Monsalvat: the
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Monsalvat: the
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ut I am also clear in my own mind why I can
even feel greater fellow-suffering for lower natures than for
higher ones. A higher nature is what it is precisely because it
has been raised by its own suffering to the heights of
resignation, or else has within it - and cultivates -- the
capacity for such a development. Such a nature is extremely close
to mine, is indeed similar to it, and with it I attain to
fellow-joy. That is why, basically, I feel less fellow-suffering
for people than for animals. For I can see that the latter are
totally denied the capacity to rise above suffering, and to
achieve a state of resignation and deep, divine calm. And so, in
the event of their suffering, as happens when they are tormented,
all I see - with a sense of my own tormented despair - is their
absolute, redemption-less suffering
without any higher purpose, their only release being death, which
confirms my belief that it would have been better for them never
to have entered upon life¹. And so, if this
suffering can have a purpose, it is simply to awaken a sense of
fellow-suffering in man, who thereby absorbs the animal's
defective existence, and becomes the redeemer of the world by
recognising the error of all existence. (This meaning will one
day become clearer to you from the Good
Friday morning scene in the third act of
Parzival.)
ooked at closely, it is Anfortas who is the
centre of attention and principal subject. Of course, it is not
at all a bad story. Consider, in heaven's name, all that goes on
there! It suddenly became dreadfully clear to me: it is my third-act Tristan inconceivably intensified.
With the spear-wound and perhaps another wound too, - in his
heart -, the wretched man knows of no other longing in his
terrible pain than the longing to die; in order to obtain this
supreme solace, he demands repeatedly to be allowed a glimpse of
the Grail in the hope that it might at
least close his wounds, for everything else is useless, nothing -
nothing can help him: - but the Grail can
give him one thing only, which is precisely that he
cannot die; its very sight increases his torments by
conferring immortality upon them...
et someone do it who will carry it through à
la Wolfram; it will then cause little
offence, and in the end may perhaps sound like something, maybe
even something quite pretty. But I take such things far
too seriously. Yet just look at the extent to which Master
Wolfram has made light of it, by
contrast! That he has understood absolutely nothing of the actual
content is of no great matter. He tacks one event on to the next,
one adventure to another, links together the Grail motif with all manner of strange and
curious episodes and images, gropes around and leaves any serious
reader wondering what his intention can have been? To which he is
bound to reply that he himself in fact knows no more about what
he is doing than the priest understands the Christianity that he
serves up at the altar without knowing what is involved.-
hat's how it is. Wolfram is a thoroughly immature phenomenon,
although it must be said that his barbaric and utterly confused
age is largely to blame for this, fluctuating as it did between
early Christianity and a more modern political economy. Nothing
could ever come to fruition at such a period; poetic profundity
was immediately submerged in insubstantial caprice. I almost
agree with Frederick the Great who, on being presented with a
copy of Wolfram, told the publisher not
to bother him with such stuff!
onsider only this one point that, of all the
interpretations to which the Grail has
been subjected in the various legends, this superficial deep
thinker should have chosen the most meaningless of all. That
this miraculous object should be a precious stone is a feature
which, admittedly, can be traced back to the earliest source,
namely, the Arabic texts of the Spanish Moors. One notices,
unfortunately that all our Christian legends have a foreign,
pagan origin. As they gazed on in
amazement, the early Christians learned, namely, that the Moors
in the Caaba at Mecca (deriving from the pre-Muhammadan religion)
venerated a miraculous stone (a sunstone - or meteoric stone -
but at all events one that had fallen from heaven). However, the
legends of its miraculous power were soon interpreted by the
Christians after their own fashion, by their associating the
sacred object with Christian myth, a process which, in turn, was
made easier by the fact that an old legend existed in southern France telling how Joseph of Arimathea had once fled
there with the sacred chalice that had been used at the Last
Supper, a version entirely consonant with the early Christian
Church's enthusiasm for relics. Only now did sense and reason
enter into it, and I feel a very real admiration and sense of
rapture at this splendid feature of Christian mythogenesis, which
invented the most profound symbol that could ever have been
invented as the content of the physical-spiritual kernel of any
religion. Who does not shudder with a sense of the most touching
and sublime emotion to hear that this same goblet, from which the
Saviour drank a last farewell to His disciples and in which the
Redeemer's indestructible blood was caught and preserved, still
exists, and that he who is pure in heart is destined to behold it
and worship it himself. Incomparable!...
had to make a completely fresh start
with Parzival!
For Wolfram hadn't the faintest idea of
what he was doing: his [i.e. Parzival's] despair in God is stupid and
unmotivated, and his conversion is even more unsatisfactory. The
thing about the Question is that it is
so utterly preposterous and totally meaningless. I
should simply have to invent everything here. And then there is a
further difficulty with Parzival. He is indispensably necessary as the
redeemer whom Anfortas longs for: but if Anfortas is to be placed
in his true and appropriate light, he will become of such immense
tragic interest that it will be almost impossible to introduce a
second focus of attention, and yet this focus of attention must
centre upon Parzival if the latter is not simply to enter at
the end as a deus ex machina who leaves us completely cold. Thus
Parzival's
development and the profound sublimity of his purification,
although entirely predestined by his thoughtful and deeply
compassionate nature, must again be brought into the foreground.
But I cannot choose to work on such a broad scale as Wolfram was able to do: I have to compress
everything into three climactic situations of violent
intensity, so that the work's profound and ramified content
emerges clearly and distinctly; for my art consists in
working and representing things in this way.
letter from a man in Duisburg, wanting to
link a study of Parsifal to a study of Wolfram's Parzival, irritates R. He says,
I could just as well have been influenced by my nurse's
bedtime story.
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 Above: The philosopher: Arthur Schopenhauer, in a portrait of ca. 1850. |
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For in the end time proclaims the
judgement of nature on the worth of all beings that
appear in it, since it destroys them: