Anarchistbanjo's World

Homo Sapiens: In the Maelstrom by Stanislaw Przybyszewski and translated by Joe E Bandel

IV.

Falk entered his study, sat down at the desk, propped his head in both hands and groaned loudly. 

All the calm he had so laboriously maintained with Isa was gone and again he felt the throbbing and drilling of his torment. The unrest coiled like a pointed sharp funnel into his spinal cord, a feeling as if he must now fall apart, grew foaming up in him; he jumped up, sat down again, he knew no way out. 

It seemed to him as if everything around him must now collapse, break down, sink in; he felt an orgy of destruction and downfall ecstasy around him. 

And the sultry heat of the summer night crushed him, spread stiflingly in his lungs, he became so sensitive that he could hardly breathe. 

He tore open the window and almost recoiled in horror. 

The sky! The sky! He had never seen it like that. It was as if he had suddenly perceived the astronomical distance. He saw the stars as if they had been moved a million times further away, larger, fierier, like huge, gangrenous burn spots. And the sky seemed so terribly alive to him… Sweat broke out on his forehead, and he felt his eyes painfully bulge. 

Then he pulled himself together again. 

And in a moment his whole life crashed down on him with visionary clarity. One period unrolled after another with raging speed. All the terrible, horrific of his life: one downfall after another, one destruction after another… He had seen his life like this only once, yes, back then when he destroyed the poor child, this dove-soul of Marit… ugh, Marit, that was the most hideous. This pointless destruction, this murder… 

He suddenly came to consciousness and laughed maliciously. 

To the devil! Am I going senile? What does a murder concern me that nature commits? Ha, ha, ha… That she had the kindness to use my humble self as a murder instrument by chance, for that I should now suffer!? No! no! that won’t do. 

He got heated. 

Esteemed and by me especially highly valued audience—by the way, I wouldn’t mind spitting on all your heads, but I may only do that in parentheses—God how tasteful! So incredibly highly honored audience: I teach you a new trick, an extremely useful trick… It is an unmasking, a disavowal, a new testament, a new salvation… In the beginning was the cunning, malicious, devilish nature… You have been told she is mighty, unconcerned, cold and proud, she is neither good nor bad, she is neither dirt nor gold… Lie, esteemed audience, infamous, ridiculous lie! Nature is malicious, refinedly malicious, lying, insidious… that is nature! He, he, he… Naturally the esteemed audience opens its chewing tools as if a four-horse hay wagon should drive in… A slick smart aleck is nature, a malicious, villainous devil… What am I? Do you know? Does he know? Naturally! The individualists, the clever people who throw out their chests and shout: I am I! Oh, they know… the individualists! 

Falk laughed scornfully. 

I am nothing, I know nothing either! Oh! it is terrible! Terrible it is! Isn’t it, Isa? You are the only one who can appreciate the terrible… I see my movements combine into actions, I hear myself speak, I feel certain processes in the sexual organs, and an act is accomplished! What happened? A misfortune happened! Hi, hi, hi, do you hear the devil grin? Who did it? I?! I?! Who am I? What am I? 

He fell into a despair fever. 

I didn’t do it! My God, how can I prevent something that was… that was prepared in me long ago and only waited for an opportunity to break out and bury everything under its lava! Did I know anything about it? Can I prevent a glance sinking into my soul and calling forth forces there, forces of whose existence I had no idea? And for that, that something unknown in me instigated a misfortune, I should atone, for that I should be tortured by my conscience? 

Dear nature, try your malicious, insidious tricks on other people; I know your tricks and wiles too well—no! to torment me, you will never succeed—never! 

He poured himself a large glass of cognac and emptied it in one gulp. 

How wonderfully He had figured out the thing! He will go to my Isa and simply say: Gracious lady, your husband is a scoundrel, he has with a foreign woman given the impetus to a new genealogical line, to an illegitimate Falk line. You, gracious lady, will naturally divorce him so that your husband can marry the girl, whereby both lines attain a genealogical unity. Ha, ha, ha… 

But, dear Czerski, I have no intention of having two legitimate lines. 

Well, then I will tell your wife anyway, for I want to free you from the lie, I am a Tolstoy, a Björnstjerne-Björnson, I fight for truth… 

But, dear Czerski, don’t you understand that the two gentlemen are senile philosophers, don’t you understand that truth becomes an idiotic lie as soon as it destroys people? Don’t you understand that it would be infinite happiness for me to go to Isa and tell her everything, don’t you understand that this lie causes me infinite torment, but truth would cause me a thousand times greater, and besides destroy Isa? Don’t you understand that truth in this case would be an idiocy, a nonsense, a disgusting cruelty? 

These narrow brains naturally don’t understand that. And the disaster will come. Isa? Yes, Isa will go. That is certain. She will simply disappear… no, she will still shake my hand in farewell, no—perhaps not, because I have soiled her with the other. Yes, that’s exactly how she will say it… But what then, what then? 

He racked his brain as if he had to necessarily find the philosopher’s stone. 

His knees had grown weak, he fell exhausted onto the sofa. 

It was undoubted. The Other in him had ruined him. He felt endlessly slackened, weak and powerless: 

The power of circumstances has destroyed the knowing Herr Falk, precisely because he was knowing. But when Herr Falk goes under, it is quite different from when, for example, little Marit throws herself into the water because she didn’t want to become mother of a Falk side line. It is thought crudely, very crudely, but this crudeness hurts, and that is a pleasure… But yes, when Falk goes under, he can control it, follow the collapse from stage to stage, note, register… 

He, he, he… he had now thoroughly unmasked nature. He had also completely overcome conscience… 

Do you want to know why, you truth-fanatics? Just open your ears well so you can at least somewhat survey the unspeakable extent of your stupidity… Just listen to my reasons, the reasons of the knowing one who has unmasked nature. 

Nature destroys. Good, very good! To destroy, she uses various means, namely first the so-called forces of nature. In this category fall her moods in the form of lightning, storms, water and wind spouts etc., etc. 

Second, she has chosen the bacilli as an outstandingly effective murder tool, a splendid and unbelievably villainous invention… 

Third, no! no third! I am no classifier, I am philosopher, consequently I skip a cute number of the cutest murder and torture tools against whose most convulsive inventiveness the Inquisition must appear tame and pleasing to God, and go immediately to the human… 

The human! Just allow me to take a deep breath, refresh my dry throat with cognac and feed my stomach a little nicotine. 

So the human! Homo sapiens in Linnaean systematics: a self-acting apparatus equipped with a registration and control clock in the form of the brain! 

Wonderful! 

Now, please, just listen well. I continue my gospel, my great work of salvation. 

Nature was ashamed of her eternal, pointless murders. Nature is lying and cowardly, she wanted to shift the guilt for her pointless murders from herself and gave the human a brain. 

Do you know what a brain is?  A very bad, discarded, unusable apparatus. Imagine a poorly functioning blood wave recorder. It will of course record the rise and fall of the pulse, but wrong, quite wrong. One will only see from it that a sinking and falling is present, but nothing more. See, in this way the brain also learns that something is happening in the soul, but what? it learns nothing about that.