting out a problem in geometry. The letters in sequence are Y H W H. I stare at them a long time. Then, in an instant, their meaning is plain. What I have written is the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter Hebrew symbol for the unspeakable name of God.
Once again, my unconscious has yielded up material from its store of myth and symbol. The circle and the square are perfect figures. The Tetragrammaton is the symbol of the ultimate perfection we call God. The silence, the solid silence, envelops me as the Creator envelops his whole creation.
I look again at the figure. I remember having seen it in many variations and with sundry embellishments in Oriental texts. It is the mandala, the symbol of completion, of the quiet of ultimate arrival. The tower I have dreamed will be for me a place of quiet repose. I am sure now that I shall build it, and that, bidden or unbidden, God will there present himself to me.
He will not be the God of my father – a narrow jurist, counting the delinquencies of his creatures on some divine abacus. He will not be the God of the Romans who insists on putting his castrated priests in shove
l hats and black skirts. On the contrary, he will be the deity written on every heart, hidden in the collective unconscious of the whole race, whom the old Gnostics perceived, whom the canonists and theologians obscured behind their formulae.
In this bleak hour before cockcrow I have stumbled upon an important truth. For me, Carl Gustav Jung, there is no royal road to wisdom. To arrive at the future I must journey into the past. To reach the sun I must penetrate the dark kingdom of the unconscious. To attain the sanity of oneness with the One, I must risk the whirling madness of the possessed.
Like old Martin Luther, I have come to the moment of decision. “Hier stehe ich; ich kann nicht anders. Gott hilfe mir! Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise. God help me!” The haunted silence weighs on me like a leaden cope.
MAGDA
Paris
I am calmer today. I have appeased Basil Zaharoff. I am free to address myself to some personal decisions. The Brothers Ysambard suggest I re-invest part of my capital in the United States. After my talks with Zaharoff, I am convinced they are right. There will be war in Europe. A stake in the New World will be a comforting insurance. Next, they suggest I sell my estates with their valuable bloodstock. The market is high. I can spread the proceeds over a broader base and reduce my risk in the aftermath of war. I am in two minds about this proposal.
The union of Papa’s property in Silbersee with my late husband’s estate in nearby Gamsfeld gave me one of the richest holdings in Land Salzburg. All my roots are there, my sweetest memories of Papa and Lily and the only other man I have ever loved, my husband Johann, Ritter von Gamsfeld.
I know this country like the palm of my hand. I can recite the history of every Schloss and shrine. I speak the dialect. I know all the old songs and dances. I grew up with the sons and daughters of the local farmers. To give up my inheritance would be like cutting off my right hand and yet the matter is, in a sense, already decided because I am no longer welcome in my home place.
The night before I left for Berlin to deliver the horses I had sold to Prince Eulenberg, my studmaster came to see me. His name is Hans Hemeling. He is sixty years old, a Tiroler, a lion of a man with a mane of white hair and a weather-scored face, the very image of his country’s hero, Andreas Hofer. When I came to Silbersee as a child, he was one of the grooms. It was he who sat me on my first pony, dusted me off and dried my tears when I took my first tumble. Together he and I built up some of the best bloodlines in European horse breeding. Now he was my accuser, grim as a hanging judge.
“You take Apollo, our best stallion. You deliberately ride him past the mares. Then, when he gets restive you thrash him and rowel him bloody and gallop him into exhaustion. You break the heart of a beautiful beast! Why for God’s sake? Why? Your own hound comes up to you to be patted. His muzzle stains your riding habit. You beat him half to death; so I have to shoot him and bury him in the rose garden. Then you get up at midnight and chop down the roses! Oh yes! You swore you didn’t do it. Maybe you even believed it. But you were seen! How do you think our people take these things? I’ll tell you, Madame! They think you’re a Hexe, a witch! If you don’t go away from here, they’ll all leave – and I’ll go with them! If you think you can run this place with foreigners, don’t try it! Your stock will be stolen, your farms will be burned. The only reason it hasn’t happened already is because I’ve told them you’re going to Berlin to get medical attention and I’m going to be in charge here. Don’t argue! Just do as I say! At least you know I’m honest. You won’t be out one Pfennig! But if you stay, you’ll lose everything.”
I knew he was right. Ever since those days of madness I had felt the hostility building around me like a wall of fire. I appealed to Hans to explain me to myself. He shrugged wearily.
“I don’t know. I wish I did. You were always a wild one. Your husband – God rest him! – tamed you for a while. After he died you went wild again. I used to think all you needed was another lusty fellow to breed sons out of you. If I’d been younger and single I’d have bid for you myself. But that’s all in the past. Now you act as if you’re bewitched and even the animals sense it. I don’t know whether you need a doctor to look into your head or a priest to drive the devils out of you!”
That was old country talk; but it hit me harder than any rhetoric. We have a church on every hill and a shrine at every crossroads; yet the ancient Germanic gods and demons live on in the black forests and the high crags and the dark tarns. They have always been more real to me than any plaster saints. I know them from fireside yarns and kitchen gossip and old wives’ tales about spells and counter-spells. After my murderous rages I could well believe that a whole legion of evil spirits had taken up residence in my skull-case. So, I didn’t fight Hans any more. I bowed my head like a penitent child and told him I would stay away until the devil was driven out. Then I would come home again.
He was not mollified. He warned me bluntly:
“Don’t hurry! And write to me before you even think of coming back. Our people have long memories!”
The message was plain. They would never forgive or forget what I had done. So, this morning in Paris I telephoned Joachim Ysambard and told him I agreed with his recommendations. He should sell the property, disperse the stock, make due provision for my staff and invest the residue in equities in the United States. Joachim was gratified by my good sense. He asked about my future plans. I asked him whether he would like to take another vacation with me in Amalfi. He laughed and hung up.
For me it is no laughing matter. I am, now, desperately alone. Before I can make any plans, I must be cured of the madness that afflicts me. Hans Hemeling’s words still haunt me. “Find a doctor to look into your head, or a priest to drive out the devils.” It is Giancarlo’s advice in different words. But both, it seems to me, are prescribing a strong dose of magic: the magic of old religion, or the magic of a new breed of faith healers, working without anatomical charts, with no patterns of clinical procedure and certainly no promise of cure.
I remember Papa telling me how, in the ancient world, patients suffering from mental disorders were taken to the sacred island of Cos. There, after ritual preparation, they were submitted to the “experience of the God”, which seems to have been a combination of hypnotic ecstasy and a primitive therapy by shock and terror. It was, Papa explained, a profound piece of curative wisdom. The patient was renewed, reborn. The “experience of the God” was like baptism for the Christian, the datum point from which his new life began. But first he had to pay the price: the long rituals, the magical lustrations, the infusions of soothing drugs. Finally, in the innermost shrine, in darkness and dread, he had to make a leap into mystery.
I have to make the same leap, in the darkness of some confessional or in an analyst’s consulting room. It is not the mystery which terrifies me. It is the simple, brutal risk. How far can I trust the man, priest or physician, who takes my confession? I know all about professional ethics and the Hippocratic oath; but I’ve been in too many common rooms and too many beds to trust my life to the discretion of my peers. Yet if I do not make the confession, the whole exercise is pointless. I shall be like the patient who reports a migraine while all the time there is a cancer growing in her belly.
So Magda, my dear, what are you going to do? You can’t stay locked in a suite at the Crillon all your life. You can’t go trotting round the fashionable houses of assignation, knowing that every escapade will finally be reported to Basil Zaharoff or to the police. You can’t make any plans at all; because, without a radical cure, the future for you is demon country. It is not guilt which haunts you. It is something far more sinister. You have learned that there is no greater excitement than to hold a life in your hands, knowing that you can snuff it out like a candle flame. There is no orgasm more potent than that produced by the act of execution. You have experienced it. You are obsessed to repeat it – and sooner or later, you will.
There now! I’ve said it, written it; the truth about Magda Liliane Kardoss von Gamsfeld. You s
ee, I understand myself. Why do I need the intervention of an analyst? And certainly a priest can’t help because I’m not at all sure I’m repentant. But I am afraid. My hands tremble so that I cannot hold the pen. I cannot be alone. I reach for the telephone and ask the operator to connect me with Doctor Giancarlo di Malvasia.
He was very gentle, very concerned. He took me to lunch at a quiet restaurant on the Ile. He told me that he had got up early and attended a mass to pray for me. I was so touched that I was ready to blurt out the whole sorry tale then and there; but he forestalled me.
“I confess that I was tempted to accept you as a patient, and treat you here in Paris with the assistance perhaps of someone like Flournoy or Janet. Then, while I was at prayer, it became clear to me that this would be a great mistake. We are too vulnerable to each other. We could compound each other’s risks. On the other hand, it would be dangerous for you just to tell me your history in fragments. It must be all or nothing.”
‘That’s precisely my problem, Gianni – all or nothing! You don’t know, you can’t know, how vulnerable I am to blackmail. How many of your colleagues can you really trust to keep their mouths shut about their patients?”
“Some – but I admit, not all!”
“How many priests then?”
“With the priest it is different. The situation is anonymous. You can confess in any church you like, to any priest you choose. The confessional is dark. You are nothing but a disembodied voice. Your narrative is a matter of substance, not of circumstance. You don’t have to write a novel about your theft or adultery. You come to the priest as to Christ. He absolves you from your sins in Christ’s name. By Christ’s merit you are restored to grace.”
