I was 14 years old when I first read this name: Abraxas
And I am not sure why it has been appearing in my head for the past couple of days, randomly, maybe it is just a semantic game that my brain is playing with me
Yes, it was on Herr Hermann Hesse’s book Demian [link in English] that I read it
and yes 14 years old when I read Demian, and after reading that book I was never again the same adolescent, those images of Emil Sinclair, his friend Demian, his mother Frau Eva, and the bird giving birth to a new world, and other ideas did change me, and profoundly
Changes as the year changes you with its mutating seasons
the Autumn here, with a first leaf a couple of days ago gently falling
on the street cement
back on Hesse, then I was around 24 or 26 years old when I took a long vacation in Autlán, my grandmother’s and mother’s hometown in Mexico… Esperanza (my grandmother) handed me a copy of “El Lobo Estepario" Der Steppenwolf, this book gave me so many bloody nightmares! And I don’t mean “bloody” as in a British insult, but literally bloody, as in dreaming every night rivers of blood during the week I was reading it… I don’t remember this book being particularly ‘violent’ at all, but I do remember it getting into your subconscious and making it ‘tickle’… I also remember very well the one specific blood dream during the reading:
There was this big parking lot in a city, there were just a few cars parked, leaving almost all the spaces empty, it was dark at night and then a sea of blood with big waves of blood inundated the parking lot, big waves of blood, very ala Stanley Kubrick’s The Shinning elevator scene
I guess Herr Hesse’s words did take me to the Magic Theatre with protagonist Harry
I have read before and after other works by him… when I was 19 or 20 I read "Narciso y Goldmundo" [Narziss und Goldmund], a beautiful book on growing and many others of his tales like Baden, Baden and of course I have read his famous Siddhartha… a great writer that I haven’t read in many years but whose shadow is in my life as it seems, permanently
Worth mentioning that almost all the Herman Hesse books I have read have been in Spanish
Maybe after this little blog acknowledgment/tribute to Abraxas, his name will stop flying inside my head. I have my theories maybe I think of this name because I think more of Germany these days, and I relate Hermann Hesse with Germany, who knows how my silly brain really works? Not me for sure, but it is just curious that I think of this name, and not Demian, or Emil, or Eva, or not another character of the book that I am actually reading (still on A Line of Beauty The story of Nick Guest, a handsome young gay man and Oxford graduate, who is actually a guest of a rich family and with high politic hierarchy in London, it is the 80’s, when AIDS was unleashing, there are tons of Margaret Thatcher as "the Lady", and cocaine snoring stories & references, and also some of the most beautiful sentences that I have read in English literature lately, the book by respected Alan Hollinghurst)
oh well, a strange head & thoughts, and a slightly skewed perception of life
I sometimes carry over my shoulders, and no, I am not crazy...
well a maybe a little… but nothing too serious ;)
