Telegrams of the Soul (7 page)

As if a heart about to burst revealed its grief and then closed up again for eternity—. That's why I often turn to page 37 in Niggli's biography of Schubert.

(Deutsche Grammaphonaktiengesellschaft.)
C2-42531.
The Trout
by Schubert.

 

Mountain stream water burbling crystal clear between cliff and pine tree permutated into music. The trout, a ravishing predator, light gray with red speckles, lurking, standing, flowing, shooting forward, downward, upward, disappearing. Beautiful blood-thirstiness!

The piano accompaniment is sweet, soft, monotone of gurgling torrent, deep and dark green. Real life is no longer needed. We feel the fairy tale of nature!

Every day in Gmunden in the afternoon hours, a lady in a watch-maker's shop had them play the gramophone record C2-42531 two to three times. She sat on a tabouret, I stood close to the device.

We never said a word to each other.

Henceforth she would always hold off on the concert till I appeared.

One day she paid to have it played three times, whereupon she was about to leave. I paid to have it played a fourth time. She waited at the door, listened along to the end.

Gramophone record C2-42531, Schubert,
The Trout.

One day she didn't come any more.

The song survived like a present from her.

Autumn came, and the esplanade was lightly paved with scattered yellow leaves.

And then they shelved the gramophone in the watchmaker's shop since it no longer paid to keep it.

She sat by the immense ground floor window that almost reached down to the ground of the dusty, gray, miserable country lane, and sewed blouses on a lovely, glittering sewing machine from morning to night. Her eyes wore an expression of despair. But she herself was not aware of it. She sewed, sewed and sewed.

She was very slender, not made for the storm of life that shakes and sweeps away souls and bodies. In the evening she ate the cold vegetables from her midday meal. All this I saw through the immense ground floor window and she saw that I saw it all.

One evening she stood leaning against the front door of the house. And she said to me: “I've taken a job in a blouse factory in Mariahilf, so I won't have to work on my own any longer in this lonely room.”

And I thought: “Country lane, country lane, you've lost your sparkle, you've lost your riches.

“A person's got to get ahead in life, isn't that so?” she said, “and by the way, I've always watched you walk by my window, three times a day. Three times a day you walked by, that's right. But in Mariahilf there'll be forty girls, and we'll be able to chatter and work like in an anthill—.”

“Listen, Miss, I'll still walk three times past your window when you won't be seated there anymore—.”

“Will you really?!? Well, then in a way I'll still be there too, I'll be back home just like before—.”

“Maybe you could leave your glittering little sewing machine at the window and with it one of your unfinished blouses—.”

“Sure, why not, I will—.”

That was the only real true relationship I ever had with a female soul in my entire uneventful life—.

Country lane, gray, dusty country lane, so now you've lost your sparkle, you've lost your riches—. And she, she's going to work now, going out into the world—!

I know two people with true feelings of friendship for me, my brother and A.R. They understand everything I think, feel, say, derive from all these things the rosiest interpretation. They have absolutely no wish to set traps for me. They perceive only the worthwhile, ignore any possible sour notes without blinking. They draw off the cream from the beloved person, don't quibble about the watery milk that floats beneath it, but rather take it as a law of nature that the cream can't reach down all the way to the bottom—. They elucidate us according to our own ideals hidden within, not according to our all too conspicuous everyday failings! They watch for our rare highpoints, turning a blind eye to our depravities. They are noble interpreters, expounders of our true nature. They fathom our frailties, they respect our strengths. They deal with us as one does with purebred canaries, parrots, starlings, dogs, monkeys. One respects their innate character, but demands nothing impossible from them. One holds up their “distinctive” exceptional qualities. This benevolently sentimental form of even-keeled kindheartedness is called: friendship. Any other kind is a sham. This noble “eternal kindheartedness” is a gift of God! It is generally reserved for the dearly departed. Only after death do we fully fathom the distinctive qualities of a loved one, delve deeper into their essence, the living manifestations of which no longer disturb us. So long as he lived he committed the irritating maladroitness to be someone other in his thinking and feeling than ourselves!

A steamy sun-drenched quiet afternoon. I sit and write. Somebody knocks at the door. “Please do not disturb me, I must be alone!”

“Gee, Peter, I really just wanted to chitchat with you, it's so boring today, do you have office hours, are you poetizing?”

“Why the irony? Yes, I'm poetizing.”

“But Peter, you're not some kind of manual laborer, thank God you've got no steady job, you can go right back to composing your poetry undisturbed in two hours when I'm gone!?”

“Just try it some time, you don't seem to understand much about this kind of work!”

“That's a new one, a poet who keeps office hours and refuses to receive a friend who'd just like to pleasantly chitchat with him. It's not like your
impressions
are going to evaporate away! Or are they?!”

“Would you ever think of troubling a lawyer, a doctor, a bank director while he was engaged in his work?!”

“Engaged in his work, Peter, come off it, yours isn't work in the ordinary sense of the word, it's a distraction, an amusement!”

“Do you wish to impede my distraction, my amusement with your pleasant
chitchat
?!”

“See you 'round, Peter, you're downright ungrateful to your admirers, but nobody takes you seriously, thank God. Adieu. Poet! I don't want to be the cause of
the world's
missing out on something! So long.”

No one man can abide another, in matters big or small, he just can't do it, that is his eternally unspoken tragedy. He can't give the reasons, which is why he must keep it to himself. That is his tragedy. He has no reason to be unhappy and yet he is, and so must bear it in silence. But when grief finally explodes it generally explodes wrongly and unjustly. Which is far worse. So to “grin and bear it” is the best thing to do. A “flare-up” calls for an immense reserve of spiritual strength and brutality, disregard for others. Who has it?! Who benefits from it?!?

So grin and bear it! Yuck!

Can you possibly know what plagues another, say your fellow man? The fact is, you don't even want to know. What a miserable doddering camel you are, loaded down, burdened with your own intimate woes. Your concern for others is a forced comedy you put on for your allegedly kind heart! Nobody has natural Savior-like inclinations. There is only one. And he got his just due, they finished him off, in fact. Interest?! At best you're interested in yourself and not even that, you're not wise enough to be so farsighted. You lend an ear, but that's the most tiresome thing of all, the fate of others. “Here, take twenty Crowns, but do shut up!” No, better let him get it off his chest—.

“The things Altenberg writes, we already know them anyhow!”

Because he writes in such a way as to give you the impression that you've always known it anyhow.

But it's only through him that you know that you've always known it anyhow, that is, ought to have known it!

You're embarrassed in front of yourself, to have fathomed it only now thanks to that crazy eccentric Altenberg!

There's only one way out:

“Well for crying out loud, I already thought that, knew that, long ago, do you have to spell everything out?! That Altenberg fellow is a nut, he has the need to enlighten!”

Do I really?! It's fine with me if the others fumble and falter on their own foolishness.

Why am I unsociable? I'll tell you. Say, for instance, I did not happen to be so, I would surely experience the following every evening at my regular café table where I retire to try and rest up after a hard day of doing nothing: “Do tell us, Peter Altenberg, I'm just dying to know, what's your position regarding the works of Karl Schönherr?!”
*
First of all, of course, I have no position, and second, if I had a position, I would have no burning need to impart it at 10:45 on the dot after the seventh mug of Pilsner! Or: “Gee, Peter, it's good to have met you in person, one thing I've always wanted to hear from your own lips, this business about women, dames, they always seem to have played a significant role in your life?! Do you really think they matter that much?!” But if you reply: “what matters to me is me and how I experience the various kinds of women!” then he says: “Naturally, you're all swelled heads, you scribblers!”

So now do you understand why I'm unsociable?! To which you'll promptly reply that that's just the way life is! Yes, but in my book it's different!

__________________

*
Karl Schönherr, 1867–1943, Viennese folk dramatist and doctor

Most people live out their life with an almost pathologically bottled up world view. The most insignificant occurrences in their own experience and the experiences of their few acquaintances not only preoccupy their thinking, but such people also unknowingly attempt to derive therefrom deep philosophical problems and universal judgments intended to open up wide-ranging perspectives! “So what are we to conclude from the fact that Anna had to go and buy herself this particular hat?! How are we to take an impartial position?! Is it just a whim, a childish folly, an impertinence, an extravagance, or should somebody in particular perhaps get upset about it?!? That too would be perfectly possible.” Everyone attempts with more or less skill to hang his own empty, irrelevant, ridiculous experiences onto the tail end of the conversation underway like a kind of “philosophical-historical” essay, which process one commonly calls “stimulating conversation.” “Wouldn't you also agree, despite everything, that G does not really appreciate B quite as much as she rightfully deserves, particularly under such extenuating circumstances?”—“Unfortunately, as much as I would like to, I cannot, ‘for reasons of principle,' give you an answer, madam, a principle, moreover, to which you yourself would surely adhere, although in any case a spark of truth appears to flicker forth from your question!” Such is “stimulating conversation!” No one is interested in anyone else, but he “psychoanalyzes” the other because it's “stimulating to dig around behind things and set yourself on a pedestal above them!” The “silent man,” the “silent woman” don't come off as wise or decent, but rather boring. “What does he, what does she take him or herself for?” Even the “ironic note” is a rotten dodge in the conversation. Should anyone ever seriously hazard a “fiery stand” in favor of something or other, then, following a brief artificial pause, the firebrand is taken aside: “But surely you couldn't possibly believe that yourself, do you?!?” Conversation is the Moloch that gobbles up and decimates the non-existent spirits and souls! At home one is one's own man, but in society one immediately becomes a philosopher
of life in general. Butchers, bakers, busy businessmen, salesmen do not suddenly transform themselves for hours on end into “universally thinking” philosophers predisposed to “look down on the swarming masses of humanity.” “It's easy enough to listen to Altenberg sound off; if it can't help you it can't harm you either, but that guy, he's one curious customer!” But those that seek to make us measure up to themselves, to lead us back to the reasonable, salubrious, normal, decent, useful mien, only they make—conversation with us!

I received a Crown, dated 1893, the face of which was polished and in which the name “Albert” had been engraved. I immediately felt that in such an unusual case poets had the duty to let their imagination ramble. In any case, it was surely a “she,” who, through a circumstance unknown to us, had had this consecrated Crown—perhaps the first lavished on her or the last—so transformed, and in a moment of material need or out of hatred, jealousy, despair, contempt or the like, had sent it back in circulation, back into the current of life, till finally, in 1914, it came to me.

I cherished it for the longest time, and Maeterlinck would have made a one-act out of it: Crown 1893. But when the valet Anton requested payment for cigarettes and I said, at the moment I had no change on hand, he pointed to the 1893 Crown lying on the desk and said: “There's a coin over there!”—“It's invalid!” I said, “just look at it!”—“I'll make do with it, you can count on my dexterity, Sir, nobody'll notice that stupid word “Albert!” And thus did that 1893 Crown slip out of my possession and resume its worldly circulation, which I, in an application of “false Romanticism” had temporarily held up—.