When Marcel Proust was denied a kiss, the longing that remained gave birth to his future writings. Ensheathed by the principles of the mother and unconditional love, we are perpetually reborn.
Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time opens with a missing kiss. His mother stays at an evening party and sends word to her son that she cannot say goodnight to him tonight—and thus plunges him into a deep crisis. In the absence of his mother’s kiss, an inner space opens. A world emerges within the child lying awake that becomes the invisible framework for an entire work. The missing kiss becomes the primal scene of poetic productivity. It is not fulfillment but rather absence, longing, even deprivation that unleashes the creative force and the impulse to write. And it is precisely from these impulses that Proust creates a grand declaration of love, a space of memory, and an archive for his mother and grandmother, the central figures of his work.
My own relationship with language is also rooted in such a space of origin. My mother was a gifted storyteller. Her lullabies, ending with a goodnight kiss, formed a recurring ritual that entrusted me to the arms of Morpheus. In my sleep, I felt the fabric between body and soul, and with some part of my consciousness, I remained awake to it. In this sometimes almost lucid dream, I was carried by a protective fabric—an ethereal body enveloped me and, at the same time, it opened me, later developing into my poetic voice.
Despite—or perhaps precisely because of—this maternal protective space, I was a child plagued by intense fears. When darkness fell, demons and ghosts would emerge from every corner of the old, monastic farmstead where I grew up. When it was my turn to empty the compost bin, I had to go down all the stairs, hop along the stone-paved path beside the house, run across the meadow to the compost pile, empty the bucket, and run back. I returned with my heart pounding and cold sweat on the back of my neck—for I had encountered several hordes of ghosts who had laid their hands upon my shoulders.
Today, I believe that this fear was well-founded. The genius loci of the estate in the Markgräflerland of southwest Germany, built in the fifteenth century by the Saint Trudbert Monastery, made itself felt and yearned for human interpreters of its realm of experience. At the Staufen Waldorf Kindergarten and the St. George Waldorf School, this intuition was reinforced, nurtured, and developed. I learned to translate it into forms, painting my fears, and capturing them in diary entries and poems. In the spirit of Waldorf education, I learned to take seriously the images sprouting within me and to transform them into artistic forms. But this development came at a price. It isolated me from my peers; I withdrew into my inner world.
Now today, as a 46-year-old writer, I am slowly coming to realize that during my childhood and adolescence, a protective yet also precarious maternal space was shaped around me—one that allowed me to find my voice as a writer but also led me to turn away from the material world and toward the world of the spirit. Even today, I still trust most the voice of the child I was back then—just like the salon writer Proust who claimed that it was not he himself who wrote In Search of Lost Time, but “that little boy within me, playing among the ruins.” More and more, I’m beginning to comprehend the happiness and unhappiness of my childhood along such ruinous fault lines as my own Combray landscape, and in doing so, I become conscious of the irrepressible power of love and vitality that permeates this lost counterworld—a world that is so alluring precisely because of its loss.
Creative Responsibility
In the summer of 2021, a few months before the war broke out, I traveled to Ukraine to participate in my brother’s wedding to a Ukrainian woman and had a life-changing experience. During the wedding ceremony on the sandy banks of the Dnieper, I had a vision. With epiphanic force, I became conscious of my mother’s presence. She had passed away a few years earlier. This was not simply a memory; a real, protective force was present—the presence of someone who has died, but also a powerful presence blessing the bride and groom. Behind them, the Dnieper transformed into the river Styx—simultaneously forming the border between Slavic East and European West—at once connecting and dividing.
In this experience, something emerged that bears similarities to the figure of Sophia as described by the poet and religious philosopher Vladimir Soloviev who saw her three times in visions: a feminine wisdom of the divine who draws together the disparate into a oneness. At the same time, the event remained concrete and earthly—a marriage, a social and bodily union. It was precisely in this entanglement of the spiritual and the sensory that the significance of the moment became apparent.
From here, threads led to Fyodor Dostoevsky and his inquiry into the possibility of unconditional love as the foundation of community. Wherever he or Soloviev works, it becomes clear that the collapse of existing orders gives rise not only to loss but also to forces of transformation. It is as if this were a characteristic trait of the “Slavic soul”: the ability to experience metamorphosis in the very act of falling into the abyss.
Such processes are intensifying today. What Joseph Beuys referred to as the “Christ impulse”—from which he derived his expanded concept of art—can be understood as an indication that creative responsibility is shifting to the individual. Authority is shifting from the external to the internal. The new does not arise through taking over but through transformation, which must proceed entirely from human beings—from us. Meanwhile—almost as a complement to this—the American, Israeli, and Russian presidents behave like rulers from the time of the tsarist or imperial empires.
We are witnessing a resurgence of outdated, autocratic, and even theocratic forms of power: as exemplified by Donald Trump when he portrayed himself online as a messianic Christ figure who protects his flock in the war against Islamist mullahs or when he said at his inauguration that God had saved him so he could make America great again. In such moments, it becomes clear that, in an exaggerated form, the old, long-outdated principles are losing their validity and their destructive nature becomes fully apparent. Perhaps a typical moment of threshold experience can also be perceived here; the owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk.
Birth and Beginning
Against the backdrop of the current turning point in history, might the forms of power associated with the feminine and the mother goddesses be emerging from the shadows of a supposedly long-since secularized monotheism? Could this be what is symbolized in Mary, Sophia, Mary Magdalene, but also in pre-Christian figures such as Isis, Venus, Aphaia, Chora, or Athena? This does not refer to a dichotomous counterforce to the father deities in the usual sense, but rather to a revolutionary feminine quality of connection, of weaving, of becoming—a force not centered on one will, but unfolding through relationship, like an onion with no center that continues to multiply, whose goal is not to bloom but to reproduce and pass on its form. A principle that is also structurally found in the art and thought of modernism, particularly in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time or in Dostoevsky’s books, all of which resemble a vast tapestry whose parts—moved by an invisible force—seem to emerge from the preceding ones. A force with which, in fairy tales, the beanstalk grows all the way up to the moon.
This principle resembles what Hannah Arendt referred to as “natality”: the right, inscribed in the body of every single human being, to bring something new into the world through one’s birth. In contrast to Martin Heidegger and his “being-toward-death,” Arendt focuses on birth and beginning as fundamental categories of human existence.
I became conscious of this dimension in a sudden, jarring moment of realization while mourning my mother. Her lifeless body lay in her singing therapy studio—marked by the suddenness of her death from a brain hemorrhage and the hours she had spent lying on the cold laminate floor. And yet the sight of her did not evoke only horror, but also a piercing clarity. When I saw her corpse—the body from which I had been born in time beyond memory—I could clearly perceive the separation of body and soul and know it not as an end but as a transition. From an anthroposophical perspective, this moment can be understood as an indication of the independence of the spiritual. The body appears as a sheath, as the cocoon of a flying creature that is shed during the process of emergence. At the same time, it asks us—the living—to carry on the legacy of the dead. A plea that permeates all genuine literature.
And so this farewell became an impulse—not for turning away from life, but for embracing it in a more conscious way. The maternal body appears not only as a biographical origin but also as a call to have courage to embrace the new—to envision, perhaps, a society of the future, one where creative, connecting forces enter social life more strongly and open the structures of patriarchy toward something unforeseen. Whether this can truly give rise to a new, more feminine and tender social form remains to be seen. Yet much suggests that we stand at a threshold where destructive and creative forces are simultaneously intensifying and rushing toward a terrifying abyss. Never in my life has the future looked so bleak, and yet the possibility of a breakthrough into a freer society has never seemed more tangible.
What emerges from this is less a theory and more my fundamental artistic experience: that at the very heart of loss lies the seed of the artistic impulse. And that every farewell contains a beginning, a call. We must set out now, Mother—fly, angel, fly!
Translation Joshua Kelberman
