I am happily married, but for those looking to meet a partner, a major challenge can be where to meet compatible people, especially face to face. With the truckers’ convoy in Ottawa, and assuming that some of them are single, it will be interesting to see if a few long-lasting relationships will be formed among people who love freedom and otherwise would have had a hard time finding compatible people in town.
But for freedom lovers who are not single and who may be led into temptation by the attractiveness of the convoy, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe’s “The Diary” (1810) is a poem for you:
“The Diary” tells the story of a man who encounters temptation while travelling away from home on business.
The poem begins optimistically by asserting that human being are inherently good and have within us the natural impulses that would stop us from hurting others:
We’ve heard and heard and finally believe:
There’s no enigma like the heart of man.
The things we do! No good to twist or weave—
We’re human yet, in Rome as Turkestan.
What’s my advice? Forget it. Maybe heave
One sigh, and then live with it if you can.
Also, when sins come nudging with that leer,
Count on some Sturdy Virtue to appear.
One day the speaker was traveling back home from a business trip, dreaming of being back with his wife in their marriage bed, when his carriage broke down. The stranded traveller finds shelter in an inn, where a pretty young woman welcomes him. The traveller is so distracted by the arousing hostess that he experiences a writer’s block, and the imagery of phallic arousal begins in earnest:
I feel that certain stirring-up begin
And dizzy with her, crazy for—I hurl
The chair away; impulsively I twist her
Into my arms, close, closer. “Listen, mister,
Cool it,” she cuddles murmuring. “My aunt,
Old hatchet face, is listening all the time.
She’s down there guessing what I can or can’t
Be up to every minute. . . .
Then sweet and low: “First tell me once or twice
You love me as a person? Say you do.
As girls around here go, I’m rather nice.
Said no to every man, till I saw you.
Why do you think they call me ‘Piece of Ice’?
Of ice, indeed! Just feel! I’m melting through.
You did it to me, darling. So be good.
And let’s be lovers, do as lovers should. . . .
But just as the speaker and the young lady are about to do the deed, the morality police intervenes: his fuel is confiscated; his breakfast sausage is not delivered as expected:
She pressed her cooler breasts against my heat
As if she liked it and felt safer there.
Lips linger on her lips; toes reach and meet,
But—something funny happening elsewhere.
What always strutted in the leading role
Now shrank like some beginner. Bless my soul! . . .
The more I brooded on my situation,
The more I seethed with curses, inwardly.
Laughed at myself, God knows without elation.
It got me down.
Unable to take advantage of the opportunity at hand due to this erectile failure, the narrator lets his thoughts drift back to his wife, who never failed to arouse him:
Ah, but my heart leaped then, and every sense,
My whole man’s-shape a pulsing of delight.
Lord, how I swept her off in a wild dance
Light in my arms, her weight against me tight.
You’d think I fought myself for her. One glance
Would tell how I grew greater, gathered might
For her sake, mind and body, heart and soul.
That was the day my actor lived his role!
As the narrator reminisces about his wife, he gains an erection—only to lose it again when he tries to wake up the sleeping girl. His body is teaching him, it seems, to wait patiently for the reunion with his wife. He fondly recalls past times with his wife:
. . . What a friend
My sturdy plowboy then! He wouldn’t scare!
But now, with all the virgin field to reap,
Look at the lousy helper sound asleep.
Or was. But now he’s rousing. He’s the one!
You can’t ignore him, and you can’t command.
He’s suddenly himself. And like the sun,
Is soaring full of splendor. Sauve and bland.
You mean the long thirst’s over with and done?
The desert traveler’s at the promised land?
I lean across to kiss my sleeping girl
And—hey!—the glorious banner starts to furl!
What made him tough and proud a moment? She,
His only idol now, as long ago;
The one he took in church exultantly.
From worlds away it comes, that rosy glow.
And, as before it worried him to be
Meager, so now he’s vexed at swelling so
With her afar. Soft, soft, he shrinks away
Out of the magic circle, all dismay.
The newfound moral strength also resolves the writer’s block. Hans Rudolf Vaget “reads the poem as metatextual. The diarist’s impotence is accompanied by writer’s block, and the resolution of the poem also contains a poetic unblocking. The poem’s motto also refers to writing: only in the crisis of creativity is the full power of creativity revealed” (in Bell 250).
That’s that. I’m up and scribbling, “Close to home,
I almost thought I wouldn’t make it there.
Honey, I’m yours, in Turkestan or Rome.
I’m writing you in bed, and by a bare
--Well, call it piece of luck or something, hmmmm!
Impotence proved I’m superman. Now where
‘S a prettier riddle. Leave it; read the rest.
Dearest, I’ve told you all. Except the best.”
Then cook-a-doodle-doo! At once the girl’s
Thrown off a bed sheet and thrown on a slip;
She rubs her eyes, shakes out her tousled curls
Looks blushing at bare feet and bites her lip.
Without a word she’s vanishing in swirls
Of underpretties over breast and hip.
She’s dear, I murmur—rushing from above
Down to my coach. And on the road for love!
I’ll tell you what, we writers like to bumble
Onto a moral somewhere, forehead glowing
Over a Noble Truth. Some readers grumble
Unless they feel improved. My moral’s showing
Look, it’s a crazy world. We slip and stumble,
But two things, love and Duty, keep us going.
I couldn’t rightly call them hand in glove.
Duty?—who really needs it? Trust your love.
Do human beings really possess natural mechanisms, powered by love and empathy, that guide us toward moral action—which sometimes mean doing nothing?
In recent days, the media has been full of sentences such as, “we just need the police to do their jobs” or “the federal government has discussed invoking special emergency powers to deal with ongoing protests in Ottawa, Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair says, calling a lack of enforcement in the nation's capital ‘inexplicable.’”
<https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/lack-of-enforcement-in-ottawa-inexplicable-blair/ar-AATNIlA>
Might Goethe’s poem help in some ways to explain the inexplicable?
There have also been some rumors and anecdotal reports in recent days that some people are far from enthusiastic about treating the protesters harshly and find it difficult to obey the will of their political masters instead of following their moral obligation to protect the Canadian people and uphold the constitution. Has it been difficult for some Canadians to stay hard when in their hearts they feel soft empathy and core agreement with the protesters?
Matthew Bell writes that “as T.J Reed and others have observed, the reference to duty in the poem’s last line appears to be a riposte to Kant’s moral theory. Whereas Kant grounds his ethics in the idea of duty to the law, which alone can motivate our adherence to moral maxims, in Goethe’s poem it is natural impulse that leads to moral behaviour. . . . . As T.J Reed puts it, ‘Love itself rather than duty has kept him faithful, the organism has itself controlled his behaviour. Such is the potency of natural morality—or the morality of natural impotence’” (p. 350).
The speaker’s natural impotence is not unlike the resistance that Jonathan Swift expects the readers of The Modest Proposal (1729) to feel when their entire beings rebel against the pseudo-scientific idea of eating babies as a “solution” to the problem of poverty in Ireland.
Reflecting on the tension between Goethe’s natural morality and Kant’s law-centered categorical imperative is especially poignant in light of the Holocaust. For the majority of people living under Nazism, the mechanisms of natural morality failed.
A number of thinkers have explored the connections between the legacy of Kant’s categorical, law-centered approach to morality and the collapse of morality under Nazism <
>. In Nazi Germany, the idea of duty was invoked as a categorical imperative to enforce compliance to “laws” that violated human rights and irrevocably tarnished the image of Germany among the nations. It did not help Kant’s reputation that Adolf Eichmann, at his trial, tried to “defend” himself by saying that he was following the Kantian imperative to obey the law. While the horrors of Nazism cannot be blamed on the by-then-long-dead Kant, the ways in which the eighteenth-century philosopher was exploited by the likes of Eichmann highlight the vulnerability of formal logic—how easily it can be distorted and manipulated to serve dictators who speak in the name of “duty.”
Goethe’s poem, in contrast, is decidedly non-Nazi in its intellectual underpinnings: it asserts the universality of human nature (“We’re human yet, in Rome as Turkestan”); it describes impotence as the characteristic of a superman (“Impotence proved I’m superman”), and it upholds love—which hopefully can be extended to the love of humanity—over duty (“Duty?—who really needs it?—Trust your love”). In Goethe and the Jews: A Challenge to Hitlerism (1934), Mark Waldman makes the case that the individualistic Goethe, had he lived under Hitler, would have ended up in a concentration camp. Too bad that those living under the master-race delusions of Nazism did not experience a bit more impotence induced by natural morality and resulting in a failure to perform.
And for us today, may love and natural morality continue to protect us from the risk of totalitarianism masked as duty.
References
The Essential Goethe, edited and introduced by Matthew Bell (Princeton, 2016) [the text of the poem is from this edition.]
Matthew Bell’s “Juvenalian Satire and the Divided Self in Goethe’s ‘Das Tagebuch’” Goethe Yearbook XVII (2010). 349-363.