He had made himself a god. In this image of a Man there is no longer any question of conflict. He neither sacrifices himself to art, nor does he sacrifice art to life. Goethe’s work, which was a grand confession—“life’s traces,” he called it—is the poetic expression of his wisdom, and it fell from him like ripe fruit from a tree.
No station was too noble for his aspirations, no detail too insignificant for his attention. His life and work assumed grandiose proportions, an architectonic amplitude and majesty, for in both his life and his work there was the same organic foundation.
He is the nearest, with the exception of da Vinci, to the god-man ideal of the Greeks. In him soil and climate were at their most favorable. He had blood, race, culture, time—everything with him. Everything nourished him!
At this lofty point when Goethe appears, when man and culture are both at peak, the whole of past and future spreads out. The end is now in sight, the road henceforth is downward.
After the Olympian Goethe the Dionysian race of artists sets in, the men of the “tragic age” which Nietzsche prophesied and of which he himself was a superb example. The tragic age, when all that which is forever denied us makes itself felt with nostalgic force. Once again the cult of Mystery is revived.
Once again man must re-enact the mystery of the god, the god whose fertilizing death is to redeem and to purify man from guilt and sin, to free him from the wheel of birth and becoming. Sin, guilt, neurosis—they are one and the same, the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
The tree of life now becomes the tree of death. But it is always the same tree. And it is from this tree of death that life must spring forth again, that life must be reborn. Which, as all the myths of the tree testify, is precisely what happens.
“At the moment of the destruction of the world,” says Jung, referring to Ygdrasil, the world-ash, “this tree becomes the guardian mother, the tree of death and life, one ‘pregnant.’ ”
It is at this point in the cultural cycle of history that the “transvaluation of all values” must set in. It is the reversal of the spiritual values, of a whole complex of reigning ideological values. The tree of life now knows its death.
The Dionysian art of ecstasies now reasserts its claims. The drama intervenes. The tragic reappears. Through madness and ecstasy the mystery of the god is enacted and the drunken revellers acquire the will to die—to die creatively. It is the conversion of that same life instinct which urged the tree of man to fullest expression. It is to save man from the fear of death, so that he may be able to die!
To go forward into death! Not backward into the womb. Out of the quicksands, out of the stagnant flux! This is the winter of life, and our drama is to secure a foothold so that life may go forward once again. But this foothold can only be gained on the dead bodies of those who are willing to die.*
- Fragment from an unfinished book; The World of Lawrence.
Benno, The Wild Man from Borneo
BENNO HAS ALWAYS reminded me of a Sandwich Islander. Not only that his hair is by turns straight and kinky, not only that he rolls his eyes in delirious wrath, not only that he is gaunt and cannibalistic, positively ferocious when his breadbasket is empty, but that he is also gentle and peaceful as a dove, calm, placid, cool as a volcanic lake.
He says he was born in the heart of London, of Russian parents, but that is a myth he has invented to conceal his truly fabulous origin. Anyone who has ever skirted an archipelago knows the uncanny faculty which the islands have of appearing and disappearing. Unlike the mirages of the desert these mysterious islands do truly disappear from sight, do truly bob up from the unknown depths of the sea.
Benno is very much like that. He inhabits an archipelago of his own in which there are these mysterious apparitions and disparitions. Nobody has ever explored Benno with any thoroughness. He is elusive, slippery, treacherous, volatile, uncanny. Sometimes he is a mountain peak covered with bright snow, sometimes a broad glacial lake, sometimes a volcano spouting fire and brimstone.
Sometimes he rolls quietly down to the ocean front and lies there like a big white Easter egg waiting to be dipped and packed away in a softly padded basket. And sometimes he gives the impression of one who was not born of a mother’s womb, but of a monster who picked his way out of a hard-boiled egg. If you examine him closely you will see that he has rudimentary claws like the mock turtle, that he has spurs like the clover cock, and if you examine very closely you will discover that, like the dodo bird, he carries a harmonica in his right tubercle.
At an early age, a very early age, he found himself living the lonely, desperate life of a river pirate on a little island off Hell Gate. Near by was an ancient whirlpool, such as Homer speaks of in the Carthaginian version of the Odyssey. Here he perfected himself in that culinary art which was to stand him in good stead during his uninterrupted privations. Here he acquired a knowledge of Chinese, Turkestani, Kurd and the less well-known dialects of Upper Rhodesia.
Here also he learned to write in that hand which only the prophets of the desert have mastered, an illegible hand which is nevertheless intelligible to students of esoteric lore. Here too he gleaned an inkling of those strange Runic patterns which he was later to employ in his pink and orange gouaches, his linoleum fretworks, his arboreal hallucinations. Here he studied the seed and the ovum, the unicellular life of the animalculae which daily filled his lobster-pots. Here the mystery of the egg first engrossed him—not only its shape and balance, but its logic, its ordained irreversibility.
Over and over again the egg crops up, sometimes in a china blue dream, sometimes counterpointed against the tripod, sometimes chipped and nascent. Exhausted by ceaseless exploration and investigation Benno is forever returning to the source and fundament, the center of his own vital creation: the egg. Always it is an Easter egg, which is to say a holy egg. Always the lost racial egg, seed of pride and strength, which has perdured since the destruction of the holy temple.
When there is nothing left but despair Benno curls up inside his holy egg and goes to sleep. He sleeps the long schizophrenic sleep of the winter season. It is more congenial than running about looking for sirloin steaks and chopped onions. When he gets unbearably hungry he will eat his egg, and then for a time he sleeps anywhere, often right outside the Closerie des Lilas, beside the statue erected in memory of Marshal Ney.
These are the Waterloo sleeps, so to speak, when all is rain and mud—and Blücher never appears. When the sun comes out Benno appears again—alive, chipper, perky, sardonic, irritable, buzzing, questioning, dubious, querulous, suspicious, effervescent, always in blue overalls and sleeves rolled up, always a quid of tobacco in the corner of his mouth. By sundown he has made a dozen new canvases, large and small. Whereupon it is a question of space, of frames, of nails and thumb-tacks.
The cobwebs are shaken down, the floor washed, the ladder removed. The bed is left stranded in the middle air, the lice make merry, the cowbells ring. Nothing to do but to stroll out to Parc Montsouris. Here, denuded of flesh and raiment, deserted by human kind, Benno studies the tom-tit and the amarillo, makes note of the weather-cocks, tests the sand and gravel which his kidneys are constantly throwing out.
With Benno it is always a feast or a famine. Either he is loading crushed rock on the Hudson or he is painting the side of a house. He is a dynamo, a gravel-crusher, a lawn-mower, an eight-day clock all in one. Now and then he lies up for repairs; the barnacles are scraped off and all seams dried and caulked. Sometimes a new poop-deck is installed.
You look at his progeny and it is Easter Island by the Count Potocki de Montalk: new landmarks, new monuments, new relics, all slithering in a Camembert green light which comes up out of the bulrushes.
There he is, Benno, sitting in the midst of his archipelago, and the eggs running about like mad. Only new eggs this time, with new equilibrium, all frolicking on the greensward. Benno, fat and lazy, lolls in the sun with the gravy running down his chops. He reads last year’s newspapers to while away the time.
He invents new dishes made of sea-weed and scallops, or failing scallops, mountain oysters. All with a dash of Worcestershire sauce and fried parsley. At such moments he loves everything that is succulent and bunting with juice. He tears the bones apart and growls like a contented wolf. He ruts.
As I say, all to conceal his fabulous origin. To conceal his monstrous birth Benno goes about smooth of tongue, sleek as a puma after the rains, talking now of this thing, now of that.
Inside him there is an unholy abracadabra fermenting. Strange equations form, queer plant-like growths, fungus, toadstools, marshmallow, poison ivy, the mandrake, the eucalyptus, all
