Tonight, I’m baking bread. Two golden loaves of challah. I can smell its warm sweet scent drifting in from the kitchen. Who could ask for anything more?
This is my first time baking bread. It takes forever to do. I hope it turns out to be worth it. The perk of this, of course, is that I can finally write my new post. Haha! Take that busy schedule. Take that job! I’ve had a marvelous day. I leisurely played in the gentle current while everyone around me busily hustled on.
I’ve had some good times this past week. I saw some old friends. It was a rejuvenating enterprise. I feel refreshed.
This time has gotten me thinking a lot about my current position in life. I’m a recent college graduate, living at home, working in a vocation miles away from my degree. I constantly am questioning the choices I have made in my life. Contemplating the new soft skin of my adulthood.
This brought me to Hesse. My love affair with German Nobel Prize winner/existential novelist extraordinaire Hermann Hesse started in junior year of college. I was in a class on modern art movements. Part of the requirements for the class was writing a comparison between trends in the arts in two different periods. I chose to highlight existentialist authors in two different periods of cultural and social construction.
Hermann Hesse lived through the unification of the German states into what is now Germany. He left Germany permanently around World War II. He was considered a traitor for not supporting the Nazi Regime. What a fucking bad ass.
His life is the stuff that existentialism is made of. That’s sort of depressing now that I’ve written that down, but it’s also true. When one grows up in a time of cultural unifications for the sake of political advancement it makes complete sense that they could lose a feeling of their specific cultural identity. Oh, I struggled with that sentence when I reread it. I’m sorry.
The first novel of his I read was Steppenwolf. Incredible. Simply incredible. The story of a man who contains all the primal urges of a Neolithic wolf. He is a gentleman and a beast in one. He is in what he knows to be the last stretch of his life and he is unclear of his own self. There’s also a magical cabaret where he is mercilessly judged by Mozart for being too serious:
“Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don’t mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time. For that reason I wished to be a hundred years old. In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.”
Fucking brilliant. Reading Hesse is being able to run naked and unashamed through a rococo mural of words. A flood of beautiful language that spins images and ideas of pain, and passion. A true philosopher and artist of fiction.
That isn’t the highlighted quote for todays post, however…
I just heard laughing in the kitchen.
I checked the two tiny braids of challah I put in the oven. They’ve grown. Immensely. They’re huge. I made a gigantic Siamese twin bread. I’ve created a monster.
I need a second to collect myself from my bread abomination. Dr. Atkins is turning over in his grave.
Back to the quote. My chosen allusion today is one from another of Hesse’s novels. Narcissus and Goldmund. Like many of Hesse’s great works it is a struggle between the duality of being. Many of Hermann’s fictions utilize a theme stemming out of the duality of existence. The main characters are often being stretched limb from limb by the opposing forces. We know from his book Demian that Hesse doesn’t necessarily seem to believe in the clash between good and evil. He does, however, employ the idea that in order to be at peace with oneself, one must balance all the opposing factors within. The protagonists are very often neurotic men striving to claim an identity they can tolerate, they become enchanted with idealistic images of balance. They grow to have deep feelings for androgynous characters who seem to have it all figured out. They reminisce over memories of long lost friends. If there is anything he seems to be an advocate against its tension and preoccupation. He preaches an idealistic fluid lifestyle carried by confidence in one’s own experiences and actions.
You must be sick of my babbling, but I still haven’t gotten to the grand appearances of our allusion. What I wish to explore with this quote is the power of language and thought. In one section of Narcissus and Goldmund the two titular characters are having a discussion about their viewpoints on the world (this happens a great deal in Hesse’s novels, there’s something sort of similar to Plato’s dialogues about them). One character, a young schoolboy studying in a cloister speaks fantastically of the earth and his dreams and their transcendence above concrete design.
“I believe,” he once said, “that the petal of a flower or a tiny worm on the path says far more, contains far more than all the books in the library. One cannot say very much with mere letters and words. Sometimes I’ll be writing a Greek letter, a theta or omega, and tilt my pen just the slightest bit; suddenly the letter has a tail and becomes a fish; in a second it evokes all the streams and rivers of the world, all that is cool and humid, Homer’s sea and the waters on which Saint Peter wandered; or it becomes a bird, flaps its tail, shakes out its feathers, puffs itself up, laughs, flies away. You probably don’t appreciate letters like that very much, do you, Narcissus? But I say: with them God wrote the world.”
That’s a stumper, huh? The first time I read this I had to read it three more times. This is why Hesse, in my mind, is a master.
“I believe.” We start off immediately with a statement of truth. In one’s own mind, what is more true than something one believes? Goldmund is letting us into the secret depths of his mind.
I’m gonna skip around a bit to draw parallels, keep an eye on the text.
This scene takes place in a religious setting: a monastery. Goldmund is a student. He tells this to a monk, Narcissus. Narcissus is very much his compliment and definitely his best friend. This is his way of rebelling against his strict religious upbringing in order to spread the wings of manhood and explore his nature. This is a declaration told in subtle singing tones.
This speech is the most beautiful piece of blasphemy you will ever hear. That’s right, just when you thought this was just a pretty paragraph: blasphemy. Goldmund hides a barb behind his poetry that equates himself with God. This story about a pleasant daydream in which he imagines letters turning into fish, and rivers, and birds is meant to validate the existence of his fantasies. He seeks to prove his point by claiming that God, too, must have summoned existence by validating His own fantasies.
“I do appreciate them greatly,” Narcissus said sadly. “Those are magic letters, demons can be exorcised with them. But for pursuit of science they are, of course, unsuitable. The mind favors the definite, the solid shape, it wants its symbols to be reliable, it loves what is, not what will be, what is real and not what is possible. It does not permit an omega to change to a serpent or a bird. The mind cannot live in nature, only against nature, only as its counterpart…”
This is Narcissus’s response. You can feel the change in rhythm. The identity shifted from a colorful vivacious speech to a whisper of tranquility. There is a sense of insecurity in the beginning. Narcissus wants to build a bridge. He concurs with Goldmund in order to soften the boy’s abrasiveness. It reads to me as being slightly defensive in that parental I’m-still-cool-I-know-what-you’re-saying kind of way. He may be a monk, but he’s still a social animal. The retort hits its first counterpoint with the words But, of course, and unsuitable. Way to use your operative words, Narcissus. “The mind…wants it’s symbols to be reliable, it loves what is, not what will be, what is real and not what is possible.” This is a direct contradiction against Goldmund’s sentiments. Goldmund preached of the fecundity of the imagination and all it has to offer. Narcissus reminds that the imagination is too great to ponder and will never be satisfying because of its fallacious nature.
Let’s take a side path for a second: Does Narcissus realize that this is, also, a contradiction to his faith, and therefore a contradiction to what he is saying? Isn’t God too great to ponder? Isn’t God immeasurably unfathomable?
The last statement made here is one that suggests that the mind is what makes all the beasts of the world imperfect. The cranial sprockets grinding into each other and eking out the labors of imagination are but blemishes on the otherwise silky skin of nature. By claiming that the mind is a matter of imperfection, despite its own vastness, completely destroys Goldmund’s argument that God would have created the universe as a result of imagination. If God is perfect, and imagination imperfect, than the two can’t possibly inhabit the same existence. That monk has some masterful rhetoric.
This is spelled out metaphorically when Narcissus claims that the mind “does not permit an omega to change to a serpent or a bird.” Once again Hesse has endowed Narcissus with the skillful tongue of a very intelligent man. He hides in this the serpent and the bird. The serpent is, of course, the time honored symbol for the devil and all that is evil. To contrast, ancient people believed that birds were the key to understanding the Gods. Augury, the communication method of choice for the Olympians. There is some subtle suggestion here that the mind cannot discern for itself what is good and evil and thus needs God to teach.
This whole teaching thing is the key really. In simplest terms:
Goldmund is a growing boy and feels smothered by the unquestionable teachings of the monastery. The only person that he is comfortable enough to release his feelings to gets a scolding dose of boiling hot angst thrown in his face. The face of the badly burned receiver than disproves him by asserting his intelligence and triumphing over the matter. He brought ointment.
Whoo. I’m out of breath, figuratively speaking. I’m pretty sure that last analogy was a bit of a stretch but eh…Worse things could happen.
I think this calls for a bit of challah. A sliver of my monster twin challot. Perhaps a smear of butter and a bit of strawberry-rhubarb jam? Maybe a little tea?
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