Gottfried Benn

You carve and sculpt, the deft chisel in a soft shapely hand. I beat my head against the marble to knock it into shape, my hands work for a living. I am still a long way from myself, but I want to become Me! There is someone deep in my blood who cries out for homemade Olympuses and worlds for humans. My mother is such a poor wretch, you’d laugh if you saw her, we live in a tight annex, built onto the end of the village. My youth is like a scab: under it there is a wound that every day leaks blood. It disfigures me. I don’t need sleep, food just enough to keep from starving. An implacable struggle and the world bristling with sword points. Each one hungers for my heart. Each one, I, unarmed, must melt in my blood.

Not reading English, and hearing about a new English thriller that hasn’t been translated. Seeing a cold beer when it’s hot out, and not being able to afford it. Having an idea that you can’t encapsulate in a line of Hölderlin, the way the professors do.

i

Know this: I live beast days. I am a water hour. At night my eyelids droop like forest and sky. My love knows few words: I like it in your blood.

When despair— you who enjoyed great triumphs and walked with confidence and the memory of many gifts of delirium and dawns and unexpected turns— when despair wants you in its grip, and threatens you from some unfathomable depth with destruction and the guttering out of your flame: then think of the unsatisfied ones, with their migraine-prone temples and introverted dispositions, loyal to a few memories that held out little hope, who still bought flowers, and with a smile of not much luminosity confided secret desires to their small-scale heavens that were soon to be extinguished.

They are human after all, you think, as the waiter steps up to a table out of sight of you, reserved, corner table— they too are thin-skinned and pleasure-seeking, with their own feelings and their own sufferings. You’re not so all alone in your mess, your restlessness, your shakes, they too will be full of doubt, dither, shilly-shallying, even if it’s all about making deals, the universal-human albeit in its commercial manifestations, but present there too. Truly, the grief of hearts is ubiquitous and unending, but whether they were ever in love (outwith the awful wedded bed) burning, athirst, desert-parched for the nectar of a faraway mouth, sinking, drowning in the impossibility of a union of souls— you won’t know, nor can you ask the waiter, who’s just ringing up another bock, always avid for coupons to quench a thirst of another nature, though also deep.

Deafness to imperatives is profundity in the wise man, children and grandchildren don’t bother him, don’t alarm him. To represent a particular outlook, to act, to travel hither and yon are all signs of a world that doesn’t see clearly. In front of my window —

A shadow on the wall boughs stirred by the noonday wind that’s enough earth and for the eye enough celestial participation. How much further do you want to go? Refuse the bossy insistence of new impressions— lie there still, behold your own fields, your estate, dwelling especially on the poppies, unforgettable because they transported the summer— where did it go?

I "—science per se—" my God, when I hear them on the radio saying that, it slays me. Is there a science that's not per se? I don't get out much, rarely get to see any lakes, gardens only sporadically and then behind fences, or in allotments, that's about the size of it, I rely on ersatz: radio, newspaper, magazines— so how can people say such things to me? It makes you wonder whether there are any surrogates for hollyhocks, for warm life, French kisses, hanky-panky, all those things that make existence a little luxurious, and all of them somehow of a piece! No, all this cerebration is not my cup of tea, but there are sometimes hours on end where there's no woman on any wavelength (I receive medium-wave, short-, long-, and VHF), no voice saying, "first you say no, then maybe, then yes," nothing but these opinionated pedagogues, it seems that everything the West thinks of as its higher product is produced by the seated male— as I say, give me the hanky-panky any day! II "—the last vestiges of the ancient culture would have completely disappeared—" (well, and what if) "—a sonorous past—" (la-di-dah) "—in villages in New Mexico farmers still bless their fields and livestock with these songs—" (very nice, I'm sure, but I don't get out of Brandenburg much). We hear Professor Salem Aleikum, the reporter still slavering over him: "the professor is lying on the porch of his house with his lute cradled in his arm singing the old ballads"— probably on an ottoman, with a carafe of ice water at his side, rejecting old hypotheses, putting out new ones— the great rivers of the world the Nile, the Brahmaputra, or what the hell do I know wouldn't be enough to drown all those professors— don't have any acreage, don't have any livestock, nothing blesses me, life is one continuous affliction, but nothing like those professors teach, teach, teach, from every pore, who turn everything into illustrated lecture (with slides).

I have met people who, asked after their names, shyly—as if they had no title to an appellation all to themselves— replied “Fräulein Christian” and added: “like the first name,” they wanted to make it easy for the other, not a difficult name like “Popiol” or “Babendererde”— “like the first name”—please, don’t burden your memory overmuch! I have met people who grew up in a single room with their parents and four brothers and sisters, and studied at night with their fingers in their ears at the kitchen table, and grew up to be beautiful and self-possessed as duchesses— and innerly gentle and hard-working as Nausicaa, clear-browed as angels. I have often asked myself and never found an answer whence kindness and gentleness come, I don’t know it to this day, and now must go myself.