Sex, madness and the coming republic
№ 5 | 3 December 2021
While Crete 1941 suggests a republic will emerge in New Zealand, the lesson of Friedrich Hölderlin’s life and poetics is perhaps that the loss of madness is a worse tragedy for a nation than the madness itself. Providing, of course, the madness and risk-taking were in an ethical cause and not an expression of delirium. ⁂
The loss of madness – after Hölderlin
Photo by Vladimir Vujeva (Unsplash)
The archipelago is sunken mind.
Dionysian Athens drank and fed
on that young god. Where are we now to find
Mainz – and dawn’s white horses tinted red?
See where the loss of madness led – a cult
and tower never to fall, be flooded
by the rivers. His hook is that tumult
and power – the reality is Greece
that drowned and Germany revolted
from any restraint or law. Release
is the firestorm drowned. He called himself Fritz,
loved looking after horses – liked the teasing
brown hips of the girls at Bordeaux. His wits
dived into the pool of Fichte’s I AM,
he played the piano and flute. Closeted
with Susette he swam he swam and swam.
This is not Delos. For half an hour –
silence in heaven, and then I saw the lamb
had opened the seals – sword-mouthed devourer.
¤ Woodford Halse, UK, 30 November 2021
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Commentary
It is thought that Hölderlin suffered from schizophrenia. The psychiatry of the day diagnosed dementia praecox and gave him three years to live, because the dementia was thought to be syphilitic in origin. In fact, he lived another 36 years. He was well-treated, humanely lodged in a yellow tower by the river Neckar in Tübingen. A carpenter and his wife looked after his daily needs, and he received visitors. His former personality was gone however, and he answered to the different pseudonyms by which he called himself. Without knowing it, he died a rich man, still capable of writing letters and composing severely formal verse.
This brings us to his mother. She was horrified to learn that her son, whom she had destined to the Lutheran seminary to become a Swabian pastor, had had an affair with his boss’s wife in the Frankfurt household that employed him as the son’s tutor. The relationship with Susette Gontard was not just a fling, but a passionate recreation of the world. Her husband was a prominent banker, who noted in his correspondence that the scandal reached business houses as far away as Hamburg. Susette died in 1802 of influenza, leaving Hölderlin alone in the world.
His mother was distraught at his two-facedness. A locked chest of his arrived from Bordeaux containing his letters. Once the locksmith had done his work, she had the whole picture. He had let her believe it was a Potiphar’s wife situation. He had not so much lied as manipulatively misled her.
Hölderlin’s tower in Tübingen
His might be one of those cases of schizophrenia caused by the inability of a young male to exclude his mother from his sexuality. He lacked a father-figure to cut him slack in the situation. His father had died when he was two, and his stepfather had died when he was ten. He failed to manage relations between lover, employer and parent in a public scandal. Hölderlin was also in his 30s, no longer a young man entering the world whose mistakes might be lived down. His character had been found wanting.
I have beside me a 1922 Weimar edition of Hölderlin’s letters in German that belonged to my mother-in-law’s mother, who came from Nordhausen in Thuringia. I find it telling that this edition largely omits the year 1793, the year of the Jacobin Republic of Mainz which was suppressed by the princes and rulers of Germany following a siege. One of its leaders was Georg Forster who had sailed as a teenager on Cook’s expedition to New Zealand, wintering in Dusky Sound. Perhaps because of the post-first world war German conservative revolution, Hölderlin’s radicalism was airbrushed in this volume. Yet he declared himself in a later letter to be the enemy of ‘despotism’.
Poetry and polis requires risk. Hölderlin imagined a republican Mainz. What kinds of republic can we envisage? What republic will New Zealand have? ⁂
Crete 1941 reviewed
Read what Cretan Times had to say about Crete 1941 here. ⁂
Bordeaux – after Hölderlin
‘Andenken’ is of a place alive
without us – 200 years apart.
Bordeaux is the only survivor
from Mardi Gras, the slow-motion Lents, March
where fig trees bloom in a land not Greece.
Somebody reached out a light that is dark,
then finally, love tasted good. The fleece
of our voices was shorn and carded
of weight, because the heroes are policed
in that country, and lovers are pardoned
of the need to remember anyone
before. Previous summers had hardened
the people, who looked so still in the sun,
until two are found together. Bare elms
will seed even, poplars stand to attention,
despite the nor’easter overwhelming,
with a surprise load of snow overnight,
sun’s blue mountains. Memory set the helm
port point five. It missed love’s shade from the light.
¤ Woodford Halse, UK, 3 December 2021
Commentary, continued
‘Andenken’ (‘Memory’) was Hölderlin’s poem of Bordeaux. This brings us to Nietzsche and risk-taking. How like Nietzsche for Hölderlin to suffer dementia and how, unlike Nietzsche’s, Hölderlin’s dementia was. Heidegger argued that of the two activities, Dichten und Denken, writing poetry and thinking, Hölderlin was the poet of now, and Nietzsche was the thinker of now. Dichten und Denken is a formula Heidegger lifted from Hölderlin, taken from a letter to a friend sent from Jena in November 1794. A big claim.
Walter Benjamin, the Jewish Marxist philosopher and critic, wrote an essay in 1914 which argued that Hölderlin had created a world that shared the poet’s death – the poet imagined as a swimmer in the short poem ‘Dichtermut’, or ‘Poet’s courage’. Benjamin and Heidegger were, of course, competitors for Hölderlin.
How live are our New Zealands?
We have a republic to imagine. Hölderlin reimagined his contemporary Germany and Greece. Recently, Barbados did done a good job of relaunching itself, but that reinvention has been ongoing for a while now. With unusual confidence and common purpose, with dignity, Barbadians have embarked on a republic, the first of the Caribbean Commonwealth countries to do so. Prime Minister Mia Mottley warmly and modestly out-presenced other dignitaries, apart from the Prince of Wales. The monarchy was graciously farewelled, and the UK had the opportunity to develop a new relationship, as a former mentor of nations with nationbuilders. With Rihanna and Anthony Kellman present, it was a graduation ceremony.
Anthony who? Kellman is a Barbadian poet and creole musician of distinction whose long poem, ‘Lime Stone’ (2008), is an epic in the broad sense. I recommend it as an example of a review of an island nation’s history, and of the experience of an atrocious agriculture and industry and commerce premised on slavery. Are poets perhaps like miners’ canaries for the political and cultural health and inclusiveness of a polity?
On the eve of the battles of Austerlitz and Jena, Germany was a noxious environment for poets and intellectuals like Hölderlin. The princely governments regarded the intelligentsia with suspicion. In Homburg, Hölderlin’s friend, Isaac von Sinclair was put on trial for treason, though he was eventually discharged, and the poet himself would have faced charges had he not been found unfit to stand trial on grounds of mental ill health.
In the poem below, I respond to a letter Hölderlin wrote to his half-brother Karl Gok in Homburg on 24 December 1798. In it he reveals that he learned from the Pyrrhonist Diogenes Laertius how thought itself is mortal, being superseding and replaced. This understanding was part of the disengagement from traditional metaphysics and from the hegemony of mathematics that went on with the Kantian revolution.
Hölderlin’s realisation was an early moment, like Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 paradigm shift. Kuhn showed how paradigms decay as they fail to respond to evidence, and are replaced. Diogenes taught Hölderlin that thought actually dies, either through decay, or is killed, executed even, assassinated. Judgement or Urteil became an important and original feature of the poet’s maturing thought, and this was enacted through what he called the deadly word. This was a judgement not a curse.
Of course, there are limits to this. Hölderlin deplored Robespierre’s reign of terror much as he identified with the Mainz Republic. When the authorities questioned him after Sinclair’s arrest, he insisted he was not a Jacobin.
The White New Zealand policy was introduced on 9 Nov 1920 (NZ History)
This is the problem of ideology, cultural constructions, and of scientific paradigms. These do die. Many die after hard resistance, or descend into acts of intellectual terrorism. Many die in their sleep. Just when did the ‘White Dominion’ of New Zealand die? It was a good state, as nation states go. We can be proud of it. Crete 1941 is about this. Sometime between 1972–84. We have yet to fill out the death certificate – some of the relatives won’t let us do it. We have successfully evolved into another kind of polity instead, without culture wars, cancel culture, or polarisation.
Hölderlin had access to a pre-Darwinian theory of evolution, that he learned from the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, which did not depend on natural selection as a mechanism. He shows at the end of his most ambitious poem, ‘Der Archipelagus’, his appreciation of how Athens had to die, and of how its site became another kind of human community.
Similarly, Goethe has the episode of the homunculus in his Klassische Walpurgisnacht. This episode in Faust pt II is like the three characters in the ‘Wizard of Oz’ – the lion, the tin man, and the scarecrow looking for courage, heart and brains. In this case it is love. Faust seeks Helena while Mephistopheles fancies some bestiality with the chimaeras. The asexual homunculus, kept in a vial, is delivered to the sea, to become the source of ongoing evolution.
Walter Benjamin was transfixed by the dichotomy in Hölderlin. Diogenes Laertius and Immanuel Kant taught the poet that thought is mortal. It is at best longaeval. Ancient Greece was a dead world. How was it relevant to Germany in the age of revolution? Reimagined by the poet, it was in danger of sharing the poet’s (mental, as it turned out) death, in the poem ‘Dichtermut’. The answer lies in Kant’s distinction between knowledge of the suprasensible, in contrast to the tangible lived-in world. Sensibility and imagination and reason were able to mediate a projection into the future.
This is what Hölderlin’s verse achieved. He was prospecting the Hellenic past for vanished gods and a revival of the Greek way to be human, when he linked the Athenian enlightenment to the Age of Enlightenment he was born into on 20 March 1770. Heidegger has a sinister aspect, but he was right to identify Hölderlin as a source of the ricorso that is such a strong feature of Nietzsche’s writing.
Hölderlin is an impending poet, said Heidegger. Climate change is beyond impending. It is happening under our noses and above our heads. Geopolitical crises may well be impending. Something good though may be impending. This is Hölderlin’s political message. What is impending is already entering our now. It is no longer just in the future. Republics have been proclaimed and established, all kinds of ways in the past. Some rightly, some wrongly.
It is now our turn. The Republic of Aotearoa New Zealand is impending. Will it say something distinct and necessary to the world? Will it address our Now. Will it be inclusive of Māori, Pacific Islanders, new New Zealanders, the business community, sports and the provinces, the suburbs and foodcourts?
It ought to be both progressive, for that is our utopian heritage, and accommodating of all citizens. Ideology divides citizenship into them and us. Poetry at least transcends ideological formulation. Xi Jinping has no poets, only folksingers. Stalin had a few great ones, whether he liked their poetry or not.
Or will it be a stop-start, line-out after line-out, scrum after scrum republic of doubt, distrust and uncertainty, like the ungainly business of the 2016 flag referendum?
Don’t worry. The republic is already with us. We are playing the game now and we are playing it well. As you can see, I am a revamped civic republican at heart. ⁂
Signing copies of Crete 1941 in Blackwell’s, Oxford (Blackwell’s)
Diogenes Laertius – after Hölderlin
On reading Diogenes Laertius,
Hölderlin learned that ideas and systems
are superseded and are found versus
Fate as mortal thought. Time had rhythms
and patterns he could observe, and nowhere
in nature did he find despotism
or monarchy. He tried a career
with princes and princesses in Homburg,
but all the while, Jacobin Mainz was near
and never had burned. It lay in the morgue
of politics – dare he claim the corpse
for poetry? Pyrrhonists had absorbed
the Republic of Nature. Don’t gawp –
shatter the vacuum glass – dash the jewel.
Gyokusai. Discover how matter warps
and suddenly swerves for time’s renewal.
Republics are self-organisation
without a prime mover. What a duel –
the homunculus lost in his nation.
¤ Woodford Halse, UK, 2 December 2021
The next poetry & polis will focus on women and epic poetry, and will be in your mailbox on 10 December