The Blazing World

Harriet Burden Notebook K

April 19, 2001

He is clever, not as Felix was clever. Felix knew how to excite collectors, how to flatter them, how to make them imagine they were the ones who had truly seen and understood the work of art in front of them. This man wants all eyes on him all the time. He films himself every day, as if the camera tells him he is alive. He would like to be an escape artist — that, above all, I think. Defy nature or appear to defy nature’s limits.

I just want to work and pull off my scheme.

And yet, I like him. He has an almost weightless bounce. I have a feeling he will want to play, because the manipulation of appearances excites him. For him, the pleasure is almost sexual, a form of titillation, yes, of rising. Tumescence. This I can feel. It is not the aging Harriet who attracts him, but my talk. He is not Anton, my green mask, or Phinny, my blue one. Phinny and I were each other or enough of each other to skip along in tandem, a duet, two whistlers out for an adventure or misadventure, P & H. But Phinny is leaving me. He’s fallen in love with the Argentinian, and I can see the lights have turned on in his eyes. How I will miss him. It was easy for us to mingle.

Rune, a name made of stone, another pseudonym altogether: gray.

He has a tic. He licks his front teeth as if checking for food.

I want to stage Rune. I want to discover the works that are his works but which I will make. Rune will be my Johannes the Seducer: terrible, sly, brilliant mask. The Kierkegaard commentators have missed the heart of the ogre. They suppress the sadistic thrill.

Peel the onion of personas, from one to the next, moving further and further inside the book.

Listen to this, Harry. You remember when you first read it. The sentence comes right near the end of the first volume. You are still in Part I. It shook you hard. Remember? He was your own being, wasn’t he? Not Cordelia.

No, that’s a lie. Poor Cordelia. But that poor is the something you spit out, reject, cough up, vomit out. Not always, not always, but the seduction is complete, his of you, not as a woman but as a man. I am Johannes. The reader Johannes seduces becomes Johannes — in part. There’s the knot. Look at the knot. It is so dull, so familiar, so unjust being treated as a woman first, always as a woman. I rebel. Why womanliness first? Why this trait first? Inescapable.

Dr. F. noticed that I was wearing a skirt. He knows. It is only the second time in all these years, he said. It is noteworthy. It was a show of vulnerability. The ones in skirts are vulnerable. This is the history of women in skirts.

Women fall, drop from the skies, one after the other, falling and falling again. Open your thighs, beloved, and I will hurl you over the cliff to your death. Vagina as battleground. Vagina as ruin. But he never says, Let me in. That is the coup. Her only power is in not letting him in. I will cross my legs tightly.

Cross your thighs, Cordelia.

The Seducer writes, “Everything is a metaphor. I myself am a myth about myself, for is it not a myth that I hasten to this tryst? Who I am is irrelevant; everything finite and temporal is forgotten; only the eternal remains, the power of erotic longing, its bliss.”

The Seducer lives only on the page. He is a phantasm of A, who is a phantasm of Eremita, the editor of Either/Or, who is in turn a phantasm of Søren Kierkegaard, long dead and animated by his pages.

Isn’t A appalled by his own aesthetic invention?I

We are all myths to ourselves.

Johannes is going to fuck Cordelia.

And then he will leave her.

S.K. loved Regina, and he left her. He did not literally screw her, it seems. He left her virginity for another, but he hurt her to the quick.II

“I shall not bid her farewell,” writes Johannes, “nothing is more revolting than the feminine tears and pleas that alter everything and yet are essentially meaningless. I did love her, but from now on she can no longer occupy my soul. If I were a god, I would do for her what Neptune did for the nymph: transform her into a man.”

There they are, the last five words: the razor.

I will transform myself into a man through Rune.

Will I become Johannes?

But Johannes was not Søren. He wasn’t A. No, he was not. We know S.K. believed in women’s tears and women’s pleas and women’s prayers. And I am not Rune. And yet, and yet, and yet, I am he somewhere else, in the phantasmagoria. Let me whisper in your ear. Let me whisper that the fantasy man with the dialectical whip is Søren, too. A trickster. I will borrow a trickster self.

Look at me, a Prometheus. I am myself a myth about myself. Who I am has nothing to do with it.

I. Burden compares the role she wants Rune to play to Kierkegaard’s use of Johannes, the pseudonymous author of “A Seducer’s Diary,” the final section of Either/Or, Part I. In the diary, Johannes writes about his seduction of Cordelia, which he manages with such consummate skill that she imagines she is pursuing him. Part I is an “onion” of pseudonymity. The editor, Victor Eremita, writes the preface for Part I. A is the character who occupies the aesthetic point of view in the first volume and declares himself the editor of “A Seducer’s Diary,” but not its author. Following Eremita, Burden understands that Johannes is A’s fictional creature, the pseudonym of a pseudonym, a “metaphor” and a “myth” that represents an extreme aesthetic position of reflection. A is horrified by his own creation. In the preface Eremita writes, “It really seems as if A himself has become afraid of his fiction, which, like a troubled dream, continued to make him feel uneasy, also in the telling” (Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. III, 9).

II. Kierkegaard met Regina Olsen in 1837 when he was twenty-four and she was fourteen. They became engaged in 1840, but a year later he broke the engagement, leaving Regina by all accounts in despair. Kierkegaard writes, “So, there was nothing else for me to do but to venture to the uttermost, to support her, if possible, by means of a deception, to do everything to repel her from me in order to rekindle her pride.” Quoted in Joachim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 186. Although he repeatedly declares his love for her in his journals, the reason for his withdrawal from his promise has been the subject of endless scholarly speculation. Despite her fascination with Kierkegaard, Burden thought S.K.’s relations with Regina were “perverse.” In Notebook K, she writes, “Regina occupies the remote space assigned to all female love objects and muses. Poor Regina! Poor Cordelia! I turn the tables!”