Lures of shiny, silvery tin shaped like human hands - Meyrink's symbolizing

Jorge Luis Borges once edited a series of little books that have tantalized later readers.  One of them contained three stories by Gustav Meyrink, all from Bats.  St. Orberose discusses the project; he led to Grant Munroe’s piece at The Rumpus, who in turn relied on this Spanish-language site.  Borges picked “J. H. Obereit’s Visit to the Time-Leeches,” “Cardinal Napellus,” and “The Four Moon Brethren.”  When Munroe wrote his piece none of these stories were available in English, but here they are in the 2010 Dedalus Meyrink Reader.

Borges shared Meyrink’s gnosticism and love of esoteric systems, although the former took it all a lot less literally than the latter.  Or such is my understanding, but perhaps I overstate Meyrink’s credulity.  This outstanding paragraph of “Cardinal Napellus” might have some symbolic relevance:

Giovanni Braccesco tried to strike up a conversation by describing our unusual methods of catching the ancient, moss-grown giant catfish that lived in the permanent darkness of the unfathomable depths of the lake.  They never came up to the light and spurned any natural bait; the only things that could get them to bite were the most bizarre forms anglers could think up: lures of shiny, silvery tin shaped like human hands which made swaying movements as they were pulled through the water, or others like bats made of red glass with cunningly concealed hooks on their wings.  (57)

The main character, a lapsed monk, spends his days on the lake, not fishing but plumbing its depths with “an egg-shaped ball of glittering metal on long, fine silk threads” (55).  His friends believe that this is some form of science, but he corrects them:

The intensity brought red blotches to Radspieller’s face and his voice cracked with the emphasis he put on each word: ‘If I could just have one wish’ – he clenched his fists – ‘it would be to let down my plumbline to the centre of the earth, so that I could shout out to the world, ‘See: here, there, see, nothing but earth!’  (64)

So Radspieler is, however strangely, deliberately avoiding a search for secret knowledge, even denying its existence.  A half page later it catches up with him, though.  The characters of H. P. Lovecraft, Meyrink’s literary cousin, are always destroyed by their quest for hidden truths, while this poor sap is punished for not looking.  He would have been happier learning about C’thulu.

If you click on the Spanish-language link above, you will see the cover of the Borges edition of Meyrink, which features a monk emerging from a blue flower.  That is almost accurate, almost in the story.  The “poisonous blue flower” is monkshood.  Any mention of a blue flower in German literature has been permanently poisoned by Novalis.  In “Cardinal Napellus” the Romantic longing for transcendent meaning leads not to bliss or escape or nirvana but to insanity and horror.

While I am making connections – I mean, Novalis and his blue flower, that one is obvious – in Adalbert Stifter’s Indian Summer the dedicated scientific protagonist makes a detailed multi-year study of the topography of a lake bottom (that does not sound right).  I had so many other unnovelistic parts of that novel to deal with that, when discussing Stifter’s novel recently, I did not even mention the scenes where he plumbs the lake and makes maps, leading to discoveries, I guess, about how the seasonal hydrology changes the lake.

So Novalis’s non-rational blue flower is poisonous and Stifter’s rational empiricism is completely useless.  What is left?  I wonder, to what work of German literature do those fishing lures refer?

Only in looking for words do we find thoughts - if "thoughts" is the right word

APHORISM, n., Predigested wisdom.

In my thinking about aphoristic writing, I have barely moved beyond categorization.  For example, The Devil’s Dictionary (1911), source of the above, is a century-old joke book.  That any of it is still funny is a literary miracle.  I find quite a lot of it funny, which is part of my problem with aphorisms:  I mostly read them for the laughs.

Aphorists are so often satirists.  If not exactly funny, their work belongs on the comic side of the ledger.  Le Duc de la Rochefoucauld begins his Maxims (1665+) with “Our virtues are usually only vices in disguise,” a motto for comic writers, even though, maxim by maxim, La Rochefoucauld is rarely comic.  His elegant, witty mind hovers over all of his writing, whether his topic is love or death, courage or vanity:

132  It is easier to be wise for others than for oneself.
135  At times we are as different from ourselves as we are from others.
137  When vanity is not prompting us we have little to say.

The first I find highly amusing, the second more painfully insightful, while the third could be the motto of Wuthering Expectations.   La Rochefoucauld’s maxims are wisdom with the lightest touch.

La Rochefoucauld’s book is unusual in that it was meant to be a book, and has a beginning, end, and even something like an argument.  Why were so many of the greatest aphorists unpublished, just keepers of notebooks, like Lichtenberg, or Chamfort and Joseph Joubert, or Novalis?  Joubert’s book feels like a set of notes for some other book, although what that book might have been is a bit mysterious.  A random entry, dated 1799:

The evening meal is the joy of the day.
How it happens that only in looking for words do we find thoughts.
We have philosophized badly.  (p. 49)

What luck, I have found another personal motto!  The last one, not the first; lunch is also a daily joy, as is, on occasion, breakfast.

I believe the notes-towards-a-masterpiece story explains Novalis as well, although I find his scraps incomprehensible.  Or I thought I did, until I looked at him just now:

127  When one reads correctly, there unfolds then in our interior a real, visible world according to the words.
128  All novels where genuine love is presented are fairy-tales – magical events.
129  The lives of cultured people should alternate between music and non-music, as between sleep and waking.

The first one is close to banal, the second a profound act of literary criticism, the third a fine aspiration, but all are written with clarity.  I wonder what book would have tied them together.

When I read books of aphorisms, maxims, proverbs, fragments, sayings of the fathers, or jokes, I create my own book, just like I do when I read a novel.  I imagine a narrator, a persona, speaking or writing the words before me, and behind him a “real” author, who also wrote the text.  I trace themes, keep an eye out for repeated ideas and imagery, concoct a story.  Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet is a more novel-like written object than any text I have mentioned here, so who am I kidding, when I write about it a couple of weeks from now, I will write about a novel, even if it is one I patched together in my own head. Other readers may read it as something else.  I hope they do.

Let’s see.  The Maxims are as per Leonard Tancock, Penguin Classics.  The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, the NYRB edition selected and translated by Paul Auster, check.  The Devil’s Dictionary is in the new, fascinating Library of America volume of Ambrose Bierce.  The Novalis comes from Pollen and Fragments, tr. Arthur Versluis, Phanes Press, 1989.  If I had used any Chamfort, it would of course have been from the W. S. Merwin-translated Products of the Perfected Civilization.

Our life is no dream, but it should and will perhaps become one.

George MacDonald was a Christian writer. He was the author of realistic novels, often with Scottish settings, always with explicit Christian messages.  When I was putting together the Scottish Reading Challenge, I had concluded, mistakenly, that these books had retreated to the archives, and that only the fantasies were still read, but I was quite wrong.  Editions of the Christian novels were recently in print.  See left for The Baronet's Song, which has been "edited for today's reader."  One of those "edits" is the title, originally Sir Gibbie (1879), which, admittedly, sounds ridiculous.

I have leafed through a strange book assembled by C. S.Lewis, George MacDonald: An Anthology (1947), which is not a collection of stories or poems, but rather of aphorisms, of sentences of wisdom broken lose from MacDonald's many books.  What a way to treat a fiction writer.  MacDonald was enormously important for Lewis, who attributes some sort of conversion experience to his reading of the strange fairy novel Phantastes (1858).  If I understand Lewis correctly, he had not a religious conversion, but an imaginative conversion, a preparation for a later religious awakening.  "I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him," writes Lewis.  But also "Few of his novels are good and none is very good."  MacDonald was a sage to Lewis, but not quite an artist.  Quotations from the valuable George MacDonald website The Golden Key.

MacDonald's Christianity was his own.  He apparently believed that animals could achieve salvation, for example, which explains the talking horses in At the Back of the North Wind, among other oddities.  He had a very strong sense of a feminine aspect of God.  The powers in his fantasies are almost always women - the North Wind, the great-great-grandmother of The Princess and the Goblin, a host of fairy tale figures in Phatastes.  MacDonald's God is, among other things, a protective mother.  It's a gentle, sweet Christianity.

It's also a German Christianity.  MacDonald, like Thomas Carlyle and George Eliot, was a keen student of German literature, particularly the great German Romantics.  "Were I asked, what is a fairytale? I should reply, Read Undine," the 1811 novella by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, MacDonald writes in the essay "The Fantastic Imagination."  MacDonald is right, by the way, about Undine.  Most important to MacDonald was Novalis, a connection that is both obvious and a complete mystery to me.  Novalis is a poet I read with keen incomprehension.  He advocated, or sought, or found, for all I know, some sort of idealized Kantian transcendental Christianity, available to us all if we would only I don't know what.

The very end of Lilith (1895) - or non-end, since the chapter is titled "The Endless Ending":

Strange dim memories, which will not abide identification, often, through misty windows of the past, look out upon me in the bright daylight, but I never dream now.  It may be, notwithstanding, that, when most awake, I am only dreaming the more.  But when I wake at last into that life which, as a mother her child, carries this life in its bosom, I shall know that I wake, and shall doubt no more,

I wait; asleep or awake, I wait.

Novalis says, "Our life is no dream, but it should and will perhaps become one."

George MacDonald, by a means I do not quite understand, turned that idea into fiction.