Gemstone Force

Resolved to “give herself” to the knight on the spot, Aurora R. - the future Wanda von Sacher-Masoch - hurries, after a long epistolary prelude, to the apartment of her pen pal and benefactor Leopold (like Leopold Bloom, Molly’s impotent husband; see Ulysses), whom she expects to find chilled to the bone, near death. In fact she encounters Leopold in an elegiac openness. He is delighted by the visitor’s juvenile bravura. He must revise the image conveyed to him by a stern correspondence. He had expected a formidable lady; a pleasantly fearsome person.

Over the course of the day in Chet’s office

The subsidiary stimulus as the primary source of pleasure—the full enjoyment unfolds only in relation to a congenial co-player. Chet’s intuitive brilliance predestines him. An ideal coexistence begins to take shape; Nana feels tickled by the insight that Nana wants to rule her with intellectual thigh pressure. That excites her. She likes to exert herself in a determining way, but also accepts invitations to a superior sovereignty.

Nana enjoys Chet’s ruses. She interprets the will to dominate—ready to burst from sheer delusions—as strong interest.

In the airless void

“Erasmus has no homeland, no proper parental home; he was born … in an airless void.”
—Stefan Zweig

He places his baptismal name between two assumed names. He spurns the language of his Dutch ancestors and gives preference to Latin. In his act of appropriation, Triumph and Tragedy of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Stefan Zweig speaks of a deliberate “shading” of illegitimate—i.e., delegitimizing—descent. It had been “irksome” to have been fathered by a priest. The author imputes to Erasmus the birth agony of an unwanted child. Erasmus refutes his fate by declaring himself Desiderius—the Desired One. In 1487 he enters the Augustinian order; a year later he takes his vows. Without particular piety he indulges his artistic inclinations. The “freely thinking and unselfconsciously writing” Erasmus remains a priest, albeit with worldly leeway. He obtains dispensations wherever the priest’s shoe pinches. Zweig recognizes an “inner compulsion toward independence.”

Nana reflects on her own origins. More on that elsewhere. In Erasmus she recognizes a wily tactician. The epoch-making figure shuns conflict and revolutionary roughness. He avoids “useless resistance.” Rather, he “steals his independence than fights for it.” Nana, too, does not like to burst in with doors flying. She values shaded maneuvers and rewards those who recognize her finesse. At times she almost hurls herself into a certain unexpectedly tender smile, while letting it seem a mere side issue that a man might sink away at the sight of her bosom framed in lace.

Her friend Lale Schlosser stages Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine on the student stage. For the premiere Nana wears an asymmetrically cut dress with a slanted button placket from Yohji Yamamoto’s “austere-elegant summer collection,” as the advertising has it. Japanese haute couture with an androgynous, deconstructive approach. Nana notes the details of the set design. She sees a Feininger ghost house. It drips from leaky pipes as in a Tarkovsky film. Ruined pomp, a shattered quadriga. Painted airplanes, smeared as if by Gerhard Richter. Then comes the “second communist spring” as an aside; Ophelia takes a seat in a wheelchair. Hamlet says: “What you have killed, you must also love.” Hamletmachine as a sweeping machine. It clears the stage: “I was Hamlet. I stood on the coast and talked to the surf BLABLA, the ruins of Europe at my back. The bells rang in the state funeral.” The rule of Helsingør falls to Fortinbras. What awaits him is “the sewer project and the decree concerning whores and beggars.” Hamlet echoes him: “You believed in crystal concepts and not in human clay.”

Nana suggests to Chet, as the site of a rendezvous, the most picturesque room in the dead wing of the university - the Karzer.

“Karzer was the term for detention cells at German universities, in which until the early twentieth century offenses were punished within the universities’ own academic jurisdiction.” Wikipedia

A pharaonic deathly silence reigns in the Karzer. The academic cell was used until 1945 within an autonomous jurisdiction. The walls are archaeologically significant sites.