Tom Foran Clark

Frida was wearing white, a sort of Greek toga, and had on golden jewelry. The green in her eyes shone out, even from the distance. Emery ran at once to her and, feeling that if he hugged her he'd somehow pass through, emerging out the other side of her, he instead just clasped her shoulders. The vision of his first seeing her, as in a dream, filled him now. Laying low at the youth hostel in Venice, boiling in delirium, he'd marveled when she'd first appeared. "I am Frida Christensen," she'd said. "You are having a fever like you are being hit by Thor's hammer." With long blonde hair and high cheekbones, she'd been porcelain-pale. Suntanned now, she glowed golden and rouge red. She took his weather-scalded cheeks in her hands and kissed him lightly on the lips. "You are feeling better now, I'm seeing," she said. "Is Pike coming with you?"

Emery started to explain, then ceased. It was too much. "It is possible he's here, on Crete," he said. "He has a woman friend. I don't know where they are."

"Well, come with me to be having some lemonade," Frida offered, taking Frederick Bergoo's hands in hers and kissing him lightly on the lips. Standing between the two men, Frida took their hands and walked toward a cabin standing in the shade of forest trees. There she served them lemonade.

So here was Frida -- and her aging artist friend Bergoo. It seemed to Emery this man could not stop talking. Emery was eager to learn more of Frida's life and times since they had parted, but Bergoo went on and on about his life. He'd come into the world in Tórshavn, on Streymoy island, the administrative capital and largest city of the Faroe Islands. While Crete covered an area of 8,336 square kilometers, Streymoy covered only 144 square miles. The Faeroe Islands were in the North Atlantic Ocean, in an archipelago midway between Norway, Iceland, and Scotland, and consist of eighteen islands separated by sounds and fjords. Like Iceland, the Faeroes were lava based islands with elevated coastal cliffs and some elevated peaks. The highest point (on Eysturoy) rose to 2,894 ft. (882m). The weather was unique -- a blend of the seasons is experienced every day with constant interplay between rain, sun and wind. Two ocean currents dominated the waters around the Faeroe Islands. The Gulf Stream was a surface current which brought warm bodies of water northwards, keeping the waters around the islands ice-free even in winter. Cold water from the Norwegian Sea moved southward along the bottom of the ocean. The Faeroe Islands had experienced several hurricanes during the 1990s, with wind speeds above 30 m/second, sometimes even reaching double hurricane force.

First settled by the Norwegian Vikings, the islands, with political ties to Denmark since the fourteenth century, had enjoyed home rule from 1948 on. The population of the Faeroe Islands had tripled during the course of the nineteenth century, and again during the twntieth century. At the end of 1990, the population had been 44,000. In the following six years, this figure had fallen by 4,000 but since 1996 it had increased, reaching 47,000 at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The two languages spoken there were Faeroese and Danish. The predominant religion was Lutheran. The biggest business was raising sheep -- in fact, "faeroe" meant "sheep." The national bird of the Faroes was the oyster catcher -- the Tjaldur. The most common bird species of the Faroes were fulmars, petrels, razor bills, puffins, kittiwakes, guillemots, and black guillemots. Torshavn, on the island of Streymoy was the administrative capital and largest city of the Faroe Islands. The most noteworthy attractions were the fishing harbour, the narrow streets (with their atmosphere of "Old Torshavn"), the local cafés, and the shops and Nordic museum in the harbor area. The main industry there was fishing. There was also tourism, offshore oil drilling, and the export of both new and second-hand ships. The only significant heavy industry in the Faeroe Islands was ship building. The ship yards in Tórshavn and in Skáli had, since 1962, built steel- hull ships. Most were fishing boats, but cargo vessels and other ships had been constructed -- many ships commissioned by foreign ship owners.

Frederik, thinking back, said, "My soul rages when I think of my job." He'd gone to work for the Danish Cultural Artifacts Protection Agency. The Danish Cultural Artifacts Protection Act had come into being in January, 1987, ensuring that any objects of cultural value within the borders of Denmark remained within the borders of Denmark and that objects entering Denmark not belonging to Denmark should leave Denmark again. Rare books, manuscripts, documents, works of art, and objects of importance to cultural history could no longer illegally be brought into or taken out of Denmark (coins and medals were the only cultural objects exempted from the regulations of the Act). The Commission on Export of Cultural Assets had consisted of five persons. Four of the members had sat ex officio as heads of the four national institutions in the area. The fifth member had been appointed by the Minister of Cultural Affairs -- this man had been Bergoo. The Commission on Export of Cultural Assets had been serviced by a secretariat which consisted of a secretary on half-time and a legal head of section also on half-time. The secretariat had been located at The National Cultural Heritage Agency at Slotsholmsgade 1, Copenhagen. The Commission's job had been to decide whether an export licence would be granted or not. This work had been carried out by the Commission members and their institutions: Det Kongelige Bibliotek (the Royal National Library of Denmark), Nationalmuseet (the National Museum of Denmark), Rigsarkivet (the Danish National Archives), Statens Museum for Kunst, and Statens Museumsnævn (the National Council of Museums), as well as a network of associated institutions: Danmarks Natur- og Lægevidenskabelige Bibliotek (the Danish National Library of Science and Medicine), Kunstakademiets Bibliotek (The Library of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts), Kunstindustrimuseet (The Danish Museum of Decorative Art), Musikhistorisk Museum (the Museum of Musical Instruments), Det Nationalhistoriske Museum på Frederiksborg Slot (The Museum of National History at Frederiksborg Castle), Rosenborgsamlingen (The Royal Danish Collections) and Tøjhusmuseet (The Royal Danish Arsenal Museum).

It had all been been too much for Bergoo. He'd fled Copenhagen and had landed at Loutros -- he and his recently arrived wife, Nora Svendsen Bergoo.

Though Frederik's father and mother had lived, during his childhood years, in extreme poverty, they had done well in their later years -- under Denmark's increasingly wealthy social welfare state. But Bergoo's childhood had been full of insecurity -- had been a time of deep unhappiness and anxiety. His early schooling had taken place in various schools for the poor, after which he'd gone to a normal public school.

As a teenager in Tórshavn, Frederik had caught typhoid fever. He'd nearly died from it. During his recuperation, his father -- who'd accused his son of being an under-developed child, regretting he'd not given seed to a more highly-gifted being -- had taught him to draw and paint. The lessons had provided the foundation for Frederik's creativity -- and his monomania, his stubborn singleminded tendency toward fixed ideas. He'd copied the works of the Van Eyck brothers, Rembrandt, Titian, and Boticelli. As he'd observed these artists, he'd become fascinated with the hard labor of the technique -- applying numerous single coatings of color, then glazing the layers with varnish.

After leaving school, Frederick had left home for good. He'd worked with a jeweler in Aarhus, a rising star in the gift shop world, Van Krokker. This man Krokker had a shop in the street of Kannikegade, where people bought Viking style jewelry. Krokker also made replicas of Cretan goddess figurenes made of ivory, bronze, silver, gold or painted faience.

Frederik had rented a room in the city, and began to study and to paint. "You'll come back to the fold," his father had told him, "when it's stormy weather." That hadn't happened. Mixing and mingling with the tourists and naturists at the nude beaches, he fell into a pattern of using people -- women especially. Frederik met Nora Svendsen, an artist's model. They had lived together in Aarhus for two years before marrying. The two had then lived in London for a year, before coming to Crete.

For the casual observer, Frederik's paintings had, at first glance, a certain naivite -- plenty nakedness and innocence. Closer examination showed an undertow of alienation and loneliness. He had often been close to suicide, but his will to live was stubborn. The two had lived on Gotland -- Vispa and Ljugarn -- in extreme hardship and poverty; they had lived in hardship and poverty in London; and now they were living in relative hardship and poverty (and relative wealth) on Crete.

Frederik made replicas of snake goddess figurimnes -- like those he'd used to make for his boss Van Krokker, in Aarhus, or he painted portraits of young women or of children. For himself, he made watercolor paintings of his domestic life.

With bright, vibrant, almost garish color, he painted his sense of impending doom. His studies of happy children countered the brooding, introspective landscapes. His morbid feelings were intensified by representations of Nora as a dark, shadowy figure spying on him, controlling his lonely life. In his self-portraits, Frederik painted himself ghostly white -- a colorless, dour figure, his face peering out from gloom. It was all the work of a deeply unhappy man.

He was determined to wipe away his memories of his "awful childhood" and his youth -- to "let off pressure" by seeking "revenge, by living well, now" -- which, of course, he was not doing.

"I am a victim of something inside me!" Frederik said of his drinking habit. "I don't blame it on God. It's me -- mine. I always end up furious! -- and only this soma, beer, calms me."

There was a deep chasm in the relationship between Frederik and Nora. There was friction. He was devoted to an ideal of beauty, of which Nora was for him an incarnation. Frederik's ideal was total integration with his ideal of beauty -- "I am thinking how I might kill you, kiss your breath clean out, and take your soul into mine -- that our two souls could be one.".

They were bound together in perverseness, torn between their shared nymphomaniacal desire for physical possession and an equal desire to destroy one another. "Viking!" she called him. "Hideous, murderous, raping, marauding Viking!".

Frederik admired Vincent Van Gogh's admiration for Thomas à Kempis who, in his "Imitation of Christ" wrote: "Remember: spiritual comfort comes of God's free gift, and not of your own merit. Do not be proud, nor over joyful, nor foolishly presumptuous; rather, be the more humble for this gift -- more cautious, and more prudent in all your doings -- for this hour will pass, and temptation will follow it. When comfort is withdrawn, do not immediately despair, but humbly and patiently await the will of Heaven; for God is able to restore you to a consolation even richer than before.... Man should live and walk humbly on earth, not reaching for the sky, but bowing to humble things, learning from the Gospel to be meek & humble of heart.".

Vincent van Gogh, who'd become an avid reader of Kempis during his early religious years, had taken the words to heart -- and to action. He'd stumbled onto the book around 1875, and was enthralled with it. Van Gogh became reclusive, wore tattered clothing, and ate only the simplest of foods. Everything he did was focused on trying to follow Christ’s example.

In the Danish artist's colony at Loutro, Frederik Bergoo was obvioulsly locked in his own private world of discontent. "Believe me," Frederik insisted, "I was born against my will. I never wanted it, this coming into the world!" He'd been turning out slick hack work, junk -- portraits of "the rich and clueless." Frederik, possessed of a persecution mania, had emerged from the crisis with the help of Swedenborgian studies. He'd been prepared to bear anything -- even to being despised and driven out -- everything for the sake of staying in control. First, in his Nordic melancholy, he had become bored with his art; then he had become disgusted with himself. Now he was prone to drinking beer and having raging fits. He was a beast with a swinish temper given over to compulsive appetite -- ravenous appetite.

His wife, Nora Svendsen Bergoo, with a Master's degree in Art History from the University of Copenhagen, had been working as an independent consultant and exhibition curator at The Jutland Academy of Fine Arts in Aarhus, Denmark. A member of Denmark's Forn Sidr (meaning "Old Custom" in old Norse), Nora worshipped the Viking gods and goddesses Thor, Odin, Freya, and others in the Norse pantheon. In Norse mythology, the world was the product of the great world-tree, Yggdrasil, which reached through all time and space. Yggdrasil was always under attack from an evil serpent, Nidhogg. The fountain of Mimir, source of hidden wisdom, lay under one of the roots of the tree.

In Aarhus, Nora had also been a member of the Theosophical Association Aarhus (TAA), a part of the Theosophical Movement that had started with the pioneering work of H. P. Blavatsky, continued in the founding of The Theosophical Society in 1875, and later expressed itself in numerous associations, organisations, and groups World Wide.

Some tenets of the Theosophical Association Aarhus: Every human being is immortal and death is only a new beginning of a great adventure that leads to higher realms of being until Man finally returns to a new life in this dimension. The Cyclic Law is universal and Man is no exception. Our many lifetimes are chapters in our own Book of Life. Theosophy taught the gradual unfoldment of consciousness through various cultures and races, and pointed at the inherent oneness of Humanity. Inner and outer globalization made each person a world citizen in the ”global village.”

"It's easy to feel that Karma is at work in us," Nora liked to say, "arising from everything going on around us us -- all from somewhere and going somewhere and for some reason. Basically, we just don't get it."

Bergoo said Nora believed planets and stars were living beings in their own right with their own auric influences, just like human beings and other living creatures. She believed the age of Pisces was ending and the age of Aquarius was beginning -- faith would be supplemented with knowledge and authority. With the beginning of Aquarius, new qualities would influence all beings. Humanity would react in terms of science, the mind, and a much more practical attitude. The present period was both influenced by the declining energies of Pisces and the rising wave of Aquarius -- resulting in chaos and conflict as well as renewal and innovative enterprises.

It was midnight when she showed up -- Nora Svendsen Bergoo. "And who is this?" a regal girl inquired, entering the room wearing a lavish golden necklace and a dress of many-colored stripes. Wide-hipped, narrow waisted, and flat-chested, she looked like one of Lucas Cranach's three graces decorated in Egyptian garb. Emery saw Frederik's eyes glaze over.

"This is my friend Emery," Frida said."One of the more elegant of the young men I met in Venice. Emery, this is Frederick's wife, Nora."

Emery reflexively stood and bowed to her. "Do you think me beautiful?" she asked boldly. "Frederick thinks I'm getting much too round. He likes me best when I'm looking like a little boy. He is never loooking at me anynore."

"Never look at you!" Frederik stood suddenly, shouting, abashed, spilling beer from his bottle. "You! Skinny as a stick or round as an apple -- either way! You, the light of my life, shunning me outright. Turning a cold shoulder. A cold heart! I wore your clothes, read your authors, ate your foods, drank your drinks. Oh God, it's terrible to think about it! -- terrible."

"How you go on," Nora took it lightly.

"Frederick, let's not bore Emery with this," Frida said.

"Emery? What is Emery to me," Frederick said. "I will warn against Nora! Her soul crept into mine. She lay like a snake and charmed me with her eyes. A man has hands, limbs, senses, thoughts, and passions. A woman has her devising -- and sharp tongue! Cunning women -- contrivers! I gave myself; she did not give -- except to give me pain. I can tell the instant she awakens in the morning -- the entire house turns suddenly cold! The sea hungers for fresh dead! I was a natural man. I reached out my hand to gather fruits -- Nora swallowed my arm! Devoured my immortality. My honor completely shot. I wanted to blot out all my memories with a great achievement -- or an honorable suicide. I began to paint again. Nora, who should have been my best friend, instead became my enemy. Never backed down. Never let up."

"Men today are monkeys," Nora chided nonchalantly. "Women not. Men are grunting apes, gorillas, monkeys; and we are doves -- softly feathered gentle birds."

"Where do you get these egregious, outrageous notions!" Frederick raved. "You're as desirous of inflicting humiliation as you are of suffering it. We men are the same! I swear, someday I will kill you."

"What a way with words," Nora laughed at him. "You should have been a poet -- or a priest."

"Yes, laugh at me -- you who are to me more than meat and drink -- the air I breathe. Fuck you!"

Frida took Emery by the hand and led him out. "Leave them being," she said. "They'll be working it out."

"Fuck you, too, Frederik!" Nora was yelling within now. "Where does all your hot air go? I have cried about this often. You grant me no authentic identity at all. I am not the air you breathe -- you would love me were I just a hole to plug. If you had your way, I would be a womb and that is all -- not a particular woman, but the spiritual personification of amniotic fluid! -- a moist cellar for you to poke around in. 'Bend over! Bend over! Bend over!' Why should I be blamed if a man goes out of his mind?

"Out of my mind?"

"Far out! You and all your little deaths. I'll be there, at your final death, and be glad afterwards!"

Emery and Frida left husband and wife to their own devices that night, removing themselves to sleep outdoors, where trees optimistically put forth new branches and leaves all through that night. The days and nights that followed were like a perennial festival. Emery felt he'd never tire of time spent with Frida! She told him the names of all the Cretan flowers -- tulips, cyclamen, orchids -- and the herbals -- oregano, thyme, labdanum. There were fish and game there that were only to be seen on Crete -- wild goats, kri kri, caretta-caretta sea turtles, and the Cretan Tree Frog. Unrepentant killer hawks circled elegantly overhead.

Emery felt he'd entered into heaven. The outward delights of this paradise would lead him to eternal joy, he felt. On Crete, the people still wore hats! -- and flowers and feathers in their hats. They helped themselves to food and drink. They danced and sang. There was always the sound of laughing children. On the waters, there was always the sound of passing boats. There was not one thing here, in this Paradise -- not a leaf -- that did seem to have originated from a marriage of love and wisdom.

The sweet dream was interrupted, often, by Frederick's constant fury. The man sought conflict like vultures wanted carrion. He interrupted Emery constantly -- told him this, informed him of that, enlightened him concerning this point, illuminated that. He steered Emery to what he saw as right, and tried to save him from what he saw was was wrong. He lectured Emery, scolded him, acccused him of stupidy, blamed him as the source of conflict when any conversation took a dive. Frida said he was transferring his venom from his wife to a stranger. He didn't even try to veil his cunning or his hate.

Frida insisted Nora really loved the man -- had showed dogged, clinging loyalty. But the eloquent beauty talked only of his "swagger, and his swinish, cunning little eyes." Frederik called her "a devotee of pomp, power, strife, and violence -- a vampiress who'd suck my very life's blood from me."

"As if I were his slave, chattel, a pet, a plaything and not a woman of intellect and aspiration. Women are not their bodies merely!"

"But they are 'not without bodies' either!" Frederick railed. "Women reject men wholesale for misogyny and reject the essence of what makes them men!

In their two different modes, Nora and Frida both carried on "the sacred dance." Like thunderstorms, they went at each other, frightening everyone around them. Frederik said of their antics and commotion: "At worst it serves to purify the empty, clutching, suffocating air." Nora was a strict, efficient, critical scold. She insisted she loved nothing so much as being alone. Frederik, passionately preoccupied with his own spiritual and eternal nature and destiny, had no appetite for silence, solitude, or calm. The cultivation of silence was anethema to him.

Frida -- open, patient, noble, and disorderly -- assured Emery there was nothing going on between her and Frederik. She explained he had turned to her in a time apart from his "beloved" Nora, to unburden his tortured artistic soul. Emery liked to believe her. Frederick, for his part, insisted he'd had intercourse with every woman in Loutros -- and that meant Frida, too, he said.

"What can a man do but succumb to his urges?" Frederick taunted Emery, raging drunkenly one evening. "Our constitutions and mechanical operations carry us away. Puritanical repressions, denials, suppressions, containments -- these carry the day? The lids sealed tight on things? No, the world was made for consummation -- fucking. We have our notion of self only in juxtaposition with otherness," Frederik roared, opening yet another beer bottle. "Men and women. East and west. Men develop a sense of identity only through juxtaposition with women, and vice versa. The West gets its entire identity through divergence from its notion of the East -- and vice versa. Men and women cast vices which they cannot acknowledge in themselves onto the other. The entire West casts vices which it cannot acknowledge onto the other. Westerners are intellectual, non-emotional, cerebral because Orientals are erotic, sensual, and corporal. In the East is decadence, sensuality, cruelty, laziness, drunkenness, greed, cunning -- the list goes on and on. But that reveals so much more about the West and its fantasies than it does about the actual people, culture, and history of the East. It seems to be built in -- these poles. They exist in reality, and where they do not exist in culture, we create them."

"Maybe that's how it is in Denmark," Emery let it slip. "Either/or."

"You have heard of Søren Kierkegaard?" Frederick seemed amazed. "The ribald Hamlet'? He too loved pornography!" Frederik declared. "Kierkegaard was an earnest, stricken, guilt-ridden man, not some featherweight like you. Kierkegaard's father, like mine, was an earnest, stricken, guilt-ridden man. His mother, like mine, was like a servant in the household. The man roamed the streets, stumbling into anonymous random companionships, as would his son Søren, too. Kierkegaard was torn between aesthetics and ethics -- the desire for ecstacy and the will to do right. exuberant lasciviousness versus dignity and grace. All in all, he felt dignity led to boredom, the root of all evil. ''Even with all my endeavors I amount to nothing,' he said, 'I do not make money, I do not get a job, I do not become a Knight of Denmark. In every way, I amount to nothing.' And yet what convoluted, cunning techniques he devised for wooing and winning women! He hungered for adventure. Seeing each new conquest as a last opportunity, his urge to seduce led him forward. He showered his women with gifts, flowers, and offerings of poetry. He wanted life to flame in that one precious moment -- that one rich, passionate moment! And in that moment, he knew, everything would be over -- again. Again and again and again! There was no solution to life's burden except in that bliss! -- merriest copulation. Kierkegaard knew intimatley this divine tension between calm and fury, between courageous dignity and irrational passion which exists everywhere -- and repeats itself endlessly. The troubador Peire Vidal saw God only when he looked on his lady nude. The gods have given men a huge and urgent biology of desire. There's no question about it. We are going to be stimulated by the sight of a naked female and we'll want to act on that."

" 'To say that the world has only a physical and not a moral significance is the greatest and most pernicious of all errors,' Schopenhauer said."

"Don't quote Schopenhauer to me! -- Schopenhauer who called man's sense of dignity 'the fundamental blunder,' a perversity of mind and temper! 'How can a man feel dignified or proud,' he asked, 'his conception a crime, his birth a penalty, his life a labor, and his death a necessity.' Schopenhauer said the notion of dignity could only be used in conjunction with men in an ironic sense. 'We shall construct many Iliads,' Ezra Pound said of a mortal woman, 'if she plays with me with her shirt off.' Talk of mysteries! Has Frida said anything to you of Freya?"

"Freya was a fertility goddess."

"The fertility goddess! The most desirable of northern goddesses, the goddess of love, sex, and attraction, the Nordic embodiment of the holy life-force. The mistress of Odin and several other gods and men, she was skilled at the form of ecstatic and malicious magic, a shamanic initiation that was very similar, perhaps, to the Eleusian mysteries. Like our Frida, Freya was free with her sexual favors. Of course the giants were always trying to take Freya away from the gods, though they knew this would lead, inevitably, to great disaster."

Talking with Frida about Frederik, Emery asked her questions for an hour, then stopped himself. "But we shouldn't be talking about this -- about Frederick, or me -- but about you."

Frida told Emery of her having grown up in Copenhagen; of her having been seduced. Seventeen at the time, she had never before let anybody get that close to her. "I wasn't loving myself. I had been thinking my hips were too small and my breasts too big." She'd fallen in love and had learned the hard way that "a woman can't be building her whole world around a man," she said. "Women are receiving men's affections, and the affections are being accompanied by flowers and candy. It isn't being long before you're knowing what is actually being asked for. After the first man, I have been meeting this other man. We went out on dates. He was making many promises." Frida had accepted money and gifts. But Frida hadn't wanted to build her life around a man. Though she'd decided she wanted primarily to enjoy the company of women, she didn't want necessarily to end having relationships with men. She hadn't been inclined toward becoming a lesbian. She'd taken up nursing in school, trying to find some thing to do -- pursue some course of reasonable action -- in which she could just do some basic good in this swirling world.

Then, prior to her meeting Pike and Emery in Venice, she had met artsy-fartsy Frederik in Grez sur Loing. He'd been recuperating from his Paris breakdown -- his anxiety attack -- apoplexy -- Stendhal's syndrome.

Frida knew that, in Aarhus and in London, married to Nora, Frederik had begun, more and more, going on the World Wide Web. Nora had told him of his nightly surfing habits. He'd taken to going on the Net later and later at night -- ignoring the actual, physical, substantial, existing Nora more and more.

For twenty-five years, Nora had told Frida -- beginning as a college student and continuing through his painting career -- he'd lived a secret life delving deeply into pornography, encounters with prostitutes, and loose affairs. "He'd go out to the red-light districts, expose himself to potential terrible public humiliation. Now he could stay at home and immerse himself in his humiliations. Here was now this 'World Wide Web' -- abundant perversions that defied description available at the click of a button in the privacy of one's own home."

What crack cocaine was to the drug addict, the Internet was to the sex addict. It was easy to get hooked -- to feed the appetite for sex -- to plunge in that downward spiral. it was eerily convenient, accessing sexually-oriented chat rooms. The total anonymityof the chat rooms fed into the continuing downward spiral. His escape from mental tension only reinforced the behavior that had brough him to his compulsivity. In the depths of temptation -- lust -- Frederik was starved for friendship, love, and the simple healthy touch.

"The sexual issues are being symptoms, not the problem," Frida said. "Something in his life is on disconnect. The symptoms are arising from loneliness, feeling depressed, feeling angry. There are deeper emotional and spiritual issues," Frida said of Frederick. "He was being abused as a child -- physically and emotionally. He was being frightened all the time -- angry. He is telling me he was always preoccupied with visual stimuli. His insatiable pursuing of of sex was an attempt to be filling up his void inside -- what he was really wanting was authentic emotional and spiritual connection."

Frederik had left London -- and Nora -- and had gone on to Paris alone. He'd intended to heal himself by a thorough immersion in, and enjoyment of, great art -- fine art -- noble art. This, he'd thought, would reform his moral deterioration -- would set him back on the path to his higher angels. Instead, in this encounter with the art history of the west -- the ebullient majesty and thrilling erotic power of western art -- he'd just about had a stroke -- almost a complete meltdown. It was all too immensely beautiful, breathtaking, and maddeningly sexual

("In Paris, in just eating a salad with feta cheese in it," Emery remembered Frederick's telling him his version of the story of his life and times, "I wanted to kill the waitress, undress her, and push my head a mile in between what I imagined were enormous, wet, and sacred vulva lips. Walking around in the museum rooms, I would pretend to be admiring the paintings or whatever. All the while I was going nuts, desiring only to get the clothes off any female that came within a yard of me. At the Louvre, I was on the verge of leaping on the headless Victory of Samothrace, just to bury my erection in what looked to me like the smoothest, most buttery, warm, yielding marble. I won't burden you what I wanted to do to all the delicious naked women on the walls of the Musée d'Orsay!")

What was Stendhal's syndrome? "Stendhal's syndrome (sten.DAWLZ sin.drum, -drohm) n. Dizziness, panic, paranoia, or madness caused by viewing certain artistic or historical artifacts or by trying to see too many such artifacts in too short a time. A psychosomatic illness that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, confusion and even hallucinations when the individual is exposed to an overdose of beautiful art, paintings and artistic masterpieces."

In 1817, Marie-Henri Beyle, better known as the French novelist Stendhal, had visited Florence and had found himself overwhelmed by the city's intensely rich legacy of art and history. When he'd visited Santa Croce (the cathedral where the likes of Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and Galileo are buried) and had seen Giotto's famous ceiling frescoes for the first time, he'd been overcome with emotion: "I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty ... I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations ... Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call 'nerves.' Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling.'' 160 years later, in the late 1970s, Dr. Graziella Magherini, at the time the chief of psychiatry at Florence's Santa Maria Nuova Hospital, noticed that many of the tourists who visited Florence were overcome with anything from temporary panic attacks to bouts of outright madness that lasted several days. She remembered that Stendhal had had similar symptoms, so she named the condition "Stendhal's syndrome."

Frederik's love of beauty and nature clashed with his hatred of mankind and history. His violent northern heritage had hit him like a personal memory. His mind had called up a flood of Viking massacres, pillaging, plundering, raping, and burning. Countless people had been taken prisoner or slaughtered outright. Towns had been emptied. The Vikings had destroyed everything. They had put the world into a state of terror. Frederik had been scared he was "on the verge of either plunging a knife into my heart or taking a torch to Paris, burning the goddamned city to the ground."

He had got himself a hotel room. He'd got himself a laptop computer. He'd plugged it in. He'd made his way to chat rooms -- conversing now not only with Danish women, but also with French women -- and Swedes, Germans, and Americans. "God, I would have chatted with wolfs, sheep, or swine," he'd told Emery, "if I thought it could lead to real or imagined orgiastic, bestial, mindless sex."

Frida had come to his rescue.