Daunt Books Publishing

The visions which overwhelm her no longer have anything to do with the ritual decrees of her oracle. She ‘sees’ the future because she has the courage to see things as they really are in the present.

And Kerényi, the Hungarian mythology researcher and religion scholar, dedicates to the ‘highly esteemed’ Mann, as an opening gift, the idea of the ‘wolfish,’ the ‘dark’ Apollo. This, by Mann’s own admission, touches on the ‘roots’ of Mann’s ‘intellectual existence.’ The two men have in common their burning interest in the ‘deeper psychic reality’ behind myth (a word which among the Greeks meant nothing other than ‘the true word,’ ‘the facts,’ later ‘the facts about the gods’). So, there was a ‘dark’ underground and background to the ‘god of light.’ This claim plainly contradicts the received opinion about Apollo, the Greek god who was pushed farthest of all into the realm of the ‘bright’ and the ‘spiritual.’ It removes him from the unfruitful antinomy of the pair of opposites, ‘Apollonian’ and ‘Dionysian.’ It also confirms the ambivalence which Thomas Mann seems to feel in his urge to identify origins: ‘Who can say where the stories originated, above or below?’

Thomas Mann, 1941, in a letter to Kerényi: ‘…  and what ought my element to be at present, if not myth plus psychology? I have long been devoted to this combination; for in fact psychology is the means to take myth out of the hands of the Fascist obscurantists and to “reconvert” it to a humane function. For me this alliance represents nothing less than the world of the future, a humanity that is blessed by the mind from above, and “from the deep-lying abyss.” ’ The embryo outline of a utopia. What can all this mean today, when those who are planning the annihilation of entire continents are, in the general understanding, neither obscurantists nor Fascists, and do not go to the trouble of trimming a Germanic or Roman pantheon to size, to serve their ends? To be sure, they too need myths, in the sense the word has meanwhile acquired: in the sense of a false belief. An example of such a myth would be that we are living in a peace that has a future in it.

Now the year is 1947, and for Thomas Mann ‘exile’ is (as he predicted in 1941) ‘no longer a waiting state aimed at homecoming,’ but instead, paradoxically, has become a kind of anticipation, the anticipation of a future

Kerényi: ‘Lamentation is very much a topical theme, don’t you think? Things look bad… .  Though I believe fundamentally that, all in all, humanity has been nudged a good piece forward, despite all appearances to the contrary. Moreover, it is a cat with nine lives. Even the A-bomb does not make me seriously anxious for its fate. Isn’t it proving itself tough in us? What a strange rashness, or what gullibility, that we continue to produce works! For whom? For what future? And yet a work, even one of despair, can never have anything but optimism, faith in life, as its final substance, for despair is a strange thing: it already carries within it the transcendence to hope.’

I hear myself saying, ‘Yes, yes,’ but inside me is a voice that says, it would take time to neutralise the self-destructive trend of today’s megasystems gradually, non-violently: time that we do not have. ‘Perhaps,’ says M., ‘we should proceed like the South Africans when they tried to free themselves from the racist regime: they got things absolutely clear in their own minds and accepted the knowledge: Our situation is hopeless. Maybe freedom can come out of that, after all.’ ‘So can resignation,’ says T.

‘In a situation like that, is there any value higher than life?’

For even fear – provided it is not the neurotic fear of nothing – is a manifestation, which implies a person standing behind it.

I want to gather together all the things that make me, make us, into accomplices of self-destruction; and that enable me, enable us, to resist it.

What is the point of beauty anymore if it is already given up for lost?

The fact that we ourselves brought into the world the forces which threaten us?