“I expected his force to feel like a truck hitting me, that it would feel heavy. But when I tried to stop him, I felt nothing—no heaviness, no force—just lightness and a sense of emptiness.” Maksem Manler, about his first Chi-Sao contact with Grandmaster Chu Shong Tin.

*

On the Bolivian Altiplano, water pushes through cracks in the rock, its chemical signature betraying its Pacific origins. The distant ocean runs beneath the American landmass, rises four hundred kilometers behind the coastline, and emerges in a landscape scarred by mining. The geological process, seen through the haze of subduction, lends itself to escapist analogies.

*

Ian Morris recounts a classic anthropological culture-shock experience. In an archaeological community winding down after work… in front of a field shack, with a bottle of ouzo in the Greek Highlands… the scholar observes a small procession: a picturesque old man and his wife. The elderly man rides a donkey, while the woman follows on foot, groaning under the weight of a large sack. When asked about the obvious disproportion, he kindly replies, “She does not ride because she has no donkey.”

*

Somewhere, Samuel Beckett comments on a colleague’s work: “His premises are not as weak as his conclusions.”

Intellectual Thigh Pressure – A Scene from the Previous Year

Goya says, “We are refugees into science. Our refuges are dust caves. Like Molly Bloom in the final monologue of James Joyce’s Ulysses, you invite me with your eyes to ask once more if you would marry me.”

I am surprised by this narrative volte-face; marriage had never been mentioned. I would rather be Stephen (Dedalus) than Molly (Bloom). I reach for her thoroughly read Ulysses. It is a sacred book from the estate of my communist grandfather, who—like Thomas Brasch’s parents—had endured the wrong kind of exile during the Nazi era and had successfully reconciled his love for all things British with socialism. He enjoyed being a citizen of the GDR, much as Heiner Müller characterized Peter Hacks: the aristocrat Hacks had misunderstood socialism as a fairy tale. For Grandpa, the GDR was a fairytale land. The potent dreamer encouraged his granddaughter’s inclination toward whimsical interpretations.

The secondary incentive as the main source of pleasure—the full enjoyment only unfolds with a man of stature. Goya’s intuitive brilliance predestines him. Signs of an ideal collaboration are palpable; I am titillated by the realization that Goya intends to guide me with intellectual thigh pressure. I like this more than I dare admit. I am always ready to accept invitations of superior sovereignty. I relish Goya’s cunning. I have my own will to dominate. Now I am Molly, the woman without a dot or a comma (cf. standard exegesis of Ulysses); a voluptuous, slightly untidy beauty according to Sacher-Masoch’s ideal. And here the arrondissement begins.

My well-honed reading compels me to a long run-up. Determined to give herself to the knight on the spot, Aurora R., later Wanda von Sacher-Masoch, hurries—after extensive written foreplay—to the apartment of her pen-pal and benefactor Leopold (like Leopold Bloom, Molly’s impotent husband), whom she expects to find deathly ill with a cold. In fact, Leopold receives her with elegiac openness. He is charmed by the youthful bravura of his visitor. He must revise the image he had received in a stern letter. He had expected a formidable lady, a pleasantly intimidating person.

Royal Admirer

The eccentric Leopold von Sacher-Masoch breaks beyond bourgeois boundaries. Yet even he finds his master. No admirer—anonymous and epistolary—had ever approached the matter as labyrinthine and enigmatic as ‘Anatol’. From the very first letter he receives, the fascinated Leopold strains to interact with Anatol personally. Yet Anatol shuns direct contact. He summons the Sacher-Masoch couple to all sorts of venues to shine in their absence. Occasionally, a handicapped stand-in appears in costume-festive, absurdly costly arrangements.

Aurora-Wanda von Sacher-Masoch still speaks of the unfortunate in the coarse language of the 19th century. At last, Aurora emerges from hiding. She stops pretending that she only crosses boundaries of propriety under duress. Anatol knows how to speak narcotic drivel. It affects Aurora so that her mask falls. We see the furiously curious, sometimes delighted, sometimes disappointed wife of a free spirit, forever used as a scapegoat. Anatol finally withdraws unrecognized, yet he leaves a final marker that allows for his unmasking. In his farewell letter, he reveals his congeniality. At any time, he could become sultry in Leopold’s place. In one fantasy, he presents himself in a “red ermine coat … and white atlas trousers.” The addressee lies at his feet, marveling at the exceptional catch.

“I will no doubt fall in love with Wanda, and she with me … a wonderful life—but I must not forget, for now, to break my father’s immaculate seal and tear up my family tree.”

Thus, the Wittelsbach King of Bavaria, Ludwig II, leaves a trace in the Sacher-Masochs’ house. The couple manages to identify Ludwig’s whispering agent: Prince William of Orange-Nassau. At this point, Aurora makes a careless slip. She refers to William’s brother Alexander as the deputy who staged the saddest scenes for her in the most illustrious settings. Her Prince d’Orange exhausted himself in the Parisian afterlife until his premature exit. Together with his mistress, the actress Henriette Hauser, he posed for Édouard Manet. Henriette embodied Manet’s immortal Nana. She paraded as “Citron.” She dubbed her lover “Prince de Citron.”

I wish for my Language Master Goya to be far more engaged and often in passing. My expectations aim at a series of small impulses that keep the erotic enterprise alive. For me, the oral, the provisional, and the in-between are sometimes as important as the main event.