From: JOURNALS OF A CRACKED ONE
byANDREI BELY
The Reason For These Journals
The purpose of these journals is to tear the mask off myself as a writer; and to tell the story of myself – me, the man who one day received a shock which traumatised him for ever; a shaking which had prepared itself throughout my whole life. And then, one day, like a terrible volcanic eruption, it happened.
My life has progressively become the substance of my writing (…)
This trauma has overturned the conception I have had of my life. (…)
What I am offering you, in my journal, is the scaffolding of the building; as for the ‘building’ (whether novel or short story), there isn’t one.
I will not hide it: I could easily deceive the reader; and serve up, in my former style, the most refined, stylistic counterpoint – in well-turned images and phrases; but these pure artistic products will teach the reader nothing about what really happened to me (…)
I will hide it no longer: perhaps I will return one day to the old dissimulation of truth which has, until now, occupied the finest stylists of Europe; but it is necessary that I cry out to the reader, even if only once: the instrument we work with – the letters of our alphabet – is false, is a lie: for me, the instrument has been broken.
My truth is found outside the sphere of literature: I have only one way of attaining it: to expel from myself, in the guise of a novel, this strange journal. (…)
I, ‘so capable’ of fitting the emotions of the soul into the rhythm of my words, present myself before you in the a-rhythm of these few fragments; they are the fragments of my own life shattered by the explosion.
The events which abolished the face of the writer in front of you do not happen to everyone; I am, I admit, the most ordinary of humans; yes, but at least I am human; and we literary professionals are not always so.
I know this from my own experience. (…)
LÉONIDE LÉDIANOÏ
(…)The ‘talent’ you value so highly is but a false one, a very ordinary false one; we deceive ourselves with it, and obliterate the inner possibility of becoming human; like the soldiers of Herod, we massacre the innocent within us. I have been this soldier, pursuing an infant. On the pathway of the star, the blinding vision converted me (…) It is not the pharisees who saw the light, but the publicans.
TWO I’S
My very existence is a wholly indecent cry against the life vowed to its own destruction; and so there is something frightening in me: my strength is founded on neither fear nor power – it is in my total helplessness.
This is why they hate me: (…) I will be lost, but not without loving.
THE WAR
- The light of ecstasy, the light of wisdom, when one is incapable of mastering it, transforms into glorious, sensual colour (…)
The time preceding the War I unfolded amidst the tearing apart of my consciousness; Nelly and I were working on the wooden architraves of the Johannisbau: how happy we were in Dornach! Yet deep within, I felt the massing of suffocating clouds.
I imagined I could hear the sound of booming thunder, echoing through the expanses of the soul; monstrous desires took shape in regions of clear sight; the most vibrant colours imaginable solidified into the bodies of the irrepressible Rubens, and the festivals of the Renaissance were consumed by Rembrandt’s shadows: -
- the history of painting is the history of the fall of the soul…
…………………………………….
War broke out.
The first Autumn of the war, I thought: it is I who have caused it: it is in me it began; my conscious, dogged battles against my doublegangers had been raging since June (war broke out in August) –
- …when the greater I descended into my own I, I felt the whole world would reflect what takes place within each one of us -
……………………………………….
This corruptible thing that dragged itself about Dornach in that painful time – that – this lifeless thing, I felt it to be a corpse; for hours I was a decomposing corpse, reaching towards my own self, as towards an angel, – and the rest of the time I was an angel a devil might have waylaid; my consciousness was displaced and my soul was shredded: the unity of my consciousness had disintegrated: I was – above myself, below myself; at the place where my ‘I’ had formerly been – a hole emerged.
At that exact moment war broke out: the guns, in Alsace, began thundering; they thundered on for two years…
…The explosions within myself had become the explosions of the world; the war had crawled out of me – it had spread itself about me.
I was a bomb ready to explode…this bomb was my heart: I bore it with great caution, like an explosive that had, against all reason, been placed within me; I remember: all I had to do was feel an emotion, and immediately I felt my heart would fire off a red, jagged missile; my stomach – would crack; and my blood – would spurt out in great jets.
The sensation that I was lost stemmed from my inability to master the light that had descended into my body and which had roused in me such a picture storm…I should have succeeded in holding back this torrent of images through the sheer force of my will; it is precisely in this that the trial consists – but I did not pass the trial; I failed to staunch the torrent of images; it seared my body; my body ignited, became a flaming torch of the vilest passions and consumed itself; where a man had once lived, there remained merely a pile of cold ashes; the wind blew: the ashes gusted away, scattering in the air.
The man was no more.
THE ILLNESS
- It was then the man in brown attached himself to me: I picked him up one day in a side street like a pernicious virus…we waited together at the tram-stop. I brought him back with me to Dornach…for hours he would watch us through the windows; when he learned that I was making preparations to leave, he made his too; and now here he is, in this railway carriage… -
IN THE CARRIAGE
The train carriages rattled along through France with the wind whistling through the window. My head was thrown about and I knocked into the wood. I glanced at the spy. An absurd idea occurred to me.
-‘Now, he will bring out an elegant little case. He will take a cigarette between two fingers – a poisoned cigarette! – and will offer it to me.’
This appeared quite clearly to me, with that clarity which does not belong to us but to semi-sleep; and now, figure this! -
- There is my man in brown looking at me with a repugnant smile, pulling out his very elegant cigarette case; he takes a cigarette between two fingers and offers it to me. Clearly, he has read it in my thoughts; not to smoke would be to betray myself (regarding what?)
And so, I smoked it: I followed, with utmost attention, the course of the disease. It climbed my chest, tickled my throat:
- “I have been poisoned!’
The carriages rattled along through France; my head was tossed about and I knocked into the wood; the man in brown with the hooked nose dozed off, open-mouthed, but it was a pretence: he was seeing what effect the poison would have on me.
Why has he poisoned me?
Because I lived near the border? Because I talked with Rudolf Steiner and listened to his lectures?
Yes, I’ve been poisoned, poisoned because of my treachery (…)
- ‘I have betrayed nothing at all’…
Someone strong and imperious, someone I experienced as a foreign body (…) replied from within me (…)
‘Oh yes you have!’
- ‘You have!’
What happened?
A jolt: a white light flashed through the carriage; I was thrown forward; the man in brown, as well, our foreheads knocked together:
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I don’t feel well’…
He was probably an agent from the Ukraine. But this was not what I was frightened of. I was frightened of the spy, in the loftiest sense of the word, of one who belonged to the International Society of Spies and who was in the pay of…
- whom?..
What was there about this man in brown that aroused such horror and panic in me? It wasn’t him I was afraid of: I was afraid of what transpired through him, of what, one day, would break over me like a black flood, when his face would be torn away. And this black flood, peering at it more closely, was the void, the absence of all colour: this blackness was a gaping breach into the place of nowhere, of nothing; (…) and in the eyes of this place, our world, the living world, is nothing; and not only our world, but also the images of pure spirit which are rooted within us – they are also nothing; it was something which reduced to nothing everything that exists (the world of the Mystery, the worlds of the Soul and of the Spirit), something whose appearance on the horizon of our consciousness was that of an absolute nothing.
The spy was, without question, a nothing belonging to the Secret Brotherhood, and he was carrying this something, this nothing, which by nature, was unknown to us and which knocked terrifyingly at our doors. To me, the spy was not horrible because of something he may have been carrying, but because of this nothing, this void. His materializing beside me at a moment when my chest, my hands, my brain felt like hollow spheres resting… upon my stomach, signified:
- The world in which you have lived, this world of the Mystery, is nothing. Your ‘I’, who this very day has taken leave of your body to enter the world of the spirit, which is nothing, is itself nothing; you dreamed that one day you would be a bodhisattva. But you, the bodhisattva, are nothing; myself, by contrast, who have welled forth like your shadow, – I am everything.
- And gusts of horror of the void blew towards me from the man in brown, (…) calling up the dim memory of a primal nightmare, where I am newly born, a time before any memories of events become linked to my own life story. I do not see my father there, nor my nurse, nor my mother; I cannot yet see my nursery draped in blue. Yet I have already become aware that I am I.
- But this ‘I’ has been launched, defenceless, into the void, traversing it in an improbable flight, resembling a ghastly fall into the abyss and reviving the memory of a point of contact, a fixed point from which the [same] ‘I’ has fallen.
- this point, so it appears to me, is the existence before birth. And the abyss into which I was hurled is my childhood body.
- Later, (…) I employed my memory to spy into the inside of this moment, a ‘moment’ belonging to it, a moment which is its very heart – the moment when I knew for certain that the decision to tear myself from the fixed point, and to let myself fall into the abyss – into the body –
- the decision to incarnate –
- belonged to me, belonged only to me. It was too late to turn back on this decision. The irrevocable had happened. I fell, I crossed the emptinesses of space, I entered the swollen organs of my dilated infant body (in the life of a newly born, growth is accompanied by terrible cries);- later, the terrifying images, devils, bugbears, sorceresses, are perceived by children as the fear of being pursued; my horrendous feeling of being like prey – is my projection of the internal sufferings of the newborn; the feeling of being followed is the sensation of moving in flight, through the interior of the organism. Or to be more exact, the sensation of remembering a flight that had once taken place, precipitating the ‘I’ across the void into the unformed organs of the body; and so: the sorceresses and bugbears – the hostile forces! are one’s state of consciousness when brutally deprived of a body: or to be more exact: the memory of such states of consciousness; -
- and so –
my man in brown is but the anxiety caused by the chase. And I have carried it dimly inside me through my whole life as the horrible memory of my state of consciousness, when wrenched from the wellspring of the spirit, before being protected by the envelope of my body. The fear of seeing the spy appear is the fear of seeing my secret depths exposed. The instant he should seize me and take me to prison, the most improbable events would take place. He would collapse onto the floor like a discarded black coat and this horrible, incorporeal something he carries inside, this nothing, would merge into me, flowing into my conscious ‘I’, extinguishing it. He is the encounter, at the border-crossing, between what is unconscious and conscious in me – at the moment when the threshold of my consciousness was violated. It is not for nothing I gained this impression: -
- from the moment when everything had been engulfed by the World War, the one tiny spot on earth I could stand firmly upon had collapsed. And France, England had collapsed on top of me, like an empty nothingness, like a vast body into which I had to incarnate(…)
- the void which had adopted the shape of the man in brown –
- the man in brown was a vessel filled up with nothing, which I had to drink –
- this void which had wrapped itself in the man in brown, -
- surged up like a shock: -
- in an instant:
- I passed from one state of consciousness into another; -
- my route –
is immeasurable: it is not France, England, Switzerland which will intercept my orbit, but foreign planets – Jupiter, the Moon and Venus – they will persecute my ‘I’ before I finally collapse into my country, onto my native soil. And Nelly is still in the world that, perhaps forever, has removed itself from me…
The train stopped; (…) the ‘spy’ jotted something down in his notebook…
LE HAVRE
Yet another bowler hat, but this time belonging to a gentleman – he jostles against me; I know him – I have met him in dream.
How to describe what happened next?
You will not understand, anyway: it is impossible: -
- but for me, it’s clear: they know everything; they know that I am not I, but the bearer of a greater ‘I’ and filled with the crisis of the world; I am a bomb (…) ready to explode. And my explosion will blow into pieces everything around. They will obviously not allow that. Their aim is to keep us in the clutches and anxieties of the world. They know all about the warmth and the glow of the nursery: the newborn child in me descends into the thundering hubbub of the world(…) and I hear quite clearly the whispering all around me:
‘It’s Him!’
For them I am that mysterious Him whose existence they have mysteriously ascertained; and they will not let this Him, who frightens them, return to Russia(…) it is clear they know much more about me than I do. For example, I know nothing about the profundity of the forces of love that tear me apart, but they do; they hate this and they also hate me, with an imperishable hatred:
- ‘Yes!’
- It’s Him!’
At my back two gentlemen fixed me with their unspeaking eyes; and suddenly everything is shot through with a dim prophetic sense:- (…)
- the wave of the fatal Nothing which destroys everything, carries everything away, rolls in to drown – my ‘I’!
- It’s Him!’
Him – he’s the Nothing.
The gentleman over there in the gloves has produced a horrible effect in me – the darkening of the soul; it is from here the indestructible hatred against all humanity breaks forth: -
- I understand the enormity of this gentleman who makes and unmakes the likes of Grey, Lloyd George, Poincaré, Clémenceau and others: -
- ‘It’s Him’.
- The events of our social system – are the cogwheels of a machine: those who participate in them are bodies linked together by a powerful, magic chain; the unity of the ‘I’, conscious of itself, fades away; the organisation, the society in which these events take place – one could even say that these have no existence – but – that – is everywhere, everywhere; the rites of this black magic, of these malign mysteries – they are enacted in the trams or at the customs; but when and how they take place, you will never discover, unless this “sir” wishes you to; (…) in a single quarter of an hour you may read a whole library of signs…
I was crushed, flattened, climbing onto the bridge of the small steam boat taking us to Southampton:- (…)
On the bridge – we were alone! – the gentleman, majestic, pensive, stood immobile, contemplating the chaos of the elements – and did not look at me; but the ultimatum he had already given me was clearly expressed in a monstrous secret code I had deciphered; it spelled out:
- ‘Oh yes, sir, it is time to give up!..’ (…)
My tired host relaxes by the hearth,
His dog on the carpet sleeping at his feet.
The kind host says: ‘Wasn’t that enough?’
Sir, it is necessary to accept one’s fate.
And near the embarkation point – all alone! – majestic and pensive, his clean-cut face reminding me of Woodrow Wilson, the gentleman remained standing, in silence(…) we were approaching England.
PART TWO
A Week in London
(…) After London, my friend and I experienced a chilling sensation: in the middle of the rib cage, the region of the heart, there where we conserved our warmth, we felt a cold stone crushing us: in London, our potential energy transformed into kinetic energy; part of this dispersed, dissipating our inner warmth into the Universal Nothingness; the result of this dissipation of warmth was first – the formation of misty vapours in our souls, then the condensation of these vapours into water and finally – the solidification of this water into ice; and even today I feel, deep inside, a piece of this hard ice; I brought it back with me from the fogs of Albion; thus, by means of artifice, Britannia implanted ice in me.
The week passed like a dream.
We had no time to think, to reflect, to remember, nor to give into our hopes or fears – since at exactly such and such an hour we were to bide our time, plead, refresh our memory, take our concerns to –
- the appropriate office: -
- and wait for the authorisation –
- to put forward a request – to this very same office! – (…)
When we had got the stamp certifying we were in London, the Police Station itself conveyed, to the other offices, documents confirming our actual existence in the City of London; this information spread into the ministries:-
- the Ministry of War, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, even, it seems, the Ministry of the Interior
- thus, the paper arrived, attesting to the fact that we were in London, multiplied by 3, in 3 different sections of three departments; multiplied by 9, it aroused an exchange of viewpoints among the nine Sub-Sections, in order to state –
- we were –
- in London –
- in London –
- in London –
- in London –
- in London –
- in London –
- in London –
- in London –
- in London!..
…………………………………………………………………………..
The Chief of the Sub-Committee
- arrived – at the exact hour –
- the exact minute –
- the exact second –
- the exact quarter of a second – in his office:
coming from his fashionable home, the home of a gentleman, – from which he had set out at the exact hour –
- the exact minute –
- the exact second –
- the exact quarter of a second –
even perhaps –
- the exact tenth of a second! – (…)
- He, the Chief of the Sub-Committee! –
- assuming the stony look of a priest bearing his chalice, through the halls of the Sub-Committee, settled himself into his comfortable armchair, lowered his eyes to the paper which I had unfortunately signed, as well as to the passport to which it was affixed, – my tattered, blotched passport, covered with stamps – he had clearly not yet been informed of the concerns of the Committees (and of the nine Sub-Committees) which were discussing amongst themselves the fact that –
- we were –
- in London –
- in London –
- in London –
- in London –
- in London –
- in London –
- in London –
- in London –
- in London! -
…………………………………………………………………………
It is highly likely that, at this moment, he took in with his melancholic look (…) the water-covered earthly globe from which islands emerged everywhere, like the five continents –
- Europe
- Australasia
- Africa
- Asia
- and –
- the two Americas!
- continents united to British Commerce for all eternity by bonds of steel, by means of fast steamers with four funnels which the torpedos were threatening… (…)
- He pressed a buzzer; an official appeared…
…………………………………………………………………………………………..
At that very moment perhaps, here, in London, my comrade and I met one of our friends who had exchanged the climate of Switzerland for the penetrating damp of London –
- when we had last left him he had been an anglophile –
He had changed during his time here, and now expounded for us his theory: one would be better off in a German concentration camp, or even a police cell in Russia, rather than mouldering here like him, for a whole year, with no possibility of escape.
- ‘You know, something strange has happened here to my consciousness’…
- ‘I have died’…
- ‘Yes!’
- ‘They have obliterated me’.
- ‘They have turned me into a point: a hypothetical point – in hypothetical space’.
- ‘I have the feeling that London does not exist’.
- ‘What is there here? The nothing’…
- ‘And at the same time there is nothing but London’…
- ‘All that existed has died…
- ‘I – am dead’…
- ‘When I arrived, my ‘I’ was still alive in me’…
- ‘But they surrounded me with spies’…
- ‘They invaded me, gnawed away at me’…
- ‘And finally I disappeared’…
- ‘Look: there they are – all these ‘misters’ moving around. But they don’t exist: you see only their absence.
- In front of you, are their silhouettes; but underneath there is only one model reproduced in unimaginable numbers (…)’.
- ‘Their numbers are illusory: there is only one – a quintessence of ‘mister’ filling the voids among the atoms’…
- ‘And his name is ‘ether’…
- But the physicist Planck did away with ether and proved that the ‘quintessence of mister’ was zero’…
We looked out of the window; we watched the ‘quintessence of mister’ walking around… an expanding phenomenon… hundreds! – tens of thousands! – hundreds of thousands!
It’s highly likely that it was at this exact moment that the buzzer was pressed and the official appeared:
‘I must request sir, that you inform me about this matter.’
Before the sir – the chief of the Sub-Committee! -
- a portfolio appeared with magical speed: inside it – a dossier about me: there is the paper I signed in Berne – and attached to it a condemning identity photograph: -
- I must admit: -
- on this photograph taken in Berne when I was exhausted, I do look, it is true, like a perfect criminal:-
- the concentrated gaze of my
eyes – the eyes of a terrified
culprit – their hollow cavities -
- aroused antipathy in
the sir who was examining my picture: the idea was born in him that –
- I was: -
- the very same who had set the officials of three ministries trembling,-
- that is to say, ‘him’,-
- he, who with his antipathetic looks, had penetrated the major State Secrets of England, in order to –
- sink, explode, bombard! –
- (which is exactly what I was doing, very naturally and comprehensively, by counting all the little zeros, the ‘misters’ running in front of me –
- one, -
- two, -
- a hundred, -
- ten thousand,
- a hundred thousand zeros!)
- And so, shoving aside the papers in outrage, the noble sir with the silver temples went on(…): -
- yes; naturally, before the War, I lived… where? in Berlin, of course, and after that in German Switzerland; worse: I was the member of a Society –
- (what unforgivable defiance against the British Lion, what treachery!) – (…)
- the sir was talking to himself: (…)
- ‘Of course, it has not been proved that this ‘mister’ from Dornach, with his suspicious looks, with those eyes and his equally dubious past –
- is the one we’re looking for.’
- ‘But, but! –
- ‘It’s a fact: this ‘mister’ did carry ‘pacifism’ here in his little suitcase’…
- ‘And that proves very well,-
- that –
- this one – is a ‘mister’ capable of bringing about the most unpleasant machinations, once he is back in Russia’…
- And so, he concluded: – it would be better for us to keep him in England!’- (…)
‘Imagine that it was possible, oh, horror! – to sever commercial relations with Canada!’
‘And with Australia!!’
‘And Africa!!’
‘And India!!’
And…’
‘London is overrun with spies, treason is taking root here – and it just so happens to coincide with the appearance of…’
‘this…’
‘enigmatic individual’.
‘Nonetheless, it is true, it has not been proved that this individual is the individual’…
‘The spy…’
‘And yet!..’
…………………………………………………………………………………………..
(…)
They did not give me a pass. Because of that (I observed it in the mirror!)– my face was becoming greyer and greyer: it had turned grey-yellow; I had exchanged the Swiss climate for the poisoned air of London, and this could already be felt; the grey-yellow concrete walls tightened their grip on me; and beneath them, toying with a glove, alone and orphaned –
- wandered a quintessence of ‘mister’, grey-yellow, weighed down by spleen; a magic circle formed in my inner world; and – the boundaries of my daily consciousness, outside of which I had lived for such a long time, began to shrink – more and more; my everyday consciousness – a grey-yellow solid house – like a weight one might have placed on one side of the scales, clearly won out over the other side of the scales, in which were placed my life –
- Nelly,
- Dornach,
- the Master,
- the world of the Spirit! –
- in London, nothing at all of these existed either in memory or in what could be seen ; and so the stone placed on my heart, cold and oppressive–
- the house of London –
crushed my heart: but it, the house of London – settled into me: first of all my soul began to nebulise into vaporous mists which blanketed my spiritual world; -
- then –
- these vapours transformed into misty landscapes, those of the English Channel:-
- then -
- emerging from the fog of the Channel, the Thames began to flow (the wrong way!); and its banks hardened into grey-yellow ice-cube houses –
- and I still feel this ice in my heart today –
- it is a present from England: and it is there I had the thought:
‘I have died!’
;‘They’ve eradicated me!’
‘I am a point: a hypothetical point in hypothetical space!’
‘And London doesn’t exist!’
‘There is – the void.’
‘And it eats away at me.’
‘I am just a whirlwind, a jig of atoms.’
;-‘Everyone, like me, is a yellow mister: and he wanders, the yellow mister, among the concreteness of yellow houses.’
-‘I, I am thousands and thousands of misters, dancing vainly down the avenues of the night…’
‘And that sir, who showed me so clearly the panorama of the ‘Nothing’, showed me to myself…’
‘It is – I’. (…)
NEAR TO THE SHORE A SHIP IS WRECKED
Starvation, disease, war, the voices of revolution spring from my strange actions; all that was living within me exploded, tearing me to pieces and flew off around the world; (…) what takes place within a single individual’s consciousness, within the ‘I’ of a single human being – is the tableau of the universe; the prototype of its beginnings and of its future intentions. (…)
They did not recognise the ‘I’ in me.
And even I did not know how to recognise I was the bomb that had exploded the past.
Only the English must have suspected it: their agents – no, not their agents, but rather the agents of ‘them’ (that is to say – the agents of the Brotherhood which acts (…) under the anglo-saxon mask) – recognised me: and they set out to dishonour the actions of my outer self, to plunge it into the abyss; they sensed I was carrying the dynamite which would explode and shatter the into a thousand pieces:-
- Russia –
- Germany –
- France –
- England, -
it is possible, yes…
But that is the future: the present is empty; I, now, am – shrapnel.
The young boys gather me up in the street.
…………………………………………………………………………………………..
(…)
Crushed by the English, suspected of spying, (…) the ferry, Haakon, cutting through the waves, set out on the sea ploughed by torpedoes – towards Bergen!
Bergen in me – was the distant past, already experienced: and now it had become – my future: I had left it scarcely three years ago; and now I was drifting, in the opposite direction, towards it: – (…)
towards the rounded grey rocks of Norway with their sloping sides, a corpse in a coffin was drifting.
Between my two visits lay three years: the birth, growth and death of the ‘child’ in me – or the Spirit.
I stood on the prow upright, as we approached Bergen (…) carrying in my arms the dead body of a three year-old child…
THE ‘I’ – WHERE IS IT?
Once, in Bergen, I boldly exploded each and every one of my walls; and emerged on the far side of them; but my ‘house’ crawled along behind me, embodying itself during these three years in a swarm of misfortunes: illnesses, confusions, obsessions – and the war; -
- after the explosion took place in me, the war broke out.
………………………………………………………………………….
The catastrophe in Europe and the explosion of my personality – are the same event; one could say: my ‘I’ – is the war: or the other way round: the war gave birth to me; I am a prototype: there is something strange in me: the temple, the skull of the Century.
Perhaps my ‘I’, – the only one in our time! – really did draw near, in its umpteenth life, to the ‘I’. Is it not extraordinary how my appearing in Switzerland, France and England provoked alarm and horror, as if it were the cause of the War? Them – they sensed it confusedly…
It was completely mutual: in Switzerland, France and England my ‘I’ felt all too clearly that it was – the war: my ‘I’ – is an offspring of the war; before the war, my ‘I’ did not exist.
No: the ‘I’ and the ‘world’ met and joined in me.
The fusion with the cosmos took place in me; the thoughts of the world, congealed and descended all the way to my shoulders: my ‘I’ is my own only to (as far as) my shoulders: from there rises upwards the dome of the heavens.
And when I have lifted my skull from my shoulders, I raised it aloft, like a sceptre. (…)
THE PLACE
- the throne is shattered(…) there is no more ‘I’ in me; in my head, there is a void: the temple is abandoned; the ‘I’, in its crown of thorns, dressed in purple, holding its lantern before it with outstretched arms, has started to wander: through the interior of its own veins(…) – yes, it is a torture quite horrendous to know and experience.
THE DEMENTED ONE
- At this time it was possible to read in the local papers that a fishing boat had been wrecked: near Bergen. But it was no fishing boat that had been shipwrecked: it was my body – on the inside, the ‘I’ had gone mad –
- my soul had cried out towards the future: and now the future had become reality; dying, among savage hordes, inside me, outside me – I stretched out my clumsy hands:
- ‘O Nelly!’
- ‘Can you hear me?’
- ‘Are you even listening to me?’
- ‘They are crying out for help.’
- ‘A ship has sunk off Bergen’.
- ‘O, save me!’
- ‘Nelly…’ (… )
‘Really!’
‘Save yourself!’
‘You’re just an impostor!’
- and I fall:- (…)
……………………………………………………………………………….
It is strange:-
- I wander the countries of the world (Switzerland, France, England, Scandinavia); and at the same time –
- I am a vagabond in the vast reaches of the cosmos; the wandering Jew – c’est moi:-
my ‘I’ –
- was present during the events in Palestine; I heard his voice; stood by the Cross; I saw the whirlwind of the Ascension; and since then I have wandered the countries of the world:
- I light my way with a golden lantern; amidst the fog, I knock on people’s windows:
- ‘Have you not seen Him?
- ‘Did He not pass this way?’
- ‘Did He not call?’
- ‘Was it not here, He celebrated the Last Supper?’
- All around me, they gather: the Swede, the Lapp with the round head, the Russian prisoner who ran away to Holland; and they ask:
- ‘Where are you going?’
I answer:
- ‘I am going where you may not follow’.
The old Swede winks at the Laplander and asks once again:
- ‘Well, tell us then, where is your home?
I answer:
- ‘There, where you are not, hypocrites.’ (…)
……………………………………………………………………………………..
Here’s the station (…)
- Yes, I’m leaving. -
- Where to? -
- To the city of the Sun: my country. -
- My body, become mad,(…) will be placed in a tomb. Up above my body, transported into my country, my spirit will pass imperceptibly into the world of my thoughts, reflections of the Sun: of Him!
But in the tomb, in my country, on Russian soil, my body, like a bomb, will explode everything that is: and it will raise itself above the cities of Russia in a huge smoke-cloud; my head of smoke will greet the ‘I’, the Sun which will be precipitated from the zenith: into me!
BACKWARDS
…I remember that my ‘I’ descended into my childhood body after my childhood body had appeared on earth; and descending into the body my ‘I’ was horrified by this body; it suffered within this body as in the jaws of the Dragon: and thus: the body – is the Dragon; (…)
I was not yet aware of the mirage of organic life; I did not understand that the organs of the body – are the gates through which the ‘I’ is chased out of Paradise; (…)
the ‘sir’ that I saw is the combined consciousness of all spies, or even the lower ‘I’ – the guardian of the threshold, he who welcomes us the moment we try to return into our country: today my Destiny is near, very near: -
- Yes –
‘I accept it’.
……………………………………………………………………………….. (…)
Three years before, in this same place, I had been travelling in the other direction: (…)
three years ago (…)
- ‘the ‘I’ –
- looked down from on high: into my heart; – (…) (…) and, bowing low before myself, it was not before myself that I bowed.
- ‘You have descended to me from the heavens’.
- ‘You have illumined me’.
- ‘You are my ascension into the mountains’.
- ‘You are – the mountains’…
And now my ‘I’ was sending me out: towards the sufferings; (…) I stood above the overhanging slopes; the ‘I’ said to me:
- ‘Descend into this precipice’.
- ‘Illumine for yourself the dark places.
- ‘You are the Fall into the precipice.’
- ‘You are – the precipice itself.’
……………………………………………………………………………………………..
They were dragging my ‘I’ into the abysmal dark preceding birth (…)
- opposite me, on the couchette, sicklily snoring, was the body of the doctor from
Odessa, looking exactly like the dry and dead skin of a dragon…
- ‘O, my brother!’
- ‘I recognise you’.
- ‘O, my untamed beast!’
- ‘I accept you: tear my soul apart’.
- ‘You are me’… (…)
FROM HAPARANDA TO BIÉLOOSTROV
(…) And here is Biéloostrov.
It is the final interrogation; the final control point; but there is no control, nor any interrogation; a shiny officer, a hussar of the imperial guard, bows very low, and asks me:
- ‘So, are you Lédianoï? Léonide Lédianoï?…
And he clicks his spurs; to let it be known that he is the one with the honour to welcome Lédianoï. (…)
The Greek Dédalopoule gives me a friendly smile – with all his heart he rejoices for me:
- ‘All my congratulations, and a happy return to your country!..’
And I know: there will be no ‘they’ any more. Them? Nothingness, smoke…
……………………………………………………………………….
But: the world of the Spirit that I have seen – there, abroad: is also smoke: it doesn’t exist; the old ancient order is here; I am – in my country… already, we are approaching Petersburg… I remain standing, glued to the window. (…)
MY COUNTRY
My God: everything is so dirty, grey, hectic, futile, tenuous and damp; (…)
- This is my first impression of Petersburg; how old and decrepit everything is – everything, everything; the trams, the houses, the pavements have all become old; the gold of the churches is gone.
My God, what restlessness; people push and shove – run and bump into each other, (…) seemingly without any purpose(…) everywhere a certain greyness reigns, and there is this crucial, anxious question:
‘And what next?’
‘What will become of us?’
‘Something is clearly about to happen?’
I couldn’t help remembering what the Swedish consul had said:
-‘Watch carefully what is happening in Russia: it is strange, you will soon see for yourself; yes, yes – it is strange.’
Now, I had seen, and – what had I seen? That everything, everything was in the process of collapsing; that the old order had already fallen apart; and that the revolution (but was this disintegration a revolution?) had happened before the revolution; everyone was aware of this; the police more than anyone else; (…) in August of that year, (1916), in the atmosphere that prevailed in Petersburg, I was burning to ask one question: -
- if I could have expressed it intelligibly, – I would have asked: -
- ‘Yes, but tell me: the revolution, when did it happen?’
The revolution had already happened; the authorities who had been overthrown still held their seats of power, like idols: but they were dead; and – there was no more authority; they had been eviscerated(…) The gesture of a soldier laying his hands on an officer struck me; I understood that that autumn the power of the officers was being transferred into the hands of the soldiers; nothing that followed astonished me any more; the shock – I received it on my first day in Petersburg: in August 1916,- this period engraved itself into my memory – it was at that point the February revolution was realized; yes, the February revolution was late – it was a dream of the past – and when had this past taken place? In the fields of Galicia(…)? Perhaps it had become real at the time of my illness in Dornach:- (…)
The tale of the pictures coursing within me, from Christiania through Berlin, Leipzig, Dornach – is the tale of the fall of the spirit, through my soul, within my body (unchanged though exhausted by the spirit), this body which literally shuddered under epileptic fits:-
- I couldn’t bear it; the war
assaulted me from within; it is I who set it going – by means of my war
against myself (we weren’t fighting against the Germans; we were
fighting against ourselves; and against our allies); – (…)
- I remember approaching Nelly:-
- ‘I can’t go on…’
- ‘Calm down.’
- ‘I’d rather die’ – and a surge of electric force
flooded through my veins; and an image came to me:-
- That of a Man standing up in the
universal void, spewing out of the
horrible breach in his open skull:-
- He was standing like a cannon
shooting at the sky; He and I; he
was firing– not a ball, a heavy cannon-ball; he was firing– the ‘I’… -
- After that, and for five weeks, I was like a corpse; the only things that remained unchanged were: my arms and my stomach, and I had the impression of being a stomach, haphazardly poised upon my legs; the rest – my ‘chest’, my throat, my brain – felt to me like… a void: all of this was the missile that I had monstrously fired from my gaping skull, fired towards the sky: this perishable thing that I had lugged with me to Dornach was – ‘that’; the heavy, deaf, lumpish stomach of a body.
And there: this portrait of myself, shot from a million copies of restive bodies, I saw it everywhere (…) – these ‘I’s had all been shot from their bodies; and ‘that’ – heavy, lumpish – imposed itself everywhere: -
- Had Russia not shot its ‘I’ into the
measureless void? After the shot fired by the
world war, had there not remained just a
heavy, compact ‘that’: in place of Russia?(…)
I remember: I was sitting in a very large restaurant with the editor of a widely distributed magazine (with a large circulation), which had nothing remotely irresolute about it, a magazine which I wrote for: the editor (…) said to me:
- Everything you have written is accurate: but it is not possible to publish such a chronicle; to print the truth today would be false. We must print what is false; for therein lies the truth…’ (…)
I understood then that in Russia everything is a lie: these ‘sirs’ have laughed to their hearts’ content; and the joke has gone further than they intended; the atmosphere of the press is now saturated with it; the souls and the ‘I’: are shot from the cannon; they need bodies, flesh to be butchered, meat; and I, I have been called back to Russia in order to sign up my flesh. (…)
I have never forgotten those first days in Petersburg.
IN MOSCOW
(…) The peaceful walls went silent; and a ray of sunshine shone through the window and landed on me, full of joy; I opened the newspaper: in this newspaper, they were heaping praises upon me; I went out visiting: to Bulgakov, Guerenson, Berdiaïev, Lossiéva; they listened to me; with genuine attentiveness; (…) most astonishing of all, my lectures drew vast audiences: my ascendant was strange; it seemed I was returning home into people’s unconscious, that I enabled them to formulate their secret thoughts; the hall listened; I became an influential lecturer.
THE YEARS
(…) It seemed that the leap across universal space to Dornach – I would never again manage to accomplish; and even should I reach the place I had left, even should I manage to seize hold of this earth – it would achieve nothing: my hands would let go their grasp on meeting Nelly’s look, her interrogating gaze:
- ‘Well?’ familiar
- ‘What?’
- ‘What is it you want…?’
……………………………………………………………………………………….
- ‘Nelly, Nelly!…’
………………………………………………………………………………………….
- ‘Nelly has never existed, there is no Nelly: you have dreamed everything’.
And I carried on day after day, I went through weeks, months, years with this doubt I could not get rid of, and a stubborn fire burned in my stomach; my lectures brought light to others, but – what light? I was necessary to many people, but what was it in me that was necessary?
Was it my incurable wound: the loss of Nelly?
…………………………………………………………………………………………
(…)
Is that all?
Yes… That’s all.
………………………………………………………………………………………
EPILOGUE
‘Journals of an Cracked One’ is – for me – a strange book, unique: exceptional; at present I almost hate it; I see in it monstrous sins against style, structure, plot – unforgivable sins in any kind of literary work; it’s an off-putting book, in bad taste, a book able to arouse a Homeric chuckle; oh, if only I were a literary critic, what a wonderful opportunity I would have to deride the author of this absurd and monstrous work! But the critic has already begun to sharpen his spirit; a Critic, best and most estimable of men, has already begun boiling with indignation: the author, he says, thinks himself to be a genius. Yes, as critic, our Mr. Critic is severely limited; – I would even go a bit further: he is stupid: he has failed to understand that I am writing all this about myself, and in cruelly mocking the events which have so painfully and so noisily occurred in my destiny, it is not I, Andrei Bely, who is writing – it’s the cracked one, the ‘idiot’ who has made a muddle of what was intended in his innermost being. Underlying all the other thoughts is this thought: everyone is a genius in the kernel of the ‘I’ that lives within them, and on because of this I, Andrei Bely, am also a genius – to the extent that Peter, Paul or James are geniuses… the leitmotif of ‘Cracked One’ – is the sickly psychological confusion which imputes to a mortal and mediocre personality the gifts of the Spirit, of the ‘I’, the supra-personal ‘I’. This indignant Critic – as critic, is a very limited human being. He is enraged by the ‘Cracked One’; as a result, my goal is achieved beyond all I might have hoped: the hero of the tale is psychically abnormal; the illness he suffers from – as I can testify– is the illness of the age; ‘mania grandiosa’ of which many, many are afflicted without suspecting it.
So why do I hate my ‘Cracked One’ so much? Quite simply because I love it as myself; I bear witness to it: in the ‘Journals’ there is not a single line where what was lived could have been represented differently than how I lived it myself. In this sense, the ‘Journals’ is my only book which is truthful; it tells of the terrifying illness I suffered between 1913 and 1916. But I have overcome this illness from which many do not recover – I conquered my ‘mania’ by representing it objectively; this ‘mania’ is the door through which each person’s ‘I’ attains awareness of the supra-personal ‘I’ in them; and here, madness lies in wait. I passed through this illness, which made Friedrich Nietzsche, the very great Schumann and Hölderlin topple over into madness. And – yes: I, I have remained sane, after shedding my old skin; and it is in full health that I have been born a second time.
You, indignant Mr. Critic, – are a brave man (but as a critic – unbelievably stupid); with your indignation against my ‘mania’, you have expressed the very attitude which led in me to this ‘satire’ on the sensations caused by ‘self-initiation’.
‘Journals of a Cracked One’ – is a satire directed against myself, against what I have personally lived through. Precisely because of this, I hate this ‘book’ as one might hate the memories of an illness one has passed through. But as my illness is the illness of the age, an illness from which many people unconsciously suffer – beyond the disgust I experience for this ‘book’ – I love the ‘Journals’, I love them because they are the truth about my illness from which I am now free. The critics who write ‘critiques’ will have to live at least another two hundred years before experiencing the trial of my illness; with regard to this illness, these poor innocent ‘critics’ are still novices.
Ah well, – I have spoken: and I suppose that here too I shall remain misunderstood.
Berlin.
September 1922.
Andrei Bely
Translation copyright © Richard Ramsbotham