24. Doctor Faustus - chapter XXV - part 2

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[continued from part 2]

p229 “Hold thy tongue!”

“Hold thy tongue? We are coming on. We wax warm. At last you drop the polite plural number and say ‘thou,’ as it should be between people who are in league and contract for time and eternity.”

“Will ye hold your tongue still?”

“Still? But we have been for nigh five years and must after all sometime hold parley and advise over the whole and over the interesting situation wherein you find yourself. This is naturally a thing to keep wry about, but after all not at length -- when the houre-glasse is set, the red sand has begun to run through the fine-fine neck -- ah, but only just begun! It is still almost nothing, what lies underneath, by comparison with all there is on top; we give time, plenteous time, abundant time by the eye, the end whereof we do not need to consider, not for a long time yet, nor need to trouble yet while even of the point of time where you could begin to take heed to the ending, where it might come to ‘Respice finem.’ [look to the end] Sithence it is a variable point, left to caprice and temper, and nobody knows where it should begin, and how nigh to the end one should lay it out. This is a good bourd and capital arrangement: the uncertainty and the free choice of the moment when time is come to heed the eynde, overcasts in mist and jest the view of the appointed limit.”

“Fables, fantasies!”

“Get along, one cannot please you, even against my psychology you are harsh -- albeit you yourself on your Mount Zion at home called psychology a nice, neutral middle point and psychologists the most truth-loving people. I fable not a whit when I speak of the given time and the appointed end; I speak entirely to the point. Wheresoever the houre-glasse is set up and time fixed, unthinkable yet measured time and a fixed end, there we are in the field, there we are in clover. Time we sell -- let us say XXIV years -- can we see to the end of that? Is it a good solid amount? Therewith a man can live at rack and manger like a lord and astonish the world as a great nigromancer with much divel’s work; the lenger it goes on, the more forget all paralysis and in highly illuminated state rise out of himselfe, yet never transcend but remain the same, though raised to his proper stature by the half-bottle of champagne. In drunken bliss he savours all the rapture of an almost unbearable draught, till he may with more or less of right be convinced that a like infusion has not been in a thousand years and in certain abandoned moments may simply hold himself a god. How will such an one come to think about the point of time when it is become time to give heed to the end! Only, the end is ours, at the end he is ours, that has to be agreed on, and not merely silently, how silent so ever it be else, but from man to man and expressly.”

p230 I: “So you would sell me time?”

He: “Time? Simple time? No, my dear fere, that is not devyll’s ware. For that we should not earn the reward, namely that the end belongs to us. What manner of time, that is the heart of the matter! Great time, mad time, quite bedivelled time, in which the fun waxes fast and furious, with heaven-high leaping and springing -- and again, of course, a bit miserable, very miserable indeed, I not only admit that, I even emphasize it, with pride, for it is sitting and fit, such is artist-way and artist-nature. That, as is well knowen, is given at all times to excess on both sides and is in quite normal way a bit excessive. Always the pendulum swings very wide to and fro between high spirits and melancholia, [sounds like he's describing bipolar disorder] that is usual, is so to speak still according to moderate bourgeois Nuremberg way, in comparison with that which we purvey. For we purvey the uttermost in this direction; we purvey towering flights and illuminations, experiences of uplifts and unfetterings, of freedom, certainty, facility, feeling of power and triumph, that our man does not trust his wits -- counting in besides the colossal admiration for the made thing, which could soon bring him to renounce every outside, foreign admiration -- the thrills of self-veneration, yes, of exquisite horror of himself, in which he appears to himself like an inspired mouthpiece, as a godlike monster. And correspondingly deep, honourably deep, doth he sink in between-time, not only into void and desolation and unfruitful melancholy lost also into pains and sicknesse -- familiar incidentally, which had always been there, which belong to his character, yet which are only most honorably enhanced by the illumination and the well-knowen ‘sack of heyre.’ Those are pains which a man gladly pays, with pleasure and pride, for what he has so much enjoyed, pains which he knows from the fairy-tale, the pains which the little sea-maid, as from sharp knives, had in her beautiful human legs she got herself instead of her tail. You know Anderson’s Little Sea-maid? She would be a sweatheart for you! Just say the word and I will bring her to your couch.”

The pains suffered by the sea-maid are something, like the dead roots of teeth, that he will keep coming back to, so I will give you the passage from the story,

Every step she took was as the witch had said it would be, she felt as if treading upon the points of needles or sharp knives; but she bore it willingly, and stepped as lightly by the prince’s side as a soap-bubble, so that he and all who saw her wondered at her graceful-swaying movements.

p231 I: “If you could just keep quiet, prating jackanapes that you are!”

He: “How now! Need you always make a rude answer? Always you expect me to be still. But silence is not my motto, I do not belong to the Schweigestill family... [the family Adrian will live with in Pfeiffering] Neither am I come hither for the sake of silence to a pagan foreign land; but rather for express confirmation between us two and a firm contract upon payment against completion. I tell you, we have been silent more than four years -- and now everything is taking the finest, most exquisite, most promising course, and the bell is not half cast. Shall I tell you how it stands and what is afoot?”

I: “It well appeareth I must listen.”

He: “Wouldst like to besides, and art well content that thou canst hear. I trow forsooth you are on edge to hear and would grumble and growl an I kept it back, and that of right too. It is such a snug, familiar world wherin we are together, thou and I -- we are right at home therin, pure Kaisersaschern, good old German air, from anno MD or therabouts, shortly before Dr. Martinus came, who stood on such stout and sturdy footing with me and threw the roll, no, I mean the ink-pot at me, long before the thirty years’ frolic. Bethink thee what lively movement of the people was with you in Germany’s midst, on the Rhine and all over, how full of agitation and unrest, anxiety, presentiments; what press of pilgrims to the Sacred Blood at Niklashausen in the Tauberthal, what children’s crusades, bleeding of the Host, famine, Peasant’s League, war, the pest at Cologne, meteors, comets, and great omens, nuns with stigmata, miraculous crosses on men’s garments, and that amazing standard of the maiden’s shift with the Cross, whereunder to march against the Turk! Good time, divellishly German time! Don’t you feel all warm and snug at the memory? There the right planets come together in the sign of the Scorpion, as Master Durer has eruditely drawn in the medical broadsheet, there came the tender little ones, the swarm of animated corkscrews, the loving guests from the West Indies into the German lands, the flagellants [Syphilis] -- ah, now you listen! As though I spake of the marching guild of penitents, the Flagellants, who flailed for their own and all other sins. But I mean those flagellates, the invisible tiny ones, the kind that have scourges, like our pale Venus, the spirochaeta pallida, [spiral-shaped bacteria (including those that cause syphilis)] that is the true sort. But th’art right, it sounds so comfortingly like the depths of Middle Ages and the flagellum haereticorum fascinariorum. [by Nicholas Jacquier (written 1458, published 1581), defined witchcraft as a new heresy. -Dartmouth guide] Yea, verily, as fascinarii [to cast a spell on] they may well shew themselves, our devotees, in the better cases, as in yours. They are moreover quite civilized and domesticated long since, and in old countries where they have been so many hundred years at home, they do not play such merry pranks and coarse preposterous jokes as erstwhile, with running sore and plague and worm-eaten nose. Baptist Spengler the painter does not look as though he, his body wrapped up in hair, would have to shake the warning rattle withersoever he went.”

p232 I: “Is he like that -- Spengler?”

He: “Why not? I suppose you think you are the only one in like case? I know thou haddest thine liefer quite by thyself and art vexed at any comparison. My dear fellow, a man always has a great many companions. Spengler, of course, is an Esmeraldus. It is not without reason that he blinks, so sly and shamefast, and not for nothing does Inez Rodde call him a sneak. So it is: Leo Zink, the Faunus ficarius, [a kind of faun (a type of lustful Roman god)] has always heretofore escaped; but it got the clean, clever Spengler early on. Yet be calm, withhold your jealousy. It is a banal, tedious case, productive of nothing at all. He is no python, in whom we bring sensational deeds to pass. A little brighter, more given to the intellectual he may become since the reception and would peradventure list not so much on reading the Goncourt journals or Abbe Galiani if he had not the relation with the higher world, nor had the privy memorandum. Psychology, my dear friend. Disease, indeed I mean repulsive, individual, private disease, makes a certain critical contrast to the world, to life’s mean, puts a man in a mood rebellious and ironic against the bourgeois order, makes its man take refuge with the free spirit, with books, in cogitation. But more it is not with Spengler. The space that is still allotted him for reading, quoting, drinking red wine, and idling about, it isn’t we who have sold it to him, it is anything rather than genialized time. A man of the world, just singed by our flame, weary, mildly interesting, no more, He rots away, liver, kidneys, stomach, heart, bowels; some day his voice will be a croak, or he will be deaf, after a few years he will ingloriously shuffle off this coyle, with a cynical quip on his lips -- what then? It forceth but little, there was never any illumination, enhancing or enthusiasm, for it was not of the brain, not cerebral, you understand -- our little ones in that case made no force of the upper and noble, it had obviously no fascination for them. it did not come to a metastasis into the metaphysical, metavenereal, meta-infectivus. . . .”

I (with venom): “How long must I needs sit and freeze and listen to your intolerable gibberish?”

p233 He: “Gibberish? Have to listen? That’s a funny chord to strike. In mine opinion you listen very attentively and are but impatient to know more, yea and all. You must have asked eagerly after your friend Spengler in Munich, and if I had not cut you off, you would avidly have asked me all this whole time about hell’s fiery pit. Don’t, I beg you, pretend you’re put on. I also have my self-respect, and know that I am no unbidden guest. To be short, the meta-spirochaetose, that is the meningeal process, and I assure you, it is just as though certain of the little ones had a passion for the upper storey, a special preference for the head region, the meninges, the dura mater, the tentorium, and the pia, which protect the tender parenchyma inside and from the moment of the first general contagion swarmed passionately hither.”

I: “It is with you as you say. The rampallion seems to have studied medicinam.”

He: “No more than you theology, that is in bits and as a specialist. Will you gainsay that you studied the best of the arts and sciences also only as a specialist and amateur? Your interest had to do with -- me. I am obliged to you. But wherefore should I, Esmeralda’s friend and cohabitant, in which quality you behold me before you, not have a special  interest in the medical field concerned, which borders on it, and be at home in it as a specialist? Indeed, I constantly and with the greatest attention follow the latest results of research in this field. Item, some doctores assert and swear by Peter and Paul there must be brain specialists among the little ones, amateurs in the cerebral sphere, in short a virus nerveux. But these experts are in the aforementioned box. It is arsie-versie in the matter, for ‘tis the brain which gapes at their visitation and looks forward expectantly, as you to mine, that it invites them to itself, draws them unto it, as though it could not bear at all to wait for them. Do you still remember? The philosopher, De anima: [Aristotle and his treatise on living things] ‘the acts of the person acting are performed on him the previously disposed to suffer it.’ There you have it: on the disposition, the readiness, the invitation, all depends. That some men be more qualified to the practicing of witch-craft, then other, and we know well how to discern them, of that already are aware the worthy authors of the Malleus.” [Malleus Maleficarum = “The Hammer of Witches,” a treatise written in 1486 by Heinrich Kramer, who sets out to refute all arguments against the existence of witches and to aid magistrates in identifying them.  -Dartmouth guide]

Mann is really getting into it now. The connection between disease and suffering and the “higher” things of the mind. That the body or mind plays an active role in disease. And it seems to me that he says here things he only hints at in The Magic Mountain.

I: “Slanderer, I have no connection with you. I did not invite you.”

He: “La, la, sweet innocence! The far-travelled client of my little ones was I suppose not forewarned? And your doctors too you chose with sure instinct.”

I: “I looked them out in the directory. Whom should I have asked? And who could have told me that they would leave me in the lash? What did you do with my two physicians?”

p234 He: “Put them away, put them away. Oh, of course we put the blunderers away in your interest. And at the right moment iwis, not too soon and not too late, when they had got the thing in train with their quackery and quicksilvery, and if we had left they might have botched a beautiful case. We allowed them the provocation, then basta and away with them! So soon as they with there specific treatment had properly limited the first, cutaneously emphasized general infiltration, and thus given a powerful impetus to the metastasis upwards, their business was accomplished, they had to be removed. The fools, to wit, do not know, and if they know they cannot change it, that by the general treatment the upper, the meta-venereal processes are powerfully accelerated. Indeed, by not treating the fresh stages it is often enough forwarded; in short, the way they do it is wrong. In no case could we let the provocation by quackery and quickery go on. The regression of the general penetration was to be left to itself, that the progression up there should go on pretty slowly, in order that years, decades, of nigromantic time should be saved for you, a whole houre-glasseful of divel-time, genius-time. Narrow and small and finely circumscribed it is today, four years after you got it, the place up there in you; but it is there, the hearth, the workroom of the little ones, who on the liquor way, the water way as it were, got there, the place of incipient illumination.”

Even if Mann was wrong about Nietzsche's genius being a result of a syphilitic condition, that he thought there was a connection does suggest the question, Would it be worth it?

I: “Do I trap you, blockhead? Do you betray yourself and name to me yourself the place in my brain, the fever hearth, that makes me imagine you, and without which you were not? Betrayest to me that in excited state I see and hear you, yet you are but a bauling before my eyes!”

He: “The Great God Logick! Little fool, it is topside the other waie: I am not the product of your pia hearth up there, rather the hearth enables you to perceive me, understand, and without it, indeed, you would not see me. [very clever] Is therefore my existence dependent on your incipient drunkenness? Do I belong in your subjective? I ask you! Only patience, what goes on and progresses there will give you the capacity for a great deal more, will conquer quite other impediments and make you to soar over lameness and halting. Wait till Good Friday, and ‘twill soon be Easter! Wait one, ten, twelve years, until the illumination, the dazzling radiance as all lame scruples and doubts fall away and you will know for what you pay, why you make over body and soul to us. Then shall osmotic growths sine pudore sprout out of the apothecary’s sowing. . . .” [reference to his fathers natural science experiments that I spared you]

[to be continued]

Previously I’ve been thinking about the bourgeois/middle-class/Mephistophelean/Scientific world from what I believe was Goethe’s perspective: As a falling away from nature (as represented by man power and horse or otherwise animal power) toward the marvels and unexpected consequences of economies based on coal, then oil, and even nuclear power. We have always been dazzled by the wonders and then surprised by the price to pay.

This is not my topic, but it occurs to me now that wind and water power could be viewed as gateway drugs to the truly Dark energy sources that were to follow. The Industrial Revolution is usually identified with coal, but it started with wind and water power. The 15th-18th century sailing ships were as important in laying the foundation for the Industrial Revolution as were the water powered mills -- as in, for example, New England and even Minneapolis. Viewed from this -- admittedly hypersensitive -- perspective, one could even second guess what Cervantes had in mind when he had Don Quixote joust at windmills. Weren’t even these, now quaint, traditional windmills in effect the thin end of the wedge?

My topic, is the public health and preventative medicine aspect of our age. The obvious consequence of this revolution in the way humans live is the astonishing increase in population. The planetary population in 1800 is commonly pegged at 1 billion. Have all the “improvements” we’ve experienced since that time in the fields of public health and medicine really been worth the consequences of having a population of 7 billion today? I don’t know where I would have drawn a line -- most of it just looks like common sense -- but was it, in the end, wise?

And now Mann suggests a new complication. Here’s a quote I remembered (and even found) from my last blog. Henry Ryecroft (the character of George Gissing) writes “For suffering and sorrow are the great Doctors of Metaphysic; and, remembering this, one cannot count very surely upon the rationalist millennium.“ -Source

I’m not prepared to say that HR and Mann are correct in their celebration of disease and suffering; but if they are, the consequences of our contemporary healthiness -- to the extent that it is not a fiction -- are possibly as dire as the sheer weight of population.

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