Cassandra

It was for his sake, whom I hated, and for the sake of my father, whom I loved, that I had avoided screaming their state secret out loud. There was a grain of calculation in my self-renunciation. Eumelos saw through me. My father did not.

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.’

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

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?’

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.

The second of the wild animals behind the wire fence has been shot; it is bleeding from a shoulder wound, looks at us reproachfully, sadly, and at the same time implacably. ‘Did you shoot at it?’ I ask H. ‘Naturally,’ he says, ‘what else could one do?’ He has taken a hunting rifle that was hanging on a wall in the kitchen. But he could not shoot again, he says. The animal does not look as if it was about to die of this wound. It occurs to us that the animals might have escaped from a passing circus. It is too late to make inquiries. We cannot possibly live with them. We cannot kill them, either. They will not leave our kitchen voluntarily. We stand there, eye to eye with the mute wild beasts, and know: it is a hopeless situation.

According to these figures, there are three European tons of TNT for every person on earth, that is, for each one of us. The Great Powers could annihilate each other more than a dozen times over. And so on. We laugh, slightly embarrassed. ‘Normal feelings’ are numbed by such statistics. Indignation, revolt would be inappropriate. The aesthetic of resistance to it all has yet to be developed.

I see our three figures in the meadow from a long distance off. A feeling of loss of reality – as if someone had made a hole in the plastic bag that has been slipped over us and now the air is escaping along with the sky.

Later, as I sit on the bench outside the house pitting plums, I wonder how many more years I will sit on the bench this way. How many years do I want to go on sitting here? A sudden tug of age.

But the line the narrator pursues is that of male action. Everyday life, the world of women, shines through only in the gaps between the descriptions of battle.

My pain for this continent is in part a phantom pain: not only the pain for a lost limb, but for limbs that have not yet been formed, not developed; for unlived feelings, unfulfilled longing. All of this compensated for in literature: for how long?