Demian
“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.
CHAPTER SIX
JACOB WRESTLES WITH GOD
I cannot relate in brief all that I learned from the singular musician
Pistorius about Abraxas. The most important result of his teaching was
that I made a further step forward on the road to self-realization. I
was then about eighteen years old. I was a young man rather out of the
ordinary, precocious in a hundred things, in a hundred other things
backward and helpless. When from time to time I used to compare myself
with others, I was often proud and conceited, but just as frequently
I felt depressed and humiliated. I had often looked upon myself as a
genius, often as half mad. I could not share the pleasures and life of
the fellows of my age, and often I heaped reproaches on myself and was
consumed with cares, thinking I was hopelessly cut off from them, and
that life was closed to me.
Pistorius, himself full-grown and an eccentric, taught me to preserve
my courage and my self-esteem. In constantly finding some value in my
words, in my dreams, in the play of my imagination and in my ideas, in
taking them seriously and discussing them, he set me an example.
“You have told me,” he said, “that you like music because it is not
moral. Well, all right. But you should be no moralist yourself! You
should not compare yourself with others. If nature had created you to
be a bat, you ought not to want to make yourself into an ostrich. You
often consider yourself as singular, you reproach yourself with going
ways different from most people. You must get out of that habit. Look
in the fire, look at the clouds, and as soon as you have presentiments,
and the voices of your soul begin to speak, yield to them and don’t
first ask what the opinion of your master or your father would be, or
whether they would be pleasing to some god or other. One spoils oneself
that way. In doing that one treads the common road, becomes a fossil.
Sinclair, my dear fellow, the name of our god is Abraxas. He is God
and he is Satan; he has the light and the dark world in him. Abraxas
has no objection to urge against any of your ideas or against any of
your dreams. Never forget that. But he deserts you if you ever become
blameless and normal. He deserts you and seeks out another pot in order
to cook his ideas therein.”
Of all my dreams, that dark love-dream recurred most frequently. Often,
often have I dreamed of it; often I stepped under the crest with the
bird on it into our house, and wished to draw my mother to me, but
instead of her I found I was embracing the tall, manly, half-motherly
woman, of whom I was afraid, and yet to whom I was drawn by a most
ardent desire. And I could never relate this dream to my friend. I kept
it back, although I had opened my heart to him on everything else. It
was my secret, my retreat, my refuge.
When I was depressed, I used to beg Pistorius to play me the
Passacaglia of old Buxtehude. I sat in the dark church in the evening,
engrossed in this singularly intimate music, which seemed to be
hearkening to itself, as if entirely self-absorbed. Each time it did me
good and made me more ready to follow the promptings of my inward self.
Sometimes we stayed awhile in the church after the strains of the organ