“I was lonely and perplexed,” I related. “I called to mind a friend of
former years who, I think, knows a great deal. I had painted something,
a bird coming out of a terrestrial globe. I sent this to him. After a
time, when I had begun to lose hope of a reply, a piece of paper fell
into my hands. On it was written: ‘The bird fights its way out of the
egg. The egg is the world. Whoever will be born must destroy a world.
The bird flies to God. The name of the god is Abraxas.’”
He answered nothing. We peeled our chestnuts and ate them, and drank
our wine.
“Shall we have another drink?” he asked.
“Thanks, no. I don’t care much for drinking.”
He laughed, somewhat disappointedly.
“As you wish! I am different. I am staying here. You can go now!”
The next time I saw him after the organ recital, he was not very
communicative. He conducted me through an old street to an old, stately
house and upstairs into a large, somewhat gloomy and untidy room where,
besides a piano, there was nothing to indicate that its occupant was a
musician. Instead, a huge bookcase and writing table gave the room a
somewhat scholarly air.
“What a lot of books you have!” I said appreciatively.
“A part of them belongs to the library of my father, with whom I
live. Yes, young man, I live with my father and mother, but I cannot
introduce you to them, as I and my acquaintances meet with but scant
respect at home. I am a prodigal son, you see. My father is very much
looked up to, he is a well-known clergyman and preacher in this town.
And I, to let you know at once, am his talented and promising son, who,
however, is guilty of many back-slidings, and, to a certain extent,
mad. I was studying theology, and deserted this worthy faculty shortly
before my final examination, although really I am still in the same
line, as far as concerns my private studies. For me it is still of the
highest importance and interest what sort of gods people have invented
for themselves at various times. I am a musician into the bargain, and
shall soon get a post as organist, I think. Then I shall be in the
church again.”
I glanced over the backs of the books and found Greek, Latin, Hebrew
titles, as far as I could see by the feeble light of the lamp on the
table. My acquaintance, meanwhile, had taken up a position on the floor
in the dark by the wall.
“Come here,” he called after a while, “we will practice a little
philosophy. That means keeping one’s mouth shut, lying on one’s stomach
and thinking.”
He struck a match and applied it to the paper and wood in the
fireplace, in front of which he was lying. The flame leapt up; he poked
and blew the fire with great skill. I lay down near him on the ragged
carpet. He stared into the flames, which drew my attention as well, and
we lay silent for perhaps a whole hour stretched out in front of the
flaring wood fire. We watched it flame and roar, die down and flicker
up again, until finally it settled down into a subdued glow.
“Fire worship was not by any means the silliest form of worship
invented,” he murmured without looking up. Those were the only words
spoken. With staring eyes I gazed into the fire. Lulled by the
tranquillity of the room, I sank in dreams, seeing shapes in the smoke
and pictures in the ashes. Once I started up. My companion had thrown
a little bit of resin into the glow. A little slender flame shot up,
I saw in it the bird with the gold hawk’s head. In the glow which
died away in the fireplace, golden glittering threads wove themselves
together into a net, letters and pictures, memories of faces, of
animals, of plants, of worms and serpents. When I woke from my reveries
and looked across at my companion, he was absorbed, staring at the
ashes with the fixed gaze of a fanatic, his chin in his hands.
“I must go now,” I said softly.
“Well, go then, good-bye!”
He did not get up, and as the lamp had gone out, I had to feel my way
across the dark room, through dark corridors and down the stairs, and
so out of the enchanted old dwelling. Once in the street I stopped and
looked up at the house. In not one of the windows was a light burning.
A little brass-plate shone in the gleam of the gas-lamp before the door.
“Pistorius, vicar,” I read thereon. As I sat in my little room after
supper I remembered that I had learnt nothing about Abraxas, or
anything else from Pistorius. We had scarcely exchanged ten words.
But I was quite contented with the visit I had paid him. And he had
promised to play next time an exquisite piece of organ music, a
Passacaglia by Buxtehude.
Without my having realized it, the organist Pistorius had given me a
first lesson, as we lay on the floor in front of the fireplace of his
melancholy hermit’s room. Staring into the fire had done me good, it
had confirmed and set in activity tendencies which I had always had,
but had never really followed. Gradually and in part I saw light on the
subject.
When quite a child I had from time to time the propensity to watch
bizarre forms of nature, not observing them closely, but simply
surrendering myself to their peculiar magic, absorbed by the
contemplation of their curling shapes. Long dignified tree-roots,
colored veins in stone, flecks of oil floating on water, flaws in
glass--all things of a similar nature had had great charm for me
at that time, above all, water and fire, smoke, clouds, dust, and
especially the little circulating colored specks which I saw when I
closed my eyes. In the days following my first visit to Pistorius this
began to come back to me. I noticed that I was indebted solely to
staring into the open fire for a certain strength and pleasure, for
the increase in my depth of feeling which I had felt since. It was
curiously beneficial and enriching--dreaming and staring into the fire!
To the few experiences I had gained on the road to the attainment of my
proper ends in life was added this new one: The contemplation of such
shapes, the surrendering of oneself to these irrational, twisting, odd
forms of nature, engenders in us a feeling of the harmony of our inner
being with the will which brought forth these shapes; we soon feel the
temptation to look upon them as our own creations, as if made by our
own moods; we see the boundary between ourselves and nature waver and
vanish; we learn to know the state of mind by outside impressions, or
by inward. In no way so simply and so easily as by this practice do we
discover to what a great extent we are creators, to what a great extent
our souls have part in the continual creation of the world. Or rather,
it is the same indivisible godhead, which is active in us and in
nature. If the outside world fell in ruins, one of us would be capable
of building it up again, for mountain and stream, tree and leaf, root
and blossom, all that is shaped by nature lies modeled in us, comes
from the soul, whose essence is eternity, of whose essence we are
ignorant, but which is revealed to us for the most part as love-force
and creative power.
Many years later I found this observation confirmed in a book, one of
Leonardo da Vinci’s, who in one passage remarks how good and deeply
moving it is to look at a wall on which many people have spat. He felt
the same sensation before those spots on the wet wall as Pistorius and
I before the fire.
At our next meeting the organist enlightened me still further on the
subject.
“We confine our personality within much too narrow bounds. We count as
composing our person only that which distinguishes us as individuals,
only that which we recognize as irregular. But we are made up from
the entire world stock, each one of us, and just as in our body is
displayed the genealogical table of development back to the fish
stage and still further, so we have accumulated in our souls all the
experiences through which a human soul has ever lived. All the gods and
devils which have ever been, whether those of the Greeks or Chinese
or Zulus, all are in us, are there as potentialities, as desires,
as starting points. If all mankind died out, with the exception of
a single moderately gifted child, who had not enjoyed the slightest
instruction, so would this child rediscover the whole process of
things; it would be able to produce gods, demons, paradises, the
commandments and prohibitions, old and new testaments--everything.”
“Well and good,” I objected; “but then what does the worth of the
individual consist of? Why do we continue to strive if everything has
already been achieved in us?”
“Stop!” exclaimed Pistorius vehemently. “There is a great difference
between whether one merely carries the world in oneself, or whether one
is conscious of that as well. A madman can have ideas which remind one
of Plato, and a pious little boy in a Moravian boarding school will
recreate in his thought profound mythological ideas which occur in the
gnostics or in Zoroaster. But he does not realize it! He is a tree or
a stone, at best an animal, as long as he does not know it. But, when
the first spark of this knowledge glimmers in him he becomes a man. You
will not consider all the two-legged creatures who walk out there in
the street as human beings, simply because they walk erect and carry
their young nine months in the womb? Look how many of them are fish or
sheep, worms or leeches, how many are ants or bees. Well, in reach of
them are the possibilities of becoming human creatures, but only when
they feel this, it is only when, if even in part, they learn to make
them conscious, that these potentialities become theirs.”
Our conversations were somewhat after this style. They seldom taught
me anything completely new, anything absolutely surprising. But all,
even the most banal, hit like a light persistent hammer-stroke on the
same point in me, all helped in my development, all helped to peel
off skins, to break up eggshells, and after each talk I held my head
somewhat higher, I was more sure of myself until my yellow bird pushed
his beautiful bird-of-prey crest through the ruins of the world-shell.
We frequently related our dreams to one another. Pistorius knew how
to interpret them. A curious example comes to my mind. I dreamed I
was able to fly. I was flung through the air, so to speak--impelled
by a great force over which I had not the mastery. The sensation of
this flight was exhilarating, but soon changed to fear as I saw myself
snatched up involuntarily to risky heights. There I made the saving
discovery that I could control my rise and fall by arresting my breath
and by breathing again.
Pistorius interpreted it as follows: “The swing, which sent you
up into the air, is the great property of mankind, which everyone
possesses. It is the feeling of close relationship with the springs
of every force, but it soon causes anxiety. It is cursedly dangerous!
For that reason most people willingly renounce flying, preferring to
walk according to prescribed laws along the footpath. But not you. You
fly higher, as befits an intelligent fellow. And behold, you make a
wonderful discovery there, namely, you gradually get the mastery over
the impelling force. In other words, you acquire a fine little force of
your own, an instrument, a rudder. That is splendid. Without that one
goes floating into the air without any will of one’s own; madmen, for
instance, do that. They have deeper presentiments than the people on
the footpath. But they have no key and no rudder, they fall whistling
through the air, down into the fathomless depths. But you, Sinclair,
you manage all right! And how, pray? You probably don’t even know.
You manage with a new instrument, with a breath regulator. And now
you can see, that your soul isn’t really ‘personal’ at bottom. I mean
that you didn’t invent this regulator. It isn’t new. It is a loan, it
has existed for thousands of years. It is the balancing organ fish
have--the air-bladder. Even to-day we actually still have a few very
rare kinds of fish whose air-bladder is at the same time a sort of
lung; and on occasion can use it to breathe with. In your dream you
made use of your lungs in exactly the same way as these fish do their
air-bladder.”
He even brought me a volume on zoölogy, and showed me the original
drawings of these ancient fish. And with a peculiar thrill I felt an
organ of early evolutionary epochs functioning in me.