Set in a symbolic version of the Bavarian town of Wasserburg am Inn, The White Dominican, first published in 1921, focuses on Christopher Dovecote, the last scion of a noble house, whose destiny is to ward off the threats of the Medusa and achieve transfiguration; he is then united with his love, Ophelia, the daughter of a theatrical couple who commits suicide rather than go on the stage as her parents want.
Extract from Chapter 3 of The White Dominican: The Nightwalk
That night I had a strange experience. Others would call it a dream, for men have only that one, inadequate word to describe everything that happens to them when their body is asleep.
As always before I went to sleep, I had folded my hands so that, as the Baron put it, ‘the left lay on the right’. It was only through experience over several years that I came to realise what the purpose of this measure was. It could be that any other position of the hands would serve the same purpose as long as they result in the feeling that ‘the body is bound’.
Every time since that first evening in the Baron’s house I had lain down to sleep in this manner, and every morning I had woken feeling as if I had walked a long way in my sleep, and every time I was relieved to see that I was undressed and not wearing dusty boots in bed and need not fear being beaten for it, as had happened in the orphanage. But in the light of day I had never been able to remember where I had walked in my dream. That night was the first time the blindfold was taken from my eyes. The fact that earlier in the evening Mutschelknaus had treated me in such a remarkable way, like a grown-up, was probably the hidden reason why a self — perhaps my ‘Christopher’ — which had until then slept within me, now awoke to full consciousness and began to see and to hear.
I began by dreaming I had been buried alive and could not move my hands or my feet; but then I filled my lungs with mighty breaths and thus burst open the lid of the coffin; and I was walking along a white, lonely country road, which was more terrible than the grave I had escaped from, for I knew it would never come to an end. I longed to be back in my coffin, and there it was, lying across the road.
It felt soft, like flesh, and had arms and legs, hands and feet, like a corpse. As I climbed in, I noticed that I did not cast a shadow, and when I looked down to check, I had no body; then I felt for my eyes, but I had no eyes; when I tried to look at the hands that were feeling for them, I could see no hands. As the lid of the coffin slowly closed over me, I felt as if all my thoughts and feelings as I was wandering along the white road had been those of a very old, if still unbowed, man; then when the coffin lid closed, they disappeared, just as steam evaporates, leaving behind as a deposit the half blind, half unconscious thoughts which normally filled the head of the half- grown youth that I was, standing like a stranger in life.
As the lid snapped shut, I woke in my bed. That is, I thought I had woken up.
It was still dark, but I could tell by the intoxicating scent of elderflowers that came streaming in through the open window, that the earth was giving off the first breath of the coming morning and that it was high time for me to put out the lamps in the town.
I picked up my pole and felt my way down the stairs. When I had completed my task, I crossed the wooden bridge and climbed up a mountain; every stone on the path seemed familiar, and yet I could not remember ever having been there before. In the high meadows, still dark green in the glowing half-light and heavy with dew, alpine flowers were growing, snowy cotton grass and pungent spikenard.
Then the farthest edge of the sky split open, and the invigorating blood of the dawn poured into the clouds. Blue, shimmering beetles and huge flies with glassy wings suddenly rose from the earth with a buzzing sound and hovered motionless in the air at about head height, all with their heads turned towards the awakening sun.
When I saw, felt and comprehended this grandiose act of prayer from mute creation, a shiver of deepest emotion ran through my every limb. I turned round and went back towards the town. My shadow preceded me, gigantic, its feet inseparably attached to mine. Our shadow, the bond that ties us to the earth, the black ghost that emanates from us, revealing the death within us, when light strikes our bodies!
The streets were blindingly bright when I entered them. The children were making their noisy way to school.
‘Why aren’t they chanting, “Doo’cot, doo’cot, diddlediddle doo’cot” at me as usual?’ was the thought that awoke in my mind. ‘Can they not see me? Have I become such a stranger to them that they don’t know me any more? I have always been a stranger to them,’ I suddenly realised with a startlingly new awareness. ‘I have never been a child! Not even in the orphanage when I was small. I have never played games as they do. At least whenever I did, it was only a mechanical motion of my body without my desire ever being involved; there is an old, old man living inside me and only my body seems to be young. The carpenter probably felt that yesterday, when he spoke to me as to a grown-up.’
It suddenly struck me, ‘But yesterday was a winter evening, how can today be a summer morning? Am I asleep, am I walking in my sleep?’ I looked at the street lamps: they were out, and who but I could have extinguished them? So I must have been physically present when I put them out. ‘But perhaps I am dead now and being in a coffin was real and not just a dream?’ I decided to carry out a test, and went up to one of the schoolboys and asked him, ‘Do you know me?’ He did not reply, and walked through me as through empty air.
‘I must be dead then,’ I concluded, unconcerned. ‘Then I must take the pole back home quickly, before I start to decompose,’ came the voice of duty, and I went upstairs to my foster-father. In his room I dropped the pole, making a loud noise. The Baron heard it — he was sitting in his armchair — turned round and said, ‘Ah, there you are at last.’
I was glad that he could see me, and concluded that I could not have died.
The Baron looked as he always did, was wearing the same coat with the jabot of mulberry lace that he always wore on feast days, but there was something about him that made him seem indefinably different. Was it his goitre? No, that was no larger or smaller than usual. My eyes wandered round the room — no, that was unchanged, too. There was nothing missing, nothing had been added. Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, the only decoration in the room, was on the wall as usual; everything in its usual place. Just a moment! That green plaster bust of Dante with the severe, sharp, monkish features, was it not on the right-hand end of the shelf yesterday? Had someone moved it round? It was on the left now.
The Baron noticed me looking round and smiled. ‘You have been on the mountain?’ he said, pointing to the flowers in my pocket which I had picked on the way.
I mumbled some excuse but he waved it aside. ‘I know; it’s beautiful up there. I often go myself. You have often been there before, but you always forgot it afterwards. Young minds can’t retain anything, their blood is still too hot; it washes the memory away. Did the walk make you tired?’
‘Not on the mountain, but on … on the white country road,’ I said, unsure whether he knew about that too.
‘Ah, yes, the white road,’ he mused, ‘there are not many who can stand that. Only someone who is born a wanderer. It was because I saw that in you, all those years ago in the orphanage, that I brought you to live with me. Most people fear the road more than they fear the grave. They get back into their coffins because they think that is death and that it will bring them peace; but in reality the coffin is life, is the flesh. Being born on earth is nothing other than being buried alive! It is better to learn to walk the white road. Only one must not think of the end of the road, for it has no end. It is infinite. The sun on the mountain is eternal. Eternity and infinity are two different things. The only person for whom infinity and eternity are the same is one who seeks eternity in infinity and not the “end”. You must walk along the white road for the sake of the walk itself, for the pleasure of walking and not to exchange one transient resting place with another. Rest — not a resting place — can only be found in the sun on the mountain. It stands still and everything revolves round it. Even its herald, the dawn, radiates eternity, and that is why the insects and flies worship it and stay still in the air until then sun comes. And that is why you did not feel tired when you climbed the mountain.’
He suddenly gave me a close look. ‘Did you see the sun?’ he asked.
‘No, father, I turned back before it rose.’
He gave a satisfied nod. ‘That is good,’ adding under his breath, ‘otherwise we would have nothing more to do with each other. And your shadow went before you, down towards the valley?’
‘Yes. Of course …’
He ignored my surprise. ‘Anyone who sees the sun,’ he continued, ‘seeks eternity alone. He is lost for the road. They are the saints of the church. When a saint crosses over, he is lost to this world, and to the next one too. But what is worse, the world has lost him; it is orphaned! You know what it means to be a foundling; do not consign others to the fate of having neither father nor mother. Walk the road. Light the lamps until the sun comes of its own accord.’
‘Yes,’ I stuttered, thinking with horror of the terrible white road.
‘Do you know what it means that you got back into your coffin?’
‘No, father.’
‘It means that for yet a little while you will share the fate of those who are buried alive.’
‘Do you mean Mutschelknaus, the carpenter?’ I asked in my childish way.
‘I know no carpenter of that name; he has not yet become visible.’
‘Nor his wife and … and Ophelia?’ I asked, feeling myself blush.
No; nor Ophelia either.’
‘Strange,’ I thought. ‘They live just across the road, and he must see them every day.’ For a while we were both silent, and then I suddenly burst out sobbing, ‘But that is horrible! To be buried alive!’
‘Nothing is horrible, my child, that you do for the sake of your soul. I, too, have been buried alive at times. On earth I have often met people who are wretched and in great need and who rail bitterly at the injustice of fate. Many of them sought comfort in the doctrine that came to us from Asia, the doctrine of the Karma which maintains that no being suffers unless it has sown the seed within itself in a former existence. Others seek comfort in the dogma of the unfathomable nature of God’s designs. They all seek comfort, but none have found it. I have lit a lamp for such people by inserting a thought’ — his smile as he said that was almost grim, and yet at the same time as friendly as ever — ‘in their minds, but so delicately that they believe it came of its own accord. I ask them this question: “Would you accept the agony of dreaming tonight, as clearly as if it were reality, that you lived through a thousand years of unimaginable poverty, if I assured you now that as a reward you would find a sack of gold outside your door when you woke in the morning?” “Yes! Of course!” is the answer every time. “Then do not bemoan your fate. Are you sure that you did not choose this tormenting dream called life on earth which, at the worst, lasts seventy years, of your own free will, in the hope of finding something much more glorious than a miserable bag of money when you woke? Of course, if you sow a ‘God with unfathomable designs’ you will one day reap him as a malevolent devil.
“Take life less seriously and dreams more so, then things will improve, then the dream can become your leader instead of, as now, going round as a garish clown in the motley shreds of our daytime memories.” Listen, my child. There is no such thing as a vacuum. That sentence conceals the secret that everyone must unveil who wants to be transformed from a perishable animal to an immortal consciousness. Only you must not apply the words merely to external nature; you must use them like a key to open up the spiritual realm; you must transform their meaning. Look at it like this: someone wants to walk, but his feet are held fast in the earth; what will happen if his will to walk does not weaken? His creative spirit, the primal force that was breathed into him at the beginning, will find other paths for him to tread, and that force within him that can walk without feet, will walk in spite of the earth, in spite of the obstacle.
‘The creative will, man’s divine inheritance, is a force of suction; this suction — you must understand it in a metaphorical sense! — would of necessity create a vacuum in the realm of first causes, if the expression of the will were not eventually followed by its fulfilment. See: a man is ill and wants to get better; as long as he resorts to medicines, the power of the spirit, which can heal better and more quickly than any medicine, will be paralysed. It is as if someone wanted to learn to write with the left hand: if he always uses the right, he will never learn to do it with the left. Every event that occurs in our life has its purpose; nothing is pointless; an illness says to a man, “Drive me away with the power of the spirit so that the power of the spirit will be strengthened and once more be lord over the material world, as it was before the Fall.” Anyone who does not do that and relies on medicines alone has not grasped the meaning of life; he will remain a little boy playing truant. But anyone who can command with the field marshall’s baton of the spirit, scorning the coarser weapons that only the common soldier uses, will rise again and again; however often death strikes him down, he will yet be a king in the end. That is why men should never weaken on the path to the goal they have set themselves; just as sleep is only a brief rest, so is death. You do not begin a task in order to abandon it, but to complete it. A task, however unimportant it appears, once begun and left half finished, corrodes the will with its poison, just as an unburied corpse pollutes the air of the whole house.
‘The purpose of our life is the perfection of the soul; if you keep that goal firmly in your sights, and in your mind and your heart every time you begin or decide something, then you will find yourself possessed by a strange, unknown calm, and your destiny will change in an incomprehensible way. Anyone who creates as if he were immortal — not for the sake of the object of his desires, that is a goal for the spiritually blind, but for the sake of the temple of his soul — will see the day come, even if it is after thousands of years, when he can say, “I will it” and what he commands will be there, will happen, without needing time to ripen slowly. Only then will the point be reached where the long road ends. Then you can look the sun in the face without it burning your eyes. Then you can say, “I have found a goal because I sought none.” Then the saints will be poor in understanding compared with you, for they will not know what you know: that eternity and rest can be the same as the road and the infinite.’
These last words were far beyond my comprehension; it was only much later, when my blood was cool and my body manly, that they reappeared, clear and alive. But that morning I heard them with a deaf ear; I just looked at Baron Jöcher and, in a sudden flash of recognition, I realised what it was that had struck me as different about him, an odd thing, his goitre was on the right side of his neck, instead of the left as usual.
Today it sounds ridiculous, but I was seized with a nameless horror: the room, the Baron, the bust of Dante on the shelf, myself, for one brief second everything was transformed for me into ghosts, so spectral and unreal that my heart froze in mortal fear.
That was the end of my experience that night. Immediately afterwards I awoke in my bed, trembling with fear. The daylight was bright behind the curtains. I ran to the window: a clear winter’s morning! I went into the next room; the Baron was sitting there in his usual working clothes at his desk reading.
‘You’ve slept in late this morning, my lad,’ he called to me with a laugh when he saw me by the door, still in my nightshirt, my teeth chattering with inner cold. ‘I had to go and put out the lamps in the town instead of you. The first time for many years. But what’s the matter with you?’
A quick glance at his neck and the last drops of fear trickled out of my blood: his goitre was back on its usual left side and the bust of Dante was in the same place as ever. Another second, and the earth had once more swallowed up the dreamworld; there was an echo fading in my ear, as if the lid of the coffin had fallen to, and then everything was forgotten.
With growing haste, I told my foster-father everything that had happened to me; the only thing I held back was my meeting with the old carpenter, Mutschelknaus. Only at one point I asked by the way, ‘Do you know Herr Mutschelknaus?’
‘Of course,’ he answered cheerfully. ‘He lives down below. A poor, poor wretch, by the way.’
‘And his daughter … Fräulein Ophelia?’
‘Yes, I know … Ophelia as well,’ said the Baron, with a sudden earnest air. He gave me a long, sad look, ‘Ophelia as well.’
Quickly I went back to the nightwalk, for I could feel a blush spreading over my cheeks. ‘Papa, in my dream, why did you have your … your left neck on the other side?’
The Baron thought for a long time. When he began to speak, he kept searching for the right word, as if he found it difficult to adapt what he had to say to my still undeveloped understanding: “To make that clear to you, my son, I would have to give you an exceptionally complicated lecture lasting a whole week, and even then you wouldn’t understand it. You’ll have to content yourself with a few random thoughts I’ll throw at you. Will you catch them? True teaching can only come from life or, better still, dreams.
‘Learning to dream is thus the first stage of wisdom. The world can give you cleverness; wisdom flows from your dreaming, whether it is a waking “dream” (in which case we say, “something just occurred to me” or, “it has just dawned on me”), or a sleeping dream, in which we are instructed through symbolic images. Likewise all true art comes from the realm of dreams. The gift of invention as well. Men speak in words, dreams in living images. The fact that they are taken from the happenings of the day has deceived many into thinking they are meaningless; which they are, of course, if you don’t pay them any attention! In that case, the organ through which we dream will atrophy, just like a limb we do not use, and a valuable guide will fall silent: the bridge to another life, that is of much greater value than earthly life, will collapse in ruins. Dreaming is the footbridge between waking and sleeping; it is also the footbridge between life and death.
‘You mustn’t take me for a great sage, my boy, just because last night my double told you so much that might seem marvellous to you. I have not yet reached the stage when I can claim that he and I are one and the same person. It is true, however, that I am more at home in that dreamland than many other people. I have become visible over there and lasting, so to speak, but I still always have to shut my eyes here when I want to open them over there, and vice versa. There are people for whom that is no longer necessary, but very, very few.
‘You remember that you could not see yourself, and had neither body, nor hands, nor eyes, when you lay down in the coffin again on the white road? But the schoolboy couldn’t see you, either! He walked right through you, as if you were empty air! Do you know where that came from? You did not take the memory of the form of your earthly body over to the other side. Only someone who can do that — as I have learnt to — is visible to himself on the other side. He will create for himself a second body in dreamland, which will later on even become visible to others, however strange that might sound to you at the moment. In order to achieve that, there are methods’ — with a grin he pointed at the print of Leonardo’s Last Supper — ‘which I will teach you when your body is mature and no longer needs to be bound. Anyone who knows them is capable of raising a ghost. With some people this “becoming visible in the other realm” happens of its own accord, completely without method, but almost always only one part of them comes alive, usually the hand. That then often performs the most pointless acts, for the head is absent, and people who observe the effect cross themselves and talk of fiendish phantoms. You are thinking, how can a hand do something without its owner being aware of it? Have you never seen the tail of a lizard break off and writhe in apparent agony while the lizard stands by, in complete indifference? It is something like that.
‘The realm over there is just as real,’ (‘or unreal,’ he added in an aside) ‘as this earthly realm. Each on its own is only a half, only together do they form a whole. You know the story of Siegfried: his sword was broken in two pieces; the cunning dwarf Alberich could not forge it together, because he was a creature of the earth, but Siegfried could. Siegfried’s sword is a symbol of that double life: the way to weld it together into one piece is a secret one must know, if one wants to be a knight.
‘The realm beyond is in fact even more real than this earthly one. The one is a reflection of the other, or rather, the earthly one is a reflection of “beyond”, not vice versa. Anything that is on the right over there’ — he pointed to his goitre — ‘is on the left here. Now do you understand?
‘That other man was my double. What he said to you I have only just now heard from your lips. It did not come from his knowledge, much less from mine; it came from yours!
‘Yes, yes, my lad, don’t stare at me like that, it came from yours! Or rather,’ he ran his hand caressingly through my hair, ‘from the knowledge of the Christopher within you! Anything I can tell you, as one human animal to another, comes out of human lips and goes into a human ear, and is forgotten when the brain decays. The only talk you can learn from, is from talking to — yourself! When you were talking to my double, you were talking to yourself! Anything a human being can tell you is, on the one hand, too little, and, on the other, too much. Sometimes it comes too soon, at others too late, and always when your soul is asleep. And now, my son,’ he turned back to his desk, ‘it’s time you got dressed. You’re surely not going to run around in your nightshirt all day?’