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The Shadow of Heidegger

I visited Hannah in her attic. She was reading a recent work of Heidegger's about which she made no comment. I had always been captivated (I am conscious of this verb, to capture, and its whimsical, complex synonyms, setup to signal the obvious, for example: to seduce, but also to slide towards scary meanings: enslave, chain, arrest; I assume this was the sense in which Hannah captivated or seduced, given that falling into those nets she deployed imperceptibly, innocently or without wanting to harm anyone, was to enslave oneself, to be arrested, to be prey in her hands. Had it happened like this to the Master?) by her sharp and dark eyes, her forehead, the brilliance of her word, her precision. I suppose all that was her beauty, and also her various, surprising green dresses. Soon, in a dizzy turn of indignity, or a grave presumption of stupidity, of irrefutable nonsense moved me. What was I doing in Hannah's attic, what game was I playing, what was I going to save? The dizziness provoked an image. There are images we have erased and with quick insolence, with ruthless aggression, they beat on us with enough strength to, perhaps, devastate us. I recalled the American singer. The image (given that this was the image) of Miss Bowles sparkled in my blinding of myself. What was I turning into? Into the savior of the feminine victims of Rainer? I was sincere: I confessed it to Hannah.

She too knew Sally Bowles. She too had yielded to Berlinesque temptation. She was friends with a gentleman of the aristocracy, someone who wanted to embody the German spirit at its highest, most refined, point: the Baron Maximilien von Heune.

"He was so educated he didn't even allow himself anti-Semitism. Leastwise with a Jewess like I, refined and open to all surprises. He took charge of me no sooner had I arrived in Berlin. He would be my guide, my protector. He would help me decipher the infinite schemes of this chaotic, ferocious polis. He liked something about me. I know not what. He listened to me speak for hours about the Greeks. He didn't look at my cleavage nor my legs, he preferred to ask me why Nietzsche found in Plato so many wrong turns. Or why it was preferable to choose Dionysus and scorn Apollo. He drank exotic liquors. He got drunk slowly and elegantly. He would speak then of Bacchus and asked, stumbling, if he was not united with Dionysus by a passion for extremes, for the senses. And even -- if I might dare -- for madness. I avoided answering such incurable confusions. But one time I told him that definition that Hegel gives for the truth, you'll recall it no doubt, a few pages unto the Preface to the Phenomenology. I did it theatrically. I took his hands. I pierced him with my eyes and said dramatically: 'Truth is the Bacchic delirium into which members deliver themselves to drunkenness'. It struck him as so sublime he kissed me on the mouth. Later, very naturally, he said: 'Don't worry. I'm homosexual.' I told him that few times had I received such a lovely kiss. We decided, laughing, to attribute it all to Hegel.

The switch in narrator near the beginning of the second paragraph is in the original.

Continued.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

  ¶ 6:30 AM