Читать книгу The Truth About Lou - Angela Von der Lippe - Страница 7

Improbable Beginnings: Reclaiming a Life

All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.

—R.M. RILKE

The truth is, dear (and this may have been a fatal flaw of mine but one I was born with) . . . ever since I can remember I was drawn to the white flame of genius. As if genius possessed that necessary fire that would blaze open the floodgates of my small world to untold vistas and carry me down a raging river of thrills far beyond my native peasant Russia. I was a girl. I never thought to get stuck in the muck of some tributary. I never thought of an end to that adventure—smack into a delta. I was too young. Thank God for that!

Genius was, of course, not “genius” at all; it was something much more explosive, visceral. Oh yes, duplicitous. It promised spiritual flight and not incidentally, earthly pleasure—essential nutrients for my all-too-hungry body and willing soul. Restless girl that I was. I was like a darting goldfinch lighting but for a moment on some programmed path too deep and distant for my quivering body to know. So I tasted morsels of forbidden knowledge as they were shamelessly fed to me from the hand of these tutors of my experience and, well yes, then true to my nature, I took wing.

However bold, however quick to the challenge of these suitors I may have been, I was terrified too. But I must have loved the danger. Throughout my life I marveled at how the calm mind of genius could destroy and envision in the same moment a blueprint for resurrection. One man proclaimed the death of God in the middle of St. Peter’s Basilica. He had another plan. Another cried the creation of the angel within the self-imposed exile of his dark dank Swiss tower. And still another mused on the sanctity of sexual desire, while stroking the austere head of one of his antiquities and quietly puffing a cigar way past midnight in the pristine consulting room of his Viennese home.

These encounters, when it comes right down to it, amounted to nothing less than erotic blasphemy. An undressing of the soul without ever having to disrobe. There was no stasis in the presence of these men. Something was always about to happen. The earth would literally shift beneath my feet and the only anchor that saved me from being dumped off the universe was the hand extended to steady my step and eyes that held me in rapt attention. So, yes, I gave myself over willingly, that is, to a point ...

This is precisely how so many have regarded my life for all these years. In the relentless hold of genius. And I have not bothered to correct them, though it’s never been my way to bask in reflected glory. I, Lou Salomé, have been viewed by fellow artists, the dearest friends and ardent critics alike, not the least of whom was my mother, as a mere appendage, an accessory to the crimes of genius, and that too, I fear, will be my legacy. My fiction—the wildfire of my imagination—the bloodletting of my passion—all but forgotten, I’m now known somewhat as a literary collector and visionary brooder.

No doubt my memoirs, my journals, my critical essays throughout the years have only contributed to the startling misconception of being serial muse to countless artists and by extension, midwife to some of the most sublime inventions of twentieth-century art and ideas. Vicarious interloper that I seemingly was.

If the truth be told, I think I was always more enamored of the art than the artist. As far back as I can remember I tended to value the message more than the messenger. I don’t know its root cause. But I recall as a child spying the blue gentian flowers, the bluebells, along the roadside to our summer estate and naming them one by one—Sasha, Katarina, Misha—only to find myself crestfallen at the door. I’d picked them; I’d picked them all and there they were crushed in my small palm. I was ever distracted into remote corners of reverie. Hmmm, that was the artist in me perhaps. Incurably romantic, disturbingly unfeminine!

From the very beginning I lived in an imaginary world, often to the neglect of those around me. You see, it was the idea that transported me. The person did not, as dispensable as the body is to the soul. People might come and go but the flight of their words was enduring, my glint of eternity. Youth is so blissfully blind. And age, well, age is rueful and forgiving. I didn’t know then what I do now, that their words would be all I was left with. No, back then their disembodied words became the lingua franca of my life’s travels. The part of them I could take with me. ... And so, though I surely let go of some friends too soon or may have let others down (I had my reasons), I never did forget them.

Especially not the poet. He wouldn’t let me. His words held on. They were his soul. So he didn’t leave this world, but lodged inside me, as if waiting to speak. No, I could never forget my Rainer, and neither will you, child. When you hear my story.

My life is the story of love’s attraction and its puzzles with pieces missing. And though I always knew there was something magnetic drawing me to these luminous men, I knew too that they seemed to have been drawn to me. That’s the part I’ve never understood. The me I couldn’t face, the child I never saw. Can we ever know the muse?

I am old now. And for once in the looming eclipse of a crystal night when the world seems asleep to the throat-hold of fascism and the inaudible scream that will soon shatter glass on our orderly streets ... Now when my body heals from the slicing assault on one breast and is no longer holding, I want for once to take leave of the gaze of my philosopher Friedrich, my poet love Rainer and my dear professor Sigmund that has so much defined me. (What would they say if they could of all the lies, the silly distortions of who we were?)

I want now to step into my own light before these eyes that have seen so much fail me. I finally want to know her. The one who’s always been there but I could not bear to see—shy child, hands hidden in a mauve muff, worldly woman wrapped in the noose of a boa—the girl, nonetheless, who dared to stare into the eyes of genius. That girl was me, of course. But somehow I never knew her. Did they?

No matter. This afterthought is where my life truly begins. And though I cannot see her, I listen for her voice. Notes of an eluded presence. Like birdsong carrying me into my final dawn. The rest—the me—I can now imagine . . . through you, my child. Help me find her and draw her for others to see.

Listen, listen carefully. I can still hear the poet’s words spoken like an oath in that cypress grove so very long ago: “Let my heart beat through you,” he said. Now, my dear, let me take you to her.