It is
all part of the beauty, the pure, plastic beauty. The body also of the
Christus is stiff and conventionalized, yet curiously beautiful in
proportion, and in the static tension which makes it unified into one
clear thing. There is no movement, no possible movement. The being is
fixed, finally. The whole body is locked in one knowledge, beautiful,
complete. It is one with the nails. Not that it is languishing or dead.
It is stubborn, knowing its own undeniable being, sure of the absolute
reality of the sensuous experience. Though he is nailed down upon an
irrevocable fate, yet, within that fate he has the power and the delight
of all sensuous experience. So he accepts the fate and the mystic
delight of the senses with one will, he is complete and final. His
sensuous experience is supreme, a consummation of life and death
at once.
It is the same at all times, whether it is moving with the scythe on the
hill-slopes, or hewing the timber, or steering the raft down the river
which is all effervescent with ice; whether it is drinking in the
Gasthaus, or making love, or playing some mummer's part, or hating
steadily and cruelly, or whether it is kneeling in spellbound subjection
in the incense-filled church, or walking in the strange, dark,
subject-procession to bless the fields, or cutting the young birch-trees
for the feast of Frohenleichnam, it is always the same, the dark,
powerful mystic, sensuous experience is the whole of him, he is mindless
and bound within the absoluteness of the issue, the unchangeability of
the great icy not-being which holds good for ever, and is supreme.
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