In order to get a sense of how these incidents survived in lore, and why people seemed to need these incidents to circulate to, what? moderate their views, or is the fixation with story-like elements a mental force, an anecdotal mindset, a vigilogogic state of mind, part of the fog that makes it difficult for consumers of such fictions to the see the reality? In the movie Rise of Evil (2003) I leave without analysis the covering of events in the trenches, the streets and beerhalls of Munich, I suppose they were fine, to focus on how this movie rendered the Hanfstaengls and if this matters. I do not much consider the extent to which there is a gap between casting and reality, but Juliana Marguelis is by her very nature and physique a cautious, reasonable being, and not nearly delusional enough to be swayed by Hitler over time.
When the Hanfstangels arrive, their house, Villa Tiefland, formerly owned by Goldbeck and wife, is a classic gothic country house of the era, like any you might yet find lining Lake Drive in Milwaukee, a block from where I grew up
the house is big, lavish, balconies.
wearing a classic pre-modern fur, Helene is kind and gentle.
Putzi is played by opposite-of-reality Liv Schrieber, who is, really, entirely opposite the tall, gangly, loudmouth Putzi was. He is here pictured not as a tychon but as the voice of reason, even though in this case he does come under the sway of Hitler, impressed by his speaking
The split between the couple makes her the rational one and him the increasingly irrational one, until that arrangement flips. At one point, in one anecdote, he wonders why the Nazis do not have flags and posters.
And so Hitler gets to work. It is not a bad “research section”, he found the swastika in books, as per trope (in reality, it was already made use of by the Thule and other societies of the time, he appropriated a common device) It is amusing to me, the power of tropes. Here he picks it out of a lineup of symbols like you might see in an encyclopedia of the occult, and, indeed, in The Quiet Ones (2014), the evil symbol is extracted from a book in exactly this fashion
though it is fun, in the sense of an inosculation, that we are shown that Hitler himself as made a marginalia note, pointing to which one he thinks might work for him
and even more interesting, and a possibility for incipits, too, that is, psychodynamic marks prior to sciropgraphy, he makes exclamation points all around them.
and so, an OES, an “original eyewitness sketch”, him doing the painting.
At a dinner, her dinner party, perhaps a cover-story over the artichoke story, Hitler arrives late. The slow pan of the camera from upper right to lower left over the top of a chandelier and its hanging crystals is a classic trope form which speaks to the fact that history is never listened to by the living, and it will happen all over again. It also bespeaks the home life of the elite, with Hitler interloping.
and here he rather ridiculously in terms of dramatization, more so the swastika compared visually to Helene’s posture, and her red wrap, at the table? really, why, to cover her chest in front of Hitler, here he as if exposes to her his four pronged penis to win her over, a grubby sort of formal comment.
but let us picture an aftering scirp of this too, her ridiculous eyes, being impressed
The Swastika aka Dickwheel Makes Her Underthetable Wet, 7 6 22
I suppose the point of such mawkish formalism, and dramatization, is to reduce everything in life to the ping-pong binaries of the domestic POV of the bourgeoise mind. if only Hitler had got fucked more, there wouldn’t have been so much killing, if she had just fucked him, that would have backed him off, it is endemic to the middle class imagination, it’s always all about sex.
This cheap dichotomy is then rendered in montage as his display at table includes a tirade against the Jews and when a guest stands up and says he is a Jew and thus demands an apology Hitler stands firm and silent, until the guest walks out. This, too, the reductio ad absurdum of antisemitism into an insult at a dinner party, the kind of easy anecdotumism that afflicts the middle class mind. To then spike the ball on the contrast, we have the swastika immediately converted to in fact a symbol of HIS presence, as I have it, taken from Simplissimus, Hitler as swastika-man, a kind of not-to-be-taken-seriously cartwheeling clown
contrasted with a cliché from Cabaret, comparing his moralistic conservative Germany with the Germany of Weimar years we all know and love through the cabaret, because life is…..after all (no, it’s not). Silly embroidery in red.
then, in that cliché, that is, life is a cabaret, a stage device, the dancers clanking on the stage prison jail bar doors
is compared to what is going on on the streets of Munich
(I do not know at present if the cabaret scene of Berlin in fact found its way into the nightlife of the Munich pubs, which we have thus far seen only from the POV of the putsch). But, speaking of the Putsch, we now get the mess, and then Hitler escaping, again a cliché, the view out of the back window of a car, not only the Raven’s Gate, that is, speaking of his escaping a place of death, but, even more so, a death zone put in his rearview, so a kind of rebirth too. This now brings him into the draft or stream of experience of the Hanfstaengls, Putzi calls Helene to tell her he’s already fled to Austria, just to be safe
In reality, Hitler found his way eventually to the Uffing house of the Hanfstaengl’s only after going through a number of options and remembering that they had a house outside of town. He arrived, and was in such a state, with a fever, that Helene put him to bed immediately, and that bed was in the attic, far from detection by visitors. As we shall see with Hughes’ odd rendering of the scene, this scenario is titillating, and a cause of curiosity. In reality, as per Conradi, and biographies, it was sometime later, that, and this taking place her sitting at the side of the bed he was recovering in, she, knowing that he had a crush on her, exploited that feeling, to as if cow him, using I believe the body heat emitted from her somewhat conventionally exposed upper chest, what is called embonpoint, she gave him a whiff of sex, to derail his intent to suicide, and thus eased the gun out of his hand. Here, the dramatization could not be clumsier, here Hitler crashes staggering through the front door
as if portraying an episode of vertigo, so a swoon, in vigilogogic terms, he spins in the foyer, under a large painting of a sea or waterfall, which always bespeaks trouble happening right now
he seems to be so delusional that for a moment he thinks a Greek bust is a person, he aims a gun at it
we see that his mind is scrambled, as spoken of by the Predicament Picture, a trope, of surf and sea, symbolizing vulnerability
he sees the darkness, the void, all is lost
then in another classic trope shot, she looks down from upstairs, the shot asking what is going on down there, what is happening out there in the big bad world, why have you crashed into my little cul de sac?
we also sneak in here a bathroom mirror style interrogation of self, the works
here again, he thinks it is someone else, ridiculous
we get the close-up, meaning, he is on the verge of firing that gun
and then Helene shows up, and it is to be noted that she is entirely in black, and entirely buttoned up, that is, all her sexuality is repressed, to make of her almost an Angel of Death, but in the capacity of saving from therefrom, odd
when he sees her, her presence gives him a figure to act out against, her presence makes it all personal, and it is not just that he lost, it is that he is ashamed of his behavior. It is very often toxic shame, the unwillingness to bear what someone you love will think of you for having done a bad thing that drives people to suicide. Such shame is part and parcel of a well-parented middle class child, who however independent and “radical” they may wish to be in life, still can be toxically shamed by failing to meet their parent’s expectations of them. My problem here is, I think it is this sort of shame that, in fact, and precisely, Hitler lacked, likely because of dysfunction in his raising. So this imposes over him a burgerlich view of the world, he is ashamed before this woman whom he hoped to win over by presenting his ideal to her.
and, then, and then, in conventional tv, one almost wants to stop using the word dramatization and replace it with tropaicization, as this scene is carelessly compounding the tropes to make an obvious point. He then only puts the gun to his temple inside the close contact of a face-to-face scrimmage, as it were.
and this allows him an out, by way only of her eyes, her eyes, bespeakers of soul, and what are they saying to him, is this a look of love? does it give him hope? no, I think it intends to show that she is the voice of reason who whispers him down from an irrational moment, entirely divested of the subplot complication that he had a crush on her.
then, and the trope here is the Abreactive Feint, that is, a freezing moment, often enacted by magic eyes alone, to paralyze a scene, to cause it to pause, and, then, in the pause, without making any abrupt move to break the hypnosis, the hand, her hand, is lifted up very slowly, he feels the electricity of her touch, the gun for a moment dissolves, loses its lethal power, and becomes as if a receptacle of the hope that someday, someday she will stroke his penis, in love and sex; and by this encuntment of the dick motif behind what he intends to do with that gun, she very, very slowly, without it even happening, so that it happens in a way that he can deny happened, which would humiliate him, she takes the gun away from him
and if in case we did not get the point from that, tv production values pre-2000 had no problem with saying it all over again by spiking the point in the next shot as now as she stares into his eyes, easing the gun out of his hand, as if saying to him nothing is happening, you are not surrendering, just let me remove this from the moment. She gets close enough to him to implicate a possible kiss (at least she did not kiss him!), she almost, but not quite, cracks a smile, perhaps giving him hope, maybe even inferring by her close-in rescue, I am on your side now
Then he takes advantage of the moment, which he is allowed to do because in a crisis men need a mother to forgive them, or at least to bury themselves in, he grabs her by the shoulders
and then slinks down the front of her body, which means over her boobs, into her midriff, there to bury his head in her skirt at about the level of the lap, that is, her cunt
then she gets to play as if the trap, the thing that caught him, he is actually apprehended by being torn away from her body
and she is like, omgomgomgomgomgomgomgomg what was that? relieved, survived
that look of almost-ecstasy, that is, orgasm, it really is a bit odd. But overall in my opinion the movie sublimated the whole complex nature of their relationship to make it possible to infer that it was not enacted by way of her exploiting his sexual desire for her, to make it all seem like it was a game of intentions. Indeed, it is strange, while in real life Putzi was the one who is much more implicated for his too-long support of the Nazis, in this version, cherchez la femme, it is the woman who is cast more to blame, for coming under his spell. Indeed, soon after, she visits him in prison, and gives him a pep talk, this might be a cover story for the gift of the autography of Frederick the Great
and here Hitler is the one sitting forlorn, like Frederick by his drum.
As life goes on, it is Putzi who offers hope, while she seems distracted, as if she has by that epiphany moment, seeing it at least in his eyes, and then visiting him in prison, perhaps behind his back, she is slowly falling for him, which in soap operas must be construed as a falling in love.
This then brings us to another scene, where Hitler more or less declares his love for her. In this case it happens as a cover story of Putzi’s giving of the gift and encouragement, playing the subaltern piano player by pumping his despairing idol with positive reinforcement. He even misread thie satire of Hitler as a buffoonish anachronism as a bit of positive fanfare, predicting a future, he obviously not reading in the presence of the undraped females a critique of Hitler’s ridiculous and irrational power over women
But when he comes to Christmas, 1923, for he got out quick, it seems that Hitler has somehow become involved in a triangle with them. It is Putzi who is in the background worrying that his wife might be drifting into an affair with Hitler. She is trying to repress her feelings, or is worried about it getting out of control, seeing him again, in the wild as it were
She and her receptive body are made the living embodiment of the Christmas tree, the ever-inosculating gemel which Christians grow in the season to cause life itself to as if grow a copy, a double, to live in the twinfire of a new beginning by deep immersion into the spirit of the season. And out of this embodiment she is reborn as a woman who could, in fact, love Hitler
It is on the far side of the tree, representing the spiral of the ritual and the season recentering things, that we see Egon, and get a scene where Hitler and Egon interact.
Right before Hitler arrives, she puts her hand on Putzi’s shoulder, as if to reassure him, no, I don’t want to fuck him. and then she siphons off some of his manliness to properly center her sexual feelings as feelings for manhood that is embodied in HIM, not Hitler.
and backed up by a bland landscape painting, bespeaking this as a topos not to be invaded, she is strong enough, with enough store of satisfied sexual energy, to yearning-free confront the dark force that now is cast over the Christmas tree, coming in on their main parlor
Hitler, the scheming cuckolder, backs off Putzi with a greeting, though rather formal, and for some reason Putzi is not glad to see him (this is the kind of dramatization that annoys, it is NOT, as far as I get from books, the truth).
and then, the movie rather mendaciously and disgustingly weaves the upcoming notable event inside Hitler’s playing with Egon
Then, to block out the elephant in the room, which is the i’ve-gone-a-year-without-sex female sex organ as if the net between them, Putzi and Hitler trade some shop talk about the publishing of Mein Kampf
In the sudden rush of Hitler books I have hyperread in recent months, there is also Simms’ Hitler: A Global Biography (2015) and Ohler’s Blitzed (2015). I jump ahead now to Peter Conradi’s Hitler’s Piano Player (2002).
The plan in something like Hitler’s Piano Player is to capture in psychodynamic scirpographs some of the scenes visualized in the mind as one reads. This state of mind I have touched upon with lycosthenes, in the eponymous author’s wonder books, where it seems that illustrations are really rather more like the cymbal clang trope in movies, just visualized starts of emotional involvement, seen entoptically in the mind. In the early part of Piano Player the stage is set for some oblique passes at history from the wrong side of the equation. As Fort calls objects that fall from the sky and are subsequently ignored “the damned”, the term works as well for persons who live and with intensity but are so on the wrong side of history it is almost, to the mainstream, querdenken. The story of Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, a wealthy young man who, born in Germany, emigrated to America to attend Harvard, and then to open a branch of his family’s art print business at 45th and Fifth Avenue in the 1910s, becoming something of a stopover point for the elite of the time, offers a number of occasions for scenes of almost damned surrealism.
After the war, Hanfstaengl returns to Germany, sets up house in Munich, and at that point begins to explore the underground political scene, bringing him in contact with Hitler. Simms makes of Hanfstaengl almost the poster boy of his argument that throughout all his political ravings it was America that Hitler most obsessed on. Hanfstaengl was a German who got away, one of the bright minds, of a brain drain that Hitler deplored; because of his Harvard education, and his family, and his wealth, he came for a time to symbolize exactly the kind of good German that Hitler wanted to entice to return to Germany, to buoy up the racial stock.
But when Hanfstaengl is at the pub where Hitler first spoke, and, indeed, took part in the Munich putsch, he has some odd impressions, difficult to visualize. A man at the pub calls Hitler a Teufelskerl, a devil of a fellow, which causes Hanfstaengl to study him, finding nothing remarkable. The man with that phrase then serves as an usher as it were introducing Hitler to him in a striking, dreamlike way. Hanfstaengl has met an exquisite corpse, who oversees or handholds his descent into a another of the odd mental postwar cultures Schivelbusch calls dreamlands, that persisted in Weimar, Germany. So, Hitler is first represented to him as a mannikin, or scarecrow of this new climate he was exploring, something like this.
when one enters into a new terrain, socially, out of the norm for you, you become as if a Sleeper, and gaze upon what ignis fatuii is conjured up for you by a tychonic (fateful person) Exquisite Corpse, my term for the one who pulls the curtain back for you. Such was that man who used the word, casting over Hitler an insistence that Hanfstaengl looking back at him see Hitler upon first impression as a devillike creature raving from a table, the lattice position in reverie, improbably in a pub.
But, then, there is a blockage. Conceding that Hanfstaengl sees Hitler as if framed by this first impression characterization, he retracts from complete agreement on what he is seeing due to the fact that he himself is a creation of a world foreign to this pub. There are a number of invisible presences that as it were like rhytchrons (my term for slices of self in time) are peeled into Hanfstaengl as he lives. Hanfstaengl does not think that Hitler is in any way remarkable, 4, Conradi, likely because no sooner introduced than we fill in the background of Hanfstaengl’s mother. She is also an American born of German Descent, a Heine, one of the 48ers who came over after the disappointments of the revolutions of that year. That was the year that Karl Marx, and also Henry Schmitz, my maternal patriarch, left Trier, the latter to settle in Germania in the middle of America, in Milwaukee (there will be an interesting upswollen moment of unconscious connection on this point, almost in the manner of an instance of Jungian synchronicity, later). Her father, his material grandfather, was his patriarch, and famous, so in the invisible quiver of his POV and the even more invisible affordances that men of wealth have, due to the nature of inherited wealth, one might see daydreams of the Paris Opera House, on whose architecture Heine worked, then too his illustrations thereof, unknown to me, but they lurk in back as as it were pieces nominable for the game of exquisite corpse played with his history.
These presences, routinely tossed into biographies to stir the reader’s imagination, serve as a sort of blinders or rose colored glasses, but of an invisible nature, in front of the Sleeper, H. It was to take over a branch of the family business in fine art prints, which made them all rich, that Hanfstaengl was originally sent to America, where he also attended Harvard. So, there is much in those rose colored glasses, and because of it, Hanfstaengl did not see a devil of man on the table in the pub, but a rather ordinary looking lower class German, uncouth and none too presentable.
I have run into this blocking figure, invisible to the eyes, before. In Price’s Diary of a Madman (1963), he cannot see himself in the mirror because his reflection is blocked by a virdolac come to torment him. Perhaps Maupassant (in Horla) saw such a figure as, indeed, a phantom created by family background cast like the illustration out of an old book, more so if that was the family business, in front of one’s eyes, causing one to turn the temperature down on whatever in enthusiasm one was being asked to see. I will call the above blocking figure, a tychonic phantom sent in from family background as lodged invisible in the interstitium, the Illustratrum.
But here is where things get tricky. In the mainstream of recollection of the years before the first world war, the POV of the victors, in particularly Britain, maintains an emphasis on the UK and the US as the center of the scenario. That is, the “world” of that time, in oft told history, is UK/US centric.
then you have all the other powers, forming their own worlds of action, but in Hanfstaengl’s case his family had become a power presence in Germany, and the German world. But as they understood what the mainstream channel was, they by reagency, and maybe double reagency, since his mother was born American, they by her presence swung round out of the German world to partake in the mainstream world to gain some cult power by opening a branch of the family business in America.
then, acknowledging that there is a gap between the mainstream world and Hanfstaengl’s part in it, due to his German birth, but then his wrinkled German American descent, we get a strange sense of his world as a sort of amusing plenum zone or crawlspace underneath or at the side of the full power picture. This too a reagent locale in the mind
then, even worse, for us, gazing back a hundred and twenty years, and being unable to see that time in American-European history without taking into consideration the blockage of World War 1, and the fact that Germany and the United States were soon to split, the contemporary eye casts that reagent culture as a contra culture in opposition to the mainstream, and thus even more surreal and quaint, a little cul de sac tucked inside the wrong side of history. Something like this,
that is, the contemporary gaze, blocked by the War, and seeing from that an attack against a picture of a relationship between primary agent and reagent subform of it, that blast of separation creates an oppositional nexus, in red, between the two, not just a reagent border, which only then casts scenes of Hanfstaengl’s life in America into a farther off occult locale, lost in some prototype space jettisoned from history. Thus, Hanfstaengl in America in 1905 lives in a cul de sac of contradistinction of Germany from America, eccentric, surreal, an agentic array forms before him, and reagently addressed from the aegis of the oppositional stance, it creates a life both of positive and negative charges, as if ions of experience, which volatility makes his experience even odder.
Take, for example, an incident reported from his Harvard years. Hanfstaengl had already by college become known as an accomplished pianist. He never pursued a career, but his amateur piano playing was one of the ways that he gained favor in the world. It was in other words a subaltern posture he assumed, glad to amuse his American college friends by being an eccentric who played Wagner on the piano. Conradi tells a story from his Harvard days where at the Sphinx club Putzi began to get a favorable reputation for his piano playing, all the fellows from all the other clubs came to hear him play. In one instance, in a time-tested college ritual, which I also was bullied to participate in, he did an allnighter, playing Wagner all night long. Conradi goes on: as dawn drew near, the crowd became more boisterous, “Let’s get a truck and have Putzi play through the streets of Cambridge”, one of the students yelled. Pandemonium broke out. The crowd managed to get a truck, then carry the piano down the stairs, then Putzi was literally mobbed by the crowd and hustled down the stairs, where he mounted the truck and started pounding out more football marches. He played like a demon, the crowd around him laughing, yelling, singing and running to keep up. The whole wild throng then flowed down the street and around the corner, he became a sensation, as dawn rose 20.
There are only a few other examples of this particular trope that I know of, in the culture. In The exorcist (1973) Father Dyer holding forth at the piano in the party of the Black Lady (note: my brother told me last night that when William Friedkin visited Holy Cross he brought the priest with him, with his girlfriend, 7 4 22), as I call it, in my conspiracy theory (and this relates to my life because in one case as part of the theatre club crowd at Holy Cross, we ended up at Fr Burke’s sister’s house in Long Island, I do not remember how, where they held forth on Saint Patrick’s day with singalong piano playing). But the most precise echolant instance of repeating this particular college story is in Five Easy Pieces (1970), when Bobby (Jack Nicholson), frustrated by a major traffic jam, jumps out of the car, jumps onto a truck, sees a piano, and plays. Then the truck veers to the off ramp, cut, for him then to jump off and do his antihero walkonby dismissal in sad nostalgia of an America he no longer believes in. This story then has a subaltern cast to it, he was accepted, but not really (and this will be a major issue when we get to the heart of his story, to follow). But to place this incident in my graphs, I construe the dreamland of his American experience to be a trap space spun out in the vigilogogic as a recreative redoubt or liferaft in which by his piano he created the lattice formation, to then from that spin out his own phantom world.
.
and then, the scene, he sees the world break out into pandemonium around him, even as he keeps on playing
they then mob him and lift him, one imagines, on shoulders down the stairs, to then deposit him in the truck, with the piano removed to it, and from there, on that displaced staged, out in the roving world of ambiency, he becomes by the attention all the windows of campus and town turned on him, something of a legend, or at least a great old time college story, a German ex German American subalternly amusing the powers that be.
The Legend of Hanfy and the Piano Truck at Harvard, 1905, 6 22 22
And then there are even more interesting events out of the cul de sacs of history. Because of his connections, and his wealth, Putzi had major contacts, and partied with the aristocracy. At Harvard he befriended the oldest son of Thedore Roosevelt, president of the United States. Says Conradi, Putzi became so close to the Theodore junior that he was invited to the White House in 1908 for the Christmas festivities and was flattered at how the President spoke to him as an equal, 20. But, in my view, he is still invited in descent from the legend, down the mobbing stairs, cast into an idealized version of ambient space, the truck as it were reconstructed at the White House, spoke of almost in terms of legendry, as in Citizen Kane (1939) (Well’s aesthetic very much of this schoolboy sort), and he now luckily is not asked to play but is wined and dined in a palace of Christmas trees, saturated in the dream of time past, more so snugly nostalgic for him representing a cul de sac presence in the ambience, an unreal presence.
Hanfy at the White House, 1908 6 22 22.
My reading being that as the light blue represents the Luor, the river in between waking and dreaming, somehow by the mobbed descent into hypnagogic-lateral ambience, some emanations from Avornos, first layer of bird free dead-nature hell on earth, were nonetheless beginning to waft up.
Soon after he came to New York, where he set up the branch of the family’s print business, at 545 Fifth Avenue, at 45th street. The rich and famous soon were visiting him, and buying fine art reproductions.
But, then, this also involved a post-graduate Harvard connection too, because the Harvard Club in NYC was right around the corner from his shop, and he dined there often. It became as it were his daily clubhouse in the city, and the scene of a few momentous occasions. Weirdly, FDR would have his breakfast there, too, and Putzi was often already there, seated at the Steinway grand piano in the corner, playing his familiar repertoire, 24. More on this in a bit, but, again, he ends up the piano player at the club.
Sometimes, when one is in descent in a tranche, on the wrong side of history, an encounter with someone in a whole other ‘world’ seems almost surreal. Djuna Barnes, whose work I have not thought about in over forty years, walked into his gallery and they sort of looked at each other and fell in love, 25. A few details from the love affair, On one occasion Putzi reportedly suffered an extremely painful burst blood vessel in his penis while dancing with her, 25. On another occasion, he was able to play her clairvoyant lifesaver, cautioning her not to go up in a homemade plane she was covering as a news story, which then crashed and killed all on board. Thus he becomes as if the good luck piece for Djuna, 25 (This sort of omenology applied to love is, of course, standard fare, but likely caused by not having a connection in the world she moved in upon which to make rational decisions based on romantic or social logic.
The business with the penis could indeed be yet another anecdote to file in under the dance craze of the era, or an emblem of sexual frustration, which then resulted in a grown man school boy having a teenager’s “boner” while close-dancing with a girl, it echoes of the days of CYO dances. In both cases, a nexus of alienation, or of simply existing in other rhytchronic zones vis a vis the cohorts of both time and class, the escalator of social progress or regress in time, could be read as friction points, by which then out of a negative the excitement of the moment of a false bond is made where there is only, really, failure to know intuitively the rules of the class, thus resorting to clairvoyance; then, getting carried away by other things out of one’s depths. And it could be construed in general that both clairvoyance and surrealism were compensating devices exploiting the modernist faith in the epiphany of the moment lived to erase for a time hardcore social restrictions. (An added oddity here, though all writing on Barnes today focuses on her lesbianism, of course, as that is the prototype essence so unqueerily valued these days, it is interesting that in her 1927 book about her gay life she as an illustrator made use of German renaissance style prints, and one wonders of the influence…….to be studied).
In any case, all this changed when the war started. In the most general sense, history remains aware that, having been it could be said one of the mainstays of the development of American culture since the 1848 emigration, German Americans suddenly found themselves to be only Germans again. For Putzi, of course, born a German, and really being a German born of a German-American mother daughter to a German, we see again the double helix of ambient diversion from the mainstream that at this point becomes something of a break.
The signal event in this case study is the incident at, indeed, the Harvard Club, Hanfstaengl was a reservist in the German army, and had a military obligation in Germany, 28. He reported to the attaché in New York, von Papen, yes, Hitler’s von Papen, for the arrangements. But Putzi was paranoid about being a foreign national in a time of war, and seemed to fear British agents on the ship so much, and was afraid of being arrested or detained for having failed to report, that he decided against the passage, 26. Conradi is ambivalent, a number of other men his age nevertheless made the journey successfully, 26. In his memoirs, H reports feeling an oppressive feeling, that I was not at the front during those difficult years, 26. As things lead up to the war years, Putzi began to sense that the Germans were being blamed for everything going wrong in the world. C reports on an incident in 1912 at the Metropolitan Opera. When invited by a survivor of the Titanic to a concert in memory of the dead, Mrs. Fairfield-Osborn, at her seat, when H was taking his, blamed Germany for the disaster, arguing that German aggression had driven the ship into the northern route, causing the catastrophe. Here again, a paragraph about a mania, anti-German outbursts gave way to open hostility once the war began. German governesses were dismissed, Wagner operas were removed from artistic programs, and the paintings of the German masters were take from the walls of art galleries and confined to cellars. The windows of Galerie Hanfstaengl were often smashed, 27. Conradi describes that the mania even seeped into the Harvard club. when a Newport playboy, Donald Rogers, called the kaiser a son of a bitch, H wanted to confront him, but this time he was saved by the humor of the Irish bartender, who, in a state of subalternity subaltern to even the subaltern, saved the day with “You.re right, his mother was British” (the Irish generally were antiBritish in the war, hoping that, in fact, Germany would assist in the revolution),27.
But the incident that became the negative legend that stayed with Hanfstaengl, it seems, for the rest of his life, was that again at the bar of the Harvard Club, in the wave of antiGerman feeling that swept over the country immediately after the sinking of the Lusitania, Putzi stood at the bar and toasted those responsible, prompting something of a fracas. In his memoirs he again debunked the story, but also revealed that he spent much time trying to run down the source, to no avail. He did not in general blame Harvard, whose chums he avers stood up for him. Still, it is in its symbolic nature a classic incident, psychodynamically. As I see it, the Harvard Club was a lifeline in New York, just around the corner from his subaltern business, that kept him in contact with the more congenial lore of his college days, and the mythos that surrounded him. That’s why he acquiesced to playing the piano there. When a mania comes, it is not a natural apotropaic force with agency, but almost always fomented by tensions or breakages in the interstitium of modern rational culture, or what the powers that be are at any given time. This converts the tychonic the Exquisite Corpse, once valued as a psychopomp, but of a compromised nature, since being humored in exploitation nonetheless, into a scapegoat, in this case a Straw Man. The mania then sweeps in over the preexisting culture and its various pushes and pulls, and like the rings of Saturn (my term for emptied out culture) in general in mass society, evacuates all form into a void. This in turn fuels a Sleeper dream that comes from a darker place, an eschatia Black Fog, which then pushes him in this case further out. Thus, his toast to the villains sinking the ship is really a far out rebuff of all the Black Fog which had made his continued presence at the Harvard Club contentious. Something like this..
It is hard, then, to provide a scirpograph for where he really is, in his mind, at the moment, exiled to the Tarpeiian Rock, the place of sacrifice, reacting with a quip to the negativity being sent his way, because in his mind his was his first response to some of the talk at the bar as a zoom of the whole club away from him, to far off, and echoing, then he would see before it hanging an effigy in straw, and in that he would then see himself, and step back further. At that point, he would stumble back a bit, and looking back behind him see that he was now no longer on the floor but on the Tarpeiian rock, edging ever closer to the edge. Regaining some composure he would nonetheless then see the great ocean wave of the evacuating effect of a mania I call the rings of Saturn rush toward him, and then stir up an eschatia of Black Fog, filled sonically with all the catcalls and criticism he had experienced lashing out against him (mixed, perhaps, in guilt, with cries of the victims of the sinking), and to regain his balance in this propulsive push against him, to push it off, he made the quip. But then too the coloring of the beer only zaps back to the straw man posture to cause this ruckus that he almost did not get out of to become a wolfshiemlike rumor that apparently (reinforced of course by his subsequent history) followed him for the rest of his life (this reads as such, whew!).
The Harvard Club Incident.
According to Conradi, the war also changed the direction of his social life, likely in response to a sudden cooling of those channels that had by his wealth alone made him an exotic gift to mainstream Ango-American culture (and as I picture World War 1 as the breakpoint that ended it, I still think the USA was living in the period the “First Republic”, entirely of, by and for the rule of the original English settlers). He then took up with Hans Heinz Ewers, who was now in New York, and whom I have come up against a few times, with his Alraune, and then his Vampire; Frank Harris, whose gilded age porn I at one point, for unclear reasons, read; and no less than Aleister Crowley, all of whom were part of a counterculture, if you will, C comments they all had disdain for the hypocrisy of conventional Anglo-Saxon morality and and admired German free thinking. It also helped that they were all fervently antiBritish, 29.
The signal psychodynamic, but also catastrophist event in this culture within culture was the bombing of the Black Tom munitions shipment to be sent to the allies. Black Tom I know as a landmark presence on the Jersey side in the old port of New York. Conradi reports that the blast shattered windows in Times Square and rocked the Brooklyn Bridge. Recently, I described the sight of the southernly moving aurora borealis over Times Square in 1921 as an example of another low sky visionary experience, this must count too, five years before, and strangely like 9/11 (also the fact that German saboteurs did it added to the climate).
The Black Tom Explosion, 1916
This is about all in terms of the contraculture, and then the counterculture, that Hanfstaengl moved in, all of it changing during the war. The change then became institutional in his life when he married Helene Niemeyer, daughter of German immigrants who’d come over in the 1880s, living yet in a German speaking home and now sorely wanting to return to Germany.
And then they went back, established a posh household in Munich, and, fatefully, they met Adolf Hitler. Which brings us back. Brendan Simms, in his global biography of Hitler, explains in detail why Hanfstaengl would also be for Hitler a symbolic person of another sort. Psychodynamically, this also means that once again, Hanfstaengl, reduced to playing a symbol in one environment, now came home and found himself lionized by an unknown politician both for his wealth but more so, if Simms is right, because he epitomized as a symbol the Harvard-educated well-off German American (but not really), which Hitler felt were the “good Germans” who got away, and whose depletion of the population left contemporary Germany in a deeply compromised degenerate state, mixed-race wise. The overall plan was to entice former German immigrants to America to repatriate, and thus restore some of the lost lustre to the German populous (a plan that never made any headway at all). As such, then, Hanfstaengl leaped oceans simply to trade being a straw man for anti-German angst to becoming a Pinax, my term for a vision of lost ideal when all else is falling apart, in the mind of a man with some insane racial ideas. Hitler, after Putzi introduced himself at the Zirkus Krone, was soon a regular visitor to the Hanfstaengl household, whom Hitler likely further idealized because of the wife.
A few things. One, it is routinely argued today in the news, which enlists the limits of ping pong thinking, that when a person evinces a contradictory taste, or favors something for themselves which they are against in general, they are a hypocrite. I don’t think so. People favor those who are close to them, and less favor those who increasingly are less close to them. They like the close, they fear the far. They are ok to the close, no to the far. Their view splits based on where in the fear vector turned to ON in their mind they split from a zone of favor to one of not favoring. Two, the flip side of Hitler’s hatred of German Jews for corrupting the German was this idea that he needed to bring back the good Germans to set them up as a purifying bulwark against them. Here, he is almost like a Marxist who nonetheless romanticizes middle class life. From a broken home, and purporting to be, stemming from his rage at the defeat of war and the sting of Versailles, a revolutionary, which the Nazis wanted to ground in the working class, it nonetheless is part of his personality that Hitler idealized the Good German and also, as Simms notes, America, for its materialist prowess, vast lebensraum and racist purity. Conradi tries to fashion for Putzi a resume of how he “influenced” Hitler to shape Nazism in this way or that—he taught Nazis how to cheer like American cheerleaders, he taught them to use popular American college-style music at rallies, he even encouraged Hitler to glean from the Lutheran Bible phrasings that would greatly enhance his speeches, but, overall, much more of his time was simply about wallowing in the borrowed pleasures of living in a normal wealth-settled German home, a lost ideal. A bit more humorously Putzi tried to educate Hitler in art, which included grooming. He would show Hitler portraits of Holbein and Van Dyke as old master models of how gentlemen dressed in elegant fashion, none to have the Rotzbremse (snot brake) of Hitler’s moustache, 48. In this case, oddly, Hitler demurred, though involving Holbein it links up to Waetzwold’s Durer, charged by Mann as racist. But then too Hitler’s later adulation of Frederick the Great, and Caryle’s book, his later possession of a portrait of Frederick which he moped over as an aegis and pinax too, is part of it. In this context the low-class Rotzbremse becomes as if Hitler’s mark of resistance to a world the other part of himself nonetheless, as exemplified by H, desperately wanted to be part of. The cult was there, but he could only approach it from a negative counter direction.
An even odder story is told about his contact with a chair. When once Hanfstaengl’s son Egon knocked his knee on an elaborate chair whose arms were carved as lion’s head, so classic German, Egon began to hit the lion in the chair, blaming it. Hitler joined in, and it apparently became a running joke for years, at each visit “Uncle Dolf” asking Egon if the chair is behaving himself, 46. Though on one level this is mere conversational gambit, taking place entirely in the world of chitchat, on another the boy animated the chair, and by going along with him Hitler validated that device. As a result, it is as if a fear vector was switched ON in the space of the chair, and the lion came alive and turned its gaze to both, a famulus, a witch’s familiar. In this Hitler is ostensibly behaving as if a telephorus, a referee of psychodynamic forces attacking the boy, but at the same time he exceeds his authority by doubling up on the fantasy to make it almost seem real, which might spook Egon in time (there is mention of the chair later in the book).
As a result, Hitler is as if cancelling out his taking up the telesphorus role, and, again, that aspect of him that was a tychon, coming into the home meant he retained an aspect of the Exquisite Corpse role and thus was a sort of two-tone front-back demonic presence to the boy, the dark side hidden behind a perhaps overly exuberant and funny ha ha veneer.
Hitler and Egon’s Lion Chair, Haenfstangl, 6 23 22
Even odder, Conradi quotes the consensus opinion of the household, that he was a good entertainer, because Hitler even would go down on his hands and knees and play trains with Egon, doing convincing impressions of everything from the puffing of the steam locomotives to the shriek of the signalman’s whistles, 46. Though it is to be reminded that the Hitler at this point was a young man who had not yet stepped into infamy, he nonetheless did already harbor some evil ideas in his grievance-devastated mind, his family angsts quickly being amplified into a national psychosis, and I cannot bear to hear these sentimental “he’s a human too” stories, without imagining that in his play-acting he was in fact calling out to the darkness of the tunnel and the oncoming light of a train in that tunnel. Well, perhaps,
Hitler playing at trains with Egon Hanfstaengl 6 23 22
In both of these I see Egon as a Blue Boy, also being served, a false ideal fussed over by die Fuhrer, so there is that problem in there too. On every side, false lost ideals.
There are other anecdotes. Conradi in all cases tries to distance Putzi from Hitler. When they went out to the movies, and saw a film on Frederick the Great, Hitler thought the scene where Frederick executes his own son was a model of how all German children would have to be brought up someday, an idea that repelled Putzi, 46.
Frederick the Great executes his Blue Boy, 7 6 22
Nonetheless, Hitler’s shyness and naivete in social matters was the factor that charmed society ladies of the day. This trope brings with it some traditional class-warfare jokes. Indeed, there is an anecdote about Hitler not knowing how to eat an artichoke, it echoes off a similar joke in the Sopranos where AJ compares it to cactus.
Hitler Conquers the Artichoke, 7 6 22
The reason Conradi’s book is called Hitler’s Piano Player is that that is, in fact, what became Putzi’s main function for Hitler, he was a Hitler whisperer, delivered by way of the piano. C reports that sometimes Putzi would play for hours regaling Hitler with Listzian fioritura, an embellishment of a melody, as in opera, and also American football songs. His greatest success, however, was with Wagner, 50. This, of course, ended up being something of a curse, and when their relationship was collapsing Hitler had reduced him to simply that, a classic subaltern role, having to sing for his supper, calling Putzi in the middle of the night to come play, 50. It is not uncommon. (In Stephanie Grisham’s book on her brief time at the Trump White House she was devastated to learn that Trump’s temper was not just for show at rallies, but an office reality that made her regret going into the West Wing. The only thing that could calm Trump down was show tunes by his music man, this was Max Miller, running for Congress in Ohio, who placated Trump with his favorite show tunes, the prize being “Memory” from Cats, called by a current reporter a maudlin ballad which finds an old, unloved feline pining for the days when she was young and beautiful (Miller’s name came up last week in support of the testimony that Trump wanted to go to the capitol)). This trope is of some age and shows up a lot. In it, the piano becomes as if a dream machine, lodged in vigilogogy, to calm to a resting state a mind made mad by the stress of life in the interstitium, or political life. It has a nineteenth century air about it,
The piano, that is, is lodged in the Luor itself, it is a luordion, if you will, a soother, the idea goes back to King David, even, it converts rage, which is anger unleashed in a frightening way, turning a fear vector to ON, making the tychon become by a figment demon in it into a raging thing, to then by countering it calm him down, mainly by pulling him into and across the Luor into a state of almost hypnagogy. Like a punch script through a player piano, the beast is fed through the piano to come out the underside a calmed being. The player, though, is still in a subaltern state, in service to the temperamental one. My experience is that this sort of thing arouses, not calms down.
Restoring the Sleeper, Hitlers Piano Player, 7 3 22
It is odd to hear Conradi argue that Hitler had little interest in the US, and then only in its technical prowess, since Simms all but makes of Putzi the standard of his argument that Hitler’s main bete noire was the US. He says that Henry Ford was his only interest, then only because of the fact that being an antisemite Ford might be a source of Nazi funding (never happened). This contradicts Schivelbush’s claim that Fordism as a metaphor of modern life swept through the new objectivity phase of the Weimar republic after 1924.
Soon after, for a time, however, Hanfstaengl’s role in Hitler’s life becomes more comprehensive. They bought a large house from Walter Goldbeck and Ruth Vallambrosa. Goldbeck was a well known and wealthy illustrator from St Lous and Chicago who made millions painting bland portraits of the superrich. Somehow, they thought it fashionable to buy a large house in Munich, likely because he too had German American connections, in Germania. When Goldbeck died, Vallambrosa married a French count, then, later in the 20s, a race car driver. There is a “blue boy” picture of Goldbeck’s sister in law, Medora, after whom a town in North Dakota was named, it’s all in google, by an unknown artist. H bought the house and under H the house in Munch became known as Tiefland. Hitler would take repeated home-away-from-home refuge there. Humorously, Goldbeck seems to have liked the ladies, but also had a complex about their power, as The Idol shows.
But Hanfstaengl entered history in offering Hitler refuge in his country home after Hitler fled the Munich putsch in 1923. I have to go back to recover an anecdote about Hitler joking about Milwaukee, an indicator of how common it was for US businessmen to be in Germany before WW1. It was at the country home that Hitler was apprehended by police, 62. As C describes it, this was Hitler’s safehouse, in the ambient German space outside of Munich, in this case Uffing. Hanfstaengl’s wife Helene received the knock on the door, an event fraught with terror in later days. She was oblivious to the dramatic events of the previous twenty four hours, and let Hitler and a doctor in, 63. For this, The New York Times, reporting on the event, said that the leader of the fascists in Bavaria had been arrested in the villa of a former New York art dealer, whom they called one of Hitler’s financial backers. 67
Though I am less interested in Hanfstaengl’s more formal role in Nazism, the spell would not be broken until 1937 when a Nazi prank backfired, and made him realize his life was in danger. He was a spokesperson too often, and supported too many of the ideas, to get off easy, he did prison time. But this also is of interest, as he was, once again, entirely backwards to history, from the POV of his origins. There is a good example of this is C’s comment on how Putzi saw a caricature of Hitler on the cover of Simplissimus, It featured Hitler on a knight’s horse, accompanied by bare-breasted supporters waving banners, as he breaks through the Brandenburg gate. Clearly, a parody or satire, though cold comfort humor is, in retrospect (worse that in the coinage of today’s liberal press SNL is actually thought to be part of the resistance, still routinely getting a notice in the day’s paper on the morning after lame jokes are told to ease the mind of worried liberals). Conradi says that it was intended as a April Fools Day satire of the failed putsch, but Putzi saw in it a vision of what one day what could become reality. The caricature became a secret inner impulse for all of us to bring about what then, in April, 1924, seemed impossible, 68. A warning from history as to how far humor can go in opposing a greater force.
I found the illustration, and that it was part of a series of Hitler parodies that Simplissimus did throughout the Weimar period, there is also an illustrator, Eric Schilling, who is clearly a psychodynamic demon picturer. All of them too analyzable for the tacit meanings found in dreamlike composition that upended or canceled out intended critique (and I am reading Fest’s biography of Hitler and find it too uncritically celebratory of his highs and lows, even if the verbiage of criticism is there. To be continued on that. Fest also describes the show trial, and the prison term, and Mein Kampf, better than I have read of it before).
In any case, Putzi continues in his role as auriga to Hitler, whispering memento mori, after he was released. Surprisingly, for all of Fest’s description of visits and accolades, it occurs to me there is something of an art installation in critique of demonstration-only politics, a fantasy. These scenes sound like they might have been more the prototype to Goodfellas. Putzi was one of the first people Hitler contacted after being released from prison on December 20, 1924. Putzi had a new house, and invited him to Hellige Abend, Christmas Eve. Conradi comments, the evening of Christmas eve is the high point of the German celebration, and Putzi’s asking Hitler to share it with him and his family illustrated the closeness of their relationship, 69. That Eve was notable, psychodynamically. Hitler’s obsession with Frederick the Great was covered with curious thoroughness in Ulrich’s biography, noting the many copies of the full set of Carlyle’s Frederic that Hitler was gifted by those knowing of his obsession. It must have become ersatz. But the portrait is Hitler’s “Blue Boy” portrait, and a pinax, a lost ideal in the context of complete breakdown (I will read Fest’s downfall). Remember that I locate Putzi psycho-GPSwise as rolled into a permanent subaltern condition floating in ambience lateral to light dreaming. Hitler’s later reliance on the mythos of Frederick’s famous last stands, on the basis of which he waged the hopeless Battle of the Bulge, a complete clusterfuck of death, is detailed in Ulrich. It also plays a major role in Anthony Hopkins’ version of the story of the bunker. In those cases, the war, waged by the powers, entirely emptied out of “life” by way of the rings of Saturn, and in such kenosis, hell on earth was bared to consciousness, and when the losses piled up repeated nightmare cast Hitler past epigogic seeing of monsters, to seek solace in a pinax.
Though I concede by the bunker it might well have been Hitler’s mind was sunk in the Black Pyramid under the Black Sun. Though I concede a gift-giving on Christmas Eve, 1924 would not seem to be so far out into the darkness, the pinax likely intending to restore to him the talismanic power of the Blue Well
Putzi contributed, then, to the Frederic the Great lore by giving Hitler as a talisman an autograph of Frederick the Great, whom he knew to be one of Hitler’s great heroes (this to a political operative who just got out of prison after staging a failed putsch). Putzi is quoted as saying (all of this no doubt from his memoir, which must be suspected of self-flattering embroidery), he once sat beside a broken drum, he was once in the depths of despair after his defeat on the field of battle, but today Germans worship his memory and glory in his achievements, 70. At which point Hitler asked him to play again for him act three of Tristan and Isolde, which Putzi did, hd remembered, playing as I never did before, 70. In this Putzi was in fact an anti-auriga, building up Hitler’s ego, mythologizing him, soothing him so that he could gain his equilibrium again, and move forward. He was seduced into losing sight of his agentic purpose.
The Christmas Talisman, 1924, Hitler’s Piano Player, 7 3 22
(the above reflects my decision that after the Putsch Hitler was virtually in a sleepwalking state in a second nightmare state of syngogy, unsure if he was awake or asleep. Having had all his previous experience dissolved by kenosis into a talus dream form consisting of the prison and the putsch piled atop the Putzi piano (and isn’t it uncanny that the nickname Putzi all but erases in it putsch?, his subaltern role as an eraser apotropaion too). He seeks shelter in a White Out dream form in ambience, which is the Putzi manor all decked out for Christmas, with the gift of a talismanic signature accompanied by a mental picture of Frederick sitting in despair by his drum, all found, as will be found in syngogic quests, in the site of the Blue Well in light sleep dreaming). (in fact there is a picture like that of Frederick, after the battle of Kolin, by Julius Schrader, so Putzi was simply repeating another of those tropes of romantic culture in the 19th century which I have termed penumbra prototype cultures to pop culture. The battle of Kolin was a serious defeat for Frederick. I made a post on this, July 4, 2022.
And, of course, Simplissimus has an even better retort to Hitler’s Frederick Cult (my point above is that Simplissimus seems to think the Frederick myth makes fun of Hitler, like it is joke that this ridiculous-looking man compares himself to him, but Hitler was dead serious)
In a meander from this writing, the whole world of Simplissimus opened up, much to review.
Entirely conceding I am wading into an ocean of scholarship, I’m in heaven because I found another “blood rain” (with stars and etc!) image in Simplissimus’s satirizing of Hitler the big joke, which apparently went on right up to when he slipped by the backdoor created by factionalism into the chancellorship in 1933, ha…..ha. In my meander in this corpus I also discovered an artist I did not know, Eric Schilling, whose figurative renderings of politics might’ve at the time been read as humorously using outdated tropes for satire but if stripped down to their inner psychodynamics bespeak extreme distress that read correctly ought to have stirred, I think he is very good. If I was 45 and not, like, old I wouldn’t mind starting a political cartoon-based zine called SIMPLISTICISSMUS, devoted to demonstrating what we seem to have lost sight of, the limits of art
This one is uncannily prescient, and of the culture of the moment, both a rain of blood, I think, and then a swastika comet casting cosmic rays down on Earth (Fest details the cosmic dimension of Mein Kampf as well).
then a couple more
andEric Schilling, a good addition, I think, to the demonic nature of art in the Weimar period, also first impression here.
Another as if living tableaux, in silent movie fashion, thirty years after the popularity in painting, came in the Hanfstaengl house that evening. Hitler had a crush on Helene. Sitting in the large artist’s studio in Tiefland, Hitler found her alone and made his pounce. Putzi had left the room to call a taxi, and taking advantage of the moment Hitler sank to his knees and thrust his head into Helene’s lap, proclaiming himself her slave. If only I had someone like you to look after me, he mused. Helene asked him why he had not, and it may be here that Hitler first gave his stock answer that he is married to Germany and would have no other love beside her. The wording is intriguing. Putzi as auriga is, indeed, subalternly, a sort of slave to Hitler, and now it is almost as if Hitler expects of that service the lending of a wife. One imagines it was uncomfortable for Helene, this scene out of a rococo romance (Helene later said that she just assumed Hitler was a neuter).
The Neuter in the friend zone, the Talismanic lap, Hitlers Piano player, 7 3 22
This story, in Conradi, is doubled up on by a more famous story in Hiterland, about Americans who supported Hitler, and in the tv movie The Rise of Evil, wherein Helene, who was aware of the crush that Hitler had on her, used her womanly power, the zap of a heaving breast, to ease the gun from Hitler’s hand as he held it out to commit suicide, declaring all is over, at Uffing, one imagines what might’ve happened had she fucked him, by a sort of rape.
The Power of Boobs (suicidus interruptus), 7 3 22
This sentimental scene, which I think is sentimentally choreographed according to popular art tropes, in romantic popular fiction, also is territory covered, in two sources at least
Hyperreading*, it’s tough, at times almost manic, in order to sweep up my extension of the study of sentimental rococo tropes** into the Nazi era, now I have to watch Rise of Evil (2003), in which Juliana Margulies as Helene Hanfstaengl uses her upper chest body heat to ease the gun from Hitler’s suicidal hand in 1923, I’m watching it today; then, there is in my book nothing worse than popular fiction, in terms of indulging in a fog of whims and caprices, these days as bad as ever, so I also found out the Helene-Hitler-whisperer episode is covered in an English novel from 1961, so I have to read that too. (*in which if in reading you see a citation you have to jump to the source then read that but as soon as your interest flags you jump back then completely forget what you didn’t read, it’s kind of manic, actually, so very busy doing nothing).(**Horror of…..Rococo (2016, unpublishable because it demands tons of film stills) is 2 volumes, 1000+ pages, maybe posted someday as part of Project Tombstone).
the starification, or the catasterization of real life people into more ideal images in media tellings of their stories, is another aspect of popular fiction that is objectionable as contributing to the fog of art or the fog of culture. I picture the moment as very close in contact with the result that Helene’s body heat from her half exposed upper chest waft up toward Hitler and thus calmed him down, for him to again want to bury himself in her body. But, in real life, Helene by no means looks like Juliana, she is much more maternal, very German, lending pathos to the scene.
If Artaud’s drawings are ultimately derived from an attempt to copy what he saw on the large rocks as he rode through the canyon, I have no issue with that
what he describes is this, a pareidolic picture, read in a psychodynamic way, in the patterns on the rock, of a man being tortured, and then the beings doing it are being erased by the strike of the sunlight, even as the man being tortured persists in the shadows.
a man being tortured happens, in sacred land, only on the Place of Sacrifice in the mind, the Tarpeian Rock as it were of the sense of being on the edge that characterizes frightened minds. This is also where a pharmakon, which serves the emotional territorial needs and fears of the tribe, dwells, and where he might be tortured. Of course, images of torture are a well worn trope in art of the medieval sort, my favorite is Eulalia
but maybe art history’s favorite is Marysas
and is it so difficult to allow such a tropaic composition to recede back into stone, for one to them repeat the process of extracting it from the facture of stone, to produce an image of a man being tortured? Sometimes, but sometimes not
indeed, for a very careful artist, it would be no problem to simply take the basic compositional tropes of representation and sand them down to make them look like authentic rockage, and then you would reverse the process to bring forth the miracle image. It is also true, and Strindberg sought to all but make a mad aesthetic based on this, in his Inferno (1896), that Michelangelo himself had a pareidolia-based understanding of how he drew figures out of images he saw imbedded in stone. So, my first argument is that Artaud could not have emptied out his mind for it to be free of visual tropes that he has seen and absorbed for some time growing up in the West. That is, a good portion of this is personal projection, which then matched with something external.
Then, my second argument is that the miracle here, that the people who are torturing are now disappearing, by the wash over of light from the sun, while the image sticks in the shadow, this too, this psychodynamically is an indication of repeated lightning strike by the High Light, or persistent consciousness, and striking over of figures, as I indicated by yellow
it is also of interest that Artaud identified with this haunted mountain, and says that most of the hauntings appear to have been raised up because he is making a periplus. That is, once every day he had one of these hallucinations.
he gives away some of his method, counting entails one, he encountered a possibly pareidolically rich shadow, then, two, he senses it is about to turn, that is, develop as a pareidolia, and in that state it was hovering, and then it was by adding up these shadows that he “made my way back to some strange hearth,” which I take to mean another pareidolic scene.
this stepwise approach is, in fact, too rationally based, and not in tune with the nature of such intuition, see Ehrenzweig for the actual. But, above, the hovering refers to the hovering ghost or angel that often appears in vigilogogy, and then, the sighting of it, that is, the shadow over the rock, then causes it to spread to rocks two through seven. And it is at six, when the scene elements combine to create a tableaux, that he gets the creepy vision feeling. This realization of a pareidolia, but as a periplus–which I use as my term for a pareidolia created by sequential movement across a surface–this being what he most sees, this again is a common feature of normal visuality. There being some psychodynamic in the sequencing also suggests I call a graph of that nature a periplus too.
Then, having told us the method, he now much more specifically, part by part, shows us a periplus of pareidolia, that is, a psychoperiplus tour
So, there is, 1) the huge window, a large flat expanse of rock; then 2) head an enormous cavity, and 3) the sun and the moon in it, and 4) his right and left arms stretched out like a bar, then 5) seven ribs on either side, and 6 ) a shining navel, then 5) shifting expressions based on indentations in the rock, and hen 7) his right arm points. For Artaud it is a portent, a prediction, a vision informed by an intercessional request, which way to go? Or to calm him, thinking himself lost. This cannot be a Tarahumara image
Artaud’s A Naked Man Leaning Out of a Huge Window, Moutain of Signs, 1936, Anth 70, May 3, 2023.
His belief is that even the light in this magic prototype locale is sent from the gods with a predetermined plan, and this was how they governed the mountain. He also says that riding on, only the arm remained, and in its ripple effect, in a periplus POV, he saw a small Village of Dreams too.
I know it is extremely cool that Artaud was on heroin, and seeking the ultimate essentialist-tude in the lives of the indigenous, and it is still cooler that from this he lost his mind, but am I allowed to not be that impressed by a vision which sees mountains as breasts?
The Stones All Had the Shape of a Woman’s Bosom, Artaud, Mountain of Signs, May 3, 2023
Then, moving on, for a periplus is an ongoing panorama, he sees a rock eight times
Eight Times I saw the Repetition of a Single Rock, which Cast Two Shadows on the Ground, Artaud, Mountain of Signs, Anth 70, May 3, 2023.
(In this short, fourth hallucination, Artaud must have passed into a dark shadowed spot, where he emotionally sinkholes (a quick mood drop) to have a vision of the bottomless pit, which this is. And, then, from that, in that, he imagines a Black Sun for this zone, which, because a figure eight, is like two suns, thus the two dark shadows cast. A momentary vison, but powerful. I could do a standard bottomless pit representation, but this suffices).
Then, immediately, in the same sentence he sees two rocks in which a large animal has an image of his own head in its jaws
I Twice Saw The Same Animal Head Holding Its Likeness in Its Jaws, Artaud, Mountain of Signs, Anth 70, May 3 2023.
(this too is a vision close to hell on earth imaginings, and, as all these are, a mondo, that is, caused by a source external to the natural mind or brain, in this case peyote. But it is also a self-cannibalization image, suggesting a hell on earth state of mind, briefly experienced, too. And since it involves this idea of the self eating the self, these rocks are ambient fall out of the Figure Eight too. So Artaud is feeling the pressure of a ruling power above him (fallen out, however, more specifically, from the mobius rotation of the Purple People Eater formation).
Then, he sees dominating the village a huge sort of phallic tooth, with three stones on its summit and four holes on its outer face; and I saw, according to their principle, all these forms press little by little into reality.
A Huge Phallic Tooth with Three Stones at its Summit and Four Holes on Its Outer Face, Artaud, Mountain of signs, Anth, 71, May 3, 2023
The key here is to capture the toothness of the phallic form, and to capture a tooth and phallic combination. Teeth in horror signifying passing by body disgust from vigilogogy into hypnagogy. The village is the village of dreams, over the in-between, and the tooth is a form of the central core shaft of consciousness, The three stones at top represent the options of control from above, say, the figure eight, the high light, or the blue streak, and then the four holes on the outer side simply represent the four layers of dreaming we have dropped in, entoptic vigilogy, over the in-between, then the village in entoptic of glass onion, the tooth coming out of that, in hypnagogy. As for the passing of it all little by little bringing it into reality, this places Artaud as doing a ride by and as he passes over into ambience under the aegis of the mondo he might sidelong glance back and since he has left it see the hypnagogic unreality pass back into its own reality.
And then a more overall summary vision, childbirth out of war, and then blood and massacre, and nothing born adding up to erase the massacre.
I Seemed To Read Everywhere A Tale of Childbirth Amid War, Artaud, Mountain of Signs, ANth 71, May 3 2023.
This paragraph is very much a hell on earth bottomless pit imagining. The rock is gnashing against itself and every time h passes it he imagines a rock as a vagina giving birth to a baby. All the other rocks are like human observers threatening, and then all the bodies with evidence of massacre marking them. I would’ve liked above to represent war in the porcupine way it is rendered in German wonderbooks of the 16th century (and here we are again, the same sort of visionary experience, transferred now to Mexico, but THIS is a Euro tropaic image, of great age)
this, once again, corpuswise, locates Artaud’s vision as part of the Euro imaginings of such things, the bristling porcupine effect which I relate to bottomless pit imagining (in, for example, Altdorfer’s panorama of Alexander at Issus)
So, he is still in the bottomless pit, but now a tableau of the Purple People Eater develops, more cannibalism. He sees a drowned man and horrifyingly sees that he is being nibbled at by rocks which have come alive to feed on him.
my version
I Found Drowned Men, Half Nibbled Away By The Stones, Artaud, Mountain of Signs, Anth 71, May 3, 2023.
And, finally, a statue of death loomed huge, holding in its hand a little child
A statue of death loomed huge, holding in its hand a little child, Artaud, Mountain of Signs, Anth 71, May 2, 2023.
In this summary, paragraph ending, and section ending image, I picture Artaud in proskynesis looking up at a stone eidol, representing for himself the full core of consciousness, but since seen from in the bottomless pit, and through hell on earth layers, far above, he is vast. Then the child in his hand is simply a register of the in-between and the place of sacrifice, where children, either as pinkies or blue boys, are sacrificed.
At this point, Artaud breaks from his panorama of visions in the rocks in the mountain of signs. He sums up by arguing that there must be some magic numerology behind all this. Fine, this is a classic conspiracy or delirispiracy claim to reality, but number theories always leave me cold, nor do I think they much relate to the underlying substrate.
He believes that the Tarahumaras have imbued the entire natural surroundings, or read from it, implanted there by the gods, a cryptic numerology
Then he mentions crossroads. Crossroads magic is, of course, universal, it pervades Europe below the level of rational appraisal of culture too, everywhere,
and a few more sightings, the signs deliberately burnt into things was to express the essential duality of things, that is, half material, half spirit, half use value object, half symbol, and Artaud argues that this in-between concept of the duality is conveyed by prime elements in signs. But the thing is, when riding through the canyon, and seeing the hyperpareidolic narratives, he was not seeing merely signs. Now, as he comes on into the village, h sees signs only. This indicates to me a retraction from the effect of heroin, if he was on it on his periplus, retreating back from full epigogy to syngogy, and then coming to rest in the glass onion, which obsesses on abstract signs. So, in his visions he bounced all the way out to full epigogy, the seeing of monsters, in the deep ambience overshadowed by the place of sacrifice and gazing down the cenote (the Mexican derivation of which I made use long before this); then, as it wore off, it is as if it went in reverse, to suck back in, and go backwards, until he gets back to a safe place level of tolerable wonder, the glass onion, and near the Blue Well, where talismans are found. And from that vantage point in the mind he then sees only abstract signs,
A ring branded on a pine tree with a red hot iron. He sees trees marked with spears, trefoils, acanthus leaves surrounded by crosses. Then in corridors choked with rocks, rows of Egyptian ankhs depicted in file (this pings a bit off key as I am currently tracing Hoagland and Bara’s crazy theory that NASA is held in the thrall of a former Nazis and Masons to , what? reconnect with the Egyptian gods of old, on the moon?) But, the only visualizably panorama of this denouement withdrawal from the state.
Corridors Choked with Rocks, Rows of Egyptian Ankhs’ Depicted, Artaud, Mountain of Signs, 1936, May 4, 2023
The Maya world symbol was on the doors, two facing triangles joined by a bar, and the bar as the tree of life, passing through the center of reality. Then he goes deep end, this science predates the flood, and the rosicrucians, and the crusades, it is evidence of a sect.
There it is, his visionary tripping as he travels in Tarahumara Mexico, remaking the landscape into a book filled with signs. Problem is, for those who seek to exoticize Artaud and his further exoticizing of the Tarahumaras, such signs are by no means difficult to discern for anyone adept in reading pareidolia. All of these “visions” exist straddling vigilogogy and hypnagogy in, in dream world terms, the Land of Nod. The hyper element involves dropping down into the glass onion and beyond, to the lattice, so a deeper dive. But, then, my thought is, during the shadowing going on in the canyons, he dropped down into the bottomless pit and from that state of mind, in that darkness, that sense of falling, that static, infected by blue streak and purple people eater hell on earth imaginings, aware that some tyche of some sort ruled over him, that Artaud has most of these visions. The bottomless pit is most of all characterized by a constant folding over and folding out in a turbulence where things contract and expand, and then slow down and speed up, and with the occasional pausing, because we are in the bottomless pit, so a state of suspension, but it could also be said that it is overcast by contentions between three demons (of the mind), Abgrunde, who has the key, The Angel of Milk and Honey, who offers moments of saving grace, and the Exterminating Angel, who drops down now and then to premodern mythic pathos, and their actions might serve a formal prototypes to any scenes seen in hyperpareidoliac reveries.
But on this point I have to be clear: there is a difference between developing a grievance in the mind relative to a targeted tyche (figure who holds your fate), and this done by a fixating on a vigilogogic form by a rational mind run amuck in irrationality, which, while concerning, is still sane (thus, the Cheadle character in Mission to Mars (2001)), and paranoia, a hypnagogic, and beyond, devisement of a complicated world theory as to why that tyche is threatening you, and you then to believe that he is after you
So, too, there is a notable difference in depth between common pareidolia, which is, in fact, very common, though still much made fun of by pure rationalists, and hyperpareidolia, where one knits together pareidols to develop mad scenes, as Artaud did. And then to see these in the wider context of the limits of thought and culture in the modern West in 1936, rationality breaking up into irrationality, held back by a strong frustrum against the hypnagogic, this descent to the hyper might well have struck Artaud as akin to madness.
And there it is, I attempt nine visions of a hyperpareidoliac nature, which art historians partial to drug theory, as well as avant garde drug users, and modernist glamorizers of madness, all see as only possibly seen if he was high as a kite, but in every case, in a mind unshackled from rationality, one is able to see such visions in all situations.
Another way to parse the power or not of Artaud’s visions, to determine if they had, indeed, something to do with tearing his mind apart, would be to locate the exact canyon that Artaud travelled in and see if one could see what he saw in particular rocks. The fear from this approach is that his vision would end up like a tour of a state park where tourists are lead to this or that spot to see the Old Man on the Mountain (which I saw in the 70s, it is since gone), which again reduces pareidolia to a comic aside mocked by the sane people with their rational minds.
My stand remains, perhaps influenced by a stand against egotism, no man or woman is an indigene, all mankind is alienated on earth, separated from nature, however close they seek to get there by limiting their living arrangement, by the human mind, which sees and manages nature through symbols and stories, acknowledging precisely that. If then, it was not visions of the mountain of signs that put Artaud over the edge, what about his experience of a shaman’s rite, and taking peyote? I have reviewed that experience as well, but for a forthcoming entry.
rmarts 