Esoteric Exaltation

Humanity began its prayers in the forest. Its first cathedrals were domes of foliage. Now yearning members of the affluent middle class are returning to decelerated rituals of devotion beneath trees that already towered forty meters high when Shakespeare was writing his plays. They follow trappers along narrow game trails through the last genuine undergrowth on Earth. Biological warfare has reduced the world's forests to a mere appendix of their original extent. Exhausted nature has switched into overkill mode. On a biblical scale it deploys fungi, insects, fire, and drought.

Once a week, Alisa—a holder of a doctorate in philology, a certified wilderness guide, and a native of the Eder Valley—leads well-heeled eccentrics, women whose daily work as senior executives contributes to the destruction of the planet's green foundations, into the cathedral forests of the North Hessian Highlands above the floodplains of the River Eder. There, under extraordinarily adverse conditions, survives one of the last remaining primeval forests on Earth. Within the living continuum of this ecological climax community, the pilgrims attain exalted states of esoteric rapture. They embrace trees, kiss them, nibble at their bark. To them, Mother Nature is a ruined potentate expected to bestow perceptual orgasms worthy of the lofty prices charged for fashionable spiritual retreats.

Forests, too, are societies: systems of hierarchy and astonishingly complex subsystems that delegate the labor of survival ever further downward, until one imagines there can be nothing left beneath. And only then does the real abundance begin—all those proteins to go. Nothing keeps you fitter than a diet of grubs, worms, and wild celery. Everywhere hang nature's own toolboxes.

Alisa performs her role as a tree whisperer on the side. Her real profession is sifting through the cold coffee grounds of academically antiquated doctrines that have yet to be discarded at Eder Valley Landgrave Philip University. She cherishes the philologically intimate dialogue she shares with Professor Colt Coogan—CC for short. Her erotic life unfolds as an endless speech act. And from time to time she is happy to make use of her lovers in passing, between one engagement and the next. For Alisa, the moment of climax fascinates only as the antechamber to something far more essential. There is discount arousal available for pennies, and there is the priceless premium program of erotic experience.

Once again, Alisa enjoys the privilege of being alone with Colt in his office. The dean sits behind a cabinet desk as though behind a barricade, distant and inaccessible. He affects an air of leisurely elegance in a velvet suit with a pocket square. It is extravagance of a particular kind. Colt embodies his own measure of things. Not an inch surrendered to chance. No concessions to the grayness of the ordinary.

The desk bears the patina of two centuries. This imposing piece was crafted in a Thuringian workshop that, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, produced furniture for professors and state officials. Goethe himself purchased furnishings there. The front is decorated with intricate marquetry, a band of ebony and pearwood. Hidden compartments lie concealed behind the upper doors.

Alisa already knows that Colt perceives her presence just as intensely as she perceives his. No other constellation approaches this one in its perfect redundancy. Across every domain, master of language and pupil repeat one another. Once more, Alisa brings up Wanda von Sacher-Masoch. She dispenses with any academic pretext. Both have long since moved beyond such charades. The black pencil skirt, the hold-up stockings, the deliberate omission of a bra—all of it belongs to the staging, but also to a long, pleasurable prelude, an expansion of the playing field far beyond its apparent limits.

The obedience of a dominatrix. The paradox. The truth in which hardly anyone takes an interest, although it is so much more compelling than the distortions of biography.

Aurora performed like an actress in Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's private dramas. Her dominance was as threadbare as her everyday dresses. While Leopold presents himself in his prose as a wealthy gentleman, in reality he was chronically short of money—though, at least initially, still comparatively well-off by the standards of Aurora, who had fallen into poverty before returning to respectable bourgeois life with Leopold's help.

"I agreed with everything he said, because I did not believe in this marriage... I did not even wish for it. He had been engaged too many times before... Honest and conscientious in spirit, he believed himself capable of more than either his temperament or his imagination could sustain. I was resolved to give myself to him, but I wanted to be nothing more than a beautiful episode in his life."

How was he supposed to entertain a wide audience when nothing entertained him? Put differently, Aurora proved an unsatisfactory dominatrix. Leopold pressured her relentlessly, interpreting her refusals as violations of a wife's duties.

"Do you imagine I can write novellas as easily as you knit stockings? My work depends upon moods, upon inspiration. You know what inspires me. If you want me to earn bread for you and your children, then surely you can do your part as well."

Aurora yielded. Defeated, she took up the whip.

Alisa wonders how she might introduce the prop into one of their own arrangements. She suffers the frustrations of a theatre director who cannot regard a production as successful, even though the critics applaud it. In private, something essential remains missing.

The institutional dignity of the master of language—his symbolic authority and accumulated prestige. At the same time, the university's medieval atmosphere makes its own indispensable contribution. The old estate provides the templates for enchantingly lunar settings, for twists and thrills.

Alisa's erotic phantasm shimmers in feudal colors and, taken as a whole, amounts to a theatrical anachronism.