Demian by Hermann Hesse
Then I found a strange refuge--by "chance," as they say. But there is no such thing as chance in such matters. When someone needs something and then finds what he needs, it is not chance that has put it in his hands: rather he himself, his own longing and need, leads him to it.
Two or three times on my walks through the city, I had heard organ music from a small church at the edge of town. I hadn't stopped, but the next time I passed by I heard it again and recognized the music as Bach. I walked up to the gate, which was locked, and since the road was almost empty of people I sat down on a bollard next to the church, pulled the collar of my coat around me, and listened. It was not a great organ, but it was a good one, and it was being played marvelously, with a strange, highly personal expression of will and insistence that made it sound like a prayer. I had the feeling: That man knows about a buried treasure hidden in this music, and he is wooing and pounding and striving with all his might for this treasure like his life depended on it. I do not understand much about music, in a technical sense, but ever since I was a child I have instinctively understood this expression of the soul, and felt musical things inside me as natural and self-evident.
Then the organist played something modern, maybe Max Reger or someone like that. The church was almost completely dark, with only a very thin light coming out of the nearby window. I waited until the music was over, then paced back and forth until I saw the organist leave the church. He was still young, but older than I was, stocky and burly in shape, and he walked quickly away, with powerful but somehow reluctant footsteps.
From that point on I sat or walked back and forth in front of the church every now and then. One time I found the door open and sat in the pews for half an hour, shivering and happy, while the organist played up above in the poor light of a gas lamp. In every piece of music he played, I heard more than the piece itself--it seemed as though everything he played was related, mysteriously connected. Everything he played was religious, was devotional and pious, but not pious like the churchgoers and the pastors--it was pious like pilgrims and beggars in the Middle Ages, unconditionally devoted to a feeling for the world that transcends all creeds. The old masters who came before Bach were played often, and old Italians. And all of them said the same thing, said what the musician had in his soul too: yearning, a sincere grasping at the world combined with desperately cutting oneself off from it, a fervent hearkening to one's own dark soul, the frenzy of devotion and a profound curiosity about the miraculous.
One time, when I secretly followed the organist after he left the church, I saw him go into a little tavern a long way from the center of town. I couldn't resist--I followed him in. I got my first good look at him. He was sitting at a table in a corner of the small room, a black felt hat on his head and a jug of wine in front of him. His face was just as I had expected: ugly and a little wild, searching and inflexible, stubborn and willful, but soft and childlike around the mouth. All the masculinity and strength of that face lay in the eyes and the brow; the lower half of the face was delicate and unfinished, lacking in self-control, almost effeminate, the chin indecisive and boyish as though in protest against the forehead and the gaze. I liked his dark brown eyes, full of ferocity and pride.
I sat down across from him without a word. There was no one else in the bar. He looked at me as though trying to make me go away, but I stood firm and looked back at him, unblinking, until he grumbled: "What are you staring at? What do you want from me?"
"I don't want anything from you," I said. "But I've already gotten a lot from you."
He furrowed his brow.
"So, you're a music enthusiast? I think it's disgusting when people go into raptures about music."
I didn't let him scare me off.
"I've listened to you play in the church many times," I said. "I don't want to disturb you, by the way. I just thought I might find something in you, something special, I don't know exactly what. But don't pay any attention to me! I can just listen to you in the church."
"I always lock up."
"You forgot to, the other day, and I sat inside. Usually I stand outside, or sit on the bollard."
"Really? You can come inside next time, it's warmer. Just knock on the door. But knock hard, and not while I'm playing. And now, out with it--what are you trying to say? You're a very young man, probably in high school or university. Are you a musician?"
"No. I like to listen to music, but only the kind you play--absolute music, the kind where you can feel someone rattling the gates of Heaven and Hell. I think I like music because it has so little to do with morality. Everything else is moral or immoral, and I am looking for something that isn't. Morality has only ever made me suffer. I'm not expressing myself very well. -- Did you know that there needs to be a god who is god and devil at once? I have heard it said that there once was a god like that."
The musician pushed his wide hat back on his head and shook his dark hair off his broad forehead. He leaned over the table toward me and gave me a penetrating look.
With bated breath he asked: "What is the name of this god you are talking about?"
"I hardly know anything about him, actually nothing except his name. He is called Abraxas."
The musician looked around suspiciously, as though someone might be eavesdropping. Then he moved closer to me and said in a whisper: "I thought so. Who are you?"
"I'm a student at the high school."
"How do you know about Abraxas?"
"By chance."
He pounded the table with his fist so hard that some wine spilled out of his glass.
"Chance! Don't talk such sh-- . . . , such nonsense, young man! No one has heard of Abraxas by chance, you know that yourself. I will tell you more about him. I know a little about him."
He fell silent and slid his chair back. As I looked at him expectantly, he made a face.
"Not here! Another time. -- Here, have some."
He reached into the pocket of his coat, which he hadn't taken off, and pulled out a couple roasted chestnuts that he tossed at me.
I didn't say anything. I took them, ate them, and was satisfied.
"So!" he whispered after a while. "How did you hear of . . . him?"
I did not hesitate to tell him.
"I was alone and didn't know what to do," I said. "Then I remembered a friend from years ago, who was very wise, I thought. I had painted something, a bird coming out of a globe. I sent it to him. After a while, when I had stopped really believing I would hear from him, I found a sheet of paper that said: The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wants to be born must destroy a world. The bird flies to god. The god is called Abraxas."
He didn't respond. We peeled our chestnuts and ate them with wine.
"Should we have more wine?" he asked.
"No, thank you. I don't like to drink."
He laughed, a bit disappointed.
"As you wish! I don't feel that way. I'll stay here. Now go!"
The next time I went to hear him play the organ, he didn't say much. He took me up an old alleyway and led me through a stately old house into a big, rather dark and desolate room, where there was nothing to suggest music except a piano, while a large bookcase and writing desk gave the room an intellectual air.
"You have so many books!" I said with admiration.
"Some of them are my father's library. I live here with him. -- Yes, young man, I live here with my father and mother, but I can't introduce you to them. My acquaintances do not meet with much respect in this house. My father is an extremely honored citizen of this city, an important pastor and preacher. And just so you know, I am his gifted and promising son who unfortunately went off the rails, and to some extent mad. I was a theology student, but just before my exams I left that upright discipline. Actually, though, I still do study that field, at least in terms of my private reading. I have always found the kinds of gods that people have come up with in different places and times an extremely interesting and important topic. A
I scanned the spines of the books and saw Greek, Latin, and Hebrew titles, as far as I could tell in the weak light of the little desk lamp. Meanwhile my new acquaintance had lain down on the floor near the wall in the dark and was doing something there.
"Come here," he called after a while, "we're going to do a little philosophy now. That means keep your mouth shut, lie on your stomach, and think."
He struck a match and lit the paper and wood in the fireplace he was lying in front of. The flames shot up and he fanned and fed the fire with exceptional care. I lay down next to him on the threadbare carpet. He stared into the fire, which soon absorbed me too, and we lay there in silence on our stomachs in front of the flickering wood fire for probably an hour, watching it blaze and roar, writhe and subside, flutter and flicker, and finally brood on the bottom of the fireplace in a silent, sunken glow.
"Fire worship was not the dumbest idea anybody ever had," he murmured at one point to no one in particular. Other than that, neither of us said a word. With my eyes fixed on the fire, I sank into dream and silence, saw shapes in the smoke and images in the ashes. One time I was startled: when he threw a piece of resin into the embers a narrow little tongue of fire shot up, and I saw in it the bird with the yellow sparrow hawk's head. Golden glowing threads ran together into nets in the dying embers in the fireplace; letters of the alphabet and pictures appeared, shapes recalling faces, animals, plants, worms and snakes. When I came to and looked at the man next to me, he was staring with fanatical devotion into the ashes, his chin on his fists.
"I have to go now," I said softly.
"All right, then go. See you later!"
He did not stand up, and since the lamp was out I had to feel my way laboriously through the dark room and down the dark hallways and staircases out of the enchanted old house. Out on the street I stopped and looked back up at it. Every window was dark. A little brass plaque gleamed in the light of the gas lamps by the door: "Pistorius, Head Vicar," I read.
Only when I sat down for dinner, alone in my little room, did I realize that I had learned nothing about either Abraxas or Pistorius, since we hadn't exchanged even a dozen words. Still, I was very happy with my visit to his house. And he had promised me a perfectly exquisite piece of old organ music for the next time I heard him play: a passacaglia by Buxtehude.
*
Without my realizing it, Pistorius the organist had given me his first lesson while I was lying on the floor with him in front of the fireplace in his gloomy hermit's room. Looking into the fire had been good for me; it had strengthened and confirmed certain inclinations I had always had but never actually carried out. Gradually I started to understand them better, at least in part.
Even as a small child I had often liked observing bizarre natural forms--not to study and analyze them, but to abandon myself to their unique magic, their confused, deep language. Long lignified tree roots, veins of color in rocks, patches of oil floating on water, cracks in glass: everything like that had cast a powerful spell on me back then, but especially water and fire, smoke, clouds, dust, and most of all the spinning spots of color I saw when I closed my eyes. In the days that followed my first visit to Pistorius's house, I started to remember these things again, and I realized that I felt a kind of joy and new strength, a heightened sense of myself, due simply to our long staring into the open flame. It was remarkably comforting and rewarding.
So now, joining the few experiences I had had until then on the path to my life's true purpose, there was a new one. Contemplating such patterns, giving ourselves over to irrational, confused, bizarre natural forms, creates in us a feeling of harmony between our inner selves and the force that willed these patterns into being--before long we even feel tempted to see these patterns as our own moods, our own creations--we see the border between ourselves and nature quiver and melt away and learn what it feels like not to know whether the images on our retina come from external or internal impressions. Nowhere but in these practices can we so quickly and easily discover the extent to which we are creators, how greatly our own soul constantly participates in the continual creation of the world. Or rather it is the same indivisible divinity active in us and in nature, and if the external world were destroyed, any one of us would be able to rebuild it, for mountain and river, tree and leaf, root and blossom, every form in nature has its model and prototype within us and arises from the soul whose essence is eternity, whose nature we do not know but which shows itself primarily as the power to love and the power to create.
Only several years later did I find this observation confirmed in a book, by Leonardo da Vinci, who spoke of how good and deeply moving it is to look at a wall that many people have spit on. He felt the same, in front of those wet spots on the wall, as I felt in front of Pistorius's fire.
The next time we met, the organist explained: "We always draw the boundaries of our personal selves much too narrowly! We count as our selves only what we can distinguish as individual or anomalous. But really we are all made up of the substance of the whole world--every one of us. Just as our bodies carry inside them the whole genealogy of our evolution, back to fishes and much farther than that, so too our souls have everything the human soul has ever experienced inside them. All the gods and devils that ever existed, whether those of the Greeks or the Chinese, or the Zulu kaffirs, they are all inside us, all there as possibilities, as wishes, as outlets. If the whole human race died out except for one single halfway talented child who had never enjoyed any education, that child would rediscover the whole course of the world and could produce everything anew: gods, demons, paradises, commandments and prohibitions, the Old Testament and the New."
I objected: "Yes, all right, but then what is the individual worth? Why should we still strive for anything if we already have everything complete inside us?"
"Stop!" Pistorius cried violently. "There is a very big difference between having the world inside you and knowing it! An insane man can utter thoughts that recall Plato, a devout little Pietist schoolboy in a Herrnhut institute can reconstruct deep mythological connections found in Zoroaster or the Gnostics from his own creative spirit. But he doesn't know it! He is a tree, or a rock, or at most an animal, until he becomes conscious of it. Then, though, at the first glimmer of this consciousness: then he becomes human. You wouldn't call every biped you see on the street human, would you, just because they walk upright and carry their babies in the womb for nine months? You can see how many of them are fish or sheep, are worms or angels, how many are ants, how many are bees! Now every one of them contains the possibility of becoming human, but only when he intuits this possibility, or even learns to bring it at least partly into his consciousness, is it truly his."
Our conversations proceeded along these lines. They rarely surprised me, or gave me anything entirely new. But all of them, even the most ordinary, hit me in the same place with their soft, steady hammer blows; they all helped shape me, helped me shed my layers of skin, break the eggshell, and after every one I held my head up a little bit higher, with a little more freedom, until my yellow bird poked its gorgeous raptor's head out of the shattered shell of the world.
We also often told each other our dreams. Pistorius knew how to interpret them. One remarkable example comes back to me now: I had had a dream where I could fly, but only by building up momentum and being hurled through the air, as it were; I could not control my flight. It was a fine, noble feeling, but it soon turned frightening, as I saw myself hurtling up to a considerable height, powerless. Then I made the saving discovery that I could control my rising and falling by holding and releasing my breath.
Pistorius had this to say: "The force that hurls you into flight is the great treasure trove of our humanity, which we all possess. It is the feeling of connection with the roots of all power. But it gets scary in a hurry! It's damned dangerous! That's why most peopl
He even brought me a zoology book and showed me the names and pictures of these antediluvian fish. And I felt, with a strange shudder, a bodily function from an early evolutionary period alive and well inside me.
CHAPTER SIX
JACOB WRESTLES WITH THE ANGEL
I cannot summarize in brief what I learned about Abraxas from the strange musician, Pistorius. The most important thing I learned from him, though, was another step on the path to myself. I was an unusual young man then, around eighteen years old--precocious in a hundred ways but very far behind and helpless in a hundred other ways. When I compared myself to other people my age, as I would do every now and then, I sometimes felt proud and conceited but just as often demoralized and depressed. There were many times I saw myself as a genius, many times as half insane. I was never able to share and join in the others' pleasures, and I was eaten up with worries and self-hatred about how hopelessly isolated I was from them, how cut off from life.