August Strindberg (1849-1912)

Prelude to the Twentieth Century
Presentation 11 of 13

August Strindberg (1849-1912)
Autobiology and the Theatre.
Skirt Madness, Dreams, Surrealism, and Ultimate Realities
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, September 13, 1984

Transcript:
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The date is September 13th, 1984. This is the 11th lecture. And as soon as of lectures by Roger were on a prelude to the 20th century. Tonight's lecture is on Strindberg who lived 1849 to 1912 autobiography on the theater, skirt madness Kareem's surrealism and ultimate realities should put a design on the board
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Flower coming out of the castle turret that's from string Barry's dream play, curious, writing the dream play in Stockholm. And he looked out of the window for Marie was writing. And so this old castle up on the hill, just outside of Stockholm, and that was the backdrop for his mythic play. Strindberg is the most torrential of all European personalities. He dwarfs even Nietzsche Strindberg. The maximum speed of the European mind is difficult to comprehend. He was just so Titanic, so proliferate in his investigations and works that he does boggle our imagination, Strindberg initiate more than any single individual in the series initiate the 20th century. He was born in 1849, but don't let that bother you. He was someone who was our contemporary, someone for whom the 1960s were just old hat, strange dark in his early life. So somehow that his
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Calling was
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Peculiar in particular. He was an intellectual child, but he was also precocious like many of the individuals that we have looked at, he wrote autobiographical works all through his life. And just before he died, he left a list of how they should be combined together. And they would form a volume of probably close to 2000 pages. He wanted them all published together. The first book in that series is called the son of a servant, and he wished that to be the title of his autobiography. His Southern title is the story of the evolution of a human bay and for Strindberg early in life, Hey, set his sights upon revealing what the actual experience of a human being was in his time. Russo was a hero for him in this regard as was nature, as well as also Schopenhauer, but Strindberg will dwarf all of these great individuals by his life in his biography, the son of a servant.
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Okay. Pardon me? I use servant, excuse me, please. Don't interrupt while I'm lecturing. I don't have notes and I have to form it in my mind. Can you understand the end of the section called first love? He recounts how the 15 year old protagonist falls in love with a woman who is 30 years old and how it is impossible for him to have a relationship with her and how she sensing this. He is caught in between being motherly toward him. And at the same time, curious as to his manly pretentions he writes it was about this time when he was 15, that he had his first love affair. If it was really love, civilized love is a very false and Drake, complicated state of mind and fundamentally unhealthy, pure love is a contradiction of terms. That is if the word pure carries the connotation of the spiritual and the consensual, as the means of propagating the race love must be sensual.
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If it is to be wholesome being sensible, it must be attracted by the physical body. While the sex drives are dominant, the two souls accommodate themselves to one another and a mutual liking and sympathy arise. This regard for each other provides an armistice, a compromise. It follows them that the dislike for each other, the mutual antipathy arises when the physical bond is broken, not vice versa, but the word physical has been given a pejorative connotation by the goldfish moral teachings of Christendom. The soul is imprisoned in the flesh, mortify, the set, the soul free, but for all that, the flesh and the spirit are one. If you killed the flesh, you killed the soul. And so Strindberg sounds one of the great themes of his writing of his life, that a man and a woman together for a complete human bear, that the soul of a human being can only be revealed in the love between a man and a woman, and that a man without a woman, he is spiritually crippled. Therefore the absolute need for a long enduring relationship, but because this relationship is so important on a transcendental level, all of the powers of dissension are focused on keeping that relationship possible. And so one of the great themes of Strindberg is how men and women need to love each other. And because of the powers of this world cannot stay together. So religion as a attain, as an attainment of wholesomeness become this frustrating bearer, the backdrop of the way in which life reveals itself in the battle of the sexes.
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He writes. In fact, in the meantime, he had his friend also had long discussions concerning their relationship with one another. Was it love or friendship, but she loved another man of schooling. She scarcely ever spoke. John never looked at her body. He only saw her eyes deep and expresses her soul. Must've been masculine enough and her body to, to explain such a friendship arising and being sufficient for both of them, the spiritual marriage can take place only between those were more or less sexless. And there was always something abnormal about it, the best marriages. I mean, those which best fulfill their real object are precisely those which are [inaudible] Strindberg, recounts, how the time of his confirmation in the church arose.
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And as the time came closer and his adolescence was coming to a close, he writes his confirmation finally took place after grueling sessions and the dimly lit chancel and a long series of discourses on the passion of Christ and self mortification. The candidates were all keyed up. They could not have been in a more exalted mood after the [inaudible]. He scolded Fanny whom he had seen laughing secretly the very day on which they worked. You receive the holy communion, the senior pastor delivered a sermon. It was the Wellmont advice of a liberal minded old man to the, um, it was cheering and comforting the choir in the background with the Oregon plate. Oh, lamb of God have mercy on us. The boys and girls wept and half fainted as though they were witnessing an execution, but John was apathetic and indifferent to it. All. He had become too familiar with sacred things.
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And the whole affair was driven to the verge of absurdity. His faith was right for falling and fall it dead for Stender. Even as a youngster, even as an adolescent, the normal presentation of religious truth became for him a trap because the normal presentation of religious fate in the 1870s in the 1880s in Sweden was extremely puritanical wave of Victorian prudery swept the country. And in fact, string barracks was to be the only voice, the single voice in all of Sweden to raise an objection to this on the grounds that it was, if anything, the prudery of the society that was irreligious. And that, in fact, it was in the arena of the marriage between men and women, which went to stray prime marginally, and it was kept astray by the corrupt society of the time. That was the plug that kept man from his true realization, his true religious enjoyment after strange barracks, he became well known in Stockholm by the publication of a novel entitled the red room.
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The red room was the Bohemian, his version of growing up, observed in Stockholm of the 1880s in the red room, seven titled scenes of artistic life and literary life. He begins the work with a description of a bird's-eye view of Stockholm, and he describes in wonderful naturalistic detail. They way talk home would be seen by birds and they're flying around and spring is coming out. And one gets the sense of this tremendous delight in nature. Opening up spring is coming forward. Then the image has given us of the place in this nature where a man lives and the first image that we are given. He has of a barmaid opening up shuttered windows that have been closed all winter. And the smell of stale beer comes out onto the spring morning and the old tensile leftover from Christmas falls down and the birds come and take it to use for their nesting places. But one gets the sense that man alone of all the creatures of nature is jailed, forced render.
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This was intolerable. And the only out that he had as a young man was to seek the society of like-minded young men who collected in a portion of one of these taverns, which they named them the red room and in the red room, the discussions of their lives inner penetrated so that the lives of the individuals were lived in order to give them material to tell tales to each other experiences were had so that those experiences could be brought into the red room. And they're in the red room, young men telling each other the events of their lives created for them, a tapestry of reality. And for Strindberg, this begins his life career of living as freely and openly as possible as honestly as possible. And part of the confirmation of his honesty was to then turn his experience no matter what it was into literature that he would find some way.
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And the experiences would prove to be too difficult to put into contemporary genre. He went very well then invent his own and Strindberg of course, well, several times in his life, right, that the drama is outmoded, but we are unable in our minds to appreciate the new reality. Therefore, we have to use the old forms and therefore I stretch the old forms as far as they can go, hoping to break them and hoping thereby to call out something new in the red room. Okay. We get the character of the events. One of the young men named Ryan helm is described in the following way. Ryan, uh, woke the following morning at four. O'clock thinking that someone had called his name. He sat up in bed and listened. Paul was quiet. He drew up the blind and saw a gray autumn morning, raining and windy. He laid down again and tried to sleep, but in vain, there were such strange voices in the wind.
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They moaned and warned and wept and wailed. He tried to think of something pleasant of his good fortune. He took up his part in a play and began saying, but it came to nothing. And he thought of what others had said and was forced to admit that he was to some extent like Horatio. And he tried to picture his friend. Agnes says, oh, Ophelia. And he saw her as a hypercritical schemer laying a trap for Hamlet and bolognaise advice. He tried to drive away this picture. And instead of he saw Agnes distinguished as a Mademoiselle shock yet, who had been the last to play the part in the municipal theater in vain. He tried to chase away these unpleasant thoughts that followed him like gnats at last tired out by the struggle he fell asleep and went through the same torment in his dreams, fought his way out of them and woke himself up only to fall asleep again. When the same scenes were repeated towards nine o'clock, he'll woke with a screen sprang out of bed as if he were fleeing from evil spirits. He looked into the mirror and saw that he had been weeping again and again, the same themes are sound within Strindberg. And as he progresses in his life, almost as if some demonic, florist gains possession of his life, these same themes, come back with evermore. Insistency evermore, deepening qualities, the themes, what is real? Yeah.
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He, our mind in its wakeful state real when we sleep, when we dream, when we have visions, is this real? Is there not a discrepancy in a differential? How are we to bring these together? We cannot do it by ourselves. We must have other human beings. We are unable on our own to experience the wholesomeness of our reality very well. Then we have friends confreres, but they are inadequate. They only present to us similar conditions to our own. And so the societies of men produce a cacophony of lost individuals, whaling to each other. He can sell us only temporarily in the telling of their tails, but each of us then retire by themselves. It is here that Strindberg says, woman is so important because it is woman that is primordial for man and in her prime or geology, she is, first of all, mother, and this mother, son relationship carries over to mother man. And the difficulty arises when man then becomes sexually active because the mother then is forced to become mistress. And at this primal outrage, man's inner guilt at having raped. His own origins begins to haunt himself. And so he tries to transform those relationships by strategies of the mind, to convince himself that there are in fact mythos plots developments that makes this all right, but the problem is there again, because the mind is deceptive, did cannot tell what is real.
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And so all of the plots go astray and end in disillusionment. And so the primal relationship between men and women fractures and the world is not safe for anyone. This is the early scene that is carried in straightened Berg's works. The red room was received extremely well. In fact, Strindberg was known more as a novelist earlier in his career. And there are in fact, two points to consider two words that are very close in Strindberg novels in Swedish. One is called sign punks, S Y N P U N K T. And stand point S T a N D P U N K. Don home is a standpoint. Whereas a sign font is a point of view and the shift is always here's the stand point, something trustworthy. Can you stay there? Can you develop a theme? Can you develop a perspective from that standpoint or is it, but just one point of view among many others, if this is true, should one, not then move facily from point of view to point of view, hoping by collecting a number of days to have some dynamics since then of what is real of what is the medically trustworthy, but the difficulty for Strindberg in all of his characters and this comes in from karaoke car, is that we feel increasingly the need to make the single point of view work for us.
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That single point of view, we identify as ourselves. It was the eye as the ego. And as we grow, as we become more established as a human being, we tend to favor them a single standpoint of self identity above all others and 10 then to coordinate any other points of view in terms of that single standpoint.
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But here's the wrong for Strindberg. He was absolutely convinced no man stands alone. He needs to have his counterpart. And so the woman's point of view becomes an indelible necessity to be integrated into his own standpoint. The difficulty here is that women are constantly changing their minds, constantly changing their points of view. And so a man is thrown back upon a sense of alienation in his own deepest levels. The more mature he becomes, the more he experiences this impossibility and caught in this bind man pushes against the only of definition that he has left to work with his mind. And so the development of man's mind comes from this primordial lack of unity,
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And then pushing against his mind man fires again and again,
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That he is playing with illusion, the Strindberg in order to set his own thoughts clear in 1884, published a series of connected short stories called getting married. They published 4,000 copies of getting married. And when the state decided to ban the book, six days later, there were only 300 and some copies left on the shelves and Stockholm. He was prosecuted for blasphemy. It was a very tough time for August Strindberg. His publisher one year felt that straight Barrick should come to the trial himself. Strindberg had taken himself out of Stockholm, had gone to Berlin, had almost, uh, been on the verge of refusing to come back. The younger brother of his publisher went to him personally in Berlin and said, this is a matter of life or death. So Strindberg facing up, arrived in Stockholm. The day before the trial, they were putting on one of his plays. The Strindberg went to the theater and, uh, it was packed with young radicals who were cheering Strindberg on. You got a tremendous ovation and reception after every act and then was greeted in the morning by huge crowds, surging around the courthouse in Stockholm. He went in and then October 21st, 1884, he was acquitted of the charge of blasphemy as far as the court went, but the powerful reactionary forces had been allied and keyed up. They had targeted Strindberg.
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The radical right had finally found someone to blame and it was Strindberg in his generation. The queen herself made sure that eventually not a string Dirk's works would be performed or published in Sweden and he would have to flee the country. What was it about getting married that was so difficult? Was it simply that he presented some images of the communion in such a cavalier fashion, that he was accused of being disrespectful to the religious trappings? Not so getting married had struck some basic chord and the basic chord was this in the 1880s, the feminist movement was just beginning in Europe. There was a tremendous way where the conservative elements and the feminist elements coincided Gibson was the champion of women who were finding their place in the world at last Strindberg in getting married, put his finger through the holes that had been glossed over by Epson had been glossed over by the feminist glossed over, even by the church liturgy in getting married, which was a series of 12 short stories linked together all with the theme of the problems, the deep problems of the condition of man's spirit in marriage later on Strindberg Birchwood, add a whole nother book to it so that the getting married that we have today as a collection of, uh, uh, over 20 short stories in the preface to getting married, Strindberg writes this, the woman question upon which the foundations of our society are now said to rest seems to me to be overrated.
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The woman question in the form in which it is right at the moment only concerns the cultured woman's population to click amounting to some 10% at the most of the population, but anything done by the culture classes is always heralded by so much noise that it soon appears to concern the whole of humanity among the population of the country as a whole or among the agricultural workers. The woman question has been solved. They get along, let us learn by their example, the country man and his wife have a very similar education. If the one can right than the other can wreck and they share the work between them without dividing it in detail as the cultured classes do so that each plays the part indicated by nature. And the one is not the master of subject. The other does not understand. The reason there's is a tolerably, satisfactory, spiritual marriage.
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They still are in town with a primordial rhythms of nature, black. He sat us religion and society by the late 19th century has taken them far, far from this. And in fact, the condition breaks out. Then the author in his preface has an interviewer and the author talking, he has himself being interviewed Strindberg, always experiments with points of view. And at the end of the author tells the interviewer. I have attack the indefensible way in which the question has been handled. The woman question today is become tinge with an ugly streak of dalliance. The whole of the doll's house by ups is a bit of old fashioned romantic tree full of idealistic weaknesses.
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Here you go, goes on to say what I have attacked here are present conditions. The first story, the one which was the cause for the blast, from the trial. Yeah, it was entitled through word of virtue. And in here the young son, again, his mother dies when he is 13, he feels like he has lost a friend. She was the one that read to him who educated him, who told him some of the deep mysteries of life just before she died. But he noticed that his father who was a scholar, the night that his wife died, was sitting by the bedside making notes for his latest book. He had found he was a biologist and he had found a new variety of goose foot, which had bent here as on the KLX, instead of the usual straight ones, he was negotiating with the academy of sciences in Berlin to get this variety included in the flora Germanic.
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And he was expecting to hear any day, whether the academy intended to immortalize him by allowing the plant when named and full to be named after him, that his wife deathbed, he was preoccupied, almost absent minded and very close to being unfriendly for. He had just received an affirmative answer for the, from the academy, but he never did expect his wife to rejoice with him. And so he was not surprised when she died. This tone, mark Strindberg out alone of his time. We have come to recognize it as the writing of the absurd existentialist school, which came in very strong after the second world war Strandberg was writing this in the early 1880s, getting married ruins, Strindberg, Yan, Sweden for decades, even though he was acquitted of blasphemy, the tone of his writing in here, the problems that he brought up were just impossible for people of his time to address themselves too. He felt somehow that he had pushed through all of the webs that held civilized life together. And then the reward of virtue. The young boy finally is training to become a priest. And he realizes that he cannot do it.
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And it comes to a head one day when he was signed in his bedroom, come to Jesus. He has pulled down and he thinks for a moment that something terrible is going to happen to him. And then he stands there and he says, he wrote, he was surprised to find that his religion was so easy to shed. It was like a Sunday coat. And he began to wonder, and if it were not rather improper to wear your Sunday clothes all through the week, he discovered in himself, a simple everyday person whom he could put up with jury. Well now though, he felt more at peace with himself. When he met himself in this new light straight forward on assuming he began sleeping deeply without dreaming.
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And the next morning he felt real joy at being alive. So string began to express how man casting off these old skins finds himself born and new and finds himself born, rather naked in this condition. And in fact, when he is thrown off all of the social traps or gotten rid of a great many of them, he's actually gotten rid all standpoints of others that have become viewpoints of the mind and that when we throw off civilization and stand naked, without them, man very quickly has to confront himself because that's who is there and the pure and simple joy pales very quickly because he just that, that he is prime, largely incomplete. And so he begins immediately looking for a relationship in the world to complete himself and very quickly displaces the freedom which he has with complex relationships with women or the complex relationships that come with a woman. And he finds himself making up a new religion of his own mind. He faces the goddess, the primordial earth mother goddess without the screening of centuries or millennia of religion. And this experience, he finds increasingly to poignant for words. So getting narrow reveals this incredible bind that modern man has put himself into. And in fact, Strindberg focuses on the impossibility of a man backtracking. Once he has begun this process, there is no out for him, but to continue it and to hope that somewhere along the line, there is a resolution for him.
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I think we should, uh, stop here and take a little break after they're freshmen. And then we'll, we'll have some more strawberries. First important play was the Crohn's. The father came out two years after getting
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Married and
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The title implies the old conundrum. Who's the father of this child, which one, but the complication in the play in the drama is that okay, the stable masculine presence agenda in the players, the captain
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Who
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Comes on you in a uniform and riding boots and spurs and so forth is progressively revealed in the dramatic action can play to be the subject of a plot by his own wife to have him declared insane. And so what seems at first, a normal plot ser servant girl was pregnant and they trying to find out if the young man they think is the fathers, the father is not really the point isn't play and not the father and the title. The play is the captain. And the tragedy is that his wife has believed that he has gone mad and he being a string Barragan man has depended for his own rationality on the impeccable relationship with his wife. And she having turned against him in just this peculiar way. He has begun to doubt himself and just that primal peculiar way. Her name is Laura. He is identified as the captain. The captain is speaking. This is an act to just give you a little dialogue. Then I was ill and almost died one day between bouts of fever. I heard voices in the next room. You and the lawyer were discussing the property. I still own them. He was explaining that as there were no children, you could not inherit. And he asked you if by any chance you were pregnant, I did not hear your reply. And I recovered and we have a child
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Who is the father. She says, you are no, I have not.
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There's a crime buried here. That's beginning to stink and want a fiendish crime. You women were so tenderhearted about freeing black slaves kept the white ones. I have slaved for you, your child, your mother, your servants. I have sacrificed career and promotion tortured, beaten, sleepless. My hair has gone gray through the agony of mind that you have inflicted upon me. Can you see that with the insight that we laid in the first part of the election, you can understand that the student barricade character for his own stability needs to have a certain quality of relationship viable. And when it is threatened, he is threatened. And because he has no religious net to catch him because he has no social nut to catch him.
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He has an immediate experience of primordial terror. She says, now you really are mad. So you hope he says, I've watched, you're trying to conceal your crime. But because I didn't understand, I pitted you. I sued your conscious thinking. I was chasing away some nightmare. I've heard you crying out in your sleep without giving your words a second thought, but now, but now later in the play, there is a nurse who has come in and has displaced the wife temporarily in this condition of confidence, which the captain is a string Burgan man must have he's. He needs to have it, his whole stability, as it, as a human
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Being, as a being
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Who is in the human form requires this. And so the nurse becomes temporarily. She has surrogate the nurse saying, Lord, Jesus, help us. The captain putting books on the table, asking her to read to him from the Odyssey, read me from the Odyssey. Kalama, speaking to Athena, who says my mother says I am a deceased son, but for myself, I cannot tell it's a wise child that knows its own father. And that's the suspicion Tilama because house about Penelope, the most virtuous of all women find state of affairs saying that he kicked up another book. He wants her to read from this it's the prophet Ezekiel ZQ of course is of the new Jerusalem divisions. He picks up another one, the poetry of Pushkin. He wants her to read to him.
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He has confidence in her. And then finally, it's not even whether she reads to him or not, but as long as she keeps talking, he finds that he's sued. And just having that little bit of relationship, you see, he's thinking, thinking fast prime marginally. He's thinking in his mental coordination and his whole world has shrunk from having a life where he is a captain and a hall and children it's shrunk to where just a nurse would do reading to him. And finally, just a nurse dancing. And finally, even that light goes out the nurse saying, God for mercy, even now, it's not too late. It wasn't too late for the thief on the cross for our savior said today shall be with me in paradise. The captain saying croaking for our crops already old Crow. He takes her hymn book from her pocket. He calls yod.
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Are you there? And you all, you know, Anders throw this woman out of the house. So she'll choke me to death with her. Hymnbook throw her out the window, Stouffer up the chimney, do what you like only get rid of her. No staring at the nurse. God, save your captain. And that's when the bottom of my heart, I can't do that. I just can't. If it were six men, but a woman, why you can't manage one woman I can manage you're all right. But there's something the man from laying a hands on a woman, what is this something? Haven't they laid hands on me. And then now the drama closes here in acts three. He begins calling characters by mythological name. He begins calling his wife folly and he begins calling himself Hercules. And finally, the captain makes the statement. I believe all you women are my enemies. You see he's gone through a complete reversal. My mother did not want me to come into this world because my birth would give her pain. She was my enemy.
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She robbed my embryo of nourishment. So I was born in complete. My sister was my enemy. When she made me knuckle under her, the first woman I took in my arms was my enemy. She gave me 10 years of sickness and returned for the love I gave her. When my daughter had to choose between you and me, she became my enemy. And you, you, my wife have been my mortal enemy where you have not let go of your hold until there is no life left in me. What's dream. Dark has gotten to is the realization for CIOs protagonists for his men, that they can find their existence, their existence. Wholesomely only in relationship to women when they think themselves through, when they think like through and then in depth way, it becomes a necessary primordial relationship. And yet, because of the vicissitudes of the mind, because of the conniving of the human mind, one does not see herself in a primordial way.
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And so she no longer is able to relate prime marginally and becomes a religious or social or illegal or an economic game plan, which destroys them all possibility of a real relationship of a real marriage. And increasingly then one is not talking to a woman. One is just talking to a person whose own illusory needs have you served their prime? I'll be the captain here. The father lays down and dies of heartbreak saying a man has no children. Only women have children. So the future is there is while we died, childless who God who holds all children, dear, the father was played. Yeah, increasingly during the Strindberg life. In fact, he wrote a number of very famous dramas that towards the end of his life were actually had quite a long life on the stage. She goes next I'm playing. I don't have time to go through everything in detail.
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As I had hoped was called lady Julie often it's translated as miss Julie. And again, it's a, it's a woman who is dominant she's domineering, but she is intelligent enough to know that she needs to have a, a relationship with a man to find completeness for herself. And yet she runs through people, men very quickly. She sees in her mind that they will not do that. They'll let her down very early in the play she's described by one of the only three characters in the play. And the valet is talking to the cook. And the cook says that she has seen lady Julie with her fiance and she was trying to train him just as she was trying to train her horse to go by row through certain tracks. And of course the relationship con all the strings there to plays have this quality.
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But the woman who becomes necessary becomes an enemy only when she becomes an authentic to herself and capable then of having a basic relationship string Strindberg in a play entitled Easter, which takes place in three successive days, Monday, Thursday, good, Friday and Easter. How's the character in it named Eleanora. And Eleanora is a primal woman who is soiled by the conniving illusions of the mind. Do you see men and women are both prey to these illusions. She's introduced in act one. And she says, among a number of things, she says, I can see the stars in daylight. She is that kind of woman who can still see stars and daylight Benjamin. Another character says the stars aren't off. Then she says, silly. The stars are always up. Why at this moment I'm sitting facing north and looking at Cassiopeia like a big w in the middle of the Milky way.
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Can't you see it? No, I can't. He says, well, there you are. She says, one person can see whether another cat. So don't be so cocky. Sure. Now I'll tell you about flower on the table. It's a Lenten Lily and its home is in Switzerland. That was a challenge full of sunlight. That's why it's yellow. And it has the power of soothing pain. I passed the flower shop on my way and saw it and what she has done. Of course, she has used a key that she has to go in and actually take this flower from this flower shop. And she feels guilty about this, but Eleanora in the play Easter, he has the vision that Strindberg has of the primal woman who was unspoiled by the illusions of the mind. She is still so tied to nature that she is able to appreciate it and all of its grandeur and its large macroscopic, uh, stra uh, structure and strategy and it's macroscopic detail.
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And it is this woman that primal man urines bar. And in fact, in man's struggle with himself, enlarging his mind, thrown back and recursively upon his own experience. He realizes in his mind that this is the archetypal image I can use that term that he really always needed to be with. And his trouble is, is that he often sees it exactly the right woman for him, but because of religious and social conditions, the very right woman for him very often has gone through the contrapositive experiences, which she has gone through. And so she has learned to manipulate exactly the right illusion to track him. That is not to trap him in a cage so much, but to trap him into needing her indelibly and not being able to have a relationship with her on any primal basis. She filters out exactly the avenues that he would choose to come in to her because she knows him exactly on a primal level.
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And it is this ability to either let go or to persevere in the relationships that for Strindberg increasingly became a sign that modern times has become Denmark Strindberg. First marriage lasted about 17 years with Siri Von Essen. I don't have time to go into all the normal details. You could find an eight. And then in second P sorry, was the wife of a very wealthy man. She was an aspiring actress telling love with a string Barrick. And they had three children together. She was divorced from her, her husband, and, uh, they had a fairly good life together, except that Strindberg, trying to get to the bottom of what was real and this relationship trying to get to the bottom of what was it in him that needed? What is it in her that he just tried all of the fabric of daily existence. They left Sweden.
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They lived abroad for many years. He actually would have three marriages in his lifetime. He met Siri, Yvonne essence, next husband, years later decades later, and had a conversation with the man. And he put that conversation again to one of his last great players called the road to Damascus. I don't know if we'll get that far tonight, but the difficulty for Strindberg was that obviously there was something demonic in the world and that only a sensitive man was able to register this demonic energy. So stream dark found himself in the 1890s going to Paris. His second marriage had broken up. He was married secondly, to a journalist named Frieda bull. It lasted about 18 months. She was the daughter of rich Austrian parents. They lived in Dornoch and Strindberg was there trying to live on the family grounds. The grandparents owned a large estate and he lived with his wife who was expecting a small life, expecting a child.
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And then they had the small baby around and they lived in a cottage in the garden. String Barragan was unable to write down exactly what he was thinking of, could not find a literary forum. And this was when he made seven huge year old paintings. He used a knife instead of a brush to lay the color on. And he said he wanted to see pure color. He went to see the colors come together, but he was increasingly upset and unable to stay in the place because the idea had occurred to him that he had developed to the point to where he was now sensitive to the demonic powers of the earth.
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Not the satanic element in existence had now risen over the horizon of credibility. And this was slowly beginning to occur to Strindberg that he was in a very precarious and dangerous position because he had no comfort of religion whatsoever. He had no social position and increasingly his economic situation was observed and Frank and complete. So Strindberg went to Paris on the invitation of some friends. And on the idea that Paris of all the places in Europe was the safest place to be when confronting something that is radical as he intuited, he was going to be confronting. And when he got there, he tried his hand at more art. He painted 10 more paintings very quickly, uh, under the invitation of having a one man art show, somewhere in Paris, it never came off. In fact, the promoter, uh, later had a relationship with, uh, white men in Greenland, like for Strindberg, more important than any of these temporary situations, personal situations was this in-depth demonic energy that was coming to the floor.
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And so Strindberg in order to find a basis for himself began associating with a man named whose name was Papa, John and Casa populace, who was one of the great French art cultists of the 19th century. And stringer began writing journals for Len initiation Paco's is periodical. He began writing all called essays that were published and widely read Paris at this time was a hotbed of all cultures like Los Angeles, neuro time. He was estimated by some writers that there were 50,000 alchemists in Paris. And the 1890s Strindberg found himself lionized by these people, not as a writer of novels or writer of dramas, but as a writer for home, science was the only possible field of man's finding a real stable basis for his mind and that the auto areas where the only possible ocean where that science could be firmly placed. In fact, he had written a book called aunt auntie Barbara, Anthony against the barbarians saying that modern science was completely dominated by illusion because it did not take metaphysical speculation into its depth into its basis.
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Strindberg was lionized and invited in and began receiving equipment. And finally set himself up as an Alchemist and parents working for, he would tell the outside world trying to make gold. He was looking for the elixir of life. He was looking for some basis to put together a mind, which he could have confidence. Yeah. String guard. Finally, 1895 was taken to St. Louis hospital in Paris. His hands were completely covered with it, sorry, psoriasis, which can from handling all of these, uh, raw chemicals, dangerous solutions, he didn't eat properly. He drank absence almost continuously. And it wasn't discovered till the first world war chemically. That absence has a very dangerous chemical combination in it. Um, it atrophies the brain and produces all the symptoms of madness that Strindberg thought were descending upon him from inner all-call energies. He began to have the sense that there were unseen powers in the world.
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In fact, it occurred to him increasingly that there was an unseen power of demonic proportions and that when a man developed his in depth perception to a certain point, he became visible to that alcohol power and that it sought to control him exactly through the instrument of London. And so stringer began trying to live a monastic life of experimenting with alchemy and this poor diet drinking and all of these worries. And he felt himself losing contact. He felt himself going into condition of the madness distributor to began to keep a journal, which is, which was published a revised form in 1897 called in fairness, the first chapter. And I have just time to give you a couple of sentences from it. The first chapter is called the hand of the unseen. It was with feelings of Savage glee that I returned home, where it's from the guard dinner, where I had parted from my little wife, she was going to our child who had fallen ill and it just didn't land. So now I had accomplished the sacrifice of my heart, her last words, when shall we meet again? And my answers soon, still echoed in my ears as an untruth. He deception that I was unwilling to admit even to myself, to something in me, whispered that we had parted forever.
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So
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In fairness, it begins in that way. I'll give you just a few excerpts from it. It's published in the penguin classic. It's about three and 50 pages. What was the meaning of this here? Where the two first rudimentary leads of the wrong that Jupiter is acorn. That was all. And yet it was an undeniable fact that 10 fingers like those of the human hand were classed together and adjust your supplication. But I was still too incredulous, too stupefied by an empirical education. And I left things as they were then came my fault. I became aware that the displeasure of the powers was lying heavy upon me. The hand of the unseen was raised against me, and it blows rainy, thick and fast about my head. First of all, my anonymous friend, the man who up until then had provided me with means of existence, took a fence at a presumption letter and withdrew his support.
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So there I was left without any resources. Then when I received the proofs of my book, Silva, Phil Barra, which is the title of one of Francis Bacon's books, I discovered that the pages were put together exactly like a pack of Welles, shuffle playing cards. Not only were they muddled and wrongly numbered, but even the different sections of the book were jumbled together, Higley pygmy. So that ironically enough, they symbolized the theory of the great disorder that prevails in nature. At last after endless delay and protraction, the booklet was printed, but then I was presented by the printer with the bill for more than twice. The some agreed upon very reluctantly. I took my microscope, my evening clothes and a few other valuables. I still possessed two upon broker, but at least my book had appeared in print. And for the first time in my life, I felt that I had said something new, important, and splendid.
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You can easily imagine how insolent and self-assured. I felt as I carried the copies to the post, raising my hand, heavenwards in the gesture of contempt, I threw the packages into the box and to show my scoring of the powers I thought as I did. So listen to me, you think's up there. I have solved your riddle. I defy you. When I reached my private hotel, I found my bill awaiting me within the company letter. And of course he's out in the street a little later in, in fairness, he's beginning, okay. To realize that everywhere he looks now because of the tremendous pressure, the all called power heating in upon him, he sees the mystical order wherever he goes, and he has no respite, but when it's difficult for him, he also has no mind, no organization that can calibrate or integrate what he is seeing.
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And so he's increasingly being dissolved into the patterns that occurred to him again and again, he says, for instance, my doctor's dwelling presented the appearance of a Buddhist monastery, the four wings of the building, one story high and closed the prod Wrangler courtyard in the middle of which stood a dome shaped building an imitation of Timberlands grade. And Samarkand the pitch of the roof and the Chinese tiles that covered. It reminded one of the far east and apathetic toward his crawled about on the paving stones or buried itself in the weeds, in a state of Nirvana, which seemed likely to endure forever. It took it have been gall roses, uh, during the outer wall of the east wing and which I lived alone to reach the two gardens belongings at the house. You crossed the yard in narrow, dark, damp place, which had in it a Chestnut tree and some angry black hands. The flower garden was a pagoda like summer house, completely overgrown by Clematis. This monastery with its innumerable rooms was inhabited by a single human being, the superintendent of the district hospital. They were a solitary. He had gone his own independent way through the hard school of life and looked down on his fellow human beings with a sturdy Nobel scorn that Springs from a profound knowledge of the relative worthlessness of everything, including one's own self.
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So he's here. And as he's here in this monastic environment, it gets worse. When I got home after my nocturnal visit a site that for a fleeting moment had attracted my attention to the doctor's drawing room. Suddenly came back to my mind. The doctor had gone to fetch some wine left alone. I started to look at a cup board with panels and laid with Walnut or Alder. I forget which as usual, the grain of the wood produced various shapes. As I looked, I'd be held, I've go Ted executed by a master hand upon which instantly I turned my back pan himself, just as the tradition of antiquity had portrayed him pan whom the middle ages had transformed into Satan. It was he all right. I can find myself here at your just bare narration of fact. I have even seen that face carefully drawn on the shell of a crack.
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And so in Fresno, he goes on in string Baird descends into this now, okay, what saved him was the artist's temperament to turn experience into literature. And increasingly he found that the mind, which he did not possess himself, the character, which he could not count on in terms of a basic religious belief was reconstructing itself in the pattern of the books that he was right, that the literature that he was producing, all of the various genres were in fact, the real Strindberg that was coming out and increasingly that towards the end of this period in Paris, this period of madness, he realized that his salvation, his salvation as a man, as a human being was to return back to that whatever genre of literature was best for him to write captured deepest, the sense of reality. And for him, it was not the novel, not the report tires or various other genre, but the drum. And so after having not written the drama for many years, Strindberg came back at the end of the 1890s, convinced that what he needed to do for the rest of his life was to reconstruct for himself, large scale dramas of truth, searching out of that by addressing himself to these drums, bringing himself not only as an author who created these drums, but bringing himself as a spectator, someone who would see these dramas put on, he would be able to reconstruct for himself his sense of self.
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He has the first great work coming back from madness. What does the great play to Damascus often called the road to Damascus? If you recall, in the new Testament, it was on the road to Damascus that Paul had the revelation of what, what the Christ meant. So the road to Damascus is the path of realization, the path of integration, the path of finding that the self, that one thought one had lost was in fact, not the real self at all. And that the real self had to be put together by dedicated years of experience and service. And for Stenberg, it was writing these great plays to Damascus actually as a trilogy of three plays together. And it's a trilogy because it's in the form of the classical Greek tragic, uh, style like east Gilis or Sophocles or your remedies. The tragic flaw here is that a man feels the need to go on indefinitely and find a solution to find the solution, to find the answer. What does it all mean? What is the bottom line? And at the end of the road to Damascus, I don't have time to go into all of it for you.
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The stranger and the tempter are talking, the stranger says, look, here is a woman injuring what the child to be baptized. The tempter says, oh yes, a little mortal who's to be consecrated to suffering. The stranger says poor child. The temperature says a human history. That's about to begin. And there what's loveliest. And most better Adam and Eve in paradise that in a week will be a hell. And in the fortnight paradise again, the stranger says, what is loveliest and brightest? The first, the only the last that ever gave life, meaning IQ. One sat in the sunlight on the veranda in the spring beneath the first tree to show new grain and a small crown crown that had in a white veil lay like thin morning mist over a face that was not of a human being then came darkness. The temperature says when the stranger says from the light itself, I know no more. The temperature says it could have only been a shadow for light is needed to throw shadows, but for darkness, no light is needed. And the stranger says stop, or will never come to an end.
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The temperature is always willing to talk more about it. Always willing to extend the probe of life, extend the experience the stranger has learned to call a hall. He does not know the final answer, but he will stop here. So the temperature then disappears saying farewell and the confessor then comes in and displaces him and advances with a large black beer cloth and says, grant him eternal peace and acquire things. May he be illumined with perpetual light? And then he is wracked with the beer cloth and the stranger completely wrapped like a black mummy on stage. He is blessed by the confessor. May he rest in peace? Amen says the choir to the baskets is one of the great works of world literature. It's a profound work. You all find in it. Um, yeah. Act two has a huge long scene in an Al chemical laboratory act three takes place going up towards this huge mountain that sticks up above the clouds and all the various set, um, vicissitudes of trying to get to this monastery.
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And when he comes to the monastery, he asked them how large it is and they tell him that it has endless room. That mankind has been building this since the age of Charlemagne. And by now there are endless rooms and less numbers of rooms. And one can have any conversations, one wishes here, and this is why this is a monastery Jerry and the stranger has to learn to stop himself from needing to go through them all from needing to think about going through more of being content, where he is, that at any given time we can call a hall and we can stop and let a sense of dwelling presence. Well up in us, Strindberg, after writing to Damascus wrote a whole series of shorter plays, which he felt were necessary vehicles for a modern man for 20th century, man, to find a way out of his own inner bind.
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Yeah. And he was not going to be able to go into his own mind because it'd become too labyrinthian of GGBS. He was not going to be able to find solace with his natural soulmate because conditions had made that impossible. And so Strindberg set up with a friend of his in Stockholm, a small theater called the intimate theater. You had lasted from 1907 to 1910, December to December. And they put on some 20 fours of Strindberg play, giving them exact performances so that they could annotate the place. And I think it'd be performed correctly wherever they would be in the world. By this time, Strindberg was beginning to be translated, beginning to be played. I think, uh, just to give you an index, I think it was, um, Julie that was played 65 times within a six month period in Stockholm about 1907 is beginning to be recognized.
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It says a B national figure. In fact, strings there creates Swedish literature. He creates the language, the vibration language that makes Swedish literature a real gem in the early 20th century. His letters to the intimate theater, which are all translated into English. Now what one notices is the emphasis upon Shakespeare, almost all of the directions, all of the writings that Strindberg gives on the way to present drama accurately have to do with the way in which Shakespeare presented character, because he says Shakespeare had the great virtue of putting himself wholly and exclusively in every character. And every speech in every scene, Shakespeare does not block as being blasphemous or being romantic, whatever the scene calls for whatever the play has engendered that humans director has the fullness of the author completely there. And that this was the ideal of truth. Drama is that we eat to be present a hundred percent wherever it is that we are whatever role we are playing. It may be a role, but if we are playing at 100%, it then becomes a real adjunct to this truth drama, and one can then find one's way. His last great book is translated called zones of the spirit. It's actually called the blue book and it's Southern title of the book of thoughts and the old Strindberg, not old by our standards, but as Indiana Jones says, it's not the years. It's the mileage. Mm.
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He wanted to put together a book of aphorisms for the truth seeker who would not be cowed by false religion, by false social values, who could not find a legitimate companion in his life could turn to books like this and carry them around with them. And there would be aphorisms in here that he could read from time to time. And that the blue book then would be a companion. The first I have this time for giving you, right? He wrote about the history of the blue book. They're about to put on his dream play. And he has been reading Plato's tomatoes and the feta. And he writes, I am now reading the proofs of the blue book. And I feel as though my mission in life were ended, I've been able to say all I had to say, I dreamt that I was in the home of my grandchild at Sabattus Berg and saw that the great pond was dried up. This pond had always been dangerous to children because it was surrounded by a swamp. It had an evil smell and was full of frogs, hedgehogs, and lizards. Now in my dream, I walked about on the dry ground and was astonished to find it so clean. I thought now that I have broken the, of the frog swamp and it is done the next day, he read the last proofs of the blue book.
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Strindberg is a gold mine for psychic images, the kinds of images that well up and the archetypal levels and the deep interpersonal levels of human questing. But what makes Jen Burke a great world author is that he did not position himself in this psychic horizon. He always aspired to keep himself on the spiritual plane, higher, different from the psychic realm. And so Strindberg eventually over long decades managed to produce a body of work that if read in order well, reproduced that Titanic journey of going through all the vicissitudes and coming out with a basic strategy for modern man, if he cannot trust others, if he cannot trust his mind. He can at least trust the honesty of his work if he does it well. And does it honestly. And so we find a source of ethics and relationality in the very courage and accuracy with which we live our lives and produce what we do in those lives that can be trusted.
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And in retrospect, after a long while the truest of that path, we will become visible. And so man, given no map and no destination, no origin and no assurance that he could even go make a life for himself out of the illusion, out of the nothingness of the world and comes up with a diadem of his own, making a trustworthiness, which exists in the world because he has put it there, insistence upon accuracy and veracity, well haunt the 20th century. And next week we will see the father of phenomenology that had been who throw, who will try to make science. It philosophic undertaking that can be verified almost like an engineering
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Plaque plank. And
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Some people think that he was quite successful. Well, I hope you enjoyed Strindberg. He merits your attention.
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[inaudible].

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