Peter Altenberg - Telegrams of the Soul

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*A popular mountain resort in Austria

I love the steamboat landings on the Salzkammergut Lakes, the old gray-black ones and the newer yellow ones. They smell so good, as if from years of soaked-up baking in the sun. In the water round their thick pylons scores of minuscule gray-silver fish are forever scuttling here and there, suddenly swarming in one place, suddenly dispersing and disappearing. The water smells so delight ful under these landing docks, like the skin of fresh fish. When a steamboat docks, all the pylons rise and the landing gathers all its strength to endure the shock. The steamboat engine with its red paddle-wheels fights a stubborn battle with the obstinate landing holding it off. The landing will not yield, defending itself, so it seems, only insofar as it is absolutely necessary, while trembling with the force of its inner resolve. At last its quiet perseverance wins out and the boat lets loose, gives way, sails off again.

For hours and hours the landing lies in wait for steamboats, withering in the heat of the sun, lonesome, shunned.

All of a sudden agitated people in light clothing approach and amass themselves on the landing. “Don’t step too far forward,” the parents warn and look at the landing as an imminent danger. I could well observe with some justification: “Somewhere, apart from the rest, two figures silently lean body to body against the railing.” But that’s an observation of the old school and so it’s best to keep it to oneself. Still I can’t deny that an obstinate stare of extended duration down into the depths from the railing, while standing in the close proximity of a young lady, often elicits its own loud and clear, albeit unspoken, response. On the landing boards, fish too small to eat are sacrificed. You catch them, hurl them against the wood, gloating over their dance of death. It’s true that between the teeth of a little pike dying is hardly a pleasant spectacle. But who after all ever dies peacefully in bed. Sometimes the landings are also crowded with the committees and the presidiums of yacht races. Sailboat regattas. For hours on end they peer through binoculars at a mysterious spot in the lake, and nobody else has the vaguest idea what’s going on. Still, everyone’s excited. Here and there a technical remark is overheard. Suddenly the crowd cries hurrah and notes are frantically scribbled. Now the landing is like the hilltop perch of a field marshal surveying a battle. Everyone follows the outcome with his binoculars. And the landing lies right there in the thick of things. But then again, on moonlit nights it lies like a dark leviathan, reaching forth, stretching its blackness out over the silver lake.

I love the steamboat landings on the Salzkammergut Lakes, the old gray-black ones and the newer yellow ones. They are for me a sort of sign of summer freedom, summer serenity, scented as if from years of soaked-up baking in the sun.

For several days now I’ve been in Munich for the very first time. I haven’t seen a thing yet, not a thing listed in the little guidebooks, no monuments, no paintings. I’m not interested in the things that were. I’m interested in the things that are, that will be! Look! The new art is beaming out at me from the show windows of the fine stores, the stuff that would transform the lot of us shriveling in life’s stranglehold into visionary artist-folk if only we could spend hours and hours gazing at it, each in our own cubicle back home. Europeans, where are you stuck in the mud?!? Joylessly you still display your Meissen figurines and vases in your hand-carved cabinets! You’re deceiving yourselves!

You live without any real affinity for the wondrous colors and forms of nature itself, say “ah!” to odd and unappealing things, feed off catch phrases and history, buy vases with blossoms that never bloomed! You’ve got eyes that can’t savor what they see in and of itself, but are, rather, swayed by names and pre-set patterns! Which is why, since you take no advantage of these most precious organs, you fail to plunder the treasures of these two inexhaustibly rich eyes, you remain miserable, empty, sad, try to soak up the pleasures of other organs, fleeting pleasures gone in a flash! Then come the long gaping hours, time that needs to be killed with the poisons “drinking,” “gambling—!”

But look, the new, the modern artist wants to reunite you with nature and its profound splendors! He wants to gently open your eyes to the gleam of life itself, not to the lure of false phantasy figures that have lost their effect! You really ought to hear the gurgle of hidden springs, not the crash of cascades! Your eyes ought to be joined in loving wedlock to the things of this world, celebrate a solemn union, a noble bond!

But you hold back, make do with rubbish! See how close the little boy is to nature when he sneaks up on the wondrous Apollo butterfly perched on the mountain thistle?! Or the little girl weaving a wreath of wildflowers?! Life comes later, makes them blind, empty! Then they play lawn-tennis on the meadow in nature! Lawn-tennis, I tell you! Hot cheeks with cold souls!

Learn from the Japanese! When the cherry trees blossom, the people flock to look, stand silently for hours on end before the white-rose splendor. No benches and tables are set up for gorging and swilling. This artistic people stand in silence before the white-rose splendor, for hours on end! Back in their rooms, on immaculate, noble, delicate yellow-brown partitions hang bamboo baskets with fine flowers. Both men and women stop by, look at the baskets of flowers and leave again, returning in silence to the tasks of the day.

But what sort of gewgaws do you have crowding your desktops and your walls?! You have them and that’s it! What’s there to look at?! You own them but you don’t love them!

Better to display the true artworks of nature under glass, wonderful exotic bugs or noble mussels in flat hues! These shades of bugs, mussels, butterflies, stones, the true shapes of blossoms and leaves embody the “new artists” for you in the applied arts. Put their work in show windows. They make a gift to you of nature in all her glory, nature which no one ever grows tired of admiring — no one who ever really truly looked with those eyes that are the direct link to the soul and the spirit, those eyes that have become the seeing spirit, the observant soul itself!

What kind of junk are you amassing?! Shame on you! Possession!? Dear God, possession must be something like the possession of one’s skin, one’s hands! It belongs to you, is indispensable, envelops, so to speak, your entire being, and is an essential part of the same, your most external self, above and beyond your epidermis. That which stands on my table top and hangs on my walls belongs to me, like my skin and my hair. It lives with me, in me, off me. Without it I’d virtually be a vestigial, stunted wastrel. Take, for instance, my lady friend, the “lady with the golden curls,” and the painting by Burne-Jones: “A girl sits reclining in a garden by the seashore, her hands resting on an old book in her lap. Two angels are fiddling for the reclining girl who has her hands folded on the old book, dreaming in that garden by the seashore; they’re hovering above book and garden, carrying her away, but whereto, whereto?!” This painting and the “departed lady,” above whose bed it hung, were one! Whoever grasped the painting grasped her, whoever grasped her grasped the painting. No other tableau could have hung above her bed. It belonged to her, to her, like her hands and hair. The lady lends an ear, but whereto, whereto?!

People of the future, you must surround yourselves with such things that truly belong to you, are one with you! The new artist fashions such things out of his genius, works conceived for your souls! Things that really belong to you! Just paint your walls white and set in a corner or hang on the wall one of those wondrous cups glazed with the hue of the hummingbird, the setting sun and the white of breaking waves!