I’ve finally written myself free for a few more weeks and I can maybe tackle my book again . . .

which is what happened in these past eight days and nights—with a more stunning debacle than before, to be sure, although the conditions weren’t necessarily success-oriented . . .

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But this time the debacle was more thorough, the failure far more spectacular than ever . . .

What happened?

Something occult, if that’s what you want to call it (Uncle Helmuth, his eyes shining, would have called it that):

A Schwab released from the body of cells and floating in air as a pure metaorganism had been annoying me since my return here like a fly stubbornly buzzing around my nose—and I didn’t want it to alight. It came from some carrion. My dream had hatched it—not the dream I had only just slipped away from, being absolved by the shy smile of my foster mother from the flower cup and redeemed. It was actually the other dream, the cellar dream, where an old bag of a cleaning woman lay murdered, her face smeared by a shovel into a Rorschach splotch . . . And whether it was a dream or a repressed reality—whether (and if so, in what way) Schwab was connected—I did not wish to be bothered by it now.

I lay in bed, keeping my eyes shut. For the time being (at last! after all the tortured days and nights), I was not available to ghosts—to any transcendental individual, no matter how interestingly he manifested himself. At least for the brief moment of my setting out into a richly creative day (and all its failure and frustration), I wanted to be untroubled by any sort of basement reminiscences: wartime air-raid basement experiences, Viennese occult basement existence, reality-constructing catacomb societies from the Reichsmark era, basement children of the new Neunteuffelian reality disguised as film producers, the topography and atmosphere of the basement in which I killed that dreadful crone in my dream (and where in reality?). My foster mother’s smile from the flower cup (un sourire presque espiègle) had exonerated me for the moment: I could take a few breaths without lifting the weight of a sin with each. I could afford, then, to think quite soberly about the contents of my notes, and try to restore the one I had lost, which I missed as if it were the key to my book.

It was easy to recall the train of thought. Snails produce their houses at the command of the species; they have no biological choice, as it were; but still, their houses have individual peculiarities. One can tell by the changing styles of art-historical eras that human beings obey such biological orders in the way they express themselves collectively. And one can see that these orders are cyclical in the way they change; that they repeat certain elements of expression in the changing of the expression, reiterate them in terms of time symmetry, as it were (every art-historical phase ends in its baroque) . . . That was roughly the gist. And oddly enough, it completely calmed me down. I enjoyed the notion of a tide-like now-and-again, of something breathing, pulsing through the world, making mankind lean alternately in one direction, then the other, like a wheat field in the wind (and the winds, as if sparked by Aeolus’s divinely musical sentiment, truly blow first from here, then from there into the various cultures). This notion virtually carried me away from the planet, putting me far beyond it, in a demiurgical contemplation: