“Because your organism is very tough, a peasant’s organism, my dear Iltis. Your sensibilities have not yet reached the stage of dependence upon the brain. You are like a hydromedusa which suddenly parts with its feelers stocked with sexual organs and sends them off to seek the female, and then does not bother about them any more. You are a very happy creature, my dear Iltis. But I don’t envy you your happiness. I never envy the ox his enjoyment of grass, not even when I am starving.”
Przybyszewski’s Individuum seeks in woman the miraculous expression of his most intimate, most precious “I.” He speaks in one place about the love of the “anointed artist,” which is a painful conception of an awful unknown force that casts two souls together striving to link them into one; an intense torment rending the soul in the impossible endeavor to realize the New Covenant, the union of two beings, a matter of absolute androgynism. For such an artist love is “the consciousness of a terrible abyss, the sense of a bottomless Sheol in his soul, where rages the life of thousands of generations, of thousands of ages, of their torments and pangs of reproduction and of greed for life.” Now recall Falk’s dream:
“He saw a meadow-clearing in his father’s forest. Two elks were fighting. They struck at each other with their large horns, separated, and made another terrific lunge. Their horns interlocked. In great leaps they tried to disentangle themselves, turning round and round. There was a crunching of horns. One elk succeeded in freeing himself and ran his horns into the other’s breast. He drove them in deeper and deeper, tore ferociously at his flesh and entrails. The blood spurted.... And near the fighting animals a female elk was pasturing unmindful of the savage struggle of the passion-mad males.... In the centre stood the victor trembling and gory, yet proud and mighty. On his horns hung the entrails of his rival.”
The epitomy of the sex-problem, heh-heh.
“I don’t envy the ox his enjoyment.” Przybyszewski despises happiness as something unworthy of an artist. A happy soul, he believes, is a miracle, the squareness of a circle, a whip made of sand. The soul is sombre, stormy, for it is the aching of passion and the madness of sweeps, living over ecstacies of boiling desire, the stupendous anxiety of depths and the boundless suffering of being. For the artist who creates the world not with his brain, but with his soul, all life is one “sale corvée,” a filthy burden, eternal horror, despair, and submission, fruitless struggle and impotent stumbling. For this reason love, the greatest happiness for ordinary males, becomes for the artist the profoundest disastrous suffering.
Take away from Przybyszewski his ecstacy of pain, and you rob him of his very essence, of his raison d’être, of his creative breath. When you read his Poems in Prose you face a soul writhing in hopeless despair, in futile longing, in maddening convulsions. But you cannot pity the artist. You are aware of the sublime joy in his sorrow, of the unearthly bliss that is wrapped in the black wings of his melancholy. In his poem At the Sea, the elemental yearning of his soul reaches cosmic dimensions. Only one other poem approaches it in its surcharged grief—Ben Hecht’s Night-Song, if we overlook the latter’s redundancy. Allow me to give you a pale translation of the “Introibo” to At the Sea:—may the Pole’s spirit forgive me my sacrilegious impertinence.
INTROIBO
Thou, who with ray-clad hands wreathest my dreams with the beauty of fading autumn, with the splendor of off-blooming grandeur, with inflamed hues of the burning paradise,—
Radiant mine!