English Studies Forum

by searching out origins one becomes a crab

an excerpt from nietzsche’s kisses

 Lance Olsen

The cream cake is undoubtedly among Germany’s most valuable contributions to Europe, Friedrich thinks, attempting to make himself comfortable inside the cramped tool shed at the back of his mother’s cramped garden.

Lisbeth is standing in front of him in her Easter dress. 

Impatiently.

 It is April.  It is 1859.  It is Naumburg.

France and Piedmont are at war with Austria and a new book by a British naturalist named Charles Darwin claims we are all in actual fact just monkeys with minds.

            Still, it is a holiday.

It is a holiday and it is warm and it is sunny and inside a furry bee is ticking against the cloudy windowpane while Friedrich thinks about cream cakes.

The bee meanders away. 

The bee returns. 

Outside, bird diction is general.  

A cart rattles and clops by in the lane and on the other side of the garden wall the cart’s horse snorffles loudly.

Friedrich tries to contemplate the sugar, butter, the crumbly excellence of the cream cake, but finds himself instead imagining his mother moving through the hushed rooms in the house across the small stone patio. 

Perhaps she is checking on Alwine’s work, perhaps searching for a lost thimble.

In Friedrich’s imagination, she is humming to herself distractedly, gliding through last year or the year before while he is busy preparing to step into tomorrow. 

He tries not to imagine it that way, yet can’t help himself. He guiltily admits when he is away at boarding school and pictures her he misses her terribly.  When he is home on holiday he feels almost nothing except the need to walk out the front door and begin to travel beyond her because no one returns from a trip the same person who left. 

His need has something to do with the closed-off scent of number 18 Weingarten, like a quilt before spring airing, the motionlessness, how his mother wears the same plain dress month after month only to replace it with one almost identical to it.

Friedrich experiences a frothy sensation. Although his teachers at Pforta seem to consider him merely competent, industrious and conscientious among many other industrious and conscientious students, he knows every evening in addition to his regular studies he also composes poems, keeps a notebook, and performs experiments in the autobiographical essay until the blue phantoms begin to lap behind his eyelids and his vision smudges. These days he cannot stop thinking and feeling and sometimes he sleeps only four or five hours a night. Pages and pages of ideas unspool from his forehead like Rapunzel’s hair from her tower. 

Friedrich knows most are boyishly trite and overstated and unrefined, a fourteen-year-old’s insights prinked out in faux-adult phrasing and syntax. 

He is continually dissatisfied with who he is and what he has accomplished and longs to enter the future, yet the future is always happening somewhere else much more engaging.

Math is another story, needless to say. 

Math and, oddly, modern languages. 

The headmaster knocked on his door as he was packing for this visit and warned him in no uncertain terms if things did not change with respect to his dreadful arithmetic papers and change soon it is quite possible Friedrich would never graduate, nor can Friedrich bring himself to believe completely the Italians and French and English don’t secretly think in German.

Surely they dream in Greek.

Who doesn’t?

But Friedrich can only do Shakespeare in translation, Voltaire with an open dictionary on his desk, and you would think Italian is simply slurred Latin without the tangly declensions although you would be entirely mistaken.

On the other side of the garden, Friedrich’s past is gliding through the rooms of the butterscotch house with green shutters and Lisbeth is standing in front of him here in the tool shed. 

Impatiently. 

An hour after lunch, she found him with a book on his bed (he almost never reads them cover to cover anymore, just thumbs through searching for passages that excite him) and told him she wanted to show him something, come along with her, and now her needle lips are moving.

When they cease, the future will have commenced.

Friedrich thinks about cream cakes, attempting to make himself comfortable in preparation for its arrival, only he is having an enormously difficult time.  He imagines how a bite falls to pieces and melts on your tongue like a cube of bready ice, returning matter to Democritus, but his little sister is standing in front of him and he couldn’t have envisioned things more differently and now his sister is saying Come on.

Come on, she is saying.  Let me show you.

Her sandblond hair is arranged in pigtails, her Easter dress white with pale blue cornflowers dappled across it. 

Her eyes are the color of pewter.

Most of us don’t so much live life as get lived by it, Friedrich understands.  He tries to remember to mention this finding to Lisbeth later.  At the moment, however, he is occupied with locating something worthy to say about the current circumstances.

I don’t know, he responds.

Lisbeth appraises him for a very long time, then snorts.

Of course you don’t, Fritz.  You never know.  Come on.  Let me show you.  Let me show you what I learned.

My stomach doesn’t feel so good.

Lisbeth looks at him as she might a recently opened jigsaw puzzle splashed across the tabletop before her.

You’re such a baby, she says. You’re such a little baby. You want to know something?

She generates a sound very close to a hiss and turns toward the door.

This is totally stupid, she says.  I’m going back in.

She turns toward the door and something in Friedrich turns, too. He knows she knows what he knows he is going to do in another second and her knowing makes him feel ashamed, yet he is already asking her to stay because it is not something he can help. Lisbeth stops, hand on the rusty knob, considering.

Friedrich hears himself promising he’ll be good.  He’ll do anything she wants.

The bee is back at the windowpane, ticking, and the horse-drawn cart has moved on, and the past continues humming to itself distractedly as it glides through hushed rooms between Friedrich’s ears. 

Lisbeth’s thumb and forefinger slide down to the latch. 

The tumbler clacks locked.

And the moment enlarges, becomes glassy with reality: every corner of the shed takes on glistening highlights.

            Okay, she says at last with a sigh, fine, fine, fine, Fritz, except it isn’t Lisbeth’s voice speaking to him.

            It is Cosima’s.

            Surprised, he raises his head and finds himself strolling arm in arm with her along a sugary snow-packed path lined with graygreen pines on the southern shore of Lake Lucerne. 

            It is Tribschen. It is 1872. The Franco-Prussian War is behind them and the Parisian communards have once again proved the dangers of the democracy by burning down the Tuileries. 

            Still, Friedrich’s first book has just appeared.

            Friedrich’s first book has just appeared and Wagner has just read it and there is nothing as unspoiled as the appearance of one’s first book. 

            All the other books one will ever write will in some sense amount to the same book, the same sensation, diluted, but one’s first is all about a promising glow: anything can happen immediately before and immediately after one’s first book’s publication.

            Cosima and Friedrich are arm in arm in bulky winter coats, deeply engaged in discussing nothing special.

            She points out the appealing shape of a leafless larch on the hillside up by the villa and Friedrich speculates on the species of a small bluebrown bird hopping atop the snowcrust. 

            It is a perfect winter day.  He feels relaxed, loose.  He takes in a lungful of frosty air and holds it.

            Four or five meters ahead, Wagner isn’t so much strolling as plowing through the afternoon in his Dutch painter’s costume with his gnarled walking stick, shouting observations about The Birth of Tragedy over his shoulder in great clouds of steam.

            Snow powder dissolves off the dipping branch of a pine and the atmosphere micas and Richard calls back Astounding, Fritz! Astounding!  You are the only real benefit apart from my dear Cosima that life has brought me! You have arrived, my friend! You have arrived! and Cosima and Friedrich laugh and Friedrich feels fresh and wild and Cosima calls out Everyone loves you, Richard! and then squeezes Friedrich’s arm like they are sharing a secret.

            Friedrich met them four years ago in Brockhaus, shortly after Cosima left that mediocre pianist Hans von Bülow for Wagner.  Friedrich assumed he had been invited to a musical soireé that evening and dreaded it, but when he showed up on the doorstep in an old suit in the middle of a downpour (he had had a new one made specially for the occasion, but at the last moment discovered he couldn’t afford to pay the tailor) he discovered it was to be a private meeting instead.

            He couldn’t believe his luck.

            The master and his mistress wanted to talk to the clever young philologist about Schopenhauer and the clever young philologist couldn’t hear enough about the master’s theories concerning Total Artwork, the aesthetic chimera that would fuse and confuse music and drama and painting and mime. 

            They hit it off brilliantly, exchanged ideas until past eleven, and, by the time Friedrich said goodbye, a genuine friendship had opened up among them.

            A few weeks later, Friedrich began what would become his regular visits to their villa in Tribschen where they continued their ongoing conversation.  They took daily walks, spent evenings listening to Wagner play the piano, shared round-robin readings of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s fictions by the fire.  Mornings, Friedrich worked on his university lectures and brought to fruition his monograph on Wagner’s renaissance of the Dionysian in art before descending the twenty steps from the second floor into companionship. 

            As his mother and sister fell farther and farther behind him on the tracks, unable to keep up, Friedrich came to think of Richard and Cosima as his adopted family, the one that would usher him into this new period in his life.

            Anything can happen immediately before and immediately after one’s first book’s appearance—and then the possibilities begin to close off, drop away. Friedrich wanted to deliver a centaur into the world by producing philosophical music with words rather than notes.  Under the cloak of scholarship, he wanted to lure his readers out onto the dance floor and break up their thoughts by thinking. 

            But truth was no one said much of anything about The Birth of Tragedy after its publication and slowly a few reviews bobbed up here and there and they were universally negative. They argued Friedrich had broken ranks with serious philologists, adopted a facile intellectual dilettantism, made an unsightly joke out of Greek culture. 

            Friedrich hated the academic factory for how it hobbled across the town square instead of waltzing.

            It was the age of the railroad and vaccinations, of blast furnaces and fertilizers, of the founding of the German Empire and the creation of the postal system, and yet scholars turtled their way along doing what they had always done in the manner they had always done it because they could not bring themselves to imagine there might be something else to do in some other mode and it was a terrible thought to contemplate how an immense number of mediocre minds were occupied with remarkably influential matters.

            Anyone stupid enough to follow rules deserves them.

            And yet here he is.

            Here he is on this perfect winter day, arm in arm with Cosima, listening to the most eminent artist of the nineteenth century inflate his head with praise.

            Richard already applauded The Birth of Tragedy in public, and, when Friedrich contemplated resigning his professorship to take up work as a publicist for him in Bayreuth, Richard dissuaded him on the grounds Friedrich still had a few things left to teach Basel.

            What is important is Friedrich feels truly healthy, truly satisfied, only when he has just produced something.

            The weather on those days is always invigorating.

            What is important, what would always be important, is this stroll, this afternoon, the way the sun astonishes the snow along this tree-lined path stretching out before them.

            Think of it, Fritz! Wagner is shouting back over his shoulder in clouds of steam, plowing forward into the alpine splendor. Think of it!  What a sense of pride knowing I need no longer provide commentary on my work!  I can leave everything to you!  I am in capable hands! I am in the hands of an exceptional young talent who understands precisely how the great Wagner liberated art by pissing with Dionysus on the mythological stage of world history! 

            Listen to what I am about to say! 

            It is the most profound thought Wagner has ever had!

            Are you listening? Are you listening?  Because Wagner says: fuck l’art pour l’art!  Fuck the petty symbolists!  Stand back, he says, and behold Herr Professor Nietzsche behold the genius of the primordial mystery!

            Except.

            Except Friedrich is not in the snow anymore.

            He is in the attic. 

            Wagner is gone.  Ariadne is gone.  The Sirens have fallen silent.

            An hour ago, surely no more than two, he entered an extended passageway.  The surface of the wall along which he ran his right hand for steerage was abrasive and porous like coal.  He tried counting his footsteps to keep track of his progress in the dark, only he lost the tally somewhere around two thousand.  He shuffled forward so long he began to suspect perhaps he wasn’t shuffling forward at all.  Perhaps he had come to a halt and was puppet-marching in place, hand resting on the wall for support, energy all burned up.

            No, he is sure he was moving: hot air passed over him and his hand kept tracking along the gritty plane, convinced sooner or later it would locate the genitalia of a door. 

            It was simply a matter of time: anyone who knows how to listen well to music knows the most poignant thing about any composition is how it will always eventually end.

            Then the passageway evaporated and his hand was tracing air and Friedrich developed two theories to account for this. First, there was a chance the passageway had opened onto a colossal room, a great blackout hall, whose borders Friedrich could no longer detect because they were so far away from him. Second, there was a chance Friedrich had never really been in a passageway at all, but rather had imagined it because the human is the only animal to experience boredom and hence there is art.

            Now he pauses, breathing, sensing heat emanating from his body.

            The best thing for a person in life, he decides, wondering which way to go, which way he came from, what exactly he is doing here, where here is, what time of day it is, what month it is, what century it is, when he will find his bed again, why Ariadne has departed and left him here, which is heavier, lead or longing, why his moustache continues to grow when everything else about him seems intent on shrinking, is never to have been born. 

            He reaches down to loosen his belt buckle and free some of the tightness around his distended belly.

            Then he remembers he isn’t wearing a belt.

            Then he remembers he isn’t wearing trousers.

            Then he remembers his belly should no longer be distended. 

            He has taken care of his watery business recently: of this he is one hundred percent not unconfident. 

            Yet his belly feels like there is a baby kicking inside.

            He decides the second best thing for a person in life is to die as soon as possible.

            At which point he hears a door slam.

            Startled, Friedrich flinches and the baby flinches and Friedrich’s hands flap up in search of safety.

            It is Richard and Richard is furious. 

            Friedrich and Cosima are sitting very quietly at right angles to each other in plush chairs in the gaudy drawing room at the family villa in Bayreuth.  They are listening to Wagner rage upstairs. He is slamming one door, tramping across their heads, slamming another, tramping back, opening and re-slamming the first.

            Friedrich’s chair is so soft and massive he worries it may be trying to consume him.  His elbows are up around his ears. He is sinking fast and Cosima is asking him how he could do such a thing.

            How could you do such a thing, Fritz? she is asking.  What were you thinking?  What in heaven’s name were you thinking?

            Friedrich, sinking, glares straight ahead, refusing to answer.

            It is Wahnfried. It is 1874. In January, Friedrich’s second Untimely Meditation appeared and almost no one except a few polite friends took notice.  In February, he looked up from his lecture notes to discover he was teaching a total of five students.

            In June, Brahms gave two concerts in Basel and Friedrich attended both. Afterward, he bought the large red bound piano score of Triumphlied.  Packing for his summer visit to the Wagners two months later, he tossed the score into his suitcase on a whim.

            Not a whim, strictly. 

            It was no secret how much Richard disliked Brahms.  He found him fatuous and restrained in a manner only a good German pretending he wasn’t fatuous and restrained could achieve.  Friedrich didn’t think much better of the music, but that wasn’t the point when he left the score on Wagner’s piano his first night at the villa so every time Wagner entered the room he would see it and know who brought it.  Before going to bed, Cosima slipped it into the piano bench.  The next morning Friedrich woke early and put it back on Wagner’s piano. 

            Brahms had forgotten Dionysus.  He didn’t give a fig for the future.  But that wasn’t the point when Friedrich made sure he was playing the bufflehead’s music as Cosima and Richard returned from their stroll through the hilly city center that afternoon.  Friedrich had excused himself from the constitutional, saying he needed to stay behind to get a little writing done, and then had paced the villa until he heard the couple returning up the walk.  He trotted over to the piano, took his seat, and launched into the composition fortissimo. 

            Bent over the keyboard, Friedrich could hear the heavy front door open and close.  He could hear Cosima and Richard’s laughter break off. He could hear Richard blunder up the staircase as if without warning the powers had turned him into a bull.

            Now Friedrich is being ingested by a large plush chair while Cosima is asking him what in heaven’s name he was thinking. 

            Richard rumbles and cracks above them. 

            The summer air is warm and dead. The drawing room reeks of Richard’s too-sweet patchouli. Glaring straight ahead, Friedrich thinks about what Friedrich was thinking. Friedrich was thinking Richard was a fraud.  That is what Friedrich was thinking.  Yet he cannot bring himself to articulate this idea fully because he cannot find it within himself to hurt Cosima. 

            This isn’t hurt.  

            This isn’t even close to hurt. 

            True, Richard continues to talk and write passionately about musical revolution. Watch him in public, though, watch him interact with the self-important bourgeoisie and frilly aristocrats, and you don’t see a redemptive artistic tempest.  You see an overdressed sycophant prancing back and forth, relishing the attention he is receiving.  Attend one of his performances, and you don’t see the beginning of tomorrow.  You see overbearing people more interested in a good meal and a good bottle of wine than in being made new.

            Recently, the Total Artwork has seemed to Friedrich less about absolute transformation than amusement and entertainment at any cost, a banal spectacle designed to keep the herd distracted and eager to return for more. 

            Listen closely, and you can hear angel wings flapping lightly among its notes. 

            Friedrich hates angels.

            Talk to me, Fritz, Cosima is saying.  Talk to me.  We have been good friends for how long?  How many good times have we shared?  Richard has worked diligently on your behalf.  How in the world could you bring that … that composer into our house by way of thanks?

            Friedrich wants to be angrier than he is, but he is unable to rise to the occasion.  There is a moment in most friendships when the friendship inexplicably becomes something less than itself.  There is a hole-in-the-heart curve you round where the collective history and agreeable feelings dematerialize with the minor recognition of the way someone lifts a glass of brandy or scratches his neck, although no one involved can bring himself to acknowledge the modulation. 

            Wagner was funny and outlandish and brilliant and faithful.  

            Now he is just one more of Friedrich’s illnesses.  

            Friedrich understands he will not be returning to Wahnfried and will not be returning to Tribschen and will not be meeting with the Wagners for another year, maybe two, and then only as someone else. 

            With that, his ego becomes a figure of speech and his face starts to soften. 

            Friedrich looks fatigued on the field of thought.

            Step by step, he blinks himself back into this drawing room and back into this warm too-sweet summer day.

            He sits up in the ominous chair and turns to Cosima and reaches forward and lays a graceful hand on one of hers and smiles awkwardly.

            They remain like that.

            They remain like that some more.

            I’m sorry, Ariadne, he says at last.  I really am.  I don’t know what came over me.  Sometimes I’m not myself and then I am.  I’m sorry.  Do you think perhaps we could go upstairs together to apologize?

            Okay, she says with a sigh, fine, fine, fine, Fritz, except it isn’t Cosima’s voice speaking to him.

            It is his llama’s. 

            It is Lisbeth’s.

She tests the latch on the tool shed door and next she is standing in front of him in her Easter dress, less impatiently, and the furry bee is back at the windowpane. 

You have to do everything I tell you, she say.

Friedrich nods.

Because this thing? You think it’s going to be one way, only it’s something else completely.  Look …

And then she is showing him with her coarse hands some of the many methods by which a human being can be punished because slaves need masters as much as masters need slaves and this is how we purchase clemency and this is how we purchase forgiveness.

Tell me what I am doing, she says, doing things.

What?

Tell me what I am doing, she says.  Say it out loud.

Friedrich, kneeling beside himself kneeling, begins to narrate the present moment expanding around them and expanding through them and he feels at home and he feels farther away from home than he has ever felt.

Tell me what I am doing now, Lisbeth says, and he does.

He tells her and he tells her.

The telling makes him feel slack and alert.

And now, she says, her pewter eyes shut and her sandblond pigtails dangling down behind her and her Easter dress white with pale blue cornflowers.  Tell me what I am doing now.

Friedrich kneels beside himself kneeling on the packed dirt floor, sweating, powerfully aware of the mud-spattered shovel, the rake, the trowel hanging on rusty hooks, the rusty bucket and rusty watering can on the dilapidated gray table in the corner, the dust circulating in the day’s growing heat, the ancient scent of soil and the bright scent of his sister, trying for a while to remember what it was he was meaning to remember, and then giving himself over fully to the joyful shameful remoteness of this event, because thoughts are to the brain as bile is to the liver.

And now, says Lisbeth.  What am I doing now?

You are doing this, he says softly, making his sister vocabulary. 

And now?

You are doing this, and I am doing this, and you are doing this, and now you are doing this, and now this, and now this, and now this …

© Lance Olsen, 2004