YEARNINGS OF THE PAINTER (1915)

from "Im Nacken das Sternemeer", 1918.*

Thronging of Parisian blue on a bare chalk base; a cynical and carping zinc-yellow; white and ivory black; the hue of the old and bedridden; a permanent green next to screams of cinnabar; umber, a bright cadmium and fiery ultramarine - yes, life must be hedged in by tubes of fat and exuberant oil paint. You must lock yourself fast between your four ash-grey studio walls, dance around before large pieces of canvas, curse all to yourself, be mad, scratch yourself, and clench a thunder-and-lightning palette in your fist.

I dream up the most magnificent subjects, apocalyptic throngs, Hebrew prophets and mass-grave hallucinations (for `Geist' is all - as to nature, you can have it), but even that is not enough: those tubes, bursting with oil, are almost more important still, for it is the paints themselves that do part of the painting, the inventing, the celebrating.

Sometimes I plant myself in front of my easel, all stupid and emptied out, I grin with my unshaken and freckled cheeks; suddenly some outline jumps out of that dull chrome cake, the cinnabar starts screaming and a wonderful chaos-world emerges from under my briskly brushes.

Paints, paints, paints without number! I shall marry into an oil paint factory. My wife will bring a thousand tubes of umber, ocher, cobalt, Krems white and madder lacquer into the marriage. My wife will be angular, frenetic and hot. She must have arms a mile long to tie me tightly to her. We will cram ourselves into a narrow bed, Ida, and we will dream of burnt umber. I shall bite off your head and play ball with it in my shrill and dissolute nights.

You winter nights! Passion and wildness till six in the morning. Let's have that snow white paper now! I bury my carpenter's pencil deep in the snow. Left and right I whisk that pencil. Just behind Sirius I put a chaos of china ink. A little child is crying in there. No mourning ash-tree casts its shadow.

Let's have that rum-bottle now, I want to guzzle. I press the easel against my hairless chest and dance obscenely and like a drunk.

Some money now, Madame! I want to rent myself six octogenarians, I shall cover them up with rough clods of earth until only their pointed knees and their yellow necks stick out. That is how I shall paint them, with paints of sheer laughter.

A steamer drifts along the river. A footbridge hangs thin above that silver surging. The man-pig trots across. Now... crunch, a crash, screams to God!

The roofs of the city open in the night winds. Zinc-yellow snouts and pink tongues push out of the gullet of the city. Above the studio window there hangs the comet of the plague…

But this is the yearning of the true painter: umber with zinc-yellow and Parisian blue! A bottle of rum! The thunder-and-lightning palette, the dissolute lover, and the hand stretched out toward the stars!

....

We have loved drawing from way back, we stupid, playful, laughing humans. From the first charming stammerings of primitive people to Kokoschka and Hermann Huber; from Raphael's disciplined style to the pornographic doodles on our piss-house walls. Drawing makes you happy, healthy, and a believer. I'm always alone. No girl loves me. No woman wants to sleep with me. No friend wants to be with me. I have no home, no country, am poor, outlawed and much hated . . . but I can draw, freely swing here and there . . . and I rejoice with the pencil, sing, pray and praise the Great Almighty!

....

WINTER ANNO 17

God's winter sweeps over us. Europe gnashes its teeth. The doors screech open. Woe, woe, millions of creatures drop and vanish, all blue, and millions grow stiff, twisted in trenches, and their blasphemies freeze on their lips…

Ear-deafening frost falls from the eastern sky. An icy storm knocks my helmet off my head. My bald pate flies far away into the steely cold. Icicle-night encircles the slums. The cold explodes around the houses which sway in the blast. The cold flies from the moon whose teeth chatter.

Further and further winter stretches the silence of distant battle-fields. Howling, it drags itself across Poland's steppes, whips around the fluttering out-posts, and the sentry in his hole pants inaudibly against his gun butt.

In the trench-shelters, at the roar of the unsteady lamp, human shapes lie about, half frozen, bodies distorted. They gasp and they puff, and the tobacco in their bellies sings a song and their farts thrash out a choppy refrain.

Packed tight around the stove in the barracks, lice-ridden warriors sit, with tatters of beard, covered in boils, and liquid manure runs out of their mouths. Others are playing cards. They play like kettle-drummers. A monkey sits on their foreheads, until the glowing stove falls over them, and dripping sweat they rush out of the house, put parched snouts to water spouts and an icy flood runs down their sticky clots of hair and snotty noses.

In the slums the women are howling. Curses come out of the cellars and rat-nests. The need for coal screams out of the windows. Influenza nests in all the corners. The children whine and their whooping-cough cries pierce through the daily routine. The baker has nothing left in his store. He pushes his hands deep into his pockets and freezes, and above him the day-owls cry "Death, death," and the flags flutter soundlessly in the north-east.

* Im Nacken das Sternemeer. Leipzig: Kurt Wolff 1918