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p153 I speak of this because, not without tremors, not without a contraction of my heart, I have now come to the fateful event which happened about a year after I received in Naumburg the letter I quoted from Adrian; somewhat more than a year, that is, after his arrival in Leipzig and that first sight of the city of which the letter tells. In other words, it was not long before -- being released from the service -- I went to him again and found him, while outwardly unchanged, yet in fact a marked man, pierced by the arrow of fate. In narrating this episode, I feel I should call Apollo and the Muses to my aid, to inspire me with the purest, most indulgent words: indulgent to the sensitive reader, indulgent to the memory of my departed friend, indulgent lastly to myself, to whom the telling is like a serious personal confession. But such an invocation betrays to me at once the contradiction between my own intellectual conditioning and the colouration of the story I have to tell, a colouration that comes from quite other strata of tradition, altogether foreign to the blitheness of classical culture. I began this record by expressing doubt whether I was the right man for the task. The arguments I had to adduce against such doubts I will not repeat. It must suffice that, supported on them, strengthened by them, I propose to remain true to my undertaking.
I said that Adrian returned to the place whither the impudent messenger had brought him. One sees now that it did not happen so soon. A whole year long the pride of the spirit asserted itself against the injury it had received, and it was always a sort of consolation to me to feel that his surrender to the naked instinct that had laid its spiteful finger on him had not lacked all and every human nobility of psychological veiling. For as such I regard every fixation of desire, however crude, on a definite and individual goal. I see it in the moment of choice, even though the will thereto be not “free” but impudently provoked by its object. A trace of purifying love can be attested so soon as the instinct wears the face of a human being, be it the most anonymous, the most contemptible. And there is this to say, that Adrian went back to that place on account of one particular person, of her whose touch burned on his cheek, the “brown wench” with the big mouth [so “gam” means mouth? I’ve never heard that], in the little jacket, who had come up to him at the piano and whom he called Esmeralda. It was she whom he sought there -- and did not find her.
p154 The fixation, calamitous as it was, resulted in his leaving the brothel after his second and voluntary visit the same man as after the first, involuntary one [I would question that]; not, however, without having assured himself of the place where she was now. It had the further result that under a musical pretext he made rather a long journey to reach her whom he desired. It happened that the first Austrian performance of Salomé, conducted by the composer himself, was to take place in Graz, the capital of Styria, in May 1906. Some months earlier Adrian and Kretschmar had gone to Dresden to see its actual premiere; and he had told his teacher and... friends... that he wanted to be present at this gala performance and hear again that successful revolutionary work... He travelled alone, and one cannot be sure whether he carried out his ostensible purpose and went from Graz to Pressburg... or whether he simply pretended the stay in Graz and confined himself to the visit to Pressburg (in Hungarian, Pozsony). She whose mark he bore had been hidden in a house there, having had to leave her former place for hospital treatment. The hunted hunter found her out.
Unless my math is failing me, we are talking about a man of one and twenty at this point.
My hand trembles as I write; but in quiet, collected words I will say what I know, always consoled to a certain extent by the thought to which I gave utterance above, the idea of choice, the thought that something obtained here like a bond of love, which lent to the coming together of the precious youth and that unhappy creature a gleam of soul. Though of course this consolation is inseparable from the other thought, so much more dreadful, that love and poison here once and for ever became a frightful unity of experience; the mythological unity embodied in the arrow.
It does look as though in the poor thing’s mind something answered the feeling which the youth brought to her. No doubt she remembered that fleeting visit. Her approach, that caressing of his cheek with her bare arm, might have been the humble and tender expression of her receptivity for all that distinguished him from the usual clientele. And she learned from his own lips that he had made the journey thither on her account. She thanked him, even while she warned him against her body. I know it from Adrian: she warned him [which is more than Faust did for Gretchen while seducing her] -- is not this something like a beneficent distinction between the higher humanity of the creature and her physical part, fallen to the gutter, sunk to a wretched object of use? The unhappy one warned him who asked of her, warned him away from “herself”; that meant an act of free elevation of soul above her pitiable physical existence, an act of human disassociation from it, an act of sympathy, an act -- if the word be permitted me -- of love. And, gracious heaven, was it not also love, or what was it, what madness, what deliberate reckless tempting of God, what compulsion to comprise the punishment in the sin, finally what deep, deeply mysterious longing for daemonic conception, for a deathly unchaining of chemical change in his nature was at work, that having been warned he despised the warning and insisted upon possession of this flesh?
Funny how Esmeralda and Clavdia harbor disease, but not young Tadzio -- though he provokes a similar fatal passion in Aschenbach in “Death in Venice”.
p155 Never without a religious shudder have I been able to think of this embrace, in which the one staked his salvation, the other found it. Purifying, justifying, sublimating, it must have blessed the wretched one, that the other travelled from afar and refused whatever the risk to give her up. It seems that she gave him all the sweetness of her womanhood, to repay him for what he risked. She might thus know that he never forgot her; but it is no less true that it was for her own sake he, who never saw her again, remembered; and her name -- that which he gave her from the beginning -- whispers magically, unheard by anyone but me, throughout his work... [he works notes representing “hetaera esmeralda” (not her actual name, mind you) into many of his most significant works.]
Obviously Salomé, by Richard Strauss was not picked at random to be the excuse for Adrian’s trip. Here is what Wiki has to say about the reception of this one act opera:
The combination of the Christian biblical theme, the erotic and the murderous, which so attracted Wilde to the tale, shocked opera audiences from its first appearance. Some of the original performers were very reluctant to handle the material as written and the Salomé, Marie Wittich, "refused to perform the 'Dance of the Seven Veils'", thus creating a situation where a dancer stood in for her.
It was first performed at the Hofoper in Dresden on 9 December 1905, and within two years, it had been given in 50 other opera houses.
Gustav Mahler could not gain the consent of the Vienna censor to have it performed, therefore it was not given at the Vienna State Opera until 1918. The Austrian premiere was given at the Graz Opera in 1906 under the composer, with Arnold Schoenberg, Giacomo Puccini, Alban Berg, and Gustav Mahler in the audience.
Salomé was banned in London by the Lord Chamberlain's office until 1907. When it was given its premiere performance at Covent Garden in London under Thomas Beecham on 8 December 1910, it was modified, much to Beecham's annoyance and later amusement. In New York, the premiere took place on 22 January 1907 after which, under pressure from wealthy patrons, "further performances were cancelled." These patrons entreated the visiting Edward Elgar to lead the objections to the work, but he refused point-blank, stating that Strauss was "the greatest genius of the age".
-Wiki
For an interesting synopsis of this “lust-hell” of an opera, see HERE.
p156 ...I can still hear him say about the author of it [Salomé]: “What a gifted good fellow! The revolutionary as a Sabbath-day child, pert and conciliant. How after great expense of affronts and dissonances everything turns into good nature, beer and good nature, gets all buttered up, so to speak, appeasing the philistine and telling him no harm was meant. . . . But a hit, a palpable hit!” ...
[Five weeks after returning to Leipzig Adrian consults a physician. About a week after his “treatment” starts the doctor dies. Adrian consults a second doctor, a dermatologist, but before his third treatment he runs into the doctor being led away in handcuffs.] p157...as though frightened off, he never took up the cure again after that and went to no other doctor. He did so the less in that the local affection healed itself without further treatment and disappeared... there were no manifest secondary symptoms... When I came back to Leipzig, once more a civilian, I found my friend unchanged in his walks and ways.
To get through this chapter requires a huge dose of poetic licence. An "adult" man, apparently never touched in his life, slinks off to Hungary after having been driven mad with lust -- over the period of a year -- by the most casual contact with a prostitute. For his sin (lust) -- let's guess -- he sacrifices himself to the danger of her disease... and then goes on with his life as though nothing had ever happened (as near as I can tell from several chapters ahead). (Having read even further ahead, I learn that it was not for lust that he journeyed to Bratislava. Can you guess the real reason? Georges Bataille probably could have. But the next paragraph still stands.)
Here's the way I imagine the scene after Adrian dramatically departs the refuge of sin in Bratislava: Shutting the door, Dika turns to her friend coming down the stairs. “What was that all about? Who's Esmeralda?” enquires her friend, “Fuck if I know. Crazy Germans need to get laid before they go completely mental.”
Epilogue... or prologue?
I’ve remembered a story from my college days that, while too personal, is so appropriate to this material that I’m going to post it anyway. My freshman year in college I was living off campus and our apartment had a major infestation of high school girls. The one and only time in my life a female has straight out propositioned me and suggested that right now would be great for sexy times, the girl was not close to being legal, and I was studying the Ontological argument for God’s existence -- and I don't mean that day or week, I mean I was at my desk with a book of Scholastic philosophy in front of me at the very moment. I passed on her generous offer and was saved (she was not taking no for an answer) by the arrival of a friend of another roommate who said yes. (I didn’t think of the second way “saved “ could be taken in that sentence until re-reading it) It turned out that the main reason she was so hot to trot was that she had a nasty case of gonorrhea. ("Symptoms of gonorrhea include... a burning or itching of the vaginal area." -Source) It’s just as well I hadn’t read Doctor Faustus at that point or I might have had very disturbing thoughts.
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