A Leak In The Safe

Willy

Listen, Eva! You must leave this house. Let us stop playing with dots and dashes and unspoken words. You know what a power you once had over me. Snow, soft white snow has covered all the memories and all pain and all the torment and all the struggles, but if the snow should melt…

****

Such happens to be the destiny of man. When this terrible mad desire for something beyond yourself begins to gnaw and tear at you, when no happiness and no joy can any longer fill your soul, when nothing can master the unrest within, or subdue the mad storm which drives you into this agonizing flight from yourself and the rest of the world, out beyond even the greatest crimes – then it must be thus.

****

Eva is Willy’s yearning. Perhaps she doesn’t even see her or feel her presence when she is with him, but it is as if she had taken possession of him, as if she were driving him into a wild flight and scourging him to inaccessible heights or into bottomless depths.

And this mad pursuit for what – for what?

No one knows, no human brain has ever understood it, nor ever will

The light of some star or other awakens us to life and it wanders and wanders, unknowing of its own destiny and that of the human beings upon whom it poured its blessing when they came upon this world.

And then this same light returns, after many, many years, to annihilate and destroy this same life which it created.

****

hey, can you believe I’m taking off again? this time to drive my daughter to Wisconsin…hopefully it’s far enough that she won’t find her way back this time…see ya tuesday…

I first became aware of Stanislaw Przybyszewski while perusing Edvard Munch’s Jealousy at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. A helpful wall sign identifies the Mephistophelean figure on the left as Przybyszewski, and as I became more and more knowledgeable about Munch’s work I saw that S.P. figured fairly frequently as a subject. I think that’s the way most of us, at least in the English speaking world, know of him (if at all), as a sort of Zelig-type always appearing in other people’s works and biographies. He’s also a veiled character in Strindberg’s plays, and a ghostly figure that haunts the northern and middle European fin de siecle without ever quite becoming manifest. In his own time he was much more widely known and influential as a poet, dramatist, novelist and thinker, responsible for disseminating his own interests in Nietzsche and Satanism and shaping the course of Decadence and Symbolism. One of the great cauldrons of modern art was a bar in Berlin dubbed the Black Pig where he, Munch, Strindberg, the exemplary femme fatale Dagny Juel, and even Knut Hamsun gathered to get drunk, argue, theorize, philosophize, sing, fight, flirt and shock the world. That’s one of the locations I would set my time machine for.

For a guy so influential, Przybyszewski’s work is very hard to come across in English. My friend John got me his most famous novel Homo Sapiens out of the Grad Library and I must say I was kind of underwhelmed, though as a true collector I don’t feel like I understand anything unless I own it. There used to be reprint of a short thing called The Synagogue of Satan, which was actually nonfiction and a lot drier than it sounds. For more than I like to pay for a book but a lot less than list price, I managed to cop the play Snow off ebay, and it was actually pretty fun, though waaaaay over the top – Munch can be dramatic and intense, but he pulls it off with his integrity and artistry, whereas Snow, which expresses the same ideas and dynamics, would be laughed off any contemporary stage. Above is my other ebay find, a postcard, which I also paid too much for, but is also a rare item. Somebody had his autograph up a while ago, but I refused to follow the bidding into the stratosphere. Generally, however, my notification when the name Przybyszewski comes up on ebay pops up only once or twice a year, which is remarkable on such a world wide marketplace. In the end his presence is like that of the aforementioned snow, overwhelming when it’s there but leaving only traces over time.