Steppenwolf

I’ve been wanting to write but it’s been difficult lately and I was in the dark as to why, or what to do about it. Yes, my circumstances have changed, and as it seemed to my foolishness, they have improved, for now I’m a house-owner and part of a community, instead of depending on a stingy landlord and having neighbours who won’t look me in the eye, let alone exchange greetings. And like a good house-owner I have been working all day to make it into a home, with good results too. So I could not really understand my feeling of melancholy and writer’s block. I have been suffering nostalgia for the ecstasies of the last two years as shared with you in this blog; but unable to re-enter that magical world.

An answer to this mystery came today, on re-reading Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf out loud to Karleen.

(This is the best way to read, the good old-fashioned way. Once literacy was a rare skill. Let us imagine ourselves in 800 AD, when Carolus Magnus (Charlemagne) was crowned Emperor. Through his love of learning he ushered in a great period of scholarship though he was probably illiterate himself. In those days, I understand, there was no such thing as silent reading—reading with the eyes alone, which as adults we take for granted these days. The most learned monks would still need to move their lips as they decoded the uncial script of the Book of Kells, or the Lindisfarne Gospel, manuscripts so precious that their vellum pages had been illumined with intricate knotwork (one continuous line running over and under itself) or key patterns: treasures of what we now call Celtic art. These days on the Internet we take in whole Web pages at a glance, with the intention of ignoring most of them and not delivering ourselves up to any magical meaning; for their words are like the grains of sand on the seashores of the world, and we are panning for just a few grains of gold. How things have changed since 800!)

Surely mankind must go mad without somewhere to go, some secret chamber of the heart where to open oneself to some trustworthy Gospel, some Dreamtime, where

the Lord is my shepherd and maketh me to lie in green pastures, and leadeth me beside the still waters.

Which leads us back to Herman Hesse. On one of his nocturnal prowls, Harry Haller is handed a poorly printed pamphlet by a stranger in the street, entitled Treatise on the Steppenwolf. It begins thus:

There was once a man, Harry, called the Steppenwolf. He went on two legs, wore clothes and was a human being. Nevertheless he really was a wolf of the steppes. . . What he had not learned however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life. . .

It goes on to expound Haller’s double nature: part bourgeois, part wolf. I see his sufferings and ecstasies in myself. It’s many years since I’ve read the book, but now it speaks its message to me with all the mysterious directness of that pamphlet thrust in Harry’s hand by the man in the street who was advertising the

“

I needed its message because though I knew I am going through a time of transition, which has caused certain physical and psychological symptoms, I have been lacking in awareness as to where I am actually going. I have been—and to some extent remain—“not myself” and therefore vulnerable to self-generated foolishness even while I blindly repeat my own doctrine about instinctive wisdom. If I were wise, I would stay silent until that wisdom truly fills the sails of my understanding. Some of the time of course, I have been silent: but mostly I have prattled to myself like a small child: “Why? Why? Why?”—usually inventing some spurious answer and seldom admitting that I don’t know.

My lone-wolf side has been buried lately: that part which sparkles with the crystals of old granite kerbs as he walks in the sunshine after heavy rain, or marvels at the gnarled and pot-bellied trunks of hedgerows pruned and eroded for centuries. In forgetfulness I’ve lately seen myself as a new kind of bourgeois by identifying with the “ordinary”. But pish! this is mere circumstance! Unlike Harry Haller, I cannot afford the middle-class suburbs, so I’ve been reduced—as you have seen dear reader, for I hide nothing from you—to live in a respectable street in the downtown area of old factories. So what? Interestingly it is the piety of Muslims clustered around their Mosque which has made it respectable. Otherwise it could have been a litter-strewn wasteland of the indigenous underclass.

No matter. In the end any attempt to harmonise with “the ordinary” (as in my last two posts) comes to nothing, because like Harry Haller I am a combination of bourgeois and prairie wolf. The one helps create order and is rewarded by common comforts, such as warmth in the room and candlelight on this early Sunday morning. The other prowls sleepless outside the boundary-fence of society, ruled only by its own impulses. The whole week I have been trying to return from being “not myself” and amongst many little signposts and helps it has been the Steppenwolf who has most directly shown me the way to go.

What holds the two sides of my nature together is a shower of blessings. Even though it seems discontinuous (as lately) I feel guided and nurtured by an unseen force. As a lone wolf I need no religion, only a language with which to share those blessings, and a humble recognition that others in their own religion, or lack thereof, are as blessed as I, and will understand. Like them, like you, I live to be in a state of Grace, where I know what to do, and walk in harmony with a higher power.