[From Time Stood Still by Paul Cohen-Portheim]

XVII THE END OF ONE WORLD

THE years of internment, the physical privations were having their effect on me as on everybody. I felt rather weak, I had got very thin, I had to rest a good deal if I wanted to get any work done. But there were com­pensations, for one's sensibility seemed to increase with the decrease of one's physical strength. I began to understand why fasting plays so great a part in church discipline. Everything in this world has to be paid for, and robust health and psychic development do not go together. Just as the monotony of outward life was compensated by an increase of spiritual activity, so a weakening physique was compensated by what I believe to have been a strengthening of inner perception, an awareness of what one is normally too gross, too dense to become aware of.

I began to dream a great deal at that time, and extra­ordinarily vividly. There were many dreams influenced by my readings, and those which appeared after reading psychoanalytical books served to canvince me that one cannot take dreams as proofs of the truth of a theory, which is their cause in many cases. I had one dream which was very illuminating. It was winter once more, the third winter in camp, it was cold and dark, the evenings seemed endless in the vitiated air of the hut. The end of the war seemed farther away than ever ; I was always cold, and, felt as if I had very little vitality left. How in­describably happy one would have been if one had had a room to oneself, properly heated and comfortable ! [184]So I thought, and then came my dream. I was standing in front of a palace of white marble, built round a circular court like that of Charles V's palace inside the Alhambra. The entrance was guarded, somewhat incongruously, by tnree men in shabby evening dress, sitting behind a counter covered in red, such as guard-God knows why -the entrance to Paris theatres and scribble something in blue pencil on a piece of paper they hand you. Also I knew, as one knows things in dreams, that this was the privileged camp of Douglas. The palace was magni­ficent, the sun shone, the sea stretched blue behind the white marble ; everything was heavenly. What I said was : 'Has my room been reserved for me ? ' One of the men handed me a blue-pencilled ticket and pointed to a window facing the pillared court. ' Up there,' he said. And I was extremely angry. 'I am not going to take a room without a sea-view under any circumstances whatsoever,' I heard myself say grandly, and with that awoke. I also awoke to the realization that I had acquired far less wisdom than I imagined, that I had really, like the Bourbons, learnt nothing and forgotten nothing, My subconscious had remained unaltered.

That is what these dreams were : strange warnings of the sub-conscious to normal consciousness, dialogues between part of myself with another unrealized part, which knew far more about myself than I knew. Call it the sub-conscious and it sounds ` reasonable ' enough for everyone to accept the explanation-quite scientific in fact. But is it certain that that sub-conscious is an individual possession ? Or is it soanething far larger, far deeper, and far more mysterious ? The dream I will describe now was the last of my dreams, and I relate it without offering an explanation. I awoke one nighe or dreamt that I awoke, I do not know which. [186]Before me was a picture of the kind I have called my imaginative drawings, a very few of which, connected with my metaphysical searchings, I had done in the last year. This was a triptych, both larger and far more elaborate than anything I had done, and there were many figures in it. The centre was a fantastic walled city crowned by a .monstrous head, two more monstrous shapes were in the yellow sky, and before the city was the crucified figure of a man. Some of the figures bore faces of people known to me in the camp, but the majority were figures which belonged to former drawings of mine, to my pre-war life. The picture was clear in every detail and I examined it a long time ; it was an extract and a conclusion of what my life and my work had been for perhaps the last ten years. And I knew, as one knows in dreams, that is without hearing or seeing, that the picture was called :'La fin d'un monde ' (not ` La fin du monde,' that was quite clear), and as even my dreams seem to be polyglot I heard a deep voice saying : 'Dies ist Dein letztes Bild ' (This is your last picture). Then I awoke or dreamt that I awoke with a loud cry which no one seems to have heard.

I remained dazed by the dream for quite a time. I have purposely mentioned the state of my health, so as to give an opportunity for the usual explanations : in a state of lowered vitality, possibly of feverishness ; in a 'barbed wire' state in short ; visionary or auditory hallu­cinations are quite common, and there is nothing very surprising, still less anything supernatural in this experience. Well, perhaps. But the dream had terrified me, for I was convinced that my death was near at hand, nor did I feel that to be at all improbable. And so, childishly, I wanted to cheat fate, and I did not begin that work for weeks. But I could not get it out of my head, it pursued me, and so at last I resigned myself to fate, began the work, and finished it lingeringly in about six weeks. [187]And nothing happened. I felt neither worse nor better than before. . . .

I had not interrupted my reading and studies altogether, but after that spell of pictorial work I took them up again with renewed enthusiasm. For quite a time already it had become my habit to make extracts from the bools I read, and to compare these extracts. The next step was to write down my commentaries on extracts and books the commentaries swelled into essays, and almost without being aware of what I had undertaken I found myself engaged in writing a book on the evolution of the arts. This contained the expression of my convictions about art as they had been formed by my studies ; I wrote about the place of art in the general scheme of things, its: importance in evolution, and on the evolution of art itself and of its different branches. This my first book has never been published and I lost the MS. with the exception of a few pages. I wrote it very quickly, I remember ; it almost seemed to write itself. Immediately afterr I began another book called The Mission of the Jew, trying to define the Jews' position and import in the world as they seemed to me. I wrote-it in English and a friend of mine who was enthusiastic about it sent it to different prominent English Jews. They wrote flattering; letters about it, though each one of them disagreed with my views, the orthodox considering me too liberal, the Zionists not sufficiently aware of the fact that there was a Jewish nation, and too preoccupied with the religious aspect, etc. There was only one thing they all agreed about and that was the impossibility of publishing it while the war lasted. It was eventually published in Germany, as my second book to appear, and while the first had found an extraordinarily good reception this; one pleased nobody, [188]The country was in feverish urest the Jewish public thought any discussion of their prob­lems inadvisable, the others were not interested.

Amusingly enough, the few letters of approval I received came from Catholic and Protestant clergymen. Incidentally, I found translating my own work from one language into another very difficult and very tiresome. I have translated the work of a good many other people and consider all these translations far superior to that of my own. My only other work of the same kind has been the translation of a prose-poem I wrote in German into English, and that seemed much easier. In Germany this appeared in an edition de luxe, in England in the review The Quest. It was called The Smile of the Seven Buddhas, and though written in 1920 is still, as I now realize, a fruit of Wakefield. The chief result of what I consider my spiritual education at Wakefield was, however, my first book to be published (in 1920). To a great extent I had written it in camp, but when I left camp I was not allowed to take any writings of any sort, not even a piece of paper with me. Some of my writings left behind (like the MS, of The Mission of the Jew) were preserved and I got them about a year or so later, but a great many had gone. But in any case I would not wait, so I wrote my book all over again and it appeared in 1920. Its title is Asien als Erzieher, which one might translate as 'The Message of Asia,' and it consists of a series of eighteen essays on all the problems which had been uppermost in my mind during the war years. While I have changed my opinions about several of these questions since that time, and have, I am sorry to say, become less of an optimist, I still regard it as the basis of all I have written since.

This then was my transformation during and by prison life : from a painter I had become a writer, and one day I remembered my dream and sat up with a start. That rawing had been my last drawing ! [189]Though I was not aware of it at the time, the fin d'un monde, the end of one world, had come about, and that was its summing-up and a farewell to it. A new world had begun and it was expressing itself in writing. When, after a long while, I began to paint again, my work no longer resembled the former work in the least, and nobody not familiar with the two has ever attributed them to one and the same painter. These new water-colours were of sea and sky, very slight and extremely simple. As near a representation of empty space and atmosphere as one could get. Formerly all had been filled to overflowing with symbols and signs of confused thought and emotion, now all that had flowed into more purely intellectual channels, confusion had become order and ordered thought expressed itself in writing. All that was left over for painting was my love of colour, of subdued colour now, and perhaps a certain lyrical tendency, but it cannot have been a very powerful impulse for it died down after some years. People who know my former work often ask me why I never paint now and I can only reply that I have no desire to paint any more. I have nothing to say, nothing new to express, I see no object in repeating oneself and I have never wished to manufacture pictorial souvenirs. Wakefield brought me the death of one thing, the birth of another, its importance to me has been vital. Compared with this aspect all its others fade into complete insignificance as far as I am concerned, and, of course, only as far as I am concerned. I cannot call this bad or good, for it has become part of myself.

Any comments, errors or omissions gratefully received The Editor HTML© F Coakley , 2021