My grandfather was laid to rest in the graveyard of the sleepy little town of Runkel. His gravestone is overgrown with thick, green moss. It bears, below the eroded date and arranged round a cross, four letters, the gold gleaming as fresh as if they had been carved only yesterday:
Vivo — that is: ‘I live’ — was the word, I was told when I was still a child and read the inscription for the first time. It has etched itself deeply on my soul, as if the dead man himself had shouted it to me from under the earth.
Vivo — I live: a strange motto for a gravestone.
It still echoes inside me and when I think of it, I feel as I did all those years ago, standing beside the grave. In my mind’s eye I see my grandfather, whom I never knew in life, lying under the ground, still intact, his hands together and his eyes, as clear and transparent as glass, wide open and unmoving. Like someone who has remained imperishable in the realm of decay and is quietly, patiently waiting for the resurrection.
I have visited the cemeteries of quite a few towns and it was always a faint, inexplicable desire to see the same word again on a gravestone that drew me there, but I only found ‘vivo’ twice, once in Denmark and once in Regensburg. In both cases the name on the stone had been rubbed out by the finger of time; in both cases the ‘vivo’ shone fresh and bright, as if the word itself were full of life.
I had always accepted as true what people told me as a child, namely that my grandfather had not left a single written word behind; I was, therefore, all the more excited when, not long ago in a hidden compartment of my desk, an old family heirloom, I came upon a whole bundle of papers which had clearly been written by him.
They were in a folder on which were written the strange words: ‘How can a person expect to escape death, unless he neither waits nor hopes.’ Immediately the word ‘vivo’ blazed up inside me; like a bright light it has accompanied me my whole life through, only dying down for a while to flare up anew within me again and again, sometimes in my dreams, sometimes in my waking life. Although I occasionally thought that it was by chance that ‘vivo’ came to be on the gravestone — the choice of inscription having been left to the pastor — when I read the maxim on the cover of the folder I was immediately convinced it must have some deeper meaning, something that had perhaps filled my grandfather’s whole life and being.
And what I read in his papers confirmed my view with every succeeding page.
There was too much of a private nature in it for me to reveal it to strangers; it must suffice if I briefly touch on that part alone which led to my acquaintance with Johann Hermann Obereit and is related to his visit to the time-leeches.
As became apparent from the papers, my grandfather was a member of the society of the Philadelphian Brethren, an order whose roots go back to ancient Egypt and which claims the legendary Hermes Trismegistos as its founder. The ‘grips’ and gestures, by which the members recognised each other, were also explained at length. The name Johann Hermann Obereit occurred frequently. He was a chemist, who seemed to have been a close friend of my grandfather and must have lived in Runkel. Since I was keen to learn more about my grandfather’s life and the dark, otherworldly philosophy that informed every line of his writings, I determined to go to Runkel to see whether there were perhaps any descendants of the aforementioned Obereit and if so, whether there was a family chronicle.
It is impossible to imagine anywhere more like something out of a dream than that tiny little town that sits, a forgotten piece of the Middle Ages, quiet as the grave with its winding alleys and grass-grown cobbles, at the foot of the mountain castle of Runkelstein, the ancestral seat of the of the Princes of Wied, oblivious to the raucous noise of the modern world.
It was still early in the morning when I went out to the little graveyard and my childhood days came back to me as I walked from one flowery mound to another in the brilliant sunshine, mechanically reading off from the crosses the names of those who were sleeping in their coffins below. While still some distance away, I recognised my grandfather’s gravestone from the glittering inscription.
A white-haired, clean-shaven old man with sharply defined features was sitting beside it, his chin resting on the ivory handle of his walking stick. He was regarding me with an oddly animated look, like someone in whom the similarity of a face has awakened all kinds of memories.
In his old-fashioned dress, almost going back to the early years of the last century, with its stand-up collar and broad, black silk cravat, he looked like an ancestral portrait from days long past. I was so astonished at the sight, so out-of-tune with the present, and had anyway become so bound up in everything I had read in my grandfather’s papers that, almost without being aware of what I was doing, I softly said the name ‘Obereit’.
‘Yes, my name is Johann Hermann Obereit,’ the old man said, without showing the least sign of surprise.
It almost took my breath away, and the things I learnt in the course of the conversation that followed were not calculated to reduce my amazement.
It is not an everyday experience to see a person before you who doesn’t seem much older than you are yourself, but yet must have lived through a century and a half. As we walked along together and he told me about Napoleon and other historical figures he had known, in the way you talk about people who have only just died, I felt like a mere youth, despite my white hair.
‘In the town they take me for my own grandson,’ he said with a smile, pointing to a gravestone we were passing which bore the date 1798. ‘By rights I ought to be buried here. I had the date of death carved on it because I didn’t want the crowds gawping at me like some modern Methuselah. The word “vivo”,’ he went on, as if he could read my thoughts, ‘will only be added once I am really dead.’
We quickly became close friends and he insisted I stayed with him.
A month must have passed. We often sat up together late into the night in animated conversation, but he always changed the subject whenever I asked him what the strange words: ‘How can a person expect to escape death, unless he neither waits nor hopes’ on my grandfather’s folder might mean. However one evening, the last we spent together, the conversation came round to the old witch trials and when I expressed the view that the women would simply have been hysterics, he suddenly interrupted me and asked, ‘So you don’t believe someone can leave their body and go, let’s say, to the Blocksberg for the witches’ sabbath?’
I shook my head.
‘Shall I show you how?’ he asked, giving me a sharp look.
‘I readily admit,’ I said, ‘that the so-called witches used drugs to put themselves in a trance and firmly believed they could fly through the air on their broomsticks.’
He thought for a while. ‘Of course, you’ll say I just imagined it,’ he muttered and fell to pondering once more. Then he got up and fetched a notebook from the bookshelf. ‘But perhaps you’ll be interested in what I wrote down here when I made the experiment years ago. To start with, I must point out that at the time I was young and still full of hope’ — I could see from his absent look that his mind was back in the past — ‘and I believed in what people call life until I lost everything that was dear to me in quick succession: my wife, my children, everything. Then fate brought me together with your grandfather and he taught me to understand what desires are, what waiting, what hoping is, how they are all interwoven and how one can tear the masks off the faces of these ghosts. We called them the time-leeches because, just as leeches suck blood, they suck time, the true lifeblood, from our hearts. It was here in this room that he taught me how to take the first step on the path by which we can conquer time and crush the vipers of hope beneath our feet. And then,’ he hesitated for a moment, ‘yes, and then I became as wood, which cannot tell whether it is being stroked or sawn, thrown on the fire or into water. Since then I have been empty inside. I sought no more comfort. I needed none. Why should I have sought it? I know that I am and that only now do I live. There is a subtle difference between “I live” and “I live” ’.
‘You say all this so calmly, but it’s terrible!’ I exclaimed, deeply moved.
‘That is only the way it seems,’ he said with a smile. ‘A feeling of happiness beyond your wildest dreams pours out from the motionlessness of the heart. This “I am” is like a sweet, eternal melody that can never die away once it has been born, neither when we sleep, nor when the outside world once more wakes in our senses, nor in death.
‘Should I tell you why people die such premature deaths, instead of living for a thousand years, as it says about the patriarchs in the Bible? They are like the green suckers of a tree, they forget they belong to the trunk and die off in their first autumn. But I was going to tell you about the first time I left my body.
‘There is an ancient occult doctrine, as old as the human race; it has been passed down by word of mouth until the present day, but only a few know of it. It shows us the way to cross the threshold of death without losing consciousness, and once we have done that, we are master over our own self. We have gained a new self and what until that point had appeared to be our “self” is now just an instrument, as our hands and feet are instruments.
‘Our hearts and breathing stop, just like a corpse’s, when our newly discovered spirit leaves our body — when we “journey like the children of Israel, leaving the fleshpots of Egypt behind and with the waters of the Red Sea a wall on either side.” I had to practise it many times, suffering unspeakable torments, until I finally succeeded in freeing myself from my body. At first I felt myself floating in the air, as sometimes in our dreams we think we can fly, knees drawn up and light as a feather, but suddenly I was drifting down a black stream that flowed from south to north — we call it the Jordan flowing upwards — and its roar was like the pounding of blood in our ears. I could not see anyone, but I could hear lots of excited voices shouting out to me to turn back until I started to tremble. Gripped by some vague fear, I struck out for a rock that appeared in front of me. In the moonlight I saw a figure standing there, the height of a youth, naked and without the characteristics of either male or female sex. It had a third eye in its forehead, like Polyphemus, and was pointing motionlessly towards the interior of the country.’
Then I set off through a thicket along a smooth, white path, but I couldn’t feel the ground under my feet and also when I tried to run my hand over the trees and bushes round me I found I couldn’t touch the surface — there was always a thin layer of air my hand could not pass through. Everything was bathed in a pale light, as from rotten wood, so that vision was clear. The outlines of the things I could see appeared slack, with a mollusc-like squashiness and strangely enlarged. Young birds with no feathers and round, brazen eyes were sitting in a nest, fat and bloated like Christmas geese, squawking down at me, and a fawn, hardly able to walk but still almost as large as a full-grown animal, was stretched out wearily on the moss and ponderously turned its head towards me like an obese pug dog.
Every animal I saw was possessed of a toad-like lethargy.
It gradually dawned on me where I was. It was a country as real, as actual as our world, and yet only a reflection of it: the realm of ghostly doubles which feed on the marrow of their earthly originals and grow to monstrous size the more their earthly counterparts languish in vain hope and expectation of happiness and joy. When young animals on earth lose their mother and wait, confident in the belief that food will come, until they waste away in torment, a phantom image of them appears on this accursed island of ghosts and sucks up the life that is draining from those earthly creatures. And the life force of these creatures, dwindling through hope, here takes on form and the ground is manured with the fertilising breath of time lost in waiting.
As I walked on, I came to a town which was full of people. I knew many of them on earth and I recalled all their disappointed hopes and how they had become more and more bowed down with grief as the years passed and yet refused to tear the vampires — their own daemonic selves who were eating up their life and their time — out of their hearts. Here I saw them distended into puffy, bloated monsters, wobbling around with their blubber, eyes staring out glassily over fat, pudgy cheeks.
I saw a shop with the sign:
Wheel of Fortune Bureau de Change
Every Ticket Wins the Jackpot
Coming out was a grinning crowd, smacking their thick lips in satisfaction as they dragged sacks full of gold behind them — the spectres of all those wasting away on earth in their insatiable pursuit of a big win at the gambling table.
I entered a temple-like hall with columns that soared up to the sky. Sitting there on a throne of coagulated blood was a monster with a human body, four arms and the horrible snout of a hyena, slavering with venomous spittle: the war god to which superstitious savage African tribes made sacrifice, beseeching him to grant them victory over their enemies.
Terror-stricken, I fled the stench of decay filling the place. Back out in the street, I stopped in amazement at the sight of a palace more magnificent than anything I had ever seen. And yet every stone, every roof, every flight of steps seemed strangely familiar, as if I had built it myself in my imagination.
I mounted the wide marble steps as if I were the undisputed lord and master of the house. And there at the top I read on the doorplate — my own name:
Johann Hermann Obereit
I went in and saw myself in purple, sitting at a splendid table, served by a thousand female slaves, in whom I recognised all the women who had aroused my senses in life, if only for a brief moment.
I was overcome with a feeling of indescribable hatred, when I realised that my double here had been wallowing in luxury and gluttony since I had been alive and that it was I who had brought him into existence and given him all this wealth by allowing the magical power of my self to pour out of my soul in hoping, longing and waiting.
I was horrified to realise that my whole life had consisted of waiting, nothing but waiting in some form or other, of a kind of incessant draining of my lifeblood, and that the time left over which I could experience as present could be counted in hours. Everything I had so far thought of as the substance of my life burst like a bubble. I tell you, whatever we do here on earth, it gives rise to further waiting, further hoping; the whole universe is polluted with the foul stench of present time dying the moment it is born. Everyone has felt the enervating weakness that befalls us when we’re sitting in a doctor’s, a lawyer’s, an official’s waiting-room — what we call life is the waiting-room of death. Suddenly I understood what time is. We ourselves are formed out of time, we are bodies which appear to be made of material but are nothing other than frozen time. And our daily trudge along the road to death, what is it other than a reversion to time, and waiting and hoping mere accompanying phenomena, like the hiss of an ice cube reverting to water when it’s placed on a stove?
As this insight came to me, I saw a quiver run through my double’s body and its face contort with fear. Then I knew what I must do: fight to the death these spectres which suck us dry like vampires.
Oh, these parasites on our life know very well why they remain invisible to us, why they hide from our view; the devil’s nastiest trick is to pretend he doesn’t exist. Since then I have eradicated waiting and hoping for ever from my being.’
‘I think I would collapse at the very first step, Herr Obereit,’ I said, when the old man fell silent ‘if I were to follow the terrible road you took. I can well imagine that one could deaden the feeling of waiting and hoping within oneself, if one worked hard enough at it, but still —’
‘Yes, but only deaden!’ Obereit broke in. ‘Deep down inside “waiting” would still be alive. You have to take an axe to the root. Become like an automaton here on earth. Like a living corpse. Never put out your hand for a fruit, however attractive it looks, if it involves the least waiting; do nothing and it will fall, ripe, into your lap. At first it is like journeying through a dreary wasteland, often for a long time, but suddenly there will be a brightness all round you, and you will see all things, both beautiful and ugly, in a new, undreamt-of radiance. Then “important” and “unimportant” will not exist for you any more, everything that happens will be equally “important” or “unimportant”. You will be as invulnerable as Siegfried after he had bathed in dragon’s blood and you will be able to say: I am sailing out on the boundless sea of an eternal life with a snow-white sail.’
Those were the last words Johann Hermann Obereit spoke to me; I have never seen him since.
Many years have passed since that time. I have tried as hard as I can to follow his teaching, but waiting and hoping will not budge from my heart.
I am too weak now, to pull out the weeds, nor am I surprised any more that among the countless gravestones in the cemeteries I so rarely find one with the inscription: