August Strindberg A Blue Book

A Blue Book by Strindberg

A Blue Book is August Strindberg“s largest book of prose (the final version runs over 1200 pages). Strindberg put in all kinds of material in A Blue Book. It consists of short essays, aphorisms, personal portraits and fictitious conversations between Swedenborg and himself. When the first part (4 in all) was published in 1907. Strindberg dedicated the book to Swedenborg "the master and leader" from the " disciple". A Blue Book is not translated to English, therefore I have tried to translate some pieces that I found interesting.
A woman-hater?
Strindberg was often accused of being a misogynist and he really did write some nasty pieces. One of his hate articles had the header "Woman“s inferiority to Man"! In the following paragraph Strindberg tries to explain and defend himself: Lithograph by Edvard Munch paintings and a short biography

Cowards
The Disciple asked: What is a misogynist? The Master replied: I do not know; but it is used by cowards as a term of abuse for those who say what everybody thinks. Cowards are the men who cannot approach a woman without going out of their minds and becoming treacherous. They buy the woman’s favour by serving their friends’ heads on a silver plate; and they absorb so much femininity that they see with her eyes and feel with her feelings. Agreed: there are things you do not mention in everyday conversation, and you do not tell your woman what is the essence of her gender; but one is sometimes allowed to write it. Schopenhauer put it best, Nietzsche not badly, Joséphin Péladan is the master; Thackeray wrote Men’s Wives, but that was suppressed; Balzac unmasked Caroline in Physiologie du mariage, and Petites misčres de la vie conjugale; Otto Weininger, having discovered the treachery when he was twenty, did not wait for the revenge but left the scene. I have said that the child is a criminal in the making that cannot control itself, but I love children nevertheless. I have also said that woman is what she is, but I have always been in love with a woman, and had children with her. Thus, he who calls me a misogynist is a fool, a liar, or a coward - or all three rolled into one!

Do not play with love
The disciple continued: When a man and a woman unite in love, a single being arises whose existence is in itself pleasurable as long as harmony reigns. But this being is such an extremely sensitive reception device, or coherer, that it is subject to interferences from the currents of others, near and far, a disadvantage that it shares with wireless telegraphy. Therefore, a disturbed relationship between spouses is the greatest suffering that exists, and unfaithfulness is a cosmic crime which leads one or the other party into a perverted relationship with their own sex. If the man casts his feelings towards another woman, the wife is exposed to terrible alternating currents which by turns make her hate and love the woman who is her rival. Often she may make friends with the man’s lover, but more often she gets to hate her. And those who go between two lovers shall not go unpunished, for the hatred they generate is so terrible that they may be paralysed by the discharges and lose their energy and zest for life. Therefore it is said: Do not play with love.

Devastation and salvation
In the following paragraph Strindberg discus the meaning of sufferings like paranoia and obsessions, seen as a way to salvation. The meaning is that a person that feels damned should receive it as a gift from God, a trial leading to salvation! Strindberg viewed his experiences during the inferno period as his necessary devastation, that opened his mind.

Imaginary punishments
The Master continued: Swedenborg speaks of being punished through imaginings. This is what the doctors vulgarly call obsessive ideas. He who suffers from paranoia is being persecuted; the simpletons maintain that he is persecuted by his own imaginations only, but if the wise man asks why he is persecuted by his imaginations, conscience answers by guessing indefinitely at the persecutor; and now the sick person goes through the list of the people he has wronged. And if there are really many wronged and their hatred is justified, it may well be that the sick person is being persecuted by their hatred, now recognised by his aroused conscience. In my mind, punishment through imagination has played the most important part, but after I discovered logic I always accepted it as punishment. The most difficult thing is suspicion, when I am forced to be suspicious of innocents; it is overpowering and my thoughts waver between trust and distrust; I struggle and gradually get the better of myself by admitting I am wrong, or in resignation accepting the breach of faith. But if I vent my suspicion, I have to ask to be forgiven; and then I accept humiliation as a receipt. Most of my misfortunes have been imaginary but they have had the same effect as real ones, for I was made aware of my own guilt. Incurable is the one who is hardened in the belief that he is being innnocently persecuted - by other human beings.

Missing Mrs. Bosse
The next paragraph is a comment on what Strindberg wrote in the Occult Diary about imagined, but strongly felt, visits by his former wife Harriet Bosse. Harriet Bosse

Mirages
The Master continued: After living in solitude for some time, I begin to see my friends as mirages. Some of them gain by distance and are surrounded by peace and a kindly light. Others, whom I in fact like when they are close, lose and are felt to be hostile. Thus, I may hate a close friend in his absence, see him in an ugly and hostile light; but as soon as he turns up there is friendly contact. There is a woman whose proximity I cannot stand but who is dear to me at a distance; we write letters, always considerate and friendly; when we have longed for each other and feel we must meet, we fall out at once, becoming common and unpleasant, and part in anger. We are fond of each other on a higher level, but we cannot be in the same room, and we dream of a reunion, dematerialized, on a verdant island with only the two of us, and possibly our child. I remember a halfhour when the three of us were actually walking hand in hand on the shore of a verdant island, and I had the impression that this was heaven. Then the dinner bell called and we were back on earth, and soon afterwards in hell.

Lust, hate and fear, or the religion of the heathen
The Master spoke: You know that one of my lifelong tasks has been the exposure of gynolatry, or the worship of woman, in life and history. I have called it the superstition of the heathen, for there is something exclusively pagan about it, and it is the religion of the heathen, but a religion of fear that has nothing to do with love. Lust, hate and fear, those are the ingredients. And as soon as a heathen approaches a woman, he becomes tame and cowardly and disloyal to his friends, his convictions and himself; immediately he wants the others to worship his idol whom he hates and fears. It is part of his animal self- love; and when he sometimes speaks well of his woman, it is only self- praise. Gynolatry is not of Christian but of pagan origin; all animals and savages fear their females, and when paganism reared its ugly head in the Graeco-Roman and Moorish colonies of southern France and Italy, along came gynolatry or the worship of the mistress, dishonestly mistaken for the Knights’ awe of the Virgin Mother which was something entirely different. This religion of the heathen comes of fear and secret hatred; therefore every tyrant has a woman who oppresses and torments him. Swedenborg explains the reason for this

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