(Portrait of Maria and Mariquita in the journal) To be with Maria is to pursue the most subtle and profound conception of the individual: Maria’s religious aestheticism tends in this direction. Her chief concern is the unity, the uniqueness of the soul (but she is thwarted by the body). It would be impossible to pay her a compliment on her beauty or a detail of her figure. She declares that no tree, no cloud, has its like. She has a horror of love, whose instrument is the quid pro quo. (She brings to mind the Princess in Tasso.)
In Mariquita, it is each physical detail that seems unique and immortal—knee, hip, smile. Beyond that, she does not trouble her head much about uniqueness, she does not believe in the immortality of the soul. Her conversation, arguments, even her thoughts are all pantomime, all latent eroticism, not a word is meant for more than the moment—she perpetually courts caresses from everything around her.
The link between Maria and Mariquita is a small, asthmatic King Charles’s spaniel, Fidèle by name, a suspicious and disdainful animal which, save on one occasion, is always hidden in Maria’s house—again the fundamental problem of Gestern (Yesterday): faith, constancy, and change—Maria dimly suspects the chaos within her; that is what she has in common with Mariquita. Thus they have the spaniel in common.
ad Maria et Mariquita: the Franciscan father’s views on the case: the views of the physician, materialistic (La Mettrie, Condillac). The anecdote of the man who was driven mad by one accident and restored by another.—“What conclusion do you draw from that?” asked the Knight.
MARIA always in mittens, hands always cold: Mariquita’s hands always as if suffused with liquid, gentle fire.
Unrestraint the essence of Mariquita: constraint the essence of the Countess. The Countess speaks of the hundred-weight-heavy chains with which heaven tries its own. We are responsible for more than ourselves. The constraint in the Countess’s love-letters.
With Maria, Andreas learns the value of inward freedom; with Mariquita, he feels a horror of absolute freedom. With Mariquita, he cannot but crave for the universal bond of union; with Maria, for the universal solvent: thus his nature must be revealed to him.
Maria is marvellously well dressed, Mariquita likes dirt and disorder.
Maria can hardly endure the scent of flowers; one day, Andreas finds her half fainting, surrounded by strongly scented flowers: Mariquita has bought the flowers at market that morning and sent them to Maria by a Friuli man.
Maria is a Christian, with mystic, Molinistic leanings; Sacramozo is indifferent; Mariquita is a pagan, she believes in the moment and in nothing else.
What Mariquita thinks of Maria (in letters or monologues, from time to time): she hates her, sees all her imperfections, thinks her a coward (just as Michelangelo thinks himself a coward in contrast to Savonarola), yet she is her most personal theme, the only one that interests her. She envies her her distinction, without being quite aware of what that distinction is, what it is that lends to Maria’s every action a royal, immaterial worth (like the horn on the brow of the unicorn, like a tower in the moon); she even tries to make Maria herself suspicious of this privilege, to submerge her in meanness (though she would be the one to suffer most by it)—she writes to her: “your dream of yesterday, that there is no such thing as the common, that it can all be overcome, that life could be lived in a perpetual élan, with none of your crouching in a corner—is a projection of your fathomless vanity, of your stupid incapacity to face reality.”
Mariquita’s stories (of Maria): sometimes as if she were an old hag, then: “that must be taken metaphorically. People must always be taken metaphorically. She is quite a pretty woman, but a fiend all the same. That is why she wants people to think her an angel: but, no woman in the world is seen through as I see through her. My eyes go beneath the skin.”
MARIQUITA: the various aspects of the demonic: mischievous, quick-witted, cynical, restless, godless. Shameless, libertine, dread of churches. Boundlessly inquisitive. Brilliant, ingénue. Utterly forgetful.
The element connecting all her phases—a kind of puppet-like activity. She must have something going on: she hates repose, meditation—for then she is afraid of being dissolved in the other.
Once Mariquita breaks out to the duenna (Andreas pretends to be asleep): “Curse her! She would like to lock me up in a convent because I am growing too much for her! I’ll have to set him at her a bit.”—Duenna: “Couldn’t you give her something to make her disappear for good?”—Mariquita: “She has a hideous strength, not only when she is praying, but at other times—a kind of inward elevation which makes me feel as if I were going to be sick; I am quite weak compared to her.”—Duenna: “Couldn’t you contrive to make one of your best poses occur to her while she is praying?”—Mariquita: “Then she feels me coming and holds me down, those are my nastiest moments. Then I hate as the man in hell must hate God.”
(Mariquita only understands her relationship to Maria bit by bit; at first, she hopes quite soon to free herself.)
Scene where Mariquita, in great distress because Maria wants to enter a convent, tells Andreas to seduce Maria; her uncanny, cringing look in this scene. In Andreas’s suspicion that the old crone has something to do with experiments of the kind which led to the “Moreau horrors,” that she may be providing material for an experimenter of this kind.
In trying to awaken the soul in Mariquita, Andreas endangers Mariquita’s life (her separate existence): she hints anxiously at this. Thus she takes him into her arms and with tears in her eyes declares she is ready to sacrifice herself to the happiness he might find with another. He feels that she is really in earnest.
Mariquita demonic to the verge of sorcery. Succubus. Once she sleeps with two men at the same time; she says: “Suppose I had slept with the one a day, six hours, two hours, half an hour, ten minutes after the other—well what then?”
Mariquita hates the idea of “truth.” “If only I never had to hear the silly word—if only you would leave me in peace with your philosophy—since the world is, after all, ‘consummable, so to speak.’”
Her gloomy image of the Knight. The pattern of his life fills her with horror. When she speaks of him, she turns pale.
Mariquita never writes, only sends messages by word of mouth; writing only exists to complicate and compromise everything.
Mariquita’s lodging: two rooms in a ramshackle palace, in the utmost disorder. The duenna, the old crone, lives in a large room behind. The bright room, as open as an aviary, where Mariquita bathes, takes her meals, and receives her guests. A little garden outside. The rich Jewish admirer, dalle Torre. Mariquita at first treats Andreas badly, but as soon as she notices that Maria likes to see him, invites him back with an invitation full of allusions to Maria. She hopes at last to seduce Maria by means of Andreas.
On the very day on which Andreas receives the invitation, Sacramozo receives a message full of insults: she is tired of him and is going to look around for someone else.
Mariquita, on the first visit, though she treats him badly, fondles his hand, saying: “Pretty hand—a pity you belong to a cold and miserly master.”
She tells him why people love him: his gravity, his reserve, nobody can tell what he will be like, nobody can be sure of having him entirely.
Mariquita—a kind of vertigo of existence. One night she goes for a drive with Andreas in the mail-coach. Embrouilleuse: everything goes wrong, the desperate confusion of all things—a whole concatenation of ill-planned arrangements, nothing fits in. Café in Mestre, in the carriage she is another being. Treats him as if he were a Casanova, imputes meetings with the Countess to him (complete in all psychological and realistic details), then, in the end: “Forgive me!”—then, violently: “And why not? Why don’t you take her?” He tries to tear himself away from her, then she hints at a secret, promises she will soon reveal her soul.
An adventure with Mariquita in the night of storm. She tries to throw the unconscious gondolier—the gondolier stunned by a blow from Andreas—into t
he water.
The courtesan wants to seduce the wild man; an excursion into the country is made for the purpose.
ANDREAS’ opposing feelings in the presence of the two women: to be with Maria makes him happy, the world seems more beautiful; Mariquita makes him gloomy, tense, fierce—afterwards ill-tempered, fatigued.
It seems incomprehensible that Maria’s hand should ever be seen, felt in a sensual movement. Mariquita’s foot returns pressure like a hand, clings, presses, like a softer, blinder, still more sensual hand.
Andreas: his feeling for Maria growing, so that his head swims at the thought of an intimacy (—merely to lay his hand on her knee), when he thinks intensely of her womanliness. He even grows jealous of Sacramozo. By becoming very insistent, he makes it possible for Mariquita to appear.
Andreas and the idea of “elegance”: elegant people are to him what Savonarola or a very aloof young nobleman were to Michelangelo. The love of the fine lady: that is his first goal; he imagines that he will be changed by it, as his grandfather was changed by the favours of the archduchess. He says to himself: “If I were her lover …”—but he cannot really imagine himself in that situation; it seems to him that he would then be a different man (for a moment, he thinks that the Knight believes him to be her lover) … gradually it dawns upon him that for him, Maria dwells in the sphere of the unattainable; he has a premonition that his fate lies here, that this is a wound whose sharpness he must always seek to allay. He suspects that Maria’s love must be directed to something in him which is unattainable to himself, utterly remote from his vanity, his restlessness, his consciousness.
With Maria, Andreas is excessively shy, so perfectly does she guide the conversation. The mere thought of asking her an intimate question (for instance, whether she knows anything about the existence of her illegitimate sister) gives him the same feeling as the thought that he might touch the mystery of her body—his head swims. Maria’s soul lies like a veil over her flesh.
Ultimately, his relationship to Maria is such that he is tormented by jealousy of Sacramozo’s “objectless” friendship.
His astonishment that human beings of such a kind exist: they are softer and harder, uglier and more conscientious, more self-possessed as a whole, more sensitive in detail—he feels as though a new sense must be born in him to comprehend this. He begins to suspect that there is something haphazard about our senses.—He realizes that he is merely drifting, like a pig in a rising flood.
He feels how the Knight sustains and elevates him, every one of his sayings enlightens, he feels himself utterly Sacramozo’s creature, but without oppression.
He does not know whether to be more astonished by the woman or the man.
LAST BOOK
What Sacramozo needs to win this woman is a lofty love of self, a religion of the self.
Sacramozo holds himself guilty of the death of someone he has loved: Mariquita says outright that he poisoned a woman.
Sacramozo believes himself responsible for the insanity of a charming young woman who now lives on like a greedy animal.
To see the “other” in her eyes—that has made him a philosopher. In exactly the same way, a strange change came over his father just before his death. Thus he comes to believe that masks are the distinguishing factor. In this sense, he says that neither Goldoni nor Molière has created a character in the individual.
In particular, he reproaches himself with having slept with this person when she was already a “lunatic.” Would she like to have a shell which contains the voice of her dead lover? The duality in Maria’s handwriting also arrives in this occasion.
At Sacramozo’s: portrait of the lady with the Sternkreuz Order: Countess Welsberg (his mother). Sacramozo on the sayings of his German mother: he forbids himself to remember her: later, he will be allowed to remember her all the more completely.—Sacramozo has understood that his cousin’s return is a dispensation, has learned to be an exile: at Welsberg, his lower nature would have prevailed, the higher development of his nature would have been checked.—Sacramozo wished to buy Welsberg Castle. The night he spent in the room with the Pyramid of Life painted on the wall. His thoughts often turn on the stages of life, of age. (His uncle of ninety-three).—Sacramozo takes for granted that of two dreams, the later always throws light on the earlier—thus everything that comes later always relates to everything that has gone before—in all directions.—The Welsberg dream: in the second he is governor, not recognized as such, who is guilty of everything, who had to pronounce sentence of death, etc.
Sacramozo: faith and superstition in time. In his hours of exaltation, he is convinced that he alone possesses the real key to the world, everybody else glides past the secret lock unaware—everything serves him, even a landscape seen once, a pool of dark water in the West Indies. He would be mad if he were not right. He is right in everything, even in taking Andreas to the Countess. His knowledge: he knows that the body forgets nothing (just like the macrocosm, the great body).—He knows Maria’s life far better than the confessors.—Sacramozo’s fate: the Key of Solomon in Hebbel’s epigram. (“We believe we hold the key of Solomon in our hands, and can unlock heaven and earth with it, but it dissolves in figures, and, to our horror, we see the alphabet renew itself. Yet let us take comfort, it has in the meantime grown more august.”)
He likes the symbolism of the Rosicrucians: the use of words in an absolutely symbolic sense, so that the words spurn the world. For, he says, everything is in the soul, everything that has power to raise spirits, and the spirits that are to be raised. “Every word evokes spirits; whatever spirit calls, its like responds” (Novalis).
In this way he can grasp the essence of poetry—the magic of configurations. To him, Goldoni (Zustina’s world, the utterly unmetaphysical) is abhorrent, Molière means little, the mimus is indifferent; the vital thing is the incantatio. True poetry is the arcanym that unites us with life, separates us from life. Separation—if we separate, death itself can be borne, only the impure is horrible (a fine, pure hour of death like Stilling’s)—but it is as indispensable to unite as to separate—the aurea catena of Homer—“Separabis terram ab igne, subtile a spisso, suaviter magna cum ingenio” (Thou shalt separate earth from fire, the subtle from the dense, smoothly and with great skill) (Tabula smaragdina Hermetis).
Sacramozo knows the power of the creative function. “We know only in so far as we create. We only know creation in so far as we are ourselves God. We do not know it in so far as we are world” (Novalis). Sacramozo knows: things are simply what the power of a human soul unceasingly makes them. Unceasing creation. The relation between two human beings as a sylph born of them (Rosicrucians).
He seeks life where it is to be found: in all that is most delicate, in the folds of things.
The abyss in such a being as Sacramozo: the despair of the onlooker, who must ask: “Do I even exist? If I must go—shall I have been?—have I known hate-love?—or was it all nothing?”
What does a man like Sacramozo want—a raving of anger at his impotence—“His Impotenceship.”
He suffers the sylph born of Andreas and the Countess, which is the stronger, to kill the weaker, whose father he is.
Sacramozo on the mystic limbs of men: it is rapture merely to think of them, to move them in silence (Maria’s dream).
On Powers: the man who is capable of prayer: “If the Countess could pray, she would be healed.”
Sacramozo’s mystic love of children, human beings as such, neither man nor woman, but both in one.
Andreas has to learn from the Knight: to discern what has real existence, to overcome the mean and common (—everything Austrian is mean and common, the hordes of chamberlains, everything in masses. In Vienna, the chief concern of everybody is to be taken for somebody).
Sacramozo’s pessimistic conception: whether I am a Christian or an atheist, a fatalist or a sceptic—I shall decide that as soon as I know who I am, where I am, and where I cease to be.
Sacramozo: “The
hope and desire of man to return to his former condition is like the desire of the moth for the light” (Leonardo).
The look he fixes on the friends of his youth. Women amuse him more than men, men touch him more deeply.
Sacramozo—that is his offence—believes it is possible to lead a second life, in which everything left undone can be done, every failure made good.—“Forty years—I have nothing more to gain, but I must lose nothing more.”
Sacramozo knows the moment that is auspicious for Andreas’s union with Maria. He chooses that moment for voluntary death—he is sure he will return, to be united to Maria transformed, (he knows that elements too are transformed)—that Andreas will then be forced to yield before him—how, he purposely avoids considering—fills him with sorrowful sympathy for Andreas.
He has always known that this would happen to him in his fortieth year. He divides his life thus: three periods of twelve years: the first, fulfilment, revelation; the second, confusion; the third, damnation or ordeal. Then three years of action, then the fortieth—annus mirabilis.
“The truly philosophic act is suicide” (Novalis).—Suicide on the one hand as the most sublime act of self-enjoyment, the indisputable dominion of the spirit over the body, on the other as the most sublime communion with the world; harmony in contrast, at last, with the final word of Oriental philosophy (Neo-Platonists on suicide).
Andreas Page 9
