Frost: A Novel (36 page)

T
HIRD
L
ETTER

Dear Assistant Strauch,
Your brother is living in the delusion that he is several beings at once, and in the delusion—to him, a terrible thing—that he is oppressed by these various, simultaneous, unpredictably fluctuating beings, whom he himself views as “the unthinkable raw material of (his) episodes.” He has spoken of the “scourge of chromatic humiliation” and of the “philosophy of the exacerbated bird’s-eye view of impure thought.” This explains the compelling nature of his constitution, his development, his unfruitfulness. It is this unfruitfulness, understood as the adoption of inhuman
rights, that allows him to live—and of course condemns him to death.

I have made the observation that your brother’s existence is fundamentally (“creating themselves in steady negation”) on two planes: the political, and what you call the “dream of a relationship.” These two lives course through the rigid geometry of his pre-established positions, and also through the commotion of his inner life, which you describe as “the interconnected void.” In the person of your brother, I think I have found a notable instance of the political man as dream and the simplifying dreamer as political, and the mutual drama of the two. You yourself spoke once of an essay you proposed to write, to be called “The Dreamer and the Political Man.” Your brother would furnish you with the most outstanding manifestation of the subject; what you wrote would be the reflection of a consciousness, of a thought, that seems, or is, complete. I believe the relationship between dream and politics as exemplified in your brother to be something utterly masculine. The dream of such a person knows neither day nor night, knows nothing political, just as the politics of such a person knows neither day nor night, nor anything dubiously dreamlike. And all that without boundaries, yes without even the thought of boundaries. The way each thing, dream and politics, exists as a separate whole in such a person, makes for complete equilibrium. I would say that a person who is equally a politician and a dreamer ought to be the one we classify as nearest to perfection, if he didn’t refuse any categorization: he would be, yes, he is, the most self-evident human being! But in such a “divine binary,” which represents a summit of human development (though without beginning and
without end), the sickness of separation is not just a tough adversary but a step comprising “all deaths at once” that continually requires to be taken. And your brother is just such an “object of all deaths at once.”

To return briefly to the area where I saw the full human potential of someone like your brother, the political and the dreamlike, being united: while his political side may be as much invested in his day-to-day existence as in his dreamlike (or as his dream), I would still describe it as
the night of his life
, and the dreamlike as his day; the day and night of his self, but without boundaries, and hence his night without a day, and his day without a night. But what is a political person? What is a dreamer? Still, that is what happened to your brother, and in him, the deadly stasis of an entropic vehemence. Together we go on long walks, from one forest to another, into one ravine and out of another; the cold is such that it is impossible to remain motionless for long, to remain motionless out of doors, not even to stop and think, he and I if we stopped and thought, we would immediately freeze, we would die in midthought, as the animals die if terror prompts them to stop in this extraordinary frost. There is an “extraordinary seductiveness of frost” here. I am currently quoting your brother with the dispassion of someone assigned to report on him, to whom “the lines of the world memory” fit together. Today your brother said: “My brain has gone to be set.” I find that an extraordinary pronouncement. Imagine if he had said: “My whole brain has been taken away to be retyped.” He mentioned
you
only once; one of those dark places in his darkness appeared, in which from time to time “he mindlessly weeps down into.” He has the oddest connection to your sister, who is now
living in Mexico. He is one of those people who refuse to say anything at all, and yet who are continually driven to say everything. Who tie tourniquets round the arteries of their thought, but to no effect; who pour themselves out in suicidal word-spate, who hate themselves in truth because the world of their feeling, apprehended as enforced incest, daily smashes them to smithereens. I should like to say: attend to your brother.

F
OURTH
L
ETTER

Dear Assistant Strauch,
there is a perfectly ordinary dread, some way short of the greater dread that has your brother in its grip, pushing him into ever greater ruthlessness (ruthlessness principally toward himself). People avoid him. I avoid him myself, in my exhaustion, such exhaustion as I am incapable of describing, I avoid him, but then I am incapable of avoiding him. I am at his mercy. Forgive me! He thrusts his frailty at me and into me in the form of sentences, like slides into a projector, which then projects those terrors onto the blank and always available walls of my self (or his). Of course you want to hear more about your brother, and I will try to keep up my strength. Do you know about the Far Eastern languages he speaks? About his “Asiatic character”? About his time as a substitute teacher? These are all great and completely self-contained darknesses within his
perpetrated existence
. He was attacked as a child. By you. Do you know about that? Your brother is the opposite of you in everything, and then he became the opposite of that again,
you are
your brother, and then again
you aren’t
 … He lives in a
“world of conceptless concepts.” His stick in his hand has great significance for him. Far from being systematic, I want to draw attention to the fact that even today he is frightened of doors that slammed shut in his childhood. He also suffers “for generations of insomniacs”! His intellectual world always took place in cemeteries, “hung around cemeteries a lot.” Do you understand? Also of interest: his relationship to music, his horror of the state, the police, order. His outrageous pleasure in turning a question into a mutilated reply. Always the thought of the “hideous accidents on the street,” of “lurking family disasters” in the distant past. A liking for circuses, for revues, for all sorts of oddities. He talks of his “kingdom of merriment.” Did you never try to get close to your brother? By ruse? Because you are a doctor, and I think contact with him would have been important to you as well. Or did you, as I fear, never have any contact with your brother? He gets over his night by day, and vice versa. He always carries the
Pensées
in his pocket. I thought I would be spared your brother’s aggression. But now I feel the contagion of his logically galloping illness. What illness is it? Your brother grows darker in the measure in which he thinks the world and everything in and around him is also darkening. “The world is a progressive dimming of light,” he says. And, tonight: “Everything in me is dried out like the bed of a stream, like the bed of a stream of blood.” As the notion of insanity is not clear to me, but merely familiar, I am unable to say whether I think your brother is insane or not. He is
not
insane! (Mad?) No, not mad either. “Echoes of death” go making noise in his head. Today I saw him sitting on his bed, stark naked, and preoccupied with his body.

•   •   •

You will suppose I have been neglecting my duty, because I haven’t written to you for so long. You may imagine I am using your money to buy myself a nice holiday! Whereas in fact my stay here is a terrible chastening, chastening in the double sense of the word. The fact is that I am steeped in your brother’s thought. In his complaints against everything. I don’t—yet—have his illness, but I am steeped in ridicule. He shows me “the malformations of the earth’s surface, created by the malformations of the cosmos.” At this moment, everything looks pretty dark to me as well. You must excuse me, this letter is dictated by a rambling for which I am not responsible. It’s late. But I would still like you to think about the “childhood punishments” you imposed on your brother. About the “childhood lies” you spread about him, all the years of your growing-up and young manhood. I don’t know whether my task can simply be abrogated at the end of thirteen or fourteen days.

Since you have failed to reply to any of my missives, I must assume that, even if you cannot be satisfied with me, you nevertheless do not desire any particular change to the current pattern, and do not insist that I immediately go back. Besides, such a move would be entirely pointless. Of course, I am thinking in terms of taking up my internship in Schwarzach in due course …

F
IFTH
L
ETTER

Dear Assistant Strauch,
medicine is dark, these are only dark paths I follow with “exposed brain” through the byways of our science, which I
should like to term the glorious one of the sciences, as the ruler of terror among all the sciences, which, unlike ours, are pseudosciences, even though ours is no better than a protoscience itself. I can’t imagine its knowledge, it is only possible to feel it in all its presumed evolutions from our thinking. Medicine seems to me like a concatenated sequence of darknesses, intimately connected to superstition, bold incisions in the perhaps already lapsed geometry of the world. In the process, the substance, flesh, the nether possibilities of the organic, appears more and more insignificant against the only true natural, which is the illimitable dark. Our science is the one from which all others proceed and take their being. And, to quote your brother, with whom I feel an ever closer connection, founded on the stimulus of reversible ideas: “The study of sickness is the most poetic of the sciences.”

I don’t want to go without writing down a few of your brother’s really remarkable sayings. Of course I won’t proceed systematically. That’s not possible for me. It’s a stage, which I am going through as well. Among other things your brother today said: “The tragedy is connected to all the other tragedies.” Also: “Worth is worthlessness, the calamity of worthlessness is the worthlessness of one’s world and of the world
unconnected to one’s own.”
He said that after coming round from a protracted period of unconsciousness, I found him lying in his room, you can imagine my consternation, my initial reaction was that he had suffered a minor heart attack. He said: “Everything is
nearly
black.” He was going through the “nitrogen of the primal condition of the devil.” In the evening he said: “The earth, the world, is bloodshot.” This is unusual. He had
always led an existence that “was both above and below any other existence, and had never approached his own
existential minimum.
”

Well, if one were able to establish overnight what our organs
are
. But perhaps you already have laid out in your mind in orderly fashion things that to me seem hopelessly entangled: perhaps an operation? Our science knows it, but doesn’t act on it, in accordance with the “terrible principle” of
“here as there, illusion!”

If only I could lay my hands on your brother’s “scrapbooks”! Did you know of the existence of these “scrapbooks” in which for many years, decades even, he has written down everything that preoccupies him?

I am only able to note down a few headings, and even that strikes me as contemptible and mad.

We played a game together today: to see which of us can reduce the other to tears! (This game, as I now know, was one you often played with your brother.) Your brother lost.

S
IXTH
L
ETTER

Dear Assistant Strauch,
Suicide comes from the womb, as you once determined: its realization begins to occur at the moment of the suicide’s birth. Everything your brother has lived through to date has been a “passion of suicide.” A pursuit to the death of everything that was particular about this particular human being.

•   •   •

Against such a background of “deafening generality” he now speaks incessantly of the “craft of suicide,” the action that will bring him to completion after a lifetime of suffering and preparation. It’s not possible to oppose the boldness of the idea that each individual suicide is the maturation of thousands of years of preparation. Your brother (who has now almost entirely stopped sleeping!) refers to motherhood as
suicidehood;
truly, the womb is the tomb. The breeding of a human being (thinking most rigorously of himself) is the decision of the father (first and foremost) and of the mother (as well) to sponsor the suicide of their offspring, the child, the sudden premonition “of having created a new suicide.”

Twenty-seventh Day

“A devilish fear, you know, has always kept me away from suicide. Then there were thoughts arising out of the dark, the whole communing with self, very pronounced in my case. The conviction of my nature, the monstrous condition of spiritual development … Yes, I was always able to repel suicide, those innumerable cases of limitless disappointment, excess, criminality, heredity, these inhuman difficulties … You must know, like all humans, I have communed almost exclusively with myself in this difficult world, where there
are practically no laws … no way of contemplating … I was too little interested, you know, always a man of resolve, of contradiction, of fear …”

The material about Strauch (in my memory) is monstrous. What is written down is the best I can do. I am probably just about able to draw up a report. But it’s not possible to describe the condition of a human being in the same way as one can describe the state of an animal. My assignment advances my education. I’m certain it won’t benefit the painter Strauch. Why? The assistant will question me. I will be able to say things to him, and I can demonstrate the painter’s walk to him. I am now able to say what drew Strauch to Weng. Why he left Vienna. Why he burned his paintings. Why he hates so much. Why he runs into the woods. Stopped sleeping. Why! I am able to say what he says and how he says it and why it makes waves of insanity and revulsion. I am able to say what he feels when he sees the landlady, and when he sees the knacker with his rucksack. Why he is indifferent to so much and what, I know what is going on within him, who this painter Strauch is, this persecuted, ostensibly useless person, who on paper may have a brother and a sister and others besides, but in reality has always been alone, much more miserably alone than one will be able to imagine even after reading my report, alone in the way that a fly is alone in an apartment in a city in winter, being chased by the occupant and his cohorts, and finally is splattered against a wall, if these people feel hounded and maddened and under attack from this fly, so that they band together in their dwelling, and silently decide to kill it off,
that vile, monstrous creature, as they call it in their aggression, that poisons their air and their evening—not knowing what a fly is, and what goes on in one, much less a fly in a city apartment in winter. I have observed the painter Strauch, I have lain in wait for him, I have lied to him, because that is what my assignment called upon me to do, I have driven him crazy with my questions, much crazier than he was before, and I struck him on the head with my silences, on his head that he fears so much. I bothered him with my youth. With my plans. With my fears. With my incapacity. With my moodiness. I talk about death without knowing what death is, what life is, what any of it is … everything I do I do in ignorance, and I compound his ruin with my own. Ruin? And finally today I even tried to list the various modes of death for his benefit, which completely cast a cloud over him. “Suicide is in my nature, you must know,” he says. Swipes the air with his stick just as a monster that’s no longer a monster might swipe at the air where there is no heaven, and not even any hell. The air he swipes at is just air and nothing else, and, as I see, it’s not even one of the elements.