Chapter 32Niobid ArmsNIOBIDENARME
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How can one seize hold of her, loneliness, how can one force her to bless us1, when she shakes us until we stiffen. Then we lie as if stunned and see only the one bright point — her! And then we see nothing at all any more — and lie as in a dull stupor. Alive and dead!
And we race through the world — we see the highest, the most beautiful — but it does not penetrate warmingly into our inward parts, we cannot get to it — between us and it a dark current rolls heavy, icy waters. And over the waters she passes, the dark woman, loneliness, the annihilator, and her eyes glow at us, bright, freezing. She passes by, but we go along with her, we keep the same time. Through all the sweetness of life that did not flower for us — past all the fragrances, all the raptures. Is this the summit? Or is it the descent already, faster and faster, and does it go down into the ghastly depths of annihilation? How toilsome the way was — how we have longed and feared and wrestled and gone without and worked and fought — from the awakening of our conscious youth onward! How we have knocked about with all our enemies. We meant to force them under our feet, to press the stamp of our personality on the world. Ever onward, year after year we have wanted that. And hope walked at our side and dripped balsam even into our despair. And she steeled us, gave new strength again and again. Without our knowing it ourselves! We wanted to be young, we wanted to stay young, inwardly and outwardly. To come to the summit as victors, and from its height, looking round us, to master the world. And we climbed — ah, what is the plural of majesty for (loneliness and I)2, I learned and looked, I worked inwardly. And I felt, and my feeling wore my strength away. As a child my parents said: “She has no heart!”3 Then feeling grew ashamed and hid itself inwardly and was afraid to show its own self. Cheerful and lively the world called me, and beautiful and amiable. But I was only lonely, and I sought a companion for the road — to the summit — to my summit.
I sought a companion for the road! And how often I deceived myself. And yet — every delusion of life — it was not in vain — it helped over many an abyss — it gave many a flowering — in poems and pictures — in courage and strength. — Today I know it — they were the emergency bridges over chasms. And they collapsed as soon as they had been crossed. Once, though, I believed I had the bridge over all the darkness of life, right into the fields of the blessed. It held five years4. For five years I lived consciously, an existence worthy of a human being, at the side of one great in spirit! How strong I was then, how I grew then in soul and in art. And then he went across — secretly, abruptly — just when I felt most sheltered. And I woke into an empty day, into an empty life. Then came despair, and made me seek help in other eyes. In eyes that had only a faint spark of the sun of his soul. And if that spark comforted me for only a day — what stretches of road I covered in that one day, how I came ever higher — ever higher. — But now hope has gradually been left behind me; loneliness looks ever deeper into my eyes. I gave my children away for a mess of pottage: the “good upbringing” and a fortune to be inherited. For seven years they fought with me, the clans, and talked of my want of true mother love5, which cannot sacrifice itself, which wants only its own comfort, the being together with the children, which cannot see what it is denying the children, how it is barring their way to their happiness in life. And after seven years I was worn down and gave away the last thing, my children. — I wanted to climb further, the old steep way, through burning sun and icy airs, the old familiar high path I have walked since my childhood. Then it suddenly seems to me that it is a false path, which never in this world leads to the summit, to the summit of my being. And a weariness creeps over me and hope has vanished.
Perhaps I have long since been at my summit, and it was not at all the height I dreamed of — and I look into night and darkness, into horror and terror. And all the work was in vain. And now I am on the descent again, into ghastly lowlands where adders and serpents have their dwelling — into want and a lonely death. I have lost my faith in the future, that divine credulity. All my supports are breaking down. And the way is dark and stony. And icy cold, or else scorching hot. And I stand and can go no further. I can only weep; I have forgotten my heights. Loneliness stares into my eyes, and despair is my companion for the road.
Then I seek the stupor. The stupor in work, the stupor in all the beauty of the world. I race through the countries! And I learn! Ever more, ever something new! But it helps me only now and then to feel the gaze of loneliness boring less deep in my soul.
For nearly a year I have not written at this. Today is a dull December day6, and I was ill for a long time. Before that I had much work again, and some success. New worlds of beauty and strength I have travelled through. My eyes are peculiar — in the width of the world they see only the wonders of beauty and sun. But when, dazzled by the light, I then look into myself, my gaze strikes a black wall, a surging chaos of blacknesses, the longer I look — and it seems to me I am looking into a gurgling gullet that is only waiting to swallow me. —
But I will not — will not!
I will carry over all the glorious things I have seen and all that I have won with a thousand pains and sufferings, over the abyss of my soul, in which despair crouches and madness — carry it to safety into Noah's ark, which juts like a tiny dot out of the flood of my sufferings, my experiences. I will not go under, I will not. What I once possessed shall shine imperishably and light up my nights.
And while I write this, loneliness grins over my shoulder, and I break down weeping. I am far too weak. Or all my drives and longings are far too strong to put up with the resignation of what is past. I try to hang my future about with coloured rags; there are real stones among them, but their brilliance can only shine on the hand of love. — I do not want the rags, I want a warm heart, a single one — and nothing further! It is all only a life-lie, a new one and the most unsteady emergency bridge of all.
I will look more closely at the “real” stones in the coloured rags of my life's fool's costume. They are called unlimited, unhindered freedom, to be here today and be able to go tomorrow to the equator, only so far, of course, as my modest means and the travelling ingenuity that goes with them allow. I will lift the full cup of the world's beauty to my thirsting lips and take a draught of it, an insatiable one. The drink is delicious when love pours it out. Handed over by loneliness, does it not become the cup of poison?
Every human being in the universe seems to me like a point and a circle. And this circle of his life-sphere and his interests is the same in nobody. From the circle of a pin-head's circumference to the circle of the genius that spans the world, I see them. And these billions of circles turn in a raging whirl about and within one another, like a monstrous system of wheels. Even if in this giant mechanism millions of circles become points again and vanish into nothing, then new millions stretch themselves up again into the circling of all living things, into the monstrous dance of death of the world. For they dance until the finger of annihilation wipes them out of the wheelwork, to make room and living air for new lovers of dancing. Living air! Few have it — and how few miss it. Most feel most comfortable in the warm suffocating fug of convention. That gives the empty brain support and strength. Why do I despise the great masses and would yet be happy if they cried hosanna to me? Happy in fame, the surrogate of love, in my surrogate. — — —
The Munich people give their newborns dummies dipped in beer7. When the children scream, such a “sucking-rag” is promptly stuffed into the little mouth. Then they fall silent — and beam and smile — and suck, suck steadily for hours, until they discover the deception. Very often, though, they do not discover it, for they have fallen asleep over the sucking. — — — I have often seemed to myself like such a poor, thirsting, helpless infant. As often as I scream — fate keeps putting new “sucking-rags” into my mouth. Then life, the implacable sphinx, seems to me to be showing a smiling face again, and I believe her again and am deceived again — for the thousandth time.
“Between the sea of stone on the horizon8 Something kindles at times like dawning worlds In a rosy shimmer and ... runs away into nothing. But I — I open my longing arms And rush to meet the rosy shimmer, But before it reaches the stone of my heart, It goes out again and I — must go on. And only the mocking shifting images Jeer ghost-like at extinguished life! Before every rosy shimmer I spread Niobid arms — for ever into the void!9”
Do many carry their life as heavily as I do? My soul is like a phonographic record. Every vibration from outside engraves a mark on it. But the music that comes of it is a ghastly dissonance. And life could give such deep and such sweet tones, could die away unearthly soft, like the music of the spheres.
For the soul that grasps everything, forgives everything, understands everything, only not the one thing, that it must be alone in this monstrous world, so crushingly, so annihilatingly alone. Why among all the millions of circles there is not one single one that swings at the same size and in the same time as hers. Shall I ever get used to this? — Shall I ever be otherwise, feel comfortable in the suffocating fug of convention? — Ah, and if I do, if I fatten myself a fat soul — have I not then lost my best, my eternal part?
Most of those who in so-called youth cherished glowing dreams and wishes lose them before their thirtieth year. And then they look down from their firm standpoint, their narrow circle, with contempt on the others, whose circle burns and trembles away so far from the world in golden lights. Over which their thousand longings flit, like the iris colours of the rainbow. A fat soul — that would give the strength to bear everything unwaveringly, so long as one has enough nourishing food and drink. How then am I to arrange my life so that loneliness does not eat my heart away — how am I to be made proof against her deadly cobra bite? To look her firmly in the abysmal eyes, to nestle into her ice-cold arms of bone: I am not afraid — I am with you, you can do nothing to me, you have taken everything from me already, now give me what you can give — greatness!10 — If I spoke to her so, should I not subdue her? For moments, perhaps; but when the flood of the years closes over me, must I not freeze to death? Freeze with a heart whose kindling could set worlds on fire? Ah, how, how can I ever subdue her, the fearful Titaness with the fist of bone and the abysmally deep eyes? Shall I not come after all to a sudden, a violent end, only to escape death by freezing? Led away by the man in the fool's costume with the glaring eyes?11 Or else, killed by the “fat soul” attained at last, will my eternal part, the running light of my thousand longings, die of fatty degeneration of the soul? How shall I end, how?
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑force her to bless us — Jacob at the ford in Genesis 32, wrestling until daybreak: “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.” Two chapters ago Jacob was quoted against her, by the man who took her children; here she takes the part herself. The verb is zwingen, and it is the memoir's word. In chapter 25 she curses the woman “whose genius cannot force down its womanhood”; in chapter 30 she hopes to “force the world to my feet” and to “force life to make me a present of one soul”; in chapter 29 she says she no longer believes she can force the world round to her at all. This chapter opens by turning the verb on loneliness itself and asking for a blessing out of the wrestling, and it will end by asking, twice, whether she can ever subdue her — “wie kann ich sie je bezwingen.” Everything in her life has to be taken by force, including consolation.
- ↑what is the plural of majesty for (loneliness and I) — She has been writing “we” for a page and a half and stops to say who the we is. It is not the royal plural: it is herself and loneliness, and they have been keeping the same time since the second sentence. The aside is the most technically striking thing in the chapter, and it does two jobs at once. It admits that the confessional “we” — the voice that says how we have longed and feared and wrestled, as though speaking for everyone — was a pretence; and it replaces the imagined company of readers with a companion she cannot get rid of. The next paragraph is about looking for a Weggenosse, a companion for the road, and by the end of the chapter despair has the post. The pluralis maiestatis is what a sovereign uses. She uses it for a woman alone in a house with her own loneliness, and then catches herself doing it.
- ↑“She has no heart!” — “Sie hat kein Gemüt” — Gemüt is the feeling heart, the inward warmth a person is supposed to have. To say a child has none is a hard verdict, and she gives it in her parents' voice, with the effect stated plainly in the next sentence: the feeling was ashamed and hid. Set against chapter 3's family scenes, this is the memoir's single most economical explanation of her. The child is told she is without feeling; the feeling goes underground and stays there; the world thereafter finds her cheerful, lively, beautiful, amiable — the four adjectives are a list of masks — and none of them is the case. Her whole adult pattern of vast declared emotion on paper and unreachable privacy in person is in this sentence, and she offers it without asking to be pitied for it.
- ↑It held five years — The Telmann marriage — the one bridge in her life that did not collapse under her, and the third time in four chapters she has counted it in years. It began with the wedding of June 1891 and ended with his death in January 1897. The image is worth keeping in mind for the rest of the memoir, because it explains the shape of the book. Every attachment is a Notbrücke, an emergency bridge thrown across a chasm, useful only for the crossing and gone the moment she is over — the Symbolist painter of chapter 25, the doctor's son of chapter 26, the Grand Duke of chapter 27. She does not regret any of them, because each one bought her a stretch of road and “manche Blüte — an Gedichten und Bildern.” The five years are the exception she measures all of it against, and she names him only as “einen Großen im Geist.”
- ↑For seven years they fought with me, the clans, and talked of my want of true mother love — The other side's case, in the other side's words — the only place in the memoir where the family that took her daughters is allowed to make its argument. It is a formidable argument and she sets it out at full length without answering it: that real mother love sacrifices itself, that hers wanted the comfort of having the children near her, that she could not see what she was withholding from them or how she was blocking their way to a happy life. Seven years of that is what she means by “mürbe” — worn soft, the word used of stone and of meat. Chapter 30 gives the same seven years from the outside, with the promises and the arithmetic; this paragraph gives what was said to her during them. Both should be read before deciding what happened in 1906.
- ↑For nearly a year I have not written at this. Today is a dull December day — The one place in the memoir where the writing itself is dated and interrupted: the book was laid aside for almost a year and taken up again on a December day, after a long illness. Chapter 12 dates the composition to 1917, and the memoir was published in 1926, seven years after her death on 12 December 1918. So this December is 1917 at the earliest — and if it were 1918, she had days to live. There is no way to settle which from inside the text, and forty-three chapters still follow, which argues for the earlier date. What the sentence does establish is that the book was written in bouts separated by illness, which is worth knowing when its chronology wanders: the chapters on either side of this gap were composed a year apart.
- ↑dummies dipped in beer — A real practice, and a shocking figure to build on: what quiets the child is not milk but the taste of something it cannot be nourished by, and the mercy is that it falls asleep before finding out. The image belongs with her other machines and substitutes — the coin-operated automat and the infant incubator she threw at Heinrich Mann in chapter 25, the gramophone record her soul turns into two pages further on, fame as the “Surrogat” of love in the paragraph just above. She thinks in terms of the thing that stands in for the thing, and here she is on the receiving end: not the artist who produces without carrying anything, but the baby given a rag to suck. It is also, in a chapter that follows the loss of her daughters, an image of a mother's substitute — and she does not point that out.
- ↑Between the sea of stone on the horizon — The poem is the end of “Wandelbilder” in Kreuz des Südens (1907) — and, as with the poem in chapter 26, she does not quote it as she printed it. The published poem opens with three stanzas the memoir drops, in which the great shining pictures have sunk into eternal darkness and she must drag through deserts “einen schweren Stein, wo mein Herz einst klopfte” — a heavy stone where her heart once beat. That is where the stone of the heart in line six comes from; without those stanzas the image arrives unexplained. Then the wording shifts throughout: the book has erglüht (glows) where the memoir has erglimmt (kindles), gestreift (grazed) where the memoir has erreicht (reached), a row of dashes where the memoir has an ellipsis, and an exclamation mark where the memoir has a full stop. The book also prefaces the last two lines with an ellipsis of silence. This is the second time she has quoted her own printed poem from memory or from a manuscript; the lesson from chapter 26 holds, and every poem in the memoir should be checked against the collections.
- ↑Niobid arms — for ever into the void! — The chapter's title, and its point: Niobe's children were shot down by Apollo and Artemis because their mother had boasted of having so many, and she was turned to a weeping stone. The woman who has just described giving her daughters away reaches out with the arms of the slaughtered children. The figure is not new to her — Tollkraut, in 1893, has a face “like Niobe's” and the line that the countenance of all mankind bears Niobid features — but its position here is everything. Chapters 28 to 31 are about losing Helga and Inge; this chapter is called Niobid Arms; and the myth she reaches for is the one in which a mother is punished for her children by having them killed in front of her, and then petrified in the act of grieving. Note too what she does with the arms: they are not the mother's, they are the children's, stretched out towards something that goes out before it can be reached. And the stone of the sea of stone, the stone of her heart, and the stone Niobe became are the same stone. (Niobe and the Niobids)
- ↑now give me what you can give — greatness! — The wrestling of the first sentence, completed: she cannot get rid of loneliness, so she embraces it and demands a blessing — and the blessing she asks for is not peace but stature. It is the bargain the whole memoir is written under. Chapter 25's curse falls on the woman whose genius cannot force down her womanhood; chapter 30 hopes to force the world to her feet and life to hand over one soul; chapter 29 gives up on forcing the world at all. Here the last thing left to wrestle is the loneliness itself, and the terms are exact: take everything, and pay me in greatness. She then answers her own proposal in the next clause — for moments, perhaps — and asks whether she will simply freeze.
- ↑Led away by the man in the fool's costume with the glaring eyes? — Madness, personified as the figure who comes for her — and dressed in the same fool's costume whose coloured rags she was examining a page earlier. The chapter's last three questions set out the three ends she can imagine for herself: freezing to death in the loneliness, a sudden and violent end to escape it, or the survival of the “fat soul” in which the eternal part dies of Seelenverfettung, fatty degeneration — a real pathological term of the day, used of the heart, turned on the soul. All three are ways of ending as something other than herself, and the last one is the one she seems to fear most. She died on 12 December 1918, of influenza, in the pandemic; the book she is writing here came out in 1926, seven years after, and this is the point at which it stops narrating her life and starts asking how it will finish.