Anarchistbanjo's World

Homo Sapiens: Under Way by Stanislaw Przybyszewski and translated by Joe E Bandel

IX.

Falk walked.

He stopped on the path.

Shouldn’t he turn back, take her in his hands and carry her up to her room?

Yes: beg her, only be allowed to kneel before her bed, stammer wild prayers together with her!

Suddenly he examined himself whether this was really an insurmountable desire in him or only the intention to give Marit new suggestions of his great passion.

Yes: did he really have this desire? Or was it even only an autosuggestion?

He examined himself and examined, but he really couldn’t distinguish. He had devised so many plans of how he could conquer her, spoken so many words to himself, fabricated and lied so many feelings, that he could no longer distinguish what was real about it and what—hm, yes, how should he call it—was artificial growth.

The suggestions with which he wanted to influence her became realities, or at least took the forms of real feelings. The words that he had earlier invented with his brain now received sexual warmth: he had played feelings so often until he actually generated them in himself.

It seemed to him as if certain brain regions had created a new blood circulation for themselves. Why then did his heart go into these throbbings when he now repeated love words that he had earlier spoken coldly a hundred times without the slightest trace of spiritual excitement?

Falk lost himself in psychological investigations about the form of a love generated by autosuggestion.

He thought about how he would describe it. Yes, he could think of nothing else, he had to calm his brain.

So: he had an assignment from a psychological journal, yes. *Journal for Scientific Psychology*. How would he now make it clear?

Well: a frequently repeated, in the brain repeated state has linked itself with new blood vessels, acted on them so long that a regular blood circulation arose, and thus the thought-state became a sensual state.

Yes so; that would probably be correct. A sensual effect was generated through pure thought-suggestion.

He heard a carriage roll past close to him. Lanterns burned on the sides, and he saw how the carriage turned at a sharp road curve. Then he saw only the lights move on in rapid course; he followed them until they disappeared in the woods. Involuntarily he had to think of the peat cutter’s will-o’-the-wisps.

Then he looked around. There lay Marit’s house. Yes, he could go in. Perhaps she expected him. Perhaps she would be very happy if he appeared so suddenly now. Perhaps she was walking in the park to cool off. Or had gone to the lake to sit on the big stone where they both had sat together so often, yes; right by the ditch, by the ravine, where the ground all around was so deeply torn open.

Strange this ravine; could it perhaps be an old riverbed? Now he walked; stopped; walked again. His brain was very fatigued;

and yet this peculiar tendency to brood! Again he thought of the psychological essay.

No, that could probably be better used for a novella. So: the man has this autosuggestive love. Bien, good! But now he also has a real love beside it, which he constantly feels, yes quite as one feels a sick organ in one’s body.

So he loves simultaneously, that means he loves both. Only: the one first entered the individual and later the brain, the other took the reverse path, and the eternal in our hero gradually begins to react violently.

Yes, Falk felt clearly how it reacted; but at the same time he felt a great, sated tiredness.

Now Marit was completely indifferent to him again; only a foretaste of sex, and he was already sated.

Tomorrow of course a reintegration would occur; but it was an undeniable fact that he felt sated this evening, yes, this evening of April 28.

So he didn’t love Marit, for he had never felt this with his wife. No; never.

Yes, and the whole time after the embrace just now: He had clearly felt how a kind of hatred, shame, yes, shame, like after a crime, shame before himself and before her, waved back and forth between them.

Was it happiness? No!

Was it pain?

Yes, certainly: Pain and shame! But the real, the non-suggested love, the love that arises because it must arise, the love that has no brain, no thinking organ, only two heart-sacks and an aorta, this love knows no shame.

No, certainly not! He thought of his love affair with his wife. They took each other because they had to take each other, and were happy. – So what is it?

Yes, what is it?

Well, please, Herr Erik Falk: You are accused and accuser at once. You are Herr Falk and Herr X.

So, Herr X, you accuse me that I seduced a girl and thus destroyed her.

Now listen: You are an intelligent man, and I can drive up before you with an arsenal of reasons.

So: *Hors la méthode point de salut*. Methodically and systematically, Herr X!

*Primo* arose in me the suggestion that I must possess this girl. Since a similar suggestion never arose in me before, I must say: This suggestion is extraordinary, and consequently deserves quite special attention.

Falk pedantically examined whether he hadn’t specified something exactly enough.

Yes, so it is an extraordinary suggestion. How it arose, I don’t know. For I can name a thousand things that may have generated it; I sometimes name them too, but I know that my brain lies to me, that I am so to speak the cuckold of my brain, and so I say: the origin of this suggestion I don’t know. I can only recognize its character: it is a sexual suggestion. It was that from the beginning…

Falk thought of a series of feeling-experiences that lay in this direction.

First on the third day of their acquaintance: She had been to the station to throw an urgent letter into the train’s mailbox. He had met her in the city, yes, at the corner house where the watchmaker lives. She became embarrassed and he too. Why did he become embarrassed? He had immediately asked himself astonished. Then he accompanied her and spoke much; yes, what did he speak about exactly? Right, about religion.

‘Halt, there lies an important argument!’

Herr X, please, can you tell me why right from the beginning, without a clear consciousness of the final purpose, I fixated on destroying her religious dogmas?

Yes, please very much, you know me and know that it is absolutely indifferent to me whether a person believes or not. You also know that I rarely speak of my ideas because I consider it unrefined to force suggestions.

Now look, Herr X, before I was conscious of it, my sex already worked in me with consistent logic and argued thus: As long as she has religion, I will never possess her, consequently the religious in her is the first and most important point of attack.

You can really believe me, Herr X, I can assure you that I didn’t think for a moment of possessing the girl before I heard the voice of the blood on that day.

Look, it was right at the cemetery, close under the birch tree whose branches hang over the fence, there I suddenly noticed—something personal may have come into my speech—that my voice got a strange tendency to tip into whispering, into confidential murmuring, and then I felt a peculiar glow around my eyes, and the skin under the eyes I felt lay in little wrinkles, whereby the expression of my eyes gets something faun-like.

I felt this last clearly because I first saw these wrinkles on my father when he fell in love with our governess. Then I completely forgot them, until suddenly three years ago in a kind of vision I saw them clearly before me again. Since then I always think of them.

Yes, now I knew definitely: it is sex.

And now it grew in me and grew incessantly and gave me no rest, and now I must; yes, I must! why? I don’t know.

Yes, yes, I know you, Herr X: The topic interests you. You want to make your wisdom shine, solve the question and substantiate with reasons.

*Bien*; is good. For I can argue as follows: The woman’s period is dependent on the influence of the moon.

How so? you will ask astonished.

Listen then. The first living being was a sea creature; the moon is known to have a great influence on water, and naturally the influence that acts on the medium will also extend to the living being that lives in this medium. The living being now bequeaths this regularly recurring influence to its descendants as a fully organized property: *quod erat demonstrandum*.

Yes, good, very good. I know that you by no means need to drag such distant reasons… ‘by the hair’ you say? well good, so don’t need to drag by the hair; but even the nearest reasons have the same value.

Falk turned around. It seemed to him as if he heard the editor grinning behind his back: So in the end you believe in the fourth dimension?

‘Yes, you know, Herr Editor, you are a man of positive ideas and positive life course. You are a rationalist and materialist. I honor you and value you very highly; but as long as you can’t prove to me the non-existence of three beings between Us Two—”Us” capitalized because we value each other mutually—yes, as long as you can’t prove that, I also won’t stop admitting the possibility of such a dimension. Because you don’t see it, nor smell, nor hear it? Well, that’s no proof. For one can have a hundred senses in latent state that will later develop in the human race. Do you know, for example, that recently a new sense was found that is titled organ-sense?