Cosmic Guilt

Nowhere does this anxiety take on a broader configuration than in the poetry of Trakl, the great genius of negativity, the "seer" of the epochal, spiritual death alluded to by his contemporaries when they reflect on mortality, decay, and decline. What concerns this poet of the night is not merely the horror or decrepitude of the body, not the rhetorical evasions of mortality or the rationalized death of industrialized citizens. It is a sickness built into the very order of being. Whatever the cause of this sickness, Trakl suggests, it can hardly be cured by knowledge, institutions, or social decisions. Politics and morality can do nothing to change it; it lies in the stars, in birth, in the predatory nature of life itself. Death is no more than its mask.

This sickness is known by its symptoms, recurring in the young man's verse: the green corruption of the flesh; blood and fever; icy winds and audible walls; lepers, cripples, and whores; people not yet born or deceased too soon; evening, night, and winter. Its motifs include estrangement, murder, silence, paralysis, fear, lament, holiness, transcendence, and rebirth. The titles that name it are "Winter Twilight," "All Souls Day," "The Wanderer," "De Profundis," "Decline," "Spiritual Twilight," "The Cursed," "Amen," "Rest and Silence," "To Those Grown Mute," "The Autumn of the Lonely One," "Human Sadness," "Dream and Derangement." Wherever we turn in this poetry we find the narrative of a fall from grace, a dissolution of soul into matter, a debasement of nature and childhood. In Trakl's mythology of cosmic malignance, the sublunary world is inhabited by evil angels. Love cannot be distinguished from hate. Madness, disease, and corruption are signs of a living conspiracy from which one can be redeemed only by expiation.

"Bitter is death," writes the poet, "the fare of the guilt-laden" (Trakl 1969: 150). Death is the "fare" (Kost). the means of sustenance, of those who are culpable. And who are these guilty ones? They are all who have existed and have yet to exist, including animals, for death spares none. Death itself is not the evil, but a manifestation of the evil, a symptom as it were of the crime. "Great is the guilt of the born" (Trakl 1969: 114, 1988: 64–65). In a poem of 1909 Trakl gives a name

to this inbred existential guilt: "Blutschuld." Literally "blood-guilt," or "a crime of the blood," the title stands above lines that seem to refer so directly to Trakl's alleged incest with his sister that the editors of the first collection of his poems did not include the composition (Trakl 1969: 249). And yet it is a significance larger than "incest" in Blutschuld which resounds most strongly in Trakl's verse—the sense of Blutschuld as a criminality built into the blood from the start. Blood-guilt, Trakl's poetry reiterates, pervades the universe. This, if anything, explains the self-immolation and derangement of those few martyric figures who perceive it. Not just incest and murder, but sex and the very struggle for survival rehearse this violent depravity of organic existence.^[23] Here Spielrein's "Destruction as a Cause of Coming into Being" is more explicit: "The reproductive instinct . . . is equally an instinct of birth and one of destruction" (Spielrein 1912: 503).

This sense of the violence and depravity of sex, stretching all the way up from the Christian theology of original sin to Schopenhauer's pessimistic metaphysics, reaches its culmination in Weininger's Sex and Character .^[24] Weininger presents sex, or Geschlecht , as a fatality delimiting the very possibilities of spiritual achievement. In Trakl the word becomes as generic as every term he uses. Beyond the gender, sexuality, or copulative activity of creatures, it refers to their "creaturality," to their participation in the cycle of procreation. Geschlecht means the very principle at work in generation, including every "race of the begotten." Nearly everywhere the principle can be reduced to its opposite.

Trakl refers to Geschlecht five times in "Dream and Derangement," the poem equating death with the fare of the guilt-laden. The long prose poem opens with a boy, a figure for the poet, weighed down by "the curse of the degenerated race" [der Fluch des entarteten Geschlechts ]. His hard father is now an old man and his mother has turned to stone. Twice the poet remarks on the curse of Geschlecht , both times in the context of a sexual scene: "O the accursed race. When, in defiled rooms, each such destiny is accomplished, death enters with mouldering steps into the house." The second mention is at the poem's end,

[23] For an analysis of the poem "Blutshuld" see Sharp 1981: 59–62. On the associations between sin, guilt, and blood in Trakl's verse see Michel-Francois Demet, "Georg Trakl: Blood, the Mirror, the Sister," in Williams, ed., 1991: 167–190.

[24] On Trakl's reading of Weininger, see Alfred Dopplei "Georg Trakl und Otto Weininger," Peripherie und Zentrum: Studien zur österreichischen Literatur , ed. Gerlinde Weiss and Klaus Zelewitz (Salzburg: Das Bergland-Buch, 1971): 43–54, and Sharp 1981: 53.

when, battered by "stony solitude," the boy is escorted by a dead man into the "dark house" of the father. Upon the arrival of the "sister," and the hint of an incestuous act, death and voluptuousness come together, revealing their bond:

Purpurne Wolke umwölkte sein Haupt, daß er schweigend über sein eigenes Blut und Bildnis herfiel, ein mondenes Antlitz; steinern ins Leere hinsank, da in zerbrochenem Spiegel, ein sterbender Jüngling, die Schwester erschien; die Nacht das verfluchte Geschlecht verschlang.

[A crimson cloud clouded his head so that he fell silently upon his own blood and likeness, a lunar face; stonily he sank down into emptiness, when in the broken mirror, a dying youth, the sister appeared; the night devoured the accursed race.] (Trakl 1969: 150; trans. Sharp 1981: 219)

Earlier in the poem Trakl had described this degenerative Geschlecht in terms reaching back to a primordial human family: "fruit and tools fell from the horrified race. A wolf tore the firstborn to pieces and the sisters fled into dark gardens to bony old men." The poet cannot suppress his cry: "O the voluptuousness of death. O you children of a dark race" (Trakl 1969: 149; Sharp 1981: 217). The generic language of the poem makes it impossible to associate the guilt of Geschlecht with only one family or only one group of acts. Rathet it refers to the transhisorical origin of the family, even to the voluptuous death of all spiritual concerns in rapacious, beastly behavior.

Is it any surprise, then, that Trakl chooses to cultivate the myth of unbornness? He recalls the ancient Greek saying of Menander, recommending the speediest of deaths, assuming one lacks the good fortune never to have been born at all. Figures so graced do exist in Trakl's poetry, especially Elis, the legendary boy buried in a mine, and Caspar Hauser, who was alleged to have spent the first seventeen years of his life chained to the wall of a dungeon-like room, only to be murdered by a stranger soon after seeing the light of day.^[25] Shortly before his suicide, Trakl is reported to have said that he was only "half-born" and did not want to see his birth completed.^[26] Did he mean that the blood-guilt of the generative-degenerate Geschlecht had not possessed him fully? Or that he was only half willing to accept the horror of aging in pursuit of lust and power? His other half would then have lived among those who refused to live by such rules, and whose refusal meant

[25] The eighteenth-century mystery of Caspar Hauser was fictionalized by the Viennese novelist Jakob Wassermann in 1908.

[26] Hans Limbach, "Begegnung mit Georg Trakl," Erinnerung an Georg Trakl: Zeugnisse und Briefe (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1966), 121–122.

death. Michelstaedter entertained a similar notion, frequently returning in his writings to the ancient Greek wisdom that the truly blessed of the gods are those who die young.

Never so much as at the beginning of the twentieth century, states Trakl's poetry, have the degenerate effects of Geschlecht been felt so starkly. It is now—and not in every possible historical world—that one hears the lament of the "solitary grandchild," the spokesman for countless generations. It is now, in the forlorn present, that the gods have been ravaged, that faces appear speechless and stones fall silent. It is in Trakl's own time that "the spirit of evil peers out of white masks" and the "self-spilt blood gushes forth from the heart" (Trakl 1969: 68, 29, 97; Sharp 1981: 212). As a "muter mankind bleeds silently," whores give birth to dead infants (Trakl 1969: 124, 1988: 81). The term Geschlecht weds Trakl's vision of ontological destitution to an indictment of that cultural history which the early twentieth century called theAbendland , the West, the land of the declining sun, playing out its twilight.

Indeed, twilight pervades the only language a poet of this era can speak. Like the boy in "Dream and Derangement," he is the voluntary victim of the epoch in which he lives. "Silvery shimmer the evil blossoms of blood on his temple, the cold moon in his shattered eyes." Thus Trakl, the child of a dark race, cannot but be a "deranged seer," announcing the "unspeakable guilt" of his own "cool grave" (Trakl 1969: 148–149; Sharp 1981: 216–217). The vision of degeneration and decline increases steadily from the idyllic struggles of Trakl's early poems to the terror and regret of the final ones. His entire poetic corpus is a "Song of the Departed One," as the title reads to the penultimate section of the last collection he composed, Sebastian im Traum (1915). The poet of Blutschuld can find no redemption except in voicing his resistance to existence.

If such an individual isolates himself in modern society, Trakl writes to a friend, it is "because he prefers to be dissolute rather than inauthentic. I anticipate world catastrophes, I take no part, I am not a revolutionary. I am the departed one, in my epoch I have no choice but that of pain" (Letter to Johannes Klein, cited by Magris 1983: vii). The present is a "bitter hour of decline, I when in black waters we gaze at a stony face" (Trakl 1969: 119). If "we" are here cast in the role of Narcissus, then the self-knowledge we obtain from our surroundings (in the image reflected by the waters) is that these surroundings have acted as Medusa, turning us to stone. Our spokesman, the poet, folds

in on himself and his participatory guilt, acquiescing in the derangement of his final Umnachtung . Nothing positive can be uttered in a night without revelation. Like Ludwig Meidner, with his Apocalyptic Landscapes of 1912–13, Trakl imagines himself to be the representative of a world at its end. His silence can speak only in the vocative mood, appealing to the consciousness of need.