KSRK: Guilty?/Not Guility? (May 6 – May 15)

Following the parable on Periander, Quidam returns again to idea of his beloved’s suffering, not to mention his own beloved suffering, and acknowledges much of it as the result of his own overheated imagination. He also takes up the idea of erotic and religious obligations and illustrates his meaning with shorter parables and an example from Greek mythology.

May 6. Morning: Quidam, for all his raving, does see the difference between his beloved’s suffering and his imagining of that suffering. The ‘problem’, if I may put it that way, is that his imagination takes precedence over her reality in such a way that his suffering is greatly increased while hers remains something of an unknown, but hopefully the fertile ground for the growth of those ‘religious postulates’ that have befuddled us all along. Quidam sees this dilemma, I think, when he writes,

But the person who is concerned about someone else does not have time really to feel his own pain, and the dreadful terrors of the imagination far outweigh the terrors of actuality.

Earlier I wrote that this struck me as Quidam’s way of appropriating her suffering. I still think this is probably true, but it’s also more complicated than a simple case of an narcissist intolerant of anybody’s feelings but his own:

The misrelation between us shows itself here again and seems to create a new wrong against her.

Yes, it certainly does. So why allow for the creation of that wrong?

Her actual pain, be it ever so keen, her plaintive cry, be it ever so vehement, is still only weak compared with the inventiveness of my imagination without my having seen anything.

I’m not so sure that he’s claiming the greater suffering because he’s an egomaniac who has to have more, even in suffering. It might be that, but I think what he’s getting at is that he can’t help it. His imagination runs away from him, and that’s why he is miserable. My understanding from earlier entries is that he believes that, in the end, he would only make her miserable as well. One ‘solution’ to his problem, I think, would be to grant her the same capacity for the empathic imagination he prizes so highly in himself. Perhaps it’s because I’m somewhat under the spell of Caroline Coleman O’Neill’s novel, Loving Soren, but this would be a way that he could account for his own suffering, without feeling as well its immense disproportion in comparison to the suffering of his beloved. Of course he may also have his reason for this; it might be that it is those ‘religious postulates’ that provide the grounding for just that sort of empathic imagination. But he doesn’t indicate anything along these lines, or much of anything with regard to her besides what she means to him.

May 7. Morning:

As for me, I feel homesick for myself, for daring to be with myself. It is shattering to have an imaginatioin and an actuality so contrary to each other. My troubled imagination is terrible. Must I now in turn, in a way just as tragic as it is comic, find actuality easier? Oh that I might be permitted to keep my fancies, for I am accustomed to grappling with them.

So it is a contest within to find out where there is the greater suffering, in the imagination or in reality. Is it possible that imaginative suffering is real suffering? He seems on the verge of stating just this. At any rate, his continued sense of the dichotomy helps him to see that Actuality is still not the tormentor that possibility is.

May 8. Morning. Quidam wrote a lot on May 8, and in the morning he is mostly concerned with wondering where she gets off in actually visiting his apartment. After all, someone may not realize that Quidam himself was not at home. Has she no concern at all for her honor? But what’s really important comes down to this: “The terror of responsibility considerably lowers the price of direct erotic sufferings.” Let me be direct and say, I simply don’t understand this. Does he mean that his erotic suffering comes cheaply when she throws herself (in an 18th century sense of the term) at him? Or does he have the insight to see that he is working himself into a frenzy over increasingly minor ‘ordeals’? The latter, I suspect, though I’m not at all certain.

There is an anti-Semitic slur that is probably just as well passed over, but there are a few other gems worth mentioning.

In the Orient, to send a silken cord is a death penalty to the recipient; in this case to send a ring is very likely a death penalty to the person who sends it.

With this statement, it seems likely that his problem is with the state of marriage rather than with her. Only the phrase “in this case” saves this observation from being the blatant, blanket condemnation, Marriage = Death. Another possible consideration might be the question of whether ‘death’ might, broadly speaking, be seen as a term for desirable transition. In moving from one state of being to another, can it not be said that the person of the earlier state, in a sense, dies? In other words, can we apply John 12:24 ("unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone”) to transitions within life as well as to that final transition?

Erotically she is in the wrong; that is certain. A girl has no right to use such means. The fact that she uses them demonstrates basically how little understanding she has of them. Truly I would not dare to use such means. The person who uses them against another binds himself just as firmly as the person he wants to bind: lest it ever be demonstrated that he has taken these sacred means in vain. But my capital crime gives her the most open account.

What was this capital crime? To be charged with ‘murder’? Later he visits her and all appears to be well. He sees that she is calm. He emphasizes the need for concealment. And then he returns to his great obsession, in a state of mind that can hardly be imagined as calm, except, significantly, towards the end:

Tomorrow, then, begins the last battle; the reign of terror. I have no impression of her at all. The religious, which always has occupied me, occupied my mind to the point of despair and surely will occupy me as long as I can think, she has enlisted on her side. Perhaps it is such a ferocious skirmish that she did not know what she should think up to use against me and so she has used this. Be that as it may, I must respect it. What I shall venture to do now is to pull myself away from her, if possible, scramble her image of me into sheer inanity and utterly confound her. Every conterargument will be respected. I know very well what these will be. All sympathy for me must be wiped out, and she must also be run weary in reflection. In all human probability she will tehn be over the worst suffering with me and, humanly speaking, will not be inclined to begin all over again the moment I leave her. - One becomes almost calm when it is a matter of acting, even if what one will do is the most desperate and in the most difficult form – namely, in the form of time and duration. But if I cannot be calm, then I might just as well not begin this work.

Am I right about this, that what brings him peace is to set about sloughing her off with the same mental preoccupations that he understands have made him miserable? Yikes.

May 8. Midnight. Quidam has here composed one of the most lyrical passages yet, justifying his author’s request to be remembered as ‘a poet’. After the paean to Stillness, devoid of any individual, personal human activity, he returns to time and the realm of human reality.

But this vegetating stillness in which human life is bewitched, in which time comes and goes and is filled with something so that there is no felt need, for all rivers flow into the sea and yet cannot fill the infinite sea, but this and that can fill up time for people – this is foreign to my soul. And yet it is this with which I must now seek to become familiar.

He imagines a Marie (who I understand to be a stand-in for his beloved; and an interesting choice for a name, at that), and then says:

No! No! That upsets my whole being! Let infinity separate us – my hope was that eternity would also unite us. Come, death, and keep her for eternity; come madness, and suspend everything until eternity removes the probate court’s seal; come, hate, with your infinite passion; come, proud distinction, with your withering wreath of honor; come, godly piety, with your incorruptible blessedness; come, one of you , and take her whom I myself cannot take – but not this, not the dabblings of the finite. – If that happens, then I am deceiving her, then I must deceive her.

Then he seems to reverse himself, when he says the following:

And it is possible for me to give her or try to send her a more lenient explanation (and for me the decisive factor is not whether I in all human probability achieve something) of my conduct, an explanation that is abhorrent to me, more abhorrent than the most brazen lie I used when I was hoping that in an infinite sense it would be beneficial to her.

May 12 Midnight.

I really am not a hasty physician, for I am not the one who hurries throught he patient’s room; it is the patient who is rushing so fast past me; and I am nto a physician, either, but rather a patient myself.

Nutty. Pricelessly nutty.

May 15 Morning.

It is an agonizing self-punishment, as agonizing as the scene in Tartarus to have to sit that way and make faces at myself. But so it must be.

Naturally brings to mind the son imitating his father in Quiet Desapair.