Self-Exhausting Intensity

“The parts of our brain optimized for the Stone Age rise almost unbidden to the driver’s seat under stress, danger, and fear—and take the wheel.” Maren Urner

“Do you know how to make God laugh? — Tell Him your plans.” Blaise Pascal

“A man who celebrates his excellence and leaves no detail out on the distinction keyboard. I’m here for these heels. I want to cast them in amber and hang them on my walls. Maybe I’ll do that. Frame the best, most polished heels and hang them on the walls. With spotlights. And look up at them when I touch myself. Mirrored in the hall of mirrors of the word castle, soaring to new heights and manifesting another wish with every orgasm, making another impossibility possible. New words, new impulses, new narratives, new heights. Best sort of brainfuck. Ever.” Christine Zarrath

“Unlike food and sex, gossip has no saturation point.” Adrianus Franciscus Theodorus van der Heijden

The antechamber played no role. The prince did not need the distance that shame demands. He felt no shame. If necessary, he ruled with his trousers down. Visitors gawked through his bedrooms. Particularly chic was the marble bath in the Superb of the Orangery. Such visits were among the treasures preserved in stories until the end of a life.

By the mid-18th century, the city palace displayed a thousand paintings. It was a Museum of Modern Art and simultaneously a showcase for old masters: Altdorfer, Dürer, Rubens, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Titian, Tintoretto, Caravaggio. The bronze baseboards in the cabinets served as objects of admiration. At the sight of multi-level, complex desks moved by spring-loaded mechanisms, a demand arose for “experts”—to guide viewers through every detail. The court kept domestic servants as specialist performers, for a penny or two, in reserve. Today, television imitates this. Every channel has its experts.

Among those traveling the Grand Tour from court to court who reached Cassel, the Ritter von Itter from Ederthal embodied a stirring presence with a genius hairstyle. He praised chamber pots, hairbrushes, slippers, and coat racks—as long as the items were in princely use. Ritter Itter extolled the slavish patience of things, composing poems about objects (“the cheerful thingness of the slipper”), which were disseminated to this day.

At the Fridericianum Museum, Ritter Itter took note of every column, every bas-relief, every replica of an Arc de Triomphe. It was customary to send artists to capitals to copy everything and reproduce it in cork. Among the life-size marble statues of Apollo, Minerva, Hercules, and Paris, busts of Homer, Seneca, and Aristotle accumulated.

Ritter Itter described the one-sided development of Bellevuestraße. It offered a free view toward the Orangery, the meadow, and the fields. The palace consisted of the old residence of a Landgrave Friedrich, never called to regency and otherwise insignificant, and two houses pressed into a single architectural unit. The extensions housed the palace guard and the observatory staff. A freestanding communication arcade demanded mention, allowing sheltered passage from one portal to the next.

In Oberneustadt, the Palais of His Royal Highness held first place among all buildings, both in terms of function and interior splendor. It lay at the northern edge of Friedrichsplatz. The main façade faced the square, while the side façades along Königs- and Karlsstraße offered admired boundaries.

As noted, Ritter Itter hailed from Ederthal. His birthplace had once been desert and tropical rainforest, the territory of the Mescalero Apache before they moved on to India. There, the Apaches became “Indians.” One cannot forbid continents from shifting. Again and again, the earth opens to mock ridiculous nuclear meltdowns. A real meltdown, no human has yet witnessed. Until 1782, the world spirit resided constantly in Ederthal; since then, it commutes to broaden its horizon. One wonders, perhaps, that the world spirit is Hessian.

Ederthal was said to be a Franconian foundation from the early Imperial period. From the first Christian millennium onward, it belonged to Kurmainz. Only when the poetry albums of the German Reich of the Roman Nation—whose beginning lay in the Franconian adoption of Roman state concepts—were already obsolete, did the people of Ederthal part from Mainz’s colors of silver and red. Their old allegiance remains visible in the Mainz wheel on the coat of arms.

This old allegiance kept Ederthal faithful to the true religion. At some point, a plague reduced the community to a few survivors. Without exception, they descended from the old Hessian noble family of the Itters, to which Cornelius von Pechstein is also distantly related. Closer is his former almost-fiancée, Mathilde von Itter-Schauenburg-Löwenstein. The fourth servant, Ruprecht, Ritter of Löwenstein (Itter and Schauenburg not yet married) was not the son of his predecessor, but a favored protégé. A mediocre career almost ensued. The “plum” inherited the Löwenburg over Ederthal with the title. Together with Alwin von Bebra, he conspired against a king-worthy Battenberg. The receipt placed him in a forested region already called Eichwald around 1100. A potent superstition protected a megalithic grave within the oak circle from major removal until 1926.

Burgrecht made Ruprecht judge of Ederthal. Executions took place in the oak circle, called Galgenhurst. “Hurst” as in woodland. The word did not persist as a place name. The Eichwald was the royal forest. I know remarks about economic interventions in the Middle Ages: oaks gave good timber, acorns nourished pigs. War-related clearings and natural devastations spared the population until a remnant of ancient trees was first noted.

Ruprecht fled into the Eichwald in the summer of 1073 when danger pressed on his iron collar. No account survives of a swordsman perhaps forced to a desperate flight for the first time. In this forest, many had already perished on the soft, treacherous ground overrun with pipegrass.

Mathilde descends from the suspect. She was born in the ancestral castle of Gudensberg. The market town in the castle’s shadow had been Celtic, Chatti, Franconian, before becoming Hessian permanently. It lies in a cheerful order at the foot of Kellerwald, home to wolves and bears. Thus, one should not enter the forest without an Askari, unlike Little Red Riding Hood, missing for two weeks due to her folly. Red Riding Hood was related to Mathilde and lived two houses up with her grandmother. I put this sentence in the past tense because I assume Red Riding Hood was eaten.

As a charm against weakness, Mathilde wears her grandmother’s signet ring. The ancestor taught her to see marriage merely as a domain of duty. Maintaining one’s poise proves character. Mathilde has lived through all this. The widow lacks any sense for bourgeois manners, yet retains a keen nose for business. The narcotics stacked in the cellar are a story of their own. To neighbors, she claims it is an Ayurvedic home-cooked meal subscription business run remotely.

She has seen In the Realm of the Senses ten times and 9½ Weeks twelve times. Sexually, she exists in an anachronistic visual echo chamber. She rides waves of stimulation. She needs a man for certain hours and is currently taking Ned, discarded by Simone. Occasionally, she calls him “my God.” The couple whispers in bed, promising things with no serious intent. For the sake of mood, they lie until the balcony collapses. Millionaire-grade colonial goods in the cellar raise the sex drive. Mathilde dedicates her first orgasm to her late husband, an aristocratic sex god with a weak heart.

The lively specimen of a wildcat on the lectern in the antechamber, the spacious privacy of the attic, the cat-sign woodcut (perhaps a cunning relic of her grandfather’s fashion, according to Mathilde), cannot fool Ned. A fir outside the window darkens the room. A day owl watches the bedroom.

Mathilde is a deadwood fetishist. She loves residual biomass, praising it on her ascents to new tasks. Her passion is for the small. She reproaches the fleeing horse for carrying up to a thousand kilos of flesh to the next predator. Where, she asks, is the finesse and incomparable skill of the cockroaches, silently colonizing the planet?

In Mathilde’s garden stands the dilapidated guardhouse of an 11th-century hill castle. Ned accompanies the noblewoman on a walk. The area has been left to rewild itself for years. Its appearance is shaped by storm damage. Fallen and torn trunks form barriers where foxes and hares bid goodnight. Mathilde leads Ned through a fir labyrinth to the ruins above the axle gorge. Two castles once crowned a hill. Three families with a common origin—two still known, the Wolfen and the Groppen—represented Mainz’s interests until Heinrich I of Hesse disarmed them and razed their residences in the 13th century. The violence spawned legends of titanic feats. Yet the events were banal. Else von Groppe, née von Salzmannshausen, had an affair with the lord across the way. Her husband’s rage brought about his own ruin. Secretly, he broke into his castle and invited the enemy to wreak havoc.