Remember Me (15 page)

Yet some music still came to him. There was an echo from the Alpinglow of the highest peaks, the music of the spheres, as one who touches a wineglass with a wet finger after it has been drained. That is true music. That is the last we hear.

Ludwig found it horrible.

At Bayreuth Wagner laid the cornerstone of what he called the Music of the Future. Ludwig refused to attend. The Great Friend sealed in the cornerstone of the opera house the telegram Ludwig had sent him. That seemed to him dreadful. It was not right that he should survive only in the cornerstone of another man’s fame, on a flimsy scrap of paper. That telegram was lodged now in the wall of the circular stair, so that others might see that he had passed that way down towards defeat.

Below him Otto reached the bottom stair. That was in 1874. That was the year when Otto’s complaint
became
obvious. It was also the year that Otto hung before him like a mirror in the morning, to show us the worst of which we are capable.

Faced with Otto’s nature, Ludwig could not sleep. He got up and drove to the Halbammerhütte, the latest of his small hideaways in the woods.

It was only a little hut. He had furnished it with gifts from his governess, Fräulein Meilhaus, collected through the years. To him it was the nursery of childhood, that prepubescence which is the only refuge we have from self-contamination and from sin.

He sat there in the cold in the middle of the night; but Fräulein Meilhaus was not there and he was not six. She was Frau von Leonrod now, and he was twenty-nine. He sat there behind his beard, which if it hid him from the world, also closed him off from the hairless world of infancy. There was no refuge here. He was too firmly wedged into the past, either to go forward or back. It was not his fault. He had been forced to live too soon, so that he outstripped himself.

Somewhere, even as he sat in the Halbammerhütte, Otto was also awake. Otto did not sleep any more, so they said. Otto lay with his boots on for eight weeks, screwed up his face at the future, and barked like a dog. He, too, had retreated, but to another part of the garden. The dog Doppelgänger, who had been there at his
coronation,
sat in Ludwig’s memory, and Otto barked at it like a puppy, refusing to leave the only source of warmth he had known.

Otto would blink his eyes and peer out at the present like a mouse through a grating. Then he would relapse and bark again, the way dogs bark at ghosts which
mercifully
we cannot see, but they can. Sometimes in his madness Otto must bark at him: Ludwig did not find that a comfortable thought.

He wandered about the Halbammerhütte, feeling the stuff of the curtains, afraid to part them lest Otto be out there, looking in, with those great serious eyes that saw the other side.

A mask must hang in Otto’s mind also, the features of
the ideal, a Medusa already turning him to stone. Ludwig remembered that when he had gone one day to
Fürstenried
, to take Otto for a drive, Otto had waved to the people only after the carriage had passed them. For Otto was farther ahead on the journey than he was. The thought was horrible.

And now at last the time had come for Otto to be locked up and sealed into his silence for good. How far off was the time when the same would be done for him?

It was not an agreeable experience, yet Ludwig had to be there. He was not only Otto’s brother, but his sovereign. There were papers to sign and people to conciliate.

Otto would still walk, if there were attendants to guide him. Ludwig waited below in the hall. Otto came slowly down the stairs, dressed more neatly than usual. On either side of him was a footman. When Otto reached the
bottom
step he turned to Ludwig and from very far away, from an immense distance, he smiled beguilingly.

Ludwig instinctively drew back. It was a smile of invitation from a dangerous stranger. It was as though Otto had said: come with me. Escape with me.

The doctor was also waiting in the hall. Gently he took Otto’s arm, motioning back the attendant footmen, and together the group moved towards the front door and the waiting carriage outside.

Otto had a new doctor. Ludwig had not met him
before
. He was a short, rotund, prissy, unreal man, full of his own importance, with a bad breath and an
overweaning
peremptory manner, in a professional black suit. As the procession moved out of the door, Dr. Gudden, for that was his name, seemed to hesitate, and then he turned back to the hall with a smile very like Otto’s. He was an alienist. It was his business to find everybody mad. It was the smile of one who seconds an invitation.

Then he left and a footman closed the door behind him. No doubt the second smile had been meant to be reassuring, but Ludwig stood motionless. It had been the smile of someone who knows you will come, because you have nowhere else to go. Dr. Gudden’s had been the face of the executioner who haunted his dreams.

He was badly scared. He had remembered something.

Several years before there had been a procession through Munich on the Feast of Corpus Christi. Fearing something untoward, Ludwig had not attended nor had he allowed Otto to take part.

The procession wound through the streets to the cathedral, between lines of soldiers stationed to hold back the crowd. Ludwig stood at a window of the Residenz to watch. Below him he saw someone break through the cordon of soldiers. It was Otto, dressed in hunting clothes. Otto rushed into the cathedral. Ludwig drew back from the window.

He had the news of what happened soon enough. Otto had flung himself before the altar and shouted that he had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost.

And so he had. If he could not be saved, he had shouted, then he would be damned. He would refuse God’s grace. If he could have nothing in his immanent world, then he would refuse compassion from the
transcendent
next. He, too, was royal. He had no choice, before silence closed upon him, but to refuse pity. If God would have no part of him, then he would have no part of God. Thus Otto. And thus, at some moment in their lives, all men capable of pride.

All those in the cathedral heard and saw him, even as the attendants hustled him out of sight. Otto had had no choice but to go mad. Others had impinged upon him. Rather than bear their touch, he had thrown himself
away. And indeed, even for Ludwig there were few choices left. He had to proceed cautiously.

For converts may think of their religion every day, but for those who are born to a religion, God fails them only when they need His presence most. To see Tolstoi with God, said Gorki, was to see two bears in one den. And two bears cannot live in one den. One of them must leave. One of them must be the weaker, and go down to his defeat. If we cannot accept our limitations, then it is God who must go. What do we do then? For it is no victory after all. When He goes, He takes the world we fought for away with Him. He breathes it in and out. The sound of that respiration keeps us awake at nights, for the sound of the death-rattle is the worst ghost there is.

Otto was not mad. Otto was damned. Otto had reached the bottom of the circular stair.

Ludwig would do anything to escape that fate, yet found nothing to do. He had worn out Richard’s love. It was as threadbare with much twisting as was the iron ring on his ringer that Richard had given him. Suddenly he was thirty-two. It was ten years since he had first met Richard, three years since Otto had been carted away to his perdition. If he could not abdicate, then perhaps he could leave Bavaria. He must find another kingdom.

For Otto was shut up in the castle of Fürstenried. Otto was now a mirror in which he did not dare to look. The executioner was not alone any more. Otto barked. The executioner had a dog swift on the scent.

As long as he was in the same country with
Fürstenried
, Ludwig would never be safe. He had not forgotten Dr. Gudden’s smile. Nor had he forgotten Otto’s. The two echoed each other, like directional lamps on the roof of a low passage, telling us which way to go.

It drove Ludwig to desperation. He sent one of his
servants in search of an ideal country. He sent him to Venezuela, Egypt, Afghanistan, the Philippines,
Columbia
, Chile, Samos, and Rügen in the Baltic. He presumed that the trip was really carried out, though he did not ask too closely.

What would he give in exchange?

He would give Bavaria in exchange. Let someone else live with the unvisited nightmare at Fürstenried, with its eternally yelping dog.

The mission was not a success. How could it be? The servant Burkel returned with the message that of all peoples, the Bavarians were loyalest to his Majesty.

What nonsense.

It only meant that they would never let him go. That nocturnal vision at Berg had been accurate. The boat of the Flying Dutchman sailed into the moon, and now it was returning. The only passenger, as he had feared, was Nosferatu, the vampire of the self, come to suck him dry. He could not love himself.

He must have love, for only love could save him now. Yet there was no love. He was thirty-three.

F
or what is the nature of love? It has no nature. It is only a process, such as chemistry, which follows the same course wherever it occurs, no matter who conducts the experiment. It is the inherent and unalterable movement towards release, nothing more.

If years after we have ceased to see someone, we think: this is an experience I would like to share with A, because it would enrich him, and his enrichment would enhance me, then that is love. For love exists only beyond the barriers of the self. It is not an emotion, but an
experience
. It is to go through the great door with someone else. Since no one exists beyond that door, then love is to know that nothing exists, and to be satisfied with that.

The process is catalytic change. We have it with many people each time a little weaker, each time the same, until we reach the great door by stasis, instead of by volition. Love in that sense is to become unchangeable through too much with many people, for change cannot exist within a single body.

And what is the door? The door is time, which has two leaves. Shut, it is the present, which is compounded of the past and the future. Open, it is timelessness. We think we open it in the death of the body. Alas, we find it only in selflessness.

What more beautiful delight is there in the world than that, at some time, somewhere, in some manner, we should, as Man, be able to enter into a world where Man does not exist, and where all things rest potential yet complete in the great
néant
which is: that we should, like a tired engine, put on a final burst of speed, and as we attain to insight, burn out utterly or fuse? So we pass beyond our point of greatest consciousness, and at last reach the unconscious to which we properly belong.

Mercy, stars, pretensions, great estates, self-
abnegation
, the pride of Saints, all these are vehicles. All these are nothing. And when, like kings, like the immortal sacred prototypes of Man’s humanity who die, but live forever in our minds, we die, why then we live.

The man who lives alone is not alone. But the man who thinks he finds understanding with another, experiences in this world that felicity proper to the world beyond, where there are no worlds.

Yet Man is worthy of all admiration. He is nothing. But in the short history of his reign temporal, with that clammy, grey, convoluted mass with which he comes into contact with the ideal, he has this triumph: that sometimes, when his mind burns out like an overcharged battery, he perceives that he is part of a vast felicity. Then for a moment he
is.

Then he is loved; then he is beautiful; for only then can he believe in love. We are but an inferior part of that vast impersonal design. But that we are, gives us equality with rocks. Sometimes, when we turn our heads at an alarming, unfamiliar sound behind us, accidentally, we have insight and so are made whole before we die.

As long as the mind of Man can conceive of nobility, then nobility he has. We are only precursors. We exist only for the benefit of those who come after us. Our love
is what we have to say to them. They will be much larger than we are, much more noble, much more fine, but that much of us they will understand. Such is our monument. Such is our love.

Sometimes it lasts an impersonal twenty minutes in a tousled bed. But sometimes it lasts into eternity. We are not. Yet knowing we are not, then we know we are. Our greatness is that others will be, who without our having been could not be. In this we approach that which created us.

This Ludwig knew but could not say.

But at least, to give him credit, when he dismissed Richard by accepting him, he knew that in this man, unlike other men, there was a fragment of truth, and was only sorry that the fragment was not more. At least in his lifetime he had loved someone, and who of us can say as much and say it truly?

Yet dismiss him he must, for he must enter eternity alone. That was his damnation. He could not escape it, elude it though he would. Every life is a parable: this is the way we should not go; it is also the way in which we must. Only in death are our souls what we would wish them. Ludwig was merely a man, the poor ruins of the self. Yet ruins know what buildings ought to be.

And what is our nobility? That we should prepare the way for some being that will see nobility more steadily, until there is nothing but perception of felicity, and beyond that state, even felicity will cease, and there will only be union with what is; and beyond that, merely Is. We can follow greatness only a little way, into the
universal
wood, beneath the sighing pressure of the rain.

But within the wood there are also steps spiralling down. We cannot elude them, for we are the entrance to them. Ludwig saw them and was badly frightened. Otto
had gone ahead down into madness, down these stairs. He himself was going mad and knew it. Yet there could be consolation in that, for madness is more than a
dis-ease
. Madness can also be good company, when no other company we may have.

Where do we go, when there is nowhere else to go but down? Ludwig did not know, for he was not mad yet. He was only driven to the frontiers of madness, knowing we may safely cross that border of the mind, given we have a
laissez-passer
to get back. Somewhere there must be somebody to sign that document, as Richard and he had signed his diary so often that now he no longer dared to keep it, lest they have to sign it again.

He must love in order to be. Without love, how could he die?