1
Nothing in the world is astonishing,
unbelievable or forsworn anymore
now that Zeus has made night out of moon
and hidden away the blazing light of the sun.
—Archilochus, 7 BCE
Archilochus’ poem above uses an eclipse, a natural event in which the moon hides the sun, as a sign that the gods disapprove of a daughter’s marriage. We have him in fragments, this poet, we have him in pieces and chunks and quotations, known for his images and forebodings.
Heraclitus quoted Archilochus’ use of natural events to describe war with the Thracians, thus adding this trochaic verse to Archilochus’ legacy: "Look Glaucus! Already waves are disturbing the deep sea and a cloud stands straight round about the heights of Gyrae, a sign of storm; from the unexpected comes fear."
2
From the unexpected comes fear— but from the ordinary comes the unbelievable. A moment that would seem to incur blessings and fruition instead disposes of a couple that has not yet tasted their thirties. I’m thinking of Edith and Egon Schiele in early 20th-century Vienna, and Edith’s pregnancy.
Perhaps nothing is unbelievable or forsworn anymore as the First World War reveals the annihilationist possibility of modern technology. Perhaps the world feels even more impossible now that the gods are no longer controlling the gunpowder or the lightning. In 1918, Schiele drew his pregnant wife’s portrait as she laid on her deathbed, ill with the Spanish flu. The two had just secured a new studio for his work; the baby was expected; life had begun assuming a shape and momentum that bourgeois friends and family considered livable (or at the very least, less scandalous).
Schiele, Edith Schiele on Her Deathbed (1918)
He made two drawings of Edith, both dated October 28, 1918; both signed in a way that presents us with the vertical image seen above.
But Edith was lying down when he sketched these drawings.
Perhaps it wasn’t clear if she would die yet, though the sketch manages to convey the glassy sheen of her eyes.
3
These two portraits, above and below, were Schiele’s final drawings, the last pieces of work to come from his hands.
This is the second drawing, and I am presenting it here as it was drawn rather than as Schiele presented it (with that vertical signature and date that gives us an Edith sitting up).
The positioning of hair curls suggests an invisible or erased pillow. With the image on its side, one can see that her lips are parted and parched by fever. She is looking at him with all the life that remains as her blood pressure drops from dehydration. Her eyes express exhaustion, disbelief, a whirlwind of things one cannot imagine.
I’m not sure which of the two sketches he drew first, though I’m tempted to guess it was the one below, the one that still has energy and presence of mind to include a hand that distracts the eye from the absence of a pillow. Again, I’ve turned it horizontally. . . It feels as if she is still alive in it? Perhaps the black crayon drawing above depicts her after her death.
4
On October 27th, the day prior, a frantic Egon asked Edith to reassure him of her love. To write it down. To say, with paper and pen for eternity (or just then), that she loved him . . . And so she did.
The document is preserved.
That same day, Egon also sent a letter to his mother, informing her of their sudden illness.
In the note, Edith’s handwriting moves across the squares of the graph paper like hands along a wall in a dark corridor. It is dizzying to read, and vertiginous to recognize the way solidity vanishes with high fever. Surely Egon, himself, was sick at this point. A few days later, he would be lying in bed, a widower. By the following day, Edith is gone.
Egon’s weakness is apparent; the skin of his arm loose, as one dehydrated by high fever. On the day of his death, just after midnight, in that darkness marking the beginning of October 31st, the artist died. His friends were present: Martha Fein took the photograph of him on his deathbed while Anton Sandig made a death mask.
Schiele on his deathbed, as photographed by Martha Fein
On November 3rd, Egon Schiele was buried in Vienna, in the cemetery at Ober-Sankt-Veit. He was twenty-eight years old. Nothing forsworn survives the drawings, the photos, the words.