Chapter Five: The Bird Fights Its Way Out of the Egg
My painted dream bird was on its way, looking for my friend. In the strangest manner an answer came to me.
In my classroom, at my seat, I once found a note stuck in my book after the break between two lessons. It was folded exactly the way we usually folded the notes that classmates now and then passed to one another secretly during a lesson. I only wondered who could be sending me such a note, for I never had dealings of that kind with any classmate. I thought it would be an invitation to some schoolboy prank in which I would not take part anyway, and I put the note, unread, in the front of my book. Only during the lesson did it happen to come into my hand again.
I played with the paper, unfolded it absently, and found a few words written in it. I glanced at them, my eye caught on one word, I was startled, and I read, while my heart contracted before fate as if in a great cold:
“The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever would be born must destroy a world. The bird flies to God. The name of the god is Abraxas.”
After reading these lines several times, I sank into deep reflection. There could be no doubt; it was an answer from Demian. No one could know of the bird but he and I. He had received my picture. He had understood and was helping me to interpret it. But how did it all fit together? And—this was what tormented me most—what did Abraxas mean? I had never heard or read the word. “The name of the god is Abraxas!”
The hour went by without my hearing anything of the lesson. The next began, the last of the morning. It was given by a very young assistant master, who had only just come from the university and whom we liked for the very reason that he was so young and assumed no false dignity with us.
Under Dr. Follen’s guidance we were reading Herodotus. This reading was one of the few school subjects that interested me. But this time I was not with it. I had opened my book mechanically but did not follow the translating and stayed sunk in my thoughts. Besides, I had already found out several times how right it was, what Demian had told me back then in religion class. What you wanted strongly enough came about. If during a lesson I was very intensely occupied with thoughts of my own, I could be sure that the teacher would leave me in peace. Yes, if you were absentminded or sleepy, then all at once he would be standing there: that had happened to me too. But if you were really thinking, really absorbed, then you were protected. And I had tried the business of the fixed look as well and found that it worked. Back in Demian’s time I had not succeeded with it; now I often felt that a great deal could be accomplished with looks and thoughts.
So I sat now, too, far away from Herodotus and from school. But then, without warning, the teacher’s voice struck into my consciousness like lightning, so that I woke up in terror. I heard his voice; he was standing close beside me; I thought he had already called my name. But he was not looking at me. I breathed again.
Then I heard his voice again. Aloud it said the word: “Abraxas.”
In an explanation whose beginning I had missed, Dr. Follen went on: “We must not imagine the views of those sects and mystical societies of antiquity as naive as they appear from the standpoint of a rationalist consideration. Antiquity did not know science in our sense at all. Instead there was a preoccupation with philosophical and mystical truths that was very highly developed. Out of it there arose, in part, magic and mere play, which no doubt often led to fraud and crime as well. But magic too had a noble origin and profound ideas. So it is with the doctrine of Abraxas, which I cited a moment ago as an example. This name is mentioned in connection with Greek magic formulas and is often taken to be the name of some sorcerer’s devil, such as savage peoples still have today. But it seems that Abraxas means a great deal more. We can think of the name as that of a deity whose symbolic task was to unite the divine and the devilish.”
The little learned man went on speaking, finely and eagerly; no one was paying much attention, and since the name did not come up again, my attention soon sank back into myself.
“To unite the divine and the devilish,” it echoed in me. Here I could take up a thread. This was familiar to me from my talks with Demian in the very last period of our friendship. Demian had said then that we did have a God whom we worshiped, but that he represented only an arbitrarily separated half of the world (it was the official, permitted, “bright” world). But one must be able to worship the whole world; so one must either have a God who was also a devil, or one must institute a service of the devil alongside the service of God.—And now, then, Abraxas was the god who was both God and devil.
For a time I went on searching along this trail with great zeal, without getting any further. I also combed through a whole library for Abraxas, without success. But my nature was never much disposed toward this kind of direct and conscious searching, in which you mostly find only truths that stay in your hand like stones.
The figure of Beatrice, with whom I had been so much and so deeply occupied for a certain time, now gradually sank down, or rather she slowly drew away from me, came nearer and nearer to the horizon, and grew more shadowy, more distant, paler. She no longer satisfied the soul.
In the existence I now led, peculiarly spun in upon myself, like a sleepwalker, a new formation began to arise. The longing for life blossomed in me, or rather the longing for love, and the sexual urge, which for a while I had been able to dissolve into the worship of Beatrice, demanded new images and goals. Still no fulfillment came to meet me, and it was more impossible than ever for me to deceive my longing and expect anything from the girls with whom my classmates sought their happiness. I dreamed intensely again, and more by day than by night. Ideas, images, or wishes rose up in me and drew me away from the outer world, so that I had more real and lively dealings with these images in me, with these dreams or shadows, and lived with them more, than with my real surroundings.
One particular dream, or a play of fancy that kept coming back, became full of meaning for me. This dream, the most important and lasting of my life, went something like this: I was coming back to my father’s house—over the front door the bird of the coat of arms shone yellow on a blue ground—in the house my mother came toward me—but when I came in and wanted to embrace her, it was not she but a figure I had never seen, tall and powerful, like Max Demian and my painted sheet, yet different, and in spite of its power wholly and entirely female. This figure drew me to itself and took me into a deep, shuddering embrace of love. Bliss and horror were mingled; the embrace was divine service, and it was just as much a crime. Too much memory of my mother, too much memory of my friend Demian haunted the figure that held me. Its embrace offended against every reverence and yet was blessedness. Often I woke from this dream with a deep feeling of happiness, often with mortal fear and the most tormented conscience, as if from a terrible sin.
Only gradually and unconsciously did a connection come about between this wholly inward image and the hint that had reached me from outside about the god to be sought. But then it grew closer and more intimate, and I began to sense that it was precisely in this dream of premonition that I was calling on Abraxas. Bliss and horror, man and woman mingled, the holiest and the most hideous woven into each other, deep guilt quivering through the tenderest innocence—such was my dream image of love, and such too was Abraxas. Love was no longer an animal, dark urge, as I had felt it in fear at the beginning, nor was it any longer piously spiritualized worship, as I had offered it to the image of Beatrice. It was both, both and a great deal more; it was angel’s image and Satan, man and woman in one, human and animal, highest good and utmost evil. To live this seemed my destiny, to taste it my fate. I longed for it and was afraid of it; I dreamed after it and fled from it; but it was always there, always above me.
The following spring I was to leave the Gymnasium and go on to the university; I did not yet know where or to study what. A little mustache was growing on my lip; I was a grown man, and yet completely helpless and without goals. Only one thing was firm: the voice in me, the dream image. I felt the task of following this guidance blindly. But it came hard to me, and every day I rebelled. Perhaps I was mad, I thought not seldom; perhaps I was not like other people? But I could do everything that others did; with a little diligence and effort I could read Plato, could solve trigonometry problems or follow a chemical analysis. There was only one thing I could not do: tear out the goal darkly hidden in me and paint it up somewhere in front of me, as others did, who knew exactly that they wanted to be professors or judges, doctors or artists, how long it would take and what advantages it would have. That I could not do. Perhaps I too would become something of the kind someday, but how was I to know. Perhaps I would have to search and go on searching, for years, and become nothing, and reach no goal. Perhaps I would reach a goal after all, but it would be an evil, dangerous, terrible one.
All I wanted was to try to live what was trying to come out of me of its own accord. Why was that so very hard?
I often made the attempt to paint the powerful figure of love from my dream. But it never succeeded. Had it succeeded, I would have sent the sheet to Demian. Where was he? I did not know. I knew only that he was bound to me. When would I see him again?
The friendly calm of those weeks and months of the Beatrice time was long past. Back then I had thought I had reached an island and found a peace. But it was always so—hardly had a state of mind grown dear to me, hardly had a dream done me good, when it was already withering and going blind. It was useless to mourn after it! I lived now in a fire of unappeased desire, of tense expectation, which often made me completely wild and crazed. I often saw the image of the beloved of my dreams before me with an overly vivid clarity, much more clearly than my own hand; I spoke to it, wept before it, cursed it. I called it mother and knelt before it in tears; I called it beloved and sensed its ripe, all-fulfilling kiss; I called it devil and whore, vampire and murderer. It lured me to the tenderest dreams of love and to wild shamelessness; nothing was too good and precious for it, nothing too bad and low.
That whole winter I lived through an inner storm that I can hardly describe. I had long been used to solitude; it did not oppress me; I lived with Demian, with the sparrow hawk, with the image of the great dream figure that was my fate and my beloved. That was enough to live in, for everything looked out into the great and the wide, and everything pointed to Abraxas. But none of these dreams, none of my thoughts obeyed me; I could summon none of them; to none could I give its colors as I liked. They came and took me; I was ruled by them; I was lived by them.
Outwardly, to be sure, I was secure. I had no fear of people; my classmates had learned that too and showed me a secret respect that often made me smile. If I wanted to, I could see through most of them very well and occasionally astonish them with it. Only I seldom or never wanted to. I was always occupied with myself, always with myself. And I longed ardently at last to live a little myself, to give something of myself out into the world, to enter into relation and struggle with it. Sometimes, when I ran through the streets in the evening and was too restless to go home before midnight, sometimes I thought then that now, right now, my beloved must meet me, walk past at the next corner, call to me from the next window. Sometimes, too, all this seemed unbearably tormenting to me, and I was prepared to take my own life someday.
I found a peculiar refuge at that time—through “chance,” as people say. But there are no such chances. When someone who needs something urgently finds what he needs, it is not chance that gives it to him; it is he himself; his own desire and need lead him to it.
Two or three times on my walks through the town I had heard organ music coming from a smaller church on the outskirts, without stopping. The next time I passed by, I heard it again and recognized that Bach was being played. I went to the door, which I found locked, and since the lane was almost empty of people, I sat down beside the church on a curbstone, wrapped my coat collar around me, and listened. It was not a large organ, but a good one, and it was strangely played, that is, well and almost like a virtuoso, but with a peculiar, highly personal expression of will and persistence that sounded like a prayer. I had the feeling: the man playing there knows that a treasure is locked up in this music, and he is wooing and knocking and laboring for this treasure as for his life. In the technical sense I do not understand very much about music, but it is exactly this expression of the soul that I have understood instinctively from childhood on, and I have felt what is musical as something natural in me.
After that the musician played something modern as well; it might have been by Reger. The church was almost completely dark; only a very thin gleam of light came through the nearest window. I waited until the music was over and then walked up and down until I saw the organist come out. He was still a young man, though older than I, square-built and stocky, and he hurried away with powerful and as it were unwilling strides.
From then on I sometimes sat in front of the church in the evening hours, or walked up and down. Once I even found the door open and sat for half an hour in a pew, shivering and happy, while the organist played up above by scanty gaslight. In the music he played I heard not only him himself. It also seemed to me that everything he played was related, had a secret connection. Everything he played was believing, was devoted and pious, but not pious like churchgoers and pastors, but pious like pilgrims and beggars in the Middle Ages, pious with a reckless devotion to a feeling of the world that stood above all creeds. The masters before Bach were played diligently, and old Italians. And they all said the same thing, they all said what the musician too had in his soul: longing, the most intimate grasping of the world and the wildest parting from it again, a burning listening to one’s own dark soul, the intoxication of devotion, and a deep curiosity about the marvelous.
Once when I secretly followed the organist after he left the church, I saw him go into a little tavern far out at the edge of town. I could not resist and went in after him. Here for the first time I saw him clearly. He sat at the table in a corner of the little taproom, his black felt hat on his head, a glass of wine in front of him, and his face was just as I had expected. It was ugly and somewhat wild, searching and obstinate, willful and full of will, and yet soft and childlike around the mouth. All the masculine and strong sat in his eyes and forehead; the lower part of his face was delicate and unfinished, uncontrolled and in part soft; the chin, full of indecision, stood out boyishly like a contradiction of forehead and gaze. I liked his dark brown eyes, full of pride and hostility.
I sat down opposite him without a word; there was no one else in the tavern. He glared at me as if he wanted to drive me away. But I held my ground and looked at him steadily until he growled crossly: “What are you staring at so damned sharply? Do you want something from me?”
“I don’t want anything from you,” I said. “But I’ve already had a great deal from you.”
He knitted his brow.
“Oh, so you’re a music enthusiast? I find it disgusting to go into raptures over music.”
I did not let myself be put off.
“I’ve often listened to you, in the church out there,” I said. “I don’t mean to bother you, by the way. I thought I might perhaps find something with you, something special, I don’t really know what. But better not listen to me at all! I can listen to you in the church, after all.”
“But I always lock up.”
“The other day you forgot, and I sat inside. Otherwise I stand outside or sit on the curbstone.”
“Oh? You can come in another time, it’s warmer. You’ll just have to knock on the door. But hard, and not while I’m playing. Now go on—what were you going to say? You’re a very young man, probably a schoolboy or a student. Are you a musician?”
“No. I like listening to music, but only the kind you play, music that’s absolute, the kind where you feel that a man is shaking heaven and hell. I love music very much, I think because it’s so little moral. Everything else is moral, and I’m looking for something that isn’t. I’ve only ever suffered from what’s moral. I can’t express myself well.—Do you know that there must be a God who is at once God and devil? There’s supposed to have been one; I heard about it.”
The musician pushed his wide hat back a little and shook the dark hair from his big forehead. As he did, he looked at me piercingly and leaned his face toward me across the table.
Softly and tensely he asked: “What is the name of the god you’re speaking of?”
“I’m afraid I know almost nothing about him, really only the name. His name is Abraxas.”
The musician looked around as if suspicious that someone might be listening to us. Then he moved up close to me and said in a whisper: “I thought so. Who are you?”
“I’m a pupil at the Gymnasium.”
“How do you know about Abraxas?”
“By chance.”
He struck the table so hard that his wineglass overflowed.
“Chance! Don’t talk sh… rubbish, young man! You don’t know about Abraxas by chance, remember that. I’ll tell you more about him yet. I know a little about him.”
He fell silent and pushed his chair back. When I looked at him full of expectation, he made a face.
“Not here! Another time.—Here, take these!”
As he spoke he reached into the pocket of his coat, which he had not taken off, and pulled out a few roasted chestnuts, which he tossed to me.
I said nothing, took them, ate, and was very content.
“Well!” he whispered after a while. “How do you know about—Him?”
I did not hesitate to tell him.
“I was alone and at a loss,” I said. “Then I thought of a friend from years ago who I believe knows a great deal. I had painted something, a bird coming out of a globe of the world. I sent it to him. After a while, when I no longer really believed in it, a piece of paper came into my hands, and on it was written: The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever would be born must destroy a world. The bird flies to God. The name of the god is Abraxas.”
He made no reply; we peeled our chestnuts and ate them with the wine.
“Shall we have another glass?” he asked.
“No, thank you. I don’t like drinking.”
He laughed, a little disappointed.
“As you like! It’s different with me. I’ll stay here a while. Off you go now!”
The next time I went with him after the organ music, he was not very communicative. In an old lane he led me up through an old, stately house and into a large, somewhat gloomy and neglected room, where apart from a piano nothing pointed to music, while a large bookcase and a desk gave the room something scholarly.
“How many books you have!” I said admiringly.
“Some of them are from the library of my father, whom I live with.—Yes, young man, I live with my father and mother, but I can’t introduce you to them; the company I keep isn’t held in high regard in this house. I’m a prodigal son, you know. My father is a fabulously honorable man, an important pastor and preacher in this town. And I, so that you know at once where you stand, am his gifted and promising young gentleman of a son, who has, however, gone off the rails and become somewhat mad. I was a theologian and left that worthy faculty shortly before my state examinations. Although I’m actually still in the trade, as far as my private studies are concerned. What sort of gods people have thought up for themselves at one time or another is still extremely important and interesting to me. For the rest, I’m a musician now and, it seems, will soon get a small post as an organist. Then I’ll be back with the church again, after all.”
I looked along the backs of the books and found Greek, Latin, and Hebrew titles, as far as I could see in the weak light of the little table lamp. Meanwhile my acquaintance had lain down on the floor in the dark by the wall and was busy with something there.
“Come here,” he called after a while, “now we’ll practice a little philosophy, that is, keep our mouths shut, lie on our bellies, and think.”
He struck a match and set paper and logs alight in the fireplace in front of which he lay. The flame shot up; he stoked and fed the fire with exquisite care. I lay down beside him on the threadbare rug. He stared into the fire, which drew me too, and we lay silent on our bellies for perhaps an hour in front of the flickering wood fire, watched it blaze and roar, sink down and writhe, flicker out and twitch, and at last brood on the hearth in a quiet, sunken glow.
“Fire worship wasn’t the stupidest thing ever invented,” he murmured to himself once. Otherwise neither of us said a word. With fixed eyes I hung on the fire, sank into dream and stillness, saw figures in the smoke and pictures in the ashes. Once I started. My companion threw a little piece of resin into the embers; a small, slender flame shot up, and in it I saw the bird with the yellow sparrow hawk’s head. In the dying glow of the fireplace golden, glowing threads ran together into nets; letters and pictures appeared, memories of faces, of animals, of plants, of worms and snakes. When, waking, I looked across at the other man, he was staring into the ashes, his chin on his fists, rapt and fanatical.
“I have to go now,” I said softly.
“Yes, then go. Goodbye!”
He did not get up, and since the lamp had been put out I had to grope my way with difficulty through the dark room and the dark passages and stairs out of the enchanted old house. In the street I stopped and looked up at the old house. No light was burning in any window. A small brass plate gleamed in the light of the gas lamp by the door.
“Pistorius, Senior Pastor,” I read on it.
Only at home, when I sat alone in my little room after supper, did it occur to me that I had learned nothing about Abraxas or anything else from Pistorius, that we had hardly exchanged ten words at all. But I was very content with my visit to him. And for the next time he had promised me a quite exquisite piece of old organ music, a passacaglia by Buxtehude.
Without my knowing it, the organist Pistorius had given me a first lesson when I lay with him on the floor in front of the fireplace of his dreary hermit’s room. Gazing into the fire had done me good; it had strengthened and confirmed inclinations in me that I had always had but never really cultivated. Gradually some of this became clear to me.
Even as a small child I had now and again had a tendency to look at bizarre forms of nature, not observing them, but surrendered to their own magic, their tangled, deep language. Long roots of trees turned to wood, colored veins in stone, patches of oil floating on water, cracks in glass—all such things had at times held great magic for me, above all water and fire, smoke, clouds, dust, and most especially the circling spots of color I saw when I closed my eyes. In the days after my first visit to Pistorius this began to come back to me. For I noticed that a certain strengthening and joy, a heightening of my feeling of myself, which I had felt since then, I owed solely to the long staring into the open fire. It was curiously soothing and enriching, doing that!
To the few experiences I had so far gained on the way toward my real goal in life, this new one was added: contemplating such forms, surrendering to irrational, tangled, strange forms of nature, produces in us a feeling of the agreement of our inner selves with the will that let these forms come into being—we soon feel the temptation to take them for our own whims, our own creations—we see the boundaries between ourselves and nature tremble and dissolve, and we come to know the mood in which we do not know whether the images on our retina come from outer impressions or from inner ones. Nowhere so simply and easily as in this exercise do we discover how much we are creators, how much our soul constantly takes part in the continual creation of the world. It is rather the same indivisible deity that is active in us and in nature, and if the outer world were to perish, any one of us would be capable of building it up again, for mountain and river, tree and leaf, root and blossom, everything formed in nature lies preformed in us, comes from the soul, whose essence is eternity, whose essence we do not know, but which makes itself felt to us mostly as the power of love and the power of creation.
Only many years later did I find this observation confirmed in a book, namely by Leonardo da Vinci, who speaks somewhere of how good and deeply stimulating it is to look at a wall that many people have spat on. Before those stains on the damp wall he felt the same thing that Pistorius and I felt before the fire.
At our next meeting the organist gave me an explanation.
“We always draw the boundaries of our personality much too narrowly! We count as part of our person only what we recognize as individually distinct, as deviating. But we consist of the whole stock of the world, each one of us, and just as our body carries within it the genealogical tables of evolution back to the fish and much further still, so we have in our soul everything that has ever lived in human souls. All the gods and devils there have ever been, whether among the Greeks and Chinese or among the Zulus, all of them are in us too, are there, as possibilities, as wishes, as ways out. If mankind died out except for a single halfway gifted child who had received no instruction of any kind, this child would rediscover the whole course of things; it would be able to produce gods, demons, paradises, commandments and prohibitions, Old and New Testaments, everything, all over again.”
“Yes, fine,” I objected, “but then what does the value of the individual consist in? Why do we still strive, if we already have everything ready-made in us?”
“Stop!” Pistorius cried vehemently. “There’s a great difference between merely carrying the world within you and knowing it as well! A madman can produce thoughts that recall Plato, and a pious little schoolboy at a Moravian school creatively thinks through deep mythological connections that occur among the Gnostics or in Zoroaster. But he knows nothing of it! He’s a tree or a stone, at best an animal, as long as he doesn’t know it. But then, when the first spark of this knowledge dawns, then he becomes a human being. You surely don’t take all the two-legged creatures walking about in the street there for human beings just because they walk upright and carry their young for nine months? You can see how many of them are fish or sheep, worms or leeches, how many are ants, how many bees! Now, in each of them the possibilities for becoming human are there, but only as he senses them, as he even learns to make them partly conscious, do these possibilities belong to him.”
Such, roughly, were our conversations. Seldom did they bring me anything entirely new, anything wholly surprising. But all of them, even the most banal, struck with soft, steady hammer blows on the same point in me; all of them helped to form me, all helped to strip skins from me, to break eggshells, and out of each one I raised my head a little higher, a little more freely, until my yellow bird thrust its beautiful bird-of-prey head out of the shattered shell of the world.
We often told each other our dreams, too. Pistorius knew how to give them an interpretation. A curious example comes to mind just now. I had a dream in which I could fly, but in such a way that I was flung through the air, as it were, by a great surge of momentum that I was not master of. The feeling of this flight was exhilarating, but soon turned to fear when I saw myself carried off helplessly to dangerous heights. Then I made the redeeming discovery that I could regulate my rising and falling by holding my breath and letting it stream out.
To this Pistorius said: “The surge that makes you fly is our great human possession, which everyone has. It’s the feeling of connection with the roots of all power, but you soon grow frightened by it! It’s damned dangerous! That’s why most people so gladly give up flying and prefer to walk on the sidewalk, guided by the regulations of the law. But not you. You go on flying, as befits a capable young fellow. And look, then you discover the strange thing, that you gradually become master of it, that to the great general force that sweeps you away there is added a fine, small force of your own, an organ, a rudder! That’s splendid. Without it you’d go off into the air helplessly; that’s what madmen do, for example. They’re given deeper intuitions than the people on the sidewalk, but they have no key and no rudder for them, and they hurtle into the bottomless. But you, Sinclair, you’re managing it! And how, if you please? You probably don’t even know yet? You do it with a new organ, with a breath regulator. And now you can see how little ‘personal’ your soul is in its depths. For it doesn’t invent this regulator! It isn’t new! It’s a loan; it has existed for thousands of years. It’s the balancing organ of fish, the swim bladder. And in fact there are still a few strange and conservative kinds of fish today in which the swim bladder is at the same time a kind of lung and can, under certain circumstances, really serve for breathing. So, exactly like the lung that you use in your dream as a flying bladder!”
He even brought me a volume of zoology and showed me the names and illustrations of those old-fashioned fish. And with a strange shudder I felt a function from early epochs of evolution come alive in me.