The Dedalus Meyrink Reader

by Gustav Meyrink

‘I readily admit,’ I said, ‘that the so-called witches used drugs to put themselves in a trance and firmly believed they could fly through the air on their broomsticks.’

  He thought for a while. ‘Of course, you’ll say I just imagined it,’ he muttered and fell to pondering once more. Then he got up and fetched a notebook from the bookshelf. ‘But perhaps you’ll be interested in what I wrote down here when I made the experiment years ago. To start with, I must point out that at the time I was young and still full of hope’ — I could see from his absent look that his mind was back in the past — ‘and I believed in what people call life until I lost everything that was dear to me in quick succession: my wife, my children, everything. Then fate brought me together with your grandfather and he taught me to understand what desires are, what waiting, what hoping is, how they are all interwoven and how one can tear the masks off the faces of these ghosts. We called them the time-leeches because, just as leeches suck blood, they suck time, the true lifeblood, from our hearts. It was here in this room that he taught me how to take the first step on the path by which we can conquer time and crush the vipers of hope beneath our feet. And then,’ he hesitated for a moment, ‘yes, and then I became as wood, which cannot tell whether it is being stroked or sawn, thrown on the fire or into water. Since then I have been empty inside. I sought no more comfort. I needed none. Why should I have sought it? I know that I am and that only now do I live. There is a subtle difference between “I live” and “I live” ’.

  ‘You say all this so calmly, but it’s terrible!’ I exclaimed, deeply moved.

  ‘That is only the way it seems,’ he said with a smile. ‘A feeling of happiness beyond your wildest dreams pours out from the motionlessness of the heart. This “I am” is like a sweet, eternal melody that can never die away once it has been born, neither when we sleep, nor when the outside world once more wakes in our senses, nor in death.

  ‘Should I tell you why people die such premature deaths, instead of living for a thousand years, as it says about the patriarchs in the Bible? They are like the green suckers of a tree, they forget they belong to the trunk and die off in their first autumn. But I was going to tell you about the first time I left my body.

  ‘There is an ancient occult doctrine, as old as the human race; it has been passed down by word of mouth until the present day, but only a few know of it. It shows us the way to cross the threshold of death without losing consciousness, and once we have done that, we are master over our own self. We have gained a new self and what until that point had appeared to be our “self” is now just an instrument, as our hands and feet are instruments.

  ‘Our hearts and breathing stop, just like a corpse’s, when our newly discovered spirit leaves our body — when we “journey like the children of Israel, leaving the fleshpots of Egypt behind and with the waters of the Red Sea a wall on either side.” I had to practise it many times, suffering unspeakable torments, until I finally succeeded in freeing myself from my body. At first I felt myself floating in the air, as sometimes in our dreams we think we can fly, knees drawn up and light as a feather, but suddenly I was drifting down a black stream that flowed from south to north — we call it the Jordan flowing upwards — and its roar was like the pounding of blood in our ears. I could not see anyone, but I could hear lots of excited voices shouting out to me to turn back until I started to tremble. Gripped by some vague fear, I struck out for a rock that appeared in front of me. In the moonlight I saw a figure standing there, the height of a youth, naked and without the characteristics of either male or female sex. It had a third eye in its forehead, like Polyphemus, and was pointing motionlessly towards the interior of the country.’

  Then I set off through a thicket along a smooth, white path, but I couldn’t feel the ground under my feet and also when I tried to run my hand over the trees and bushes round me I found I couldn’t touch the surface — there was always a thin layer of air my hand could not pass through. Everything was bathed in a pale light, as from rotten wood, so that vision was clear. The outlines of the things I could see appeared slack, with a mollusc-like squashiness and strangely enlarged. Young birds with no feathers and round, brazen eyes were sitting in a nest, fat and bloated like Christmas geese, squawking down at me, and a fawn, hardly able to walk but still almost as large as a full-grown animal, was stretched out wearily on the moss and ponderously turned its head towards me like an obese pug dog.

  Every animal I saw was possessed of a toad-like lethargy.

  It gradually dawned on me where I was. It was a country as real, as actual as our world, and yet only a reflection of it: the realm of ghostly doubles which feed on the marrow of their earthly originals and grow to monstrous size the more their earthly counterparts languish in vain hope and expectation of happiness and joy. When young animals on earth lose their mother and wait, confident in the belief that food will come, until they waste away in torment, a phantom image of them appears on this accursed island of ghosts and sucks up the life that is draining from those earthly creatures. And the life force of these creatures, dwindling through hope, here takes on form and the ground is manured with the fertilising breath of time lost in waiting.

  As I walked on, I came to a town which was full of people. I knew many of them on earth and I recalled all their disappointed hopes and how they had become more and more bowed down with grief as the years passed and yet refused to tear the vampires — their own daemonic selves who were eating up their life and their time — out of their hearts. Here I saw them distended into puffy, bloated monsters, wobbling around with their blubber, eyes staring out glassily over fat, pudgy cheeks.

  I saw a shop with the sign:

  Wheel of Fortune Bureau de Change

  Every Ticket Wins the Jackpot

  Coming out was a grinning crowd, smacking their thick lips in satisfaction as they dragged sacks full of gold behind them — the spectres of all those wasting away on earth in their insatiable pursuit of a big win at the gambling table.

  I entered a temple-like hall with columns that soared up to the sky. Sitting there on a throne of coagulated blood was a monster with a human body, four arms and the horrible snout of a hyena, slavering with venomous spittle: the war god to which superstitious savage African tribes made sacrifice, beseeching him to grant them victory over their enemies.

  Terror-stricken, I fled the stench of decay filling the place. Back out in the street, I stopped in amazement at the sight of a palace more magnificent than anything I had ever seen. And yet every stone, every roof, every flight of steps seemed strangely familiar, as if I had built it myself in my imagination.

  I mounted the wide marble steps as if I were the undisputed lord and master of the house. And there at the top I read on the doorplate — my own name:

  Johann Hermann Obereit

  I went in and saw myself in purple, sitting at a splendid table, served by a thousand female slaves, in whom I recognised all the women who had aroused my senses in life, if only for a brief moment.

  I was overcome with a feeling of indescribable hatred, when I realised that my double here had been wallowing in luxury and gluttony since I had been alive and that it was I who had brought him into existence and given him all this wealth by allowing the magical power of my self to pour out of my soul in hoping, longing and waiting.

  I was horrified to realise that my whole life had consisted of waiting, nothing but waiting in some form or other, of a kind of incessant draining of my lifeblood, and that the time left over which I could experience as present could be counted in hours. Everything I had so far thought of as the substance of my life burst like a bubble. I tell you, whatever we do here on earth, it gives rise to further waiting, further hoping; the whole universe is polluted with the foul stench of present time dying the moment it is born. Everyone has felt the enervating weakness that befalls us when we’re sitting in a doctor’s, a lawyer’s, an official’s waiting-room — what we call life is the waiting-room of death. Suddenly I understood what time is
. We ourselves are formed out of time, we are bodies which appear to be made of material but are nothing other than frozen time. And our daily trudge along the road to death, what is it other than a reversion to time, and waiting and hoping mere accompanying phenomena, like the hiss of an ice cube reverting to water when it’s placed on a stove?

  As this insight came to me, I saw a quiver run through my double’s body and its face contort with fear. Then I knew what I must do: fight to the death these spectres which suck us dry like vampires.

  Oh, these parasites on our life know very well why they remain invisible to us, why they hide from our view; the devil’s nastiest trick is to pretend he doesn’t exist. Since then I have eradicated waiting and hoping for ever from my being.’

  ‘I think I would collapse at the very first step, Herr Obereit,’ I said, when the old man fell silent ‘if I were to follow the terrible road you took. I can well imagine that one could deaden the feeling of waiting and hoping within oneself, if one worked hard enough at it, but still —’

  ‘Yes, but only deaden!’ Obereit broke in. ‘Deep down inside “waiting” would still be alive. You have to take an axe to the root. Become like an automaton here on earth. Like a living corpse. Never put out your hand for a fruit, however attractive it looks, if it involves the least waiting; do nothing and it will fall, ripe, into your lap. At first it is like journeying through a dreary wasteland, often for a long time, but suddenly there will be a brightness all round you, and you will see all things, both beautiful and ugly, in a new, undreamt-of radiance. Then “important” and “unimportant” will not exist for you any more, everything that happens will be equally “important” or “unimportant”. You will be as invulnerable as Siegfried after he had bathed in dragon’s blood and you will be able to say: I am sailing out on the boundless sea of an eternal life with a snow-white sail.’

  Those were the last words Johann Hermann Obereit spoke to me; I have never seen him since.

  Many years have passed since that time. I have tried as hard as I can to follow his teaching, but waiting and hoping will not budge from my heart.

  I am too weak now, to pull out the weeds, nor am I surprised any more that among the countless gravestones in the cemeteries I so rarely find one with the inscription:

  Cardinal Napellus

  We didn’t know much about him apart from his name, Hieronymus Radspieller, and that he had lived for years in the tumbledown castle, where he had rented a whole floor for himself from the owner — a white-haired, surly Basque, the last servant of a noble family that had withered away in melancholia and solitude — and made it habitable with sumptuous antique furnishings.

  It was a sharp, fantastic contrast when you went into his rooms from the completely overgrown wilderness outside, where never a bird sang and everything seemed devoid of life, apart from when the rotten, tangle-bearded yews groaned in terror at the force of the föhn wind or the dark green lake, like an eye staring up at the heavens, reflected the white clouds as they passed.

  Hieronymus Radspieller spent almost the whole day in his boat, lowering an egg-shaped ball of glittering metal on long, fine silk threads into the still waters: a plumb-line to sound out the depths of the lake.

  He must be working for some geographical society, we conjectured, as we sat together for a few hours in the evening after a fishing expedition. We were in Radspieller’s library, which he had kindly put at our disposal.

  ‘I happened to meet the old postwoman who brings the letters over the pass,’ Mr Finch remarked, ‘and she told me there’s a rumour he was a monk in his younger days and used to flagellate himself until the blood came, night after night — they say his back and arms are covered in scars. Talking of Radspieller, where can he be tonight? It must be well past eleven.’

  ‘It’s the full moon,’ said Giovanni Braccesco, pointing with his wrinkled, old man’s hand out of the window at the shimmering path of light across the lake. ‘We’ll easily be able to see his boat if we keep a look-out.’

  Then, after a while, we heard steps coming up the stairs, but it was only Eshcuid, the botanist, returning late from his excursions to join us in the room.

  He was carrying a plant as tall as a man, with shining, steel-blue flowers.

  ‘It’s by far the largest example of this species that’s even been found,’ he said in expressionless tones, nodding to us. ‘I never imagined monkshood would grow at this altitude.’ Taking great care not to crush a single leaf or petal, he placed the plant on the windowledge.

  He feels the same as we do, was the thought that came to me, and I sensed that at that moment Mr Finch and Giovanni Braccesco were thinking the same thing. ‘He’s an old man and he wanders restlessly over the earth, like someone looking for his grave without finding it. He gathers plants which are withered the next day. Why? What’s the point? He doesn’t think about it. He knows his activities are pointless, as we know ours are, but he will have presumably been worn down by the sad realisation that everything we undertake, great or small, is pointless, just as it has worn the rest of us down throughout our lives. Ever since we were young we’ve been like people who are dying, their fingers scrabbling fitfully at the coverlet, not knowing what to hold on to; like people who are dying and who realise death is in the room, so it makes no difference whether they fold their hands or clench their fists.

  ‘Where are you heading for when the fishing season here is over?’ Eshcuid asked, after he had checked his plant again and slowly come over to join us at the table.

  Mr Finch ran his hand through his white hair, played with a fish-hook and, without looking up, shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Giovanni Braccesco unconcernedly after a pause, as if the question had been directed at him.

  After that an hour must have trickled away in such leaden, wordless silence that I could hear the blood pounding in my ears. Finally Radspieller’s pale, beardless face appeared in the doorway. As always, his expression had the composure of old age and his hand was steady as he poured himself a glass of wine and drank to us, but he brought an unaccustomed atmosphere of restrained excitement into the room which quickly transmitted itself to us.

  His eyes were usually tired and indifferent, and had the strange characteristic that, as with people suffering from diseases of the spinal cord, the pupils never contracted or dilated and did not appear to react to light — Mr Finch used to say they were like matt-silk waistcoat buttons with a black dot on them — but today there was something feverish about them as his gaze flickered round the room, up and down the walls and over the shelves of books, apparently uncertain what to fix itself on.

  Giovanni Braccesco tried to strike up a conversation by describing our unusual methods of catching the ancient, moss-grown giant catfish that lived in the permanent darkness of the unfathomable depths of the lake. They never came up to the light and spurned any natural bait; the only things that could get them to bite were the most bizarre forms anglers could think up: lures of shiny, silvery tin shaped like human hands which made swaying movements as they were pulled through the water, or others like bats made of red glass with cunningly concealed hooks on their wings.

  Hieronymus Radspieller was not listening.

  I could tell that his mind was elsewhere.

  Suddenly the words came pouring out, as if for years he had doggedly kept some dangerous secret behind closed lips, only to release it with an abrupt cry: ‘At last! Today my plumb-line touched bottom.’

  We stared at him, uncomprehending.

  I was so mesmerised by the strangely quivering tone of his voice that for a while I only listened with half an ear to his explanations of the process of measuring the depths of the ocean. There were many chasms down there, he said, thousands of fathoms deep, maelstroms whirling round which swept up every plumb-line and held it there, not letting it reach the bottom unless some fortunate chance intervened.

  Then suddenly his voice erupted like a triumphal rocket as he declared: ‘It’s t
he deepest point on earth a human instrument has ever reached!’ and the words burnt into my mind, striking me with a terror for which I could find no reason. There was some kind of eerie double meaning in them, as if there were an invisible presence standing behind him and speaking to me in veiled symbols through his lips.

  I could not take my eyes off Radspieller’s face. How shadowy, how unreal it had become all at once! If I closed my eyes for a second I could see little blue flames flaring up round it: ‘Saint Elmo’s fire of death’ were the words that immediately came to mind and I had to force my lips to stay shut to stop myself shouting them out loud.

  As if in a dream, my mind was filled with passages from books written by Radspieller and which I had read, full of amazement at his learning. They were passages blazing with hatred of religion, faith and hope, of everything the Bible has to say about promises.

  It was, I somehow realised, the recoil from the fervent asceticism of a youth tormented by ardent longing that had sent his soul tumbling back down to earth: the pendulum of fate taking a man from light to darkness.

  I pulled myself out of the benumbing daydream that had taken possession of my senses and forced myself to listen to Radspieller’s story, the beginning of which still echoed in my mind, like distant, incomprehensible murmuring.

  He had the copper weight from his plumb-line in his hand, twisting it to and fro so that it glittered like a piece of jewellery. He went on:

  ‘You, as passionate anglers, call it exciting when you feel a sudden pull at the end of your line, which is only five hundred feet long, telling you that there is a large fish on the hook, that immediately a green monster will rise to the surface in a swirl of spray. Multiply that feeling by a thousand and you might perhaps understand what I felt when this lump of metal finally told me: You have touched bottom. I felt as if my hand had knocked at a door. It’s the end of the work of decades,’ he added softly. He was talking to himself and there was a note of apprehension in his voice. ‘What … what will I do tomorrow?’