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Title: Saint Tantalus Author: Benjamin De Casseres Date: 1936 Language: en Topics: egoism, individualism, nihilism, philosophy Source: Retrieved 07/24/2022 from https://archive.org/details/worksofbenjamindecasseresvolume1][archive.org]] ([[https://archive.org/details/worksofbenjamindecasseresvolume3) Notes: Published as part of the DeCasseres Books collection between 1936–1938 and in The Works of Benjamin DeCasseres volumes 1 & 3 in 1939.
To
THE DIOSCURI
JOHN COWPER POWYS
and
LLEWELYN POWYS
“And so these two sons of Zeus ascended to the heavens together and
became the Constellation Gemini—known to men as Castor and Pollux.”
“Saint Tantalus” (Book No. 8) is from my unpublished volume of the same
name.
This arrangement of chapters is the same arrangement as the larger
book.—Benjamin DeCasseres.
I write because I wish to make for ideas, which are my ideas, a place in
the world. If I could foresee that these ideas must take from you peace
of mind and repose, if in these ideas that I sow I should see the germs
of bloody wars and even the cause of the ruins of many generations, I
would nevertheless continue to spread them. It is neither for the love
of you nor even for the love of truth that I express what I think. No—I
sing! I sing because I am a singer. If I use you in this way, it is
because I have need of your ears!
—Max Stirner.
I have also the Bible of Hell, which the world shave whether they will
or no.—William Blake.
Now, Saint Tantalus is the Pope of Hell.
Give me this day a corroding doubt and deliver me from single-mindedness
and all faith that I may scan the Centre from each point on the
marvellous Circle and scan each point on the Circle from the illusive
Centre, and let not my procreating disbeliefs fall away from me, and
defraud me not of pain.
Boots and saddles, ye dreamers and thinkers, for the great wild-goose
chase! Let us hunt the Ultimate; lay our mines beneath the Mansion of
Illusions, and ride triumphantly into the Nowhere, with our gay
gonfalons, inscribed with their metaphysical, philosophical and poetic
nonsense, flying in the chill winds that blow across our ghostly
uplands!
To be practical is human; to be superfluous is divine. Yea, we are the
superfluous, the salt of the earth—do you not feel this salt in your
sores?
Boots and saddles, ghost-hunters and fowlers of the Fugacious!
To write the “book of revenge” (as James Huneker calls Flaubert’s
“Bouvard et Pecuchet”)—that is the dream of all great artists. All
revolutionary art, like religion, is a kind of revenge. In some men,
like Flaubert and Schopenhauer, it is the life-long vendetta of a
penned-up ego against the commonplace and the limited.
Wagner was a demi-god, and he dreamed of heroic fornications and
Olympian sex-frenzies. Not being able to satisfy this madness in “The
Ring” and “Tristan and Isolde,” he wrote “Parsifal,” the apotheosis of
venom, spite and unassuaged lust. He spat on women and deified the
eunuch.
Wagner should have lived in a harem of Junos; but being only a mortal
with the voluptuous dreams of a thousand Joves packed in his skull, he
flung at the world his opera of revenge—“Parsifal,” the Epic of Spleen.
The root of Nihilism in philosophy and art is spite. “The Temptation of
St. Anthony,” “The World as Will and Idea,” “Thus Spake Zarathustra,”
“Les Fleurs du Mai” are spite books. Flaubert should have been God.
Schopenhauer should have been Buddha. Nietzsche should have been Satan.
Baudelaire should have been the soul of the Innominable Beauty.
But Nature walled up these panting spirits in flesh, and, like a serpent
awakening from its coma, as soon as they appeared on earth they thrust
their fangs deep into the dugs of Life, spitting their glowing, mirific
poisons over everything.
Ibsen has, indeed, confessed that all his plays are nothing but the
result of his venom. There have been great geniuses who have never given
their spite back to the world; but in these cases it was because they
lacked the power, not the will. For really great genius is known by this
alone—its contempt for life.
All great books are the philosophies of victims. There is one cure for
the feeling of vengeance. It is not forgiveness, but war.
The war of the iconoclast on the eternal philistine springs from the
“malign joy”—the hatred of those who have not suffered like us, the grim
determination of the restless soul to let no species of complacency
escape his venom.
We professional destroyers and announcers of spiritual insurrections
look on happiness as the supreme evil, the one fatal obstacle to the
completion of our own malign joy. So we perform our intellectual revels
within sight of this paunchy, wheezy, gmnt-of-delight, the unexpungeable
philistine. We seek to universalize our malady. We anoint ourselves with
the spittle of jealousy and make ourselves believe it is the holy
unguent of our spiritual sanctification.
The absurd has an inexorable logic—there is Life to prove it. The absurd
in life is the rule. For example, the giant Christianity that was born
of the dwarf Humility!
It is Satan who whispers into the ear of St. Anthony, in Flaubert’s
great book, “Suppose the absurd should be true?” But a still more
terrible question often visits the minds of the sceptical rats of the
intellect, the satanic lurkers in strange corners: Suppose all the
postulates of mediocrity should be true? Suppose race-wisdom is the
final, the only wisdom? Suppose stupidity—i.e., the “rational”—is the
veritable integument of God? Suppose the philistine is elect?
Disdain is the poisoned spittle of pride. “The Ivory Tower” is a tomb
where the ghost of Envy refuses to remain buried. “We superior men”—have
we really any sense of humor? To be singular, to be eccentric, to be
aristocratic, to be the coxcomb of art and intellect: the windy Ultima
Thule.
The poetic imagination is a kind of vicarious atonement for the enforced
virtues of the flesh. It is a venomous idealism.
Most men and women who have surmounted their passions become meddlesome.
This is often called “the passage from sin to good works.” Their
peevishness is styled “humanitarian propaganda.” Bernard Shaw and
Tolstoy are examples of this nuisance.
There is a sweetness in the thought, to many of us, that we have been
greatly wronged by some one. And we defer our vengeance or let it go
altogether, so that we may preserve the luxury of revelling in our
self-pity. We would rather lick at that honey-pot than go through the
fatiguing labor of uncorking our phials of venom.
There is a kind of grief that nourishes, just as there is a pleasure
that destroys. There is no sweeter feeling than the feeling of pity
because it is compounded of sensuality and self-love. And there is
nothing more valid than pity because it springs from these two sacred
principles. Ideal pain has as great a fascination for some minds as
ideal pleasures have for others. The soul, like the body, craves
sensations, and, like the body, it fears but one thing—extinction. It
would rather suffer than be annihilated.
The perversity of a Poe, a Baudelaire, is the protest of the soul
against the numbing power of pleasure and the deadly fascination of joy.
When our Genius mocks at us it is then we grow desperate—and do
something great. Out of the tombs of despair issue gods.
Why should we dreamers and thinkers of another plane despise this age we
live in ?—this age of shreds and pasteboard, of superficialities and
mass stupidities, of inanities and ideals of material prosperity? Has it
not given to us the divine haters, the poets and philosophers of
Nihilism, the disequilibrated geniuses of destruction, the great
pessimistic analyzers of all the humbug done beneath the moon?
There is a kind of mind that grows more beautiful the closer and the
more continued its contact with the ugly. It is the kind of mind that
grows in direct contrast with its physical and economic environment. It
becomes stronger, through an enkernelled principle of revolt and
dissent, as it comes into contact with the things that tend to weaken
it. The action of the inimical environment causes an immediate and
continuous reaction on the inner life of the being who is enclosed
within it. It is the revolt of the cell against the organism. It is the
root-principle of genius. The sense of disillusion furnishes us with a
vantage-ground to behold our own unconquerable stupidity.
Irony is the December of enthusiasm.
Impotence engenders through the brain. Out of its very sterility it
fabricates images and dreams and melodious abstractions, chaste and
provoking.
To lose one’s mask while acting—that is death to the ironic thinker. The
guffaw of the mob is more terrible than its brickbats.
No matter how absolute our individuality, no matter how consistently and
inexorably we have enacted our dream, we have still only badly mimicked
ourselves.
What Napoleon did was never the realization of the dream of what
Napoleon should have been. Jesus had to put on something of an antic
disposition to weave himself into the world. There is that within us
that will never take on arms and legs and tongue. There is a sulker in
the little tent of our being who will not come forth into “real life.”
He dreams and dreams and sends out ingenuous ghosts and mannikins of
itself which are our diurnal selves.
And so our deeds play pantomime to this non-emergent and ourselves are
mimic to the Self.
“Spectators of life” are in reality spectators of their own emotions—or
lack of emotions—about life. Amiel cried that he was doomed forever to
stand motionless on the bank and watch the stream roll by. But Amiel did
not see the stream, but millions of Amiels which that stream reflected.
The spectator, like the actor in life, foists himself upon things.
The sinister ironies of the eye!
After all illusions have gone the prying intellect still remains—the
stealthy ghoul who creeps to the grave after the interment of the
corpse.
A man may doubt everything with so much passion that he, too, has
hallucinations, like the greatest of devotees. Such was the scepticism
and nihilism of Flaubert. Like God, he ejected worlds while he yawned.
Flaubert, the most inexorable ironist of all literature, was himself the
great examplar of the irony that ironic passion conceals—for being the
exponent of depersonalization in art, making a lifelong attempt to
separate his feelings from his artistic taste, he, above all men, has
revealed his contempts and hatreds most completely in his works.
Flaubert of all literary men of the last century, Bourget tells us, put
at the head of his sentences the I a less number of times than any
other. For that reason it is all the more there. There is nothing
quicker to reveal a person than an attempt to hide. A great work of art
is not an expression of a man’s view, his opinion; it is the man. It is
the trumpet of the I, a saga of a special ego.
An exceptional joy—the joy of doubt, a joy of which Anatole France is
the chief modern exponent, as behind him stand Renan and Montaigne. Here
again is proof-positive that ideals in themselves are neither good nor
bad. It is the emotion that they inspire that lends to them what they
have of pain or pleasure on their countenance (for an idea is only the
countenance of a mood).
Temperament decides everything. The hell of Baudelaire was the heaven of
Goethe. Dogmas are without humor; Certitude never smiles. The joy
inspired by doubt is the joy inspired by change and motion. Just as the
philosophic pessimist or Nihilist would not exchange his living faith in
evil and cosmic vacuity for all the splendors of the Church, so the
child of doubt would not exchange his scepticism for all the sureties of
smaller minds. And it is not doubt as doubt that gives him joy, but it
is egotistic satisfaction that wells up from the very springs of his
nature. Doubt is his truth. Doubt is his own special attitude. Doubt is
his inalienable joy. Doubt is his “will-to-power;” doubt is his
“will-to-live.” It is his weapon of offence and defence. It is his
illusion, his North Star, his will-o’-the-wisp. Irony, ridicule,
disdain, the smiling, nebulous silence that can uncreate a God or a
creed are his darling weapons. His mental slingshot is filled with the
pebbles of his corrosive wit, and his eye gleams with a drunken humor
when he can whisper into the ear of some St. Anthony, “Suppose the
absurd should be true?” He knows the very question is a joke and a
quibble, for what can be true except eternal doubt?
And so irony lurks behind irony, doubt impinges on doubt—and this God of
Enormous Contradictions, this philosophic Merryandrew, laughingly
burrows his way to the “Core of Things”—which is only the rind of
another core. And he alone keeps wassail over his own graves.
There are few intellectual joys to be compared to the joys of the
congenital pessimist. Wherever he looks he may verify himself. The
knowledge of his own inherent perversity adds to his egotistic
complacency. He is swollen with the consciousness of his companionship
with the most famous men of all times—from Buddha to Thomas Hardy. His
disdain and contempt for the puppets of the illusory add yet another
instrument in the orchestra of his spiritual felicity.
Lastly, he cares nothing about his kind of thought; the only agony he
cannot endure is not to be heard. The nihilism of Flaubert, the
pessimism of Schopenhauer, the hellish perversity of Baudelaire, the
ghastly smile on the mind of Jules Laforgue were the very sources of
whatever happiness came to them. If they could never have enunciated it
in print, if they could never have had a hearing, then, indeed, they
would have suffered. For the pessimist and Nihilist know only one
Golgotha— tonguelessness. If we write against life with joy or urge our
pessimism with passion we raise the tide of well-being; for it is not
our opinions that make us happy, but the passion with which we urge
them.
The inventor of poisons is oftener a happier man than the cultivator of
roses. It is the passionate activity of the ego that brings us joy. The
direction of that activity is of no moment.
Nothing calms like the sense of the irremediable. The overwhelming
certitude that nothing can be changed for the better leaves us solid
ground to walk on—it is the final peace of the congenital pessimist. It
makes spleen immortal.
World-pessimism is the Ideal that cries for a body. Flaubert, Hardy,
Baudelaire and Schopenhauer had a body for their thoughts, but none for
their ideals.
The materialist is, then, the most perfect creature this world can
produce, for he never has ideals beyond his capacities; he never aspires
to that which he cannot embody.
The thing that I must do is always right; my vice consists in overdoing
it.
All judgment of whatsoever kind is error. One thing cannot pass on
another thing.
How absurd the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” when all growth
presupposes death!
Pity is a privilege of power.
The end of evil is not good, but the good of the thing that is evil.
Hence Napoleon was a perfect being until Waterloo and Iago perfect until
the gyves were put upon him. Evil is that which puts a check upon an
evolving passion, a gagging of power, necessity turned awry by a greater
necessity. Perfection has nothing to do with ethics. Perfection is an
adjustment of means to ends. Individual bias viewed from its own
standpoint is always right and good; viewed from the standpoint of
another individual bias it is wrong and evil.
“I forgive you” means “I hate you but you can no longer harm me.”
A renunciant is a man who gives up his seat in a car to a pretty woman
and then maliciously treads on his neighbor’s corns.
Who shall fathom the venom in the soul of the world-rejector!
It is a question whether the name of Jesus will outlive that of Nero,
for Nero was the incarnation of evil and in him we recognize our inmost
selves — aspiration to power, ruthlessness, unscrupulousness. Jesus was
the incarnation of the world-mythus, the epiphany of a Phantom, unhuman,
unreal, a spiritual prestidigitateur. Our admiration goes to Jesus, but
our real work is building Neros and Napoleons.
Man’s ethical systems are forever pronouncing judgment on the cosmic
processes when in reality it is the cosmic processes that are always
pronouncing judgment on our ethical systems. Christian ethics have gone
to pieces for this reason; the ethics of Socialism are impossible of
application for the same reason. The ethical systems of man are verbal
judgments. The cosmic system is Judgment itself.
Condemnation of a fault in others is really a secret admiration of that
fault. That which we cannot do we hate or worship, and hate is worship
plus fear.
Common-sense is the ability to rise to the small.
We call an evil-doer “bad” not because of his action in the abstract,
but because of its concrete effect upon us. We do not oppose evil; we
dislike pain. The evil-doer can give us pain; hence he is “bad.” This
judgment we pass upon him is rooted in as profound a selfishness as is
the “bad” act of the evil-doer. We clap him in jail — that is, we do him
harm by rendering him harmless so that he may do us no more harm. That
acts in themselves are neither good nor evil is seen in the fact that if
we act on a certain line of advice and we fail because of this advice we
speak of the “evil influence” of the one who advised. But if exactly the
same course of action — the same acts, in fact — redound to our benefit
we acclaim the adviser a benefactor.
The law does not punish the crimes of sleepwalkers; and yet the crimes,
sins, transgressions of our waking are nothing but the result of
hallucinatory acts. We are muscle and flesh leashed to a vision. We are
somnambules of the unconscious, egged on to do “virtuous” or “evil” acts
by an omnipotent, unseen Suggester, who works through heredity,
environment, prenatal determinations and the infinite subconscious flux.
One should always give a “moral” reason for doing what he fears to do.
When the legal restraints against doing a thing are removed, when
penalties are abrogated by Church or State, watch the moral and the
sanctimonious swarm into the Forbidden Country! When fear has been
removed watch the Christian “rat” on his Ideal.
Altruism is the vanity of the humble. It is the brittle strength of the
weak.
Of all the virtues amiability comes the nearest to being a vice.
Prudence never looks you straight in the eye. It is a form of craft.
Beware of a man who takes his bearings every time he utters a word or
undertakes an action.
There is not a movement of the body that is not murderous.
Remorse is a phase of fear.
Morality is a clever device for exploiting your darling sin with the
minimum of punishment.
My vices are as sacred to me as your virtues. Besides, your virtues are
my vices. Be off, thou sleek one, or I shall void a particle of my
insight upon thee!
Asceticism is the most splendid of all the vices, for in that state one
may eat his cake and always have it.
When I wish to do something very urgently I construct a moral code and
do it; when I have a strong natural repugnance to doing something I
construct a moral code and jail the man who does it.
We are unselfish not in order that we may alleviate another’s suffering
but that we may enjoy the spectacle of another’s torture at close range.
We love to humble the unfortunate with our alms.
If I pass judgment on another the mental attitude which I am compelled
to assume in passing that judgment is that other’s judgment on me.
Self-sacrifice is perverted rapture, the abandonment of self to another
who will call you good, but seldom will call you great. There is always
a secret contempt in the heart of mortals for the gods that stoop.
In the heavy penalties that Nature has put upon the mind of genius she
seems to repent of having created for herself an all-seeing Eye. For in
the mind of man she seems to see her possible destroyer, and she gives
to the lords of intellect a burden that can hardly be borne.
She did not dream that Eye would pierce to the heart of her secret and
could remain calm in the face of infinite change and the knowledge of
the inutility of Being.
Nature is in terror, like a modest woman caught undressed by the ironic
eye of a satyr.
There is a Spy in the world. It is the mind of the seer, the serene
rejector, who suffers more than others, but nevertheless remains serene,
like the beatification of the faces of martyrs seen through smoke and
flame.
The psychology, the poetry, the philosophy of the ages from Plato and
Aristotle to Schopenhauer and De Gaultier have only hinted at the uses
of the intellect, the tremendous significance and the dazzling
possibilities of Mind, the reality risen out of the illusion we call
matter. Only the Hindu sages have crossed the threshold and walked with
firm foot through the asphyxiating atmosphere that fills every chamber
in the House of the Will out on to the terraces that overlook the
universe—the terraces of perception, the high, isolated battlements
where even ghosts dare not walk.
Not that on these heights emotion is lost and negatived; rather, it is
spun into rarer and more ethereal textures. The rapture of instinct
transmutes itself into the rapture of prospects; the opaque garment of
passion melts into the diaphanous robe of mental ecstasy.
And up there is mirth — philosophic mirth, the twinkle philosophic, for
what things are seen from that height, where the mechanism of normality
ceases to function for him who stands there!
The intellect is anarchic, Dionysian, epicurean, the tempter, the
redeemer, the rebellious principle in nature.
The sum of sentiment is God; the sum of intelligence is Lucifer.
The Cross was made for the Will. On it the emotions are crucified. Every
wish of the heart finishes at a Golgotha.
For the intellect there can be no Golgotha, no crucifixion, for it takes
pride in discovering and registering its very limitations. Where
imagination fails it, it seeks a refuge in mockery, and where there
remain no further worlds for it to sack it triumphs in irony.
It finds the God of Serenities in the skull of Spinoza, leers at the
world from the brain of Voltaire, shrugs its shoulders at life from the
head of Schopenhauer, seethes in stupendous vortices of rhapsody behind
the foreheads of Beethoven and Liszt, smiles with pity from the
brain-cells of Anatole France, and sups on the souls of Beauty in the
adytum of Keats.
Small wonder that priest and puritan have put Intellect on the Index!
Creation, the fundamental instinct, has three stages—animal,
intellectual, egoistic. In the subhuman world and among most humans the
passion for creation is satisfied in the reproduction of their kind. The
artist exhausts his creative passion in the making of something that,
unlike a child, cannot change, desire, age, grow ugly and decay.
The tendency of the second stage of creation is to show us the absurdity
of the first stage.
The third and highest stage of creation is the creation of
Self—self-culture, self-conquest, the fabrication of a super-me with no
other material result of one’s labor than the accidental influence one
may exert on other beings.
This third type reaches its culminating grandeur in epicurean Yogihood,
where the inutility and absurdity of all creative processes are seen—all
except its own, for here creator and destroyer blend, and the irony of
its own paradox is redeemed in its eternal self-mockery.
Thus the most terrible moment in intellectual evolution is when a man
first sees himself from his own height—the butterfly glancing back on
its late slimy envelope.
The free mind must have one policeman—Irony. The free, skeptical
spirit—all curiosity, buccaneering, the poacher on forbidden preserves,
the winged hound of knowledge—is surrounded by footpads within and
without and sandbaggers with the bludgeons called “systems” concealed in
their sleeves.
To remain perfectly free one must have the will-to-disbelieve, the
instinct to suspect everything. And he must put his friends in irons and
straitjackets and listen to them at a safe distance.
His is a religious grin; and when the Ironical Spirit falls asleep at
its post, it knows that the velvet-footed spirit of Practical Logic is
prowling about its night-fire.
To the eye of the transcendental ironist all are not equal in
foolishness, for there are degrees of stupidity and absurdity; but all
are equal at last when flung against the Infinite..
The secret of alleviation from pain lies in the conception of a beyond
to every object, every passion and every ache; that is, the perception
that each thing is transitory and ephemeral and can be dissolved by an
act of thought in a larger relation.
The intellect that lives bathed in the constant rays of that ultimate
beyond—which is the engulfing Infinite—makes little ado about anything.
Its paltry, practical life is swallowed up in the boundless wastes of
its consciousness. Desire itself fades like the last thread of smoke
from a volcano seen from a bark fleeing to landless horizons.
Intellect is salvation. To widen the rings of consciousness, to recede
into vaster and vaster centres of vision, to live with processes instead
of things, to swing acrobatically from the trapeze of years to the iron
hoop of eternity, to sit and watch the slow drizzle of souls across the
ages instead of wriggling around in planetary mud, to burrow for the
causes of things rather than to weep over consequences—that is to
breathe a smiling defiance at the bronzed face of Oblivion and set up
with your own hands the ivory obelisk recording your victory over the
corpses of change.
Man can tolerate any thought except that Nature resides in him, and not
man in Nature. If he seeks an outlet for his iconoclastic instincts he
says he “conforms to a natural law,” deriving from this abstract and
anonymous Polytheism the justification of doing what he wishes to do.
The witches that brewed our destinies in cauldrons are no longer
accredited, but the brew has been transferred from cauldrons to the
receptacles of Nature. Law—“Natural Law” is now the witch.
Man is always seeking for something beyond himself in order to justify
or condemn himself. He dare not erect himself into God, mount the Horebs
of his own soul and mould the Tables of the Law out of his own feelings,
dreams and aspirations. Man is brave except when confronting himself. He
believes in all kinds of divinities except the divinity which gives
value to all other so-called divinities—that is, himself, the inner,
sufficient man, who is the measure of whatever is, even of those mythic
measures—devils and gods—that he forever fabricates.
The instinct to perceive the ludicrous is the beginning of freedom. The
will-to-mockery—that is the beginning of serenity. After emerging from
the drudgery of the emotional sweatshops one gets a view of that
minutiae of stupidity—the life of the masses.
The eating, drinking, sexual man, submerged in passion and emotion and
clamped in the interminable trivial, can have no notion of the fact that
he is only a by-product, an experiment in the hands of some evolving
principle the aim of which is yet unguessed.
The billions that come and go across the earth are not, properly
speaking, living at all, since they have not super-consciousness; they
have no perception of their irrelativity to the eternal mystery that
surrounds us, since they are the marionettes of reflex action.
The condition of the vast hordes of men and women that rise from embryo
and end in senility, having accomplished exactly what the ape and the
bee and crab accomplish with infinitely less noise, is not as pitiful as
it is ridiculous.
To the intellect that has kept its head above the waves of the will for
any length of time, and so achieved an independent relation to things
and a view that differs not in degree but in kind from the view under
the waves, incongruity—or the genesis of the ridiculous—is the first
idea of which it is conscious.
To perceive eternal necessity and its endless repetition of forms, and
then to glance below into the world of struggling human animalculae,
sets the Intellect a-tittering and touches the mouth to irony and sets
in the eyes the twinkle of knowledge and the moisture of pity.
In looking at the world today—its politics, its business, its heavy
seriousness in all things—one feels how far we are away from the riant
frivolity, the mad vinous goings-on that a certain aspect of the
everlasting Greek legend connotes.
The spirit of Aristophanes and Rabelais is nowhere perceptible. Man has
civilized himself into stupidity. His gravity is the one source of the
comic in brains still susceptible to the influence of the incongruous.
This tiny candidate for oblivion and eternal transmutation sitting in
clusters in solemn national and international convocations revising his
notion of economic predestination! The Greeks with their streak of
insouciance had some glimpse of the utter irrelativity of man.
To see humans from the Empire State Tower brings a desire to laugh, but
to look at the world from the high mental tower of disinterested
perception is the most uproariously grotesque thing in the world.
For the first sees the doer, man, and that is pathetic if one stops
there; but from these lookouts of the intellect one sees the Undoer and
the ironic sneer on its face. It is then one becomes conscious of the
humor of the universal superstition, namely, that there is a difference
between being and not-being.
Ages ago our ancestors dreamed of posterity—the “wonder of posterity”,
the “joy of newer generations”, the “blessings of the coming
civilizations.” Well, here we are, their posterity, their future time,
the fabled romping-place of their imaginations made real! The iron
horror, machinery; the grinding poverty of our great cities; the ghastly
deviltries of “enlarged navies;” the flowing world sewers of
“international politics;” the Communistic mania smearing and smashing
and levelling all that is distinctive, aristocratic, highbred—that is
the fetid thing that is today called “modem civilization,” the slaves’
breeding-hole, the immortalizer of mediocrity.
Here in this Black Hole each one battles for his inch of standing-room
and his patch of air, while Science sits on the turrets and towers of
our prison maundering about the glories of “breaking the atom”,
“aeronautic progress” and the “scientific organization of the means of
consumption and distribution”!
“Progress” is forever a myth of the imagination and the “betterment of
mankind” is a drug. Always ghosts, catch-words and the brazen cry of
“progress!” Forever and forever this lie of a “golden age,” the
posterity-obsession! Since man became a moral being he has been stupid.
The simple impulse to pleasure, the law of “seek thy happiness,” express
thyself, has undergone every conceivable perversion.
Man’s blasphemy has always been religious. The only blasphemy is denial
and postponement of self, the immolation of my instincts on the altar of
some fictitious god. That satanic grin on the face of the moon—did not
that world once, too, hold her burden of hypocrisy? And the ironic
twinkle of the stars in the great free spaces—do they not tell you the
story of man’s absurd illusions and his organized cant?
The words “Ideal” and “Idealist” have never been understood. All
dreamers, philosophers and poets have been called idealists. They have,
in the mind of the practical person, imaginative worlds up their sleeves
which they desire to set upon the table when Convention and Conformity
turn away their heads.
As a matter of fact, great dreamers are all destroyers. If they were
idealists, they would never be tendered the hemlock or bound to the
stake or cross. The practical person is the idealist—arch-idealist of
all time. He has an ideal of sexual relationship which he calls
marriage. Let the “dreamer” dare attack it! Defend “free-love” (the
realism of sex-relation) in a crowd of philistines and watch the sudden
automatic amalgamation for defensive purposes, for here an ideal (that
is, an organized superstition) is to be defended at all costs.
All laws in which the community prescribes the conduct— “betters the
morals”—of individuals is enacted on a theory of “world betterment”,
i.e., an ideal. All this stupendous and freedom-destroying web of
regulation in which the individual finds himself has been woven on the
loom of the Ideal. Today the practical, cold-blooded doctrine of
self-regulation stands confronted by bayonets in the hands of idealists
(that is, the slaves of the superstition called “socialization”, the
stupid cringers before an ideal of herd-life). The lure of the
Socialistic state attracts more practical people than any other doctrine
ever before put forth because it pictures an ideal condition.
The man-in-the-street is the red-handed murderer in all times, for from
him, with his ignorant dogmatizing and clotted ideals, flows all the
cruelties of “progress” and legislative morality. The free soul, the
realist, must always fly to the desert to escape this theoretical spew
that flows from ideals of conduct, ideals of life, ideals of
citizenship, ideals of sex-relation and ideals of what-not
(anti-cigarette ideals, anti-beer ideals, anti-adultery ideals).
For the glory of Spinoza and Nietzsche and Thoreau and Whitman is that
they came simple and frank and innocent into a world of fetid idealists.
They were naked, and behold those with clothes called them impure! They
conformed to themselves, and lo! they were stoned for idealists by the
thugs of Idealism!
Innocence! Innocence! where is it fled?’ Where does that ancient child
hide itself?—the innocence of the gods, the innocence of the Viking
conscience, the innocence of law, the innocence of instinct, the
innocence of the unconscious.
We of the historic epoch live in a chamber of horrors, with its racks
and wheels of “right” and “wrong” and its ghastly confessional closets
of “good-and-evil.” Everything is tainted. Art has lost its effrontery
because it has lost its spontaneity; it is brainish and vapid and
apologizes in long Shavian prefaces.
Even rebellions seek justifications and challenge on moral grounds.
Artistic, spiritual and social nonconformity use the weapons of
conformity to justify itself. Nature is paying the penalty for willing
an intellect. There is the spot of blood on all we do—the mythic spot of
blood that pursued I.ady Macbeth; and all about us, in the air, in the
heavens, we are menaced by the aerial daggers that none but the
over-refined brain of Macbeth saw. Like Lot’s wife, we look back; look
back on every act, instead of passing gayly on into newer circles of
power.
“Why have you broken your toy, child?” the solemn-conscienced parent
asks sternly.
“Because it was made to be broken,” responds the soul of the child
through its laughing eyes.
And so all that comes to our hands is made to be broken— broken gayly;
even as Change uses and breaks us gayly, passing on without memory,
without conscience, without apology, as innocent as impulse, as immortal
as destruction and resurrection.
“What have you done?” Creation, expression, embodiment in some material
frame of the fleeting dreams of the soul have always been held to be the
one excuse for being, the ultimate of worth. As though creation or
expression had necessarily to embody itself materially!
Creation is in its highest attribute and activity an exfoliation of the
inner nature before the glad eye of Perception. The highest expression
is increment of knowledge expressed in will, strength, character,
aspiration.
Why must I make a picture, a book, a palace of my vision? Merely to be
conscious to-day of a newer horizon is to have expressed myself. To
express one’s self to one’s self, to accouche on the beds of
consciousness each day another thought, to forge for one’s self in the
night before the earless, eyeless, tongueless Self another dimension
wherein the I may pasture on the morrow—is not that finer than to be
possessed with the vulgar craze for prehensile embodiment?
And yet I felt the impulse to write this on paper! The very irony of
vanity!
Consciousness may be only a prolonged debauch of the Unconscious, but in
that long carouse it has begotten a mighty warrior, the buccaneering
Individual, a pillager of strange mains, rover of strange seas, a
cut-throat.
As a woman who feels herself with child for the first tim feels the
impulse to retreat, to fly, to secrete herself, so a man with a new, a
daring thought, a new method, another way, has the instinct of fear
awake in him simultaneously with the joy that sings in the heart and
brain. The barrier-breakers, the wondermen, the cerebral cliff-dwellers,
those on the crow’s nest of this phantom ship of a universe, the
horizon-eaters, the space-peerers—they should have a care!
It is Nietzsche who complains that the dream and the opportune moment of
execution never come together. They never can because there is an
inherent conflict between the spirit of dreams and the spirit of action.
All dreaming, all great mental creation, is the aureole, the fiery
winding-sheet, of some physical weakness, the incense from our
sepulchres. No person ever freely willed a “life of contemplation.”
It is the compromise fine souls are compelled to make with the spirit of
life. It is the inexorable retort of delicacy to vulgarity.
As action is normal, only the normal, mediocre mind can get itself a
body that reflects itself. The beyond-man retires to the interior
jungles and moon-peaks, where he may breed himself in quiet, where he
may eject into those inner dimensions, those infinities of perception
and feeling, what there is creative in his ego.
There are “Raphaels without hands;” but every Raphael may claim his rock
in the Caucasus, his Alhambra—and his Rosinante.
The paradoxical mind is the mind that sees the irony of its own truth.
The aesthetic and intellectual overmen know what has been called “the
truth of masks”—also the masks of truths. With alpenstock and iron
clutch they dare crawl out to the edge of their moral and intellectual
phases and peep beneath the thin projections on which they lie, thus
discovering the other side of their support.
And on the other side of that ledge of gold or ice or moss they may see
things that would strike with idiocy the brain that can only feel its
way from a premise to a conclusion. But those who can, and do
instinctively, reason a way out of all premises into the unpremised—the
just perceivable fourth dimension—who by blending opposites create a
vacuum which must be filled hypothetically by another kind of
activity—for them there is the savage delight of free heights.
For the eagle may behold both sides of the moon and live, but the
slugworm must stick to its logical grooves.
The perception of the absurd is the beginning of the lust for the
sublime. And the paradox is the key to freedom.
Each man has his secret. We the intellectual aestheticians must despoil
each one of his inmost—rob, pillage and loot each being brought to our
door. For this were we born.
Like a cat, we must circle softly around the mice that overrun the
world—a cat with gleaming eyes and silken-smooth coat. The most
commonplace person has thus his value, his angle, his particular, unique
perfume. After vivisection he is of no use to us. But until then he is
virgin and thrills us with possibilities.
Audacity, “immorality” and the will-to-be-tempted — they are the marks
of life. Again and again my thoughts and instinct circle around those
torches set in a stupid, smug world of little beings. To rape the sacred
Vestals of Convention on the high altar of “Social Necessity”—that is
the dream of those who ponder under the walls of the Citadels of
Conformity.
The mind of the dreamer and thinker, ravished forever by its quest for
ideal delight, bitten by its infinite doubts, living in the day of its
own open eye, goes into the world to circulate with the average man
under a mask. The spirit of ideal delight must be gently chloroformed,
upon the mouth of Doubt a muzzle must be fastened, and the eye whose
gaze is clinical must be closed with the copper pennies of politeness.
Life as experience; life as episode; life as incident: there can be no
other justification for life that still leaves one free. What is new
must be welcomed because it is new, not because it may be true. To die
and to find the Truth are the same things. Convictions, creeds,
philosophic or otherwise, are tombs. Only the expedient is immortal.
Doubt is dynamic, Olympian. “I think,” “I urge,” “I believe”—these are
the stones that one places over the graves of dead things.
An eagle about to take flight from a peak—such should be the attitude of
the free, evolving spirit. No thought is final—it should only be the
promontory from which we behold other thoughts, unbeheld before.
Actions, thoughts and feelings that complete themselves are tombs.
The manner in which a person lies about a fact may be more interesting
than a fact itself.
Some women possess a modesty that is positively lascivious.
You do not see his faults from a high enough point of view; they may be
his virtues.
Most men are proof against the woman who frankly solicits; but what man
is proof against the wiles of modesty ?
Religious zeal in unmarried women is a form of concupiscence.
When a person confesses his ignorance on a subject he does it not to be
enlightened but to draw attention to his frankness.
The end and aim of the business man, the money-seeker, is to manoeuvre
his way, like a rat, into a cage, filch the cheese and get out before
the door snaps.
Each person I meet is the extension of my own ego. His traits are my own
traits. If I have them not now I had them once, or I will have them.
As base as man—that is the one perfect simile because baseness cannot be
found outside of man. The tiger, the hyena, the serpent are cruel, but
not base.
What keeps the masses at their drudgeries day after day? Two imaginative
seductions—the anticipation of night and its bed-sweets and the Magic
To-morrow, the Miraculous Day. So age after age they suck away at Time’s
dirty dugs, and the few drops of stinking water they feel gurgling in
their throats they believe to be milk from the Sacred Teat.
Success has the same effect on us as flattery—it deadens thought, throws
us off our guard, stupefies us. The life-failure is the only competent
judge of the things of this world; he is alive at every point. Only the
foiled are capable of estimating the forces that undo us. For this
reason great seers are generally physical defectives. Would you
know?—then pray for failure.
Marriage is popular because it abrogates the law against rape.
Old maids come to have a sly regard for the harlot.
Never introduce a woman to your best friend, especially if that best
friend is your mind.
Education: What will it profit a child to know the States that bound
Pennsylvania on the north, east, south and west if it does not know that
its life is bounded on the north by Pain, on the east by Illusion, on
the south by Seduction, on the west by Ounce?
The intangible, the unspoken, in us have tongues of fire. Not my word
makes the profound impression, but the way I utter it. And if I utter
nothing, then my silence shall character things for you. I cannot hear
what you say because I am watching your reservations. You are blabbing
your secrets to me and you do not know it. You tell me your whys and
wherefores, but I see other whys and wherefores.
Man is woman awake, the unconscious that has flowered into intellect.
Woman is the sarcophagus of the past; man the sprig of edelweiss that
has sprung from the depths of that tomb.
Woman is a millinery creature—she loves the decorative and worships the
verbal. She has no love of truth; but she likes the way truth is
expressed. If truth is not expressed well for her she prefers a lie
splendidly told. She loves religion for the same reason that she loves a
lover, a novel or a new hat— she gets a sensation, an emotion. She is
soulless and an atheist in the worst sense, because to her soullessness
she adds hypocrisy. There are women that money, flowers, suppers and
dresses cannot buy, but no woman in the world can resist a poet and his
passionate verbal millinery, and if she does not fall before a fleshly
romancer she worships the author of the parables of the New Testament
and she cohabits with him secretly between the scarlet sheets of her
imaginings. But it is not Christ she worships, but Christ’s white cloak
and his “soulful” eyes and the rest of nature’s seductive millinery. In
the confessional she revels in the lascivious joy of spilling her soul
at the feet of an alleged ascetic (how the ascetic appeals to woman! for
here again is millinery, more embroidery for her libidinous imagination,
more “style”!). In short, woman has but one instinct—to be tickled, with
a baby, a lover, or a pretty poem. She understands nothing, but rubs
herself lasciviously and passionately against everything. She has the
curiosity of the mole, not of the eagle. She is in¬capable of telling
the truth except to bolster up a lie. Women know their own deadly
emptiness, and their every movement is an attempt to pull the rags of
appearance over their soullessness. Millinery! Millinery! Millinery!
Man is the rind of the species, the integument of his ancestors, the
speaking-tube of the Species-Ghost. Individuality is an hypothesis. All
differences in men are merely superficial.
We are the rapidly tossed-off shapes from the syncopated brain-beat of
the Species-Ghost, whose aims are extra-individual. Analyze each one of
us to the centre and there is universal mergence. The intellect, which
seems the numbered seal of individual difference, is only a
sparrow-hawk.
It is the lookout of the Species-Ghost, the far-flung phosphor from its
lidless, sleep-glozed eyes.
Leander swims the Hellespont for the Species-Ghost and Abelard remits
the cowl for the Species-Ghost; Euclid, Newton and Leonardo are the
Species-Ghost at play, and under the helmets of the millions fallen on
many battlefields she peeps out and grins, and lapses into her pregnant
trance again and dreams those redundant, multi-colored dreams which we
are, her buffeted shadows.
All is for her, all is of her, all returns to her. We shadows toddle no
farther than the ends of her leash. Our finest act is only a particle of
the pulp of her secret intents. She apparels us in a light that seems to
gleam with mystic ardors and in a clumsy moment she cancels it, like a
giant open hand rammed down suddenly over a lighted candle. We are her
multiplex echoes—echoes muted into an immortal stillness when she
gestures that she has done with us.
She schemes for us the slow agonies of life and holds our quivering
souls over the flaming hollows of our hopes, and dyes our days with the
scarlet of illusive imaginings.
Drunk with an ideal called the Type, we are the shambles of the
Species-Ghost, the charnel-houses through which she stalks to her
unknowable bourne.
The bleak Calvaries of individual life are the feast-places of the
Species-Ghost. She multiplies her shadows most where Poverty stalks, and
into the houses of little bread she brings the greatest number of mouths
that shall be shaped to food-whimper.
She bids Despair yet live if it but hoid a single reproductive germ and
blows her withering breath nuer our eyes when the periods of duplication
are past- Ur if we still live on, it is that she may mock us with
memories.
She sits serenely on the tombs of races, nations and individuals, for
her retorts and crucibles are older than illusion and as indestructible
as life.
The Spirit of the Species never forgets. She is Memory’s monument. She
marshals the entire past into each present, weaving link on link, circle
within circle, and we humans are nothing but the bonded warehouses of
her immemorial gim-cracks; relics of antiquity; cobwebs of potency and
tendency spun by the Type-Idea in the spumy brain of the Species-Ghost.
Man transmits himself through a physical act, but he transmits the type
through a metaphysical act.
In the formless seed which was my beginning where were the moulds and
dies and the incalculable forces that decreed I should be a man, and not
a gorilla or a demigod?
I paused as inexorable tendency in the atoms of the seed. Beyond the
material atom of scientific hypothesis there lies the super-atom of
particular- type; forces that stand behind Force; ghosts-in-waiting;
phantoms of the before-world that were shown to Cain by Lucifer in their
flight beyond the outposts of relation in Byrc.n’s great drama.
The minimum visible, the least mote, is still a wonder-house of
unguessable possibilities. The Species-Ghost is housed there, the ghost
who works through us, around us, above us and under us, but never for
us.
We each have our secret pact with the Species-Ghost, some work to be
done for her, some trinkets to be tossed into her ^dimensional lap. Each
thing we do, no matter how abstract, is done to further the
life-instinct, to raise vitality to the begetting mark.
All pictures are paint ed for her, all philosophies sweated out of the
brain for her, all poems written to her. Her subtle indirections are
unimaginable. In the land where the denial of life is the cult of 3i
great religion, India, she has multiplied beyond all numbers. She
invents priests and monks and ascetics to sharpen the imaginings of the
millions and to whet the reproductive appetite.
She smiles in secret at those who keep the covenants of chastity,
knowing what gigantic sex forces she is conserving and caging in those
worn bodies, forces that will break their dikes otherwhere and do her
work. The chaste are Love’s apprentices; the bodies of ascetics are
reserve storage-houses of the Species-Ghost.
We who are cones of dust draw our significance from her; but what does
she signify?
Why these multiform vain masks, this sublime fidelity to a sovereign
inutility? To what God are we the fleeting orisons? To what Mecca stands
the race addressed?
The individual is eclipsed in the species, and the species hangs a frail
tatter to uncertain geological and cosmological forces.
Each of us is but the hoary, leafless shoot of a monstrous Idea, a
concrete particle in a bloodless abstraction—the Type.
We are the buzzing gnats of a perpetual sundown. The light that gleams
in our eyes is not our light, but species-light, and the work I do is
not my work, but species-work.
Onward and onward, ever hastening, we strew the alleys and boulevards of
time with our flesh and blood and bone, the ultimate and the beginning
yoked in a fathomless Mystery. Or we lie stretched on the biers of
contemplation, the sword of revolt dropped from the puzzled hand.
We are Time’s terrible and wonderful evocation, the quick-tumbled,
earth-tumbled spawn of the Species-Ghost, who labors and labors and
comes not out of us.
The Unconscious has perception without knowledge, memory without
consciousness.
If in sleep we forget our waking lives, may we not in our waking lives
forget a far more wonderful life we live in our sleep?
We obey laws we know nothing of; we are crushed by the imponderable,
lashed by huge whips of silk which we cannot see. A danger clearly seen
only half-exists. It is the unknown fatalities that ambush us.
In the sunken galleons of the Unconscious we find coinage of an
incalculably ancient mintage.
The Unconscious in its blind all-knowingness flings a picture into
consciousness of what will be. This is a “presentiment,” a “warning,” a
prophecy. It is nothing but the working of the law of causality. The
Unconscious has experienced 1, 2 and 3. It proceeds to show that 1 plus
1 will bring about 2; 2 plus 2 will bring about 4. All conscious
experience is a verification of the predestined.
The Unconscious is the arsenal of causation, the lair of the Furies, the
tool-house of the old blind artisan, Fate.
Consciousness is a post-hypnotic awareness of our deeper, unconscious
selves. All conscious action is the working out of endless suggestions
created in endless past times by the Eternal Suggester—Need. All
conscious life is a post-hypnotic revelation.
How can we “fulfil Self” when all our lives are a vicarious atonement,
when each one of us is compelled to liquidate the debts contracted by an
ancestor?
That which is born must decay, and that which decays must be born again;
but that which causes both birth and death knows not mortality. The
vitalizing principle not only appears in things newly created but in
things that die as well. The Eternal Creative Passion knows no death.
Disintegration is one of its methods of recreating. Death (so-called) is
a change in the direction of a force, not the annihilation of a force.
The Unconscious, the borderless reservoir of all things, knows not life
or death.
The “inanimate” is inconceivable. The very highest kind of intelligence
may be latent in the rotting beams of old houses. In some “inanimate”
things this possibility of life— this universally involved mind—lies
nearer to the surface than in others and suspires an atmosphere, an aura
or projection of its coming life and gives rise to strange influences
that highly sensitive beings feel in certain places. “Haunted houses”
are such.
Twenty-thousand leagues under our lightest act, twenty-thousand leagues
under the seas of chance, there you may hunt for “free-will.” And if you
never return from those depths I shall know what you have found. And if,
by some miracle, you return I shall know, too, from your grave silence
what you have found.
Instincts are blindfolded ideas. The eye of a powerful instinct will,
however, pierce the bandage and seek its end with a greater degree of
certainty than the wideawake thought. For the highest thought is a
manifestation of a profound need of sight generated in an anterior
existence, a need that was felt there only as an instinct with a fold
over its eye.
The idea of free-will is one of the decoys of Unconscious Eternal
Necessity.
An odor, a sighing in the trees at night, the rustle of a dress will
evoke thoughts and portions of our past that we had forgotten entirely.
Where have these thoughts been? In the Unconscious, we say. But they
cannot merely rest there inert for years, neither living nor dying. May
they not have lives of their own? May not the Unconscious have a
consciousness peculiar to its own nature? Why will not the law of
procreation, growth and development which we find universal in the
narrow domain of our personal consciousness hold as well in the domain
of personal unconsciousness? All past acts and thoughts live as
modifying influences of our present actions; but modification may be
only one of their activities.
We may be living an infinite number of lives at once. The savage who
believes that his soul actually leaves his body in sleep and enacts what
it dreams may have the truth.
That infinite unconscious world in us—which is to our conscious life as
sun-waves to the midge that lives a day in their waves—may be the abode
of an intelligence that sees our consciousness as a form of death.
Thought is conscious force. Unconscious force is indestructible,
immortal. Why may not the same be true of force that has once attained
self-consciousness?
Each mood is a composite of all previous moods, and what you have
forgotten is always being remembered.
Oblivion is neither a state nor a thing; it is disappearance, not
annihilation. It conveys loss, not extinction. It is the land lost in
the fog, but land still.
Sometimes in a roomful of people who have been talking a strange,
unaccountable silence will fall on the company. By a curious coincidence
all will stop talking at about the same time as though all had sensed
some common danger or ghost-form. A strange uneasiness takes possession
of all. The five or ten seconds of silence seem measured out to
infinity. The soul seems to take a sudden plunge into bottomless
abysses. A vague fear is perceptible on all faces, a fear allied to the
fear of the supernatural or nightmare-terror. It is as though silence
had become material and stood a ghastly Presence before all. In the
voice of the first person who breaks the spell is a trace of nervous
hysteria, and there come over the faces of the others, at the sound
again of the familiar, looks of unutterable relief, something of a sense
of deliverance. All are aware, in varying degrees, of having been in the
presence of something horribly Real. What is the secret of this fear, of
this soul-embarrassment, this momentary terror? Do the subliminal selves
of all those present merge and create a Presence, intangible,
incorporate, a Thing, shadowy, dumb, all-knowing, malign, inhuman; a
being compounded of all the beings present, suddenly evoked by the
falling of all volitional masks? Or is it the sudden apparition of
endless pasts, a great composite ghost of those beings that each of us
were when we, in our ignorance and fear of foes lurking in the dark and
in mountain passes, made of night and silence a Thing?
Philosophic and poetical gentility has prated for thousands of years of
the creative and transforming power of love.
I write something of the creative and transfiguring power of hate, of
the eternity of hate, the morality of hate, the rejuvenating power of
hate, the cosmic, social and artistic necessity for hate, the splendor
and sublimity of hate.
Repulsion, hatred, opposition—“Room for me or thou diest”—are the
conditions of individuality.
Universal love would insure universal catalepsy. Passion creates, not
love. The spark is struck off at the moment of impact.
All movement is conditioned in hate. All so-called progress, which is
merely motion lapsing from ironic goal to ironic goal, is the revolt of
the Present against the Past. Eternal insurrection, challenge, hatred
and battle are the conditions of the survival of anything.
Hate, dissatisfaction, discontent, contempt are the sacred fires that
must be forever kept burning. What man dislikes shall be his God; what
man hates shall be his golden Cain-brand.
The mystical blasphemers, the upsetters, the deniers, the sappers, those
that seek to lay the rotten rookeries of cosmic and earthly complacency
in the dust—it is they who are the Holy Ghosts of Time, our guardians,
the night-watch of those who love and sleep.
Prometheus, gnawed by a majestic hate, still parleys with Jove, and
Lucifer, now as forever, still hurls his imprecations from his
earth-hell and pits his mystic steeds of black against the milk-white
geldings of the Lord of Incense.
In nature hate and murder are conditions of survival.
All beauty is a record of hate. Forms, elements and worlds flush space,
appealing to the contemplative-aesthetic sense merely as carven images
of beauty. But to the clairvoyant intellect they are the painted records
of an everlasting strife, the gonfalons of triumph raised above the
cosmic shambles, the jubilees of hate triumphant.
This opposition, hatred, strife and demonic impulse to arise into being
and maintain a foothold there at any cost is a commonplace of existence,
but not a commonplace in human apprehension. To live and to prey are to
hate.
The Hindu says all life is guilt. All feasts celebrate the death of
something. They are the gambols of the peoples on corpses, the high
wassail of hate, the gratulations of survival.
The Persian invocation says “Give me this day an enemy.”
An enemy helps me to create, drives me to my wits’ ends, distends my ego
and puts a thousand eyes in my brain. An enemy’s eye cast on me in hate
has fructifying power. Self rushes to the centre of gravity; instinct
and intellect arise armed cap-a-pie. From within the penetralia of the
soul there issues the primitive being aureoled in his acrid aversions.
Hate is ethical. Hate destroys trammels. It is the moral passion that
burns up codes, parchments and flays oleaginous optimism that pins paper
roses in the hair of the Lord of Things as They Are.
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Strindberg rowelled the dugs of the
Arch-Stupidity that litters us and the worlds we expire on like a
field-woman accouches her burden.
“Moral indignation,” which is the name moralists give to hate, is a
barometer of mental and spiritual life. Each is known by his aversions,
by the things he seeks to destroy.
They who hate life are greater than life; they who love life are
still-born; they are ravished only by sex and kitchen-scents.
The life of the individual is like the life of a beast of prey.
The totality of each man’s movements from the cradle to the grave if
they could be put into a design, into a kind of composite photograph,
would resemble the circular, attentive movement of an animal about its
prey.
There is the thing the Will seeks to pounce on and make its own, and we
circle around it for years sometimes, drawing closer and closer,
crushing with the paw of egotism all that gets into our way.
All great literature is rooted somewhere in an ideal hatred, in a
recognition of the eternal qui vive of Man; the perception that man is
greater in his overcomings than in his resignations.
The revealer must be a good hater. He moves the world because the lever
of intellectual perspective rests on the fulcrum of aversions.
By
BENJAMIN DeCASSERES
TO
CARLO DE FORNARO
Part 2 of “Saint Tantalus” is from the larger book of the same name.
Part 1 was Book No. 8. Part 3 will be published some time in the future.
The original title of this Book 22 was advertised as “Dionysus and
Maya”, but I decided to keep the original title of “Saint Tantalus.”
A few epigrams and paragraphs in this book appeared anonymously in
Elbert Hubbard’s “Philistine”, to which I contributed for about ten
years.
—Benjamin DeCasseres.
I write because I wish to make for ideas, which are my ideas, a place in
the world. If I could foresee that these ideas must take from you peace
of mind and repose, if in these ideas that I sow I should see the germs
of bloody wars and even the cause of the ruins of many generations, I
would nevertheless continue to spread them. It is neither for the love
of you nor even for the love of truth that I express what I think. No—I
sing! I sing because I am a singer. If I use you in this way, it is
because I have need of your ears!—Max Stirner.
I have also the Bible of Hell, which the world shall have whether they
will or no.—William Blake.
Now, Saint Tantalus is the Pope of Hell.
Give me this day a corroding doubt and deliver me from single-mindedness
and all faith that I may scan the Centre from each point on the
marvellous Circle and scan each point on the Circle from the illusive
Centre, and let not my procreating disbeliefs fall away from me, and
defraud me not of pain.
When we think of philosophers we think of heads, heads magical with
dreams, heads poisoned with venom, heads that hold the secret of
serenity, heads that are frenzied with the Absolute, heads ironic, heads
lascivious, heads anarchic, sad heads that carry about in them withered
worlds and the parched and yellowed skins of their youthful ideals.
Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Spinoza were the sensual hermits.
Philosophy is the lamentation of intellectual voluptuaries, the
recessional of renunciants—the triumphant largo of personal defeat. The
thoughts of philosophers are their paramours. They weave their ecstasies
of the incorporate. They have taken the Infinite for concubine. Men who
write out philosophies differ in no respect from women who keep secret
diaries—for philosophy is nothing more than the diary of a bias, the
autobiography of a private weakness.
The beginning of intolerance is in a “love of truth,” which is the
intellectual aura that surrounds the deep-rooted prejudices of
philosophers. Whether a thing is true or false is of no importance. If
it yields pleasure it has fulfilled its reason for being. This is as
true of a strumpet as of Hegel’s philosophy. Pleasure, not truth, is the
unit of all values. And that was the secret of the philosophy of the
greatest of all the thinkers of the ancient world: Epicurus.
To the philosophic mind, isolation is the only miracle. Each thing is
the shadow of some other thing. A thing without relations would be a
monstrous apocalypse in nature—a veritable Peter Schlemihl. Driven from
relation to relation, he is at last forced to posit an Absolute, a First
Cause, a something that stands unrelated to a past. Then he smiles that
lifelong smile, which is nothing more than the fine ironic glint from
his vacuity.
Express your deadly thought if you wish to extract the poison in it. Let
the artist kill the thinker. Let creation—and there is a creation that
is destructive—destroy the destroyer.
Where is the thinker who at the end of his life has called “encore!” in
the face of the falling curtain? His books are his bile transfigured.
He who pursues truth must be prepared to enjoy the honeymoon after he
catches her—the honeymoon, I mean, of disillusion. And if there is no
disillusion, you have married the wrong truth.
The supremely tragic figure of all philosophic history is Nietzsche, for
the thing he hated most—the Ideal—fell desperately in love with his
sublime soul and strangled him in its love-coil.
His “Will-to-Power,” his “realism,” his “Dyonisian” passion, his
optimism are the very groundwork of all ideals. He was, par excellence,
the thing he spurned. He was the supreme idealist of his age, a man
drunk on the Impossible, a maker of idols as fragile as any that had
gone before.
His spleen was idealism, his superb eogism was idealism. His mind was
blasted by the love of the thing he hated.
He was a mental polytheist—a real primitive of the intellectual world.
He endowed his Thoughts with life, conceived them to be living things.
They frowned at him, laughed at him, dressed and undressed before him.
He married them, unmarried them—he, the priest of Mind. He coddled them,
raged against them; they lived in communities like men and women; they
functioned before him, like us. He even speaks of their brows, their
necks, their legs; some were fleet, others slow, some lame, other were
mere slaveys. They lived hierarchically. Some wore purple; others
patches. They had their houses, their dungheaps, their bathtubs.
They slew him in the end—as we are all slain at last by the things we
give birth to.
All intelligence tends to Nihilism. All impotence ends in venom.
Nihilism is the supreme ethic of the baffled.
Irony and paradox are everywhere at the core of things. It is by a rigid
logic that we destroy the logicality of existence. It was by
mathematical formulas that Henri Poincaré, the great mathematician,
destroyed the value of mathematics as an absolute science. Out of
Flaubert’s thousand-faceted mind, which by affirming and negativing
every point of view destroyed all points of views, was born the only
logical point of view from which to look at existence: the ironic.
The history of so-called “intellectual movements” is the history of the
attempts of man to justify his instincts. They are the codes in which he
legalizes his inevitable growth, revolts, reversions, perversions.
Merely to have a feeling about a thing is not enough. There must be a
Herbert Spencer to justify the world’s feeling about evolution before it
is accepted. There must be Voltaires and Rousseaus and Schopenhauers to
tell us why things merely felt to be wrong are wrong.
This feeling of the necessity for intellectual justification of what is
inexorable is the obscure reasoning of the Unconscious itself. It is the
everlasting shadowy Why that tracks forever through all of its
labyrinthine ways the Must. I say shadowy Why, for the Must is the
reality. The old proverb “We will always find reasons for doing what we
want to do” holds in its profound wisdom the secret of the appearance of
thought itself.
Intellect sanctifies, and, like all professional sanctifiers, it is
hypocritical and slavish.
Nihilism is the last word in philosophic absurdity. It admits nothing,
denies nothing; it has no programme, no metaphysic. It is neither
pessimistic nor optimistic. It holds that universal annihilation is to
be desired not because the world is necessarily evil, or life
insupportable, but because the whole scheme of things is earmarked with
stupidity.
Does God exist? Yes. Well, what then? What of it? He is merely the
protagonist of all stupidity. But how came the Nihilist with this
knowledge—the irretrievable stupidity of all possible life-conditions?
Well, that’s the irony of it. He himself is the greatest victim of the
Monstrous Mockery. Hence, more than ever he sticks to his Nihilism. He
is the transcendental idealist. He is the transcendental butt of a
transcendental inutility.
Nihilism is the only doctrine (?) that challenges the validity of its
own feelings. It is the very soul of Irony itself brought to judgment,
having even its suspicion of annihiliation, suspecting that the
Everlasting Nothing is only another trap.
The Nihilist is in love with the absurd. His dreams are the fantasies of
doubt. And, after all, provisionally, he stands nearest the truth—for he
mirrors cosmic absurdity. His formula is that of Brahma: abracadabra.
Nihilism is a war on relativity. It is the passion for the Absolute,
which spurns parts. It is a form of the mania for the infinite. It is a
divine madness inspired by the transitory and the phenomenal.
Once in a while there come into the world men who will be stayed by no
answer— a Flaubert, a Saltus, a Nietzsche, a Jules de Gaultier. They are
the Implacable, dreamers Ă rebours, the tease of God and men. They stand
atop the barricades of ancient and modern thought— barricades made up of
the sweepings and debris of all systems, of all affirmatives. They
affirm nothing, they deny nothing. They menace. They are the
night-riders of the intellect, the hangmen of all the safe-housed. With
rack and screw and belly-bolt they seek to torture the truth out of that
old hussy, Isis. And, like Goya’s skeleton, she screams her Nada! into
the night while the Torquemadas of the intellect—as bloodsmeared as
their victim—loosen the screws and throw the jade out of the penetralia,
knowing that she lied.
The nihilistic mind may be a disequilibrated product, but Nihilism
equilibrates and evens all values. It dissolves everything in its own
acid, then dissolves the acid. This last action is the doubling of the
ego on itself, the final beatification of pride.
Schopenhauer and Flaubert and Leconte de Lisle represent the last, the
highest development of intelligence in the Occident. In them we behold
the final cataclysm of thought, the end of the brain-orgy begun in the
eighteenth century. Their brains experienced sensations before their
flesh and nerves did. Their imaginative intelligences broke down the
pillars of the Temple of Life, which is the Lupanar of Chimeras. They
were the sick giants of modernity, sick from excess of light, broken by
the weight of “truth.”
Leconte de Lisle—the Chesterfield of Nihilists—held the individual to be
nothing. Law and the spectral Idea behind all concretions alone
mattered; yet de Lisle is perpetuated in literary history as an
individual. The thing which did not exist for him, the thing which was
to him merely a passing grotesque shadow, was the thing that made him
immortal.
Thus even the Infinite is capable of irony—for it uses the individual to
proclaim the nothingness of the individual. It renders significant the
means which it uses to proclaim the insignificance of the transmitter.
Is the individual the ironic glint in the eye of Change, or is Change
only an illusion of the individual mind?
Answer, you laughing, merry-lipped gods of cosmic hocus-pocus!
The last task of the artist should be to describe to us the immutable,
says Nietzsche. Through movement to grasp the immobile; through the
fugitive to seize the principle—is that the task?
But the “immutable” can in no manner be the Real. It is the deepest of
all illusions, more firmly rooted than anything else because it is the
background of motion. Or, should we say that the immutable is the
condition of all illusion, the very principle of fugacity, the static
Idea in which the particular pullulates like minute organisms in a sheet
of still water? And which, like a dormant pool, is bottomed by the slime
of expediency.
Away with that, too! shouts the Nihilist.
What the ultimate truth may be is not as important as my desire to know
what will be my emotion before it.
Will the ultimate truth be my truth? If not, it will leave me cold, even
if it be the truth. By this I mean to say, We do not seek the truth;
there is no “instinct for truth”—it is only another familiar mental lie
to say that we have such an instinct. Will the truth flatter my ego?
Will it satisfy my special metaphysical itch?
That (all philosophers and poets to the contrary notwithstanding) is
what the “pursuit of truth” means. “The unselfish seeker of light” wears
the mask of nobility, but secretly he seeks his own, and will have no
other truth but his truth.
At the end of each cycle of pessimism, nihilism and analysis there comes
a renascence of religious faith.
From the ashes of these mighty mental and moral conflagrations there
always arises the pale Redeemer, who is no other than Satan in
penitential garb. The Satanic principle buried deep in the nature of
things nowhere shows its profound subtlety, its capacity for infinite
mutability, with greater effect than here.
Back and forth this changeling god rolls the human spirit—back and forth
between the abyss that lies at the end of every intellectual debauch and
the glorified citadels of faith. Intellectual curiosity and religious
rapture: this master necromancer uses both merely to perpetuate the
species, to swell its booty, wrought of our immemorial pains, our
indestructible illusions.
Ages of theological and political repression are ages of mysticism. When
the critical intellect (and all intellect is primarily destructive) is
under the ban it seeks the vaults and subterreanean passages of the soul
and reappears as prophecy and metaphysic. In the psychological
trick-cabinet there are many wardrobes, but only one Magician. In the
Middle Ages the intellect crawled on its belly and was called mysticism.
It will crawl again.
Two of the greatest pleasures: the emotion that comes to us from doing a
forbidden thing and the intellectual pleasure that comes to us in
analyzing the stupidity of those who dared not do it. Add to this the
consciousness of our superiority as possessor of the stolen goods and
the disdain for those who have it not—the ego can expand no further than
this. It is the final beatification of pride.
Life—the luring principle—is not only a coquette who excites our
passions without in the least intending to satisfy them, but, different
and more monstrous than any other coquette, she has no organ to assuage
the sublime passions she arouses.
The unintelligent has its harmonies. At seventy, a man is conscious of
this by glancing backward. He is conscious, too, of a well-regulated and
logical whole from bib-and-tucker to crutches. Also he sees at last that
nonsense has its infallible mathematics.
“Be in harmony with the cosmos!” cries Marcus Aurelius, Spinoza, Taine.
Which cosmos? The cosmos of my instincts or the cosmos of my intellect?
The cosmos of external nature or the cosmos of the imagination?
The pride of fathering a solution; the pride of inventing a formula, a
watchword; the pride of arriving at some end—that is the besetting sin
of all philosophers, priests and politicians.
The absolute helplessness of man before the Eternal Mystery is never
more apparent than when that man is an intellectual giant.
All roads lead to Nihilism; but all must be taken. Each one of the
roads, alone, leads to dogmatism. He who leads all lives ends in the
same mental state as he who is not yet born.
That is, to experience all things and nothing are exactly the same
thing.
All gods and devils whatsoever will gray and pass through the twilight
of senescence into the Nothing—except one, who reigns from everlasting;
one who is the root of the conception of the Everlasting.
It is Ennui. We may drug him; but the Almighty himself cannot kill him
without destroying himself.
To discover the spectre Ennui it is only necessary to rend a shadow—that
is, act. He yawns behind each gesture. Pleasure is the glittering
scabbard of Ennui. Thoughts are the serious dreams of the sad demon,
Ennui. Actions are his self-imposed illusions.
Ennui in the greatest minds is caused not by a lack of objects on which
they may expend their activity, but by a perception of the utter
uselessness of all objects and all activity. It is the gray mantle in
which they wrap their haughtiness.
There are two visions—the vision reparative and the vision malefic. One
is the fair dream of what might have been; the other is the fascinating
dream of our destiny at its worst—the strange consolation of the damned
in dreaming of the next horror in their pilgrimage through their hells.
It is the difference between the dreams of Don Quixote and
Hamlet—between following Dulcinea or Medusa. For there are Utopias of
horror as well as Utopias of delight.
To fall in love with our terrors, to finally make of our disbeliefs a
god, to erect our latter fanes with the thoughts that have stretched us
in youth on beds of agony and set up in those fanes as redeemers our
most terrible suspicions—such is the history of certain intellects. It
was in this wise that Baudelaire knelt before Ennui and Amiel and
Leconte de Lisle before Death.
The colossal vanity of him who complains of being bored with life! If
humility is Vanity as Tartuffe, as boredom it seeks to be no less than
Deity.
The healthy being wallows in the illusions of the life around him. The
sick being—he who does not fit into his environment—seeks out the
antique or builds Utopias or mortars his crumbling dreams with the white
plaster of some religious dogma. The first preys and preys and smiles;
the second becomes an archaeologist or a socialist or narcotizes himself
with dreams of the impossible. The blond beast and the disease of
nervous exhaustion—we stand between the two.
We, I say—we corroders, we breeders of doubt, we Satanic ones—we
baffled, splenetic sick men.
Conscience is the internal psychic conflict of the customary with the
new. Conscience is always antique. The new is always subversive.
What we call faults in others are merely our intolerances.
Humility is Pride lying in wait, the bushwhacker in the grass, as
stealthy and as subtle as an enforced virtue.
The souls of great men—the lords of the Ego—are like those gigantic
mirrors before which a host may stand and contemplate itself. We worship
the great Egoists because in them we behold the actualization of our own
abrogated dreams. They represent a sort of vicarious apotheosis of the
things we never dared. And this canonization of greatness is always a
canonization of power—not goodness. Christ and Napoleon are both types
idealized. One epitomized other-world lust and the other this-world
lust. They are shapes from the brew of dreams. They are the creations,
the cunning, subtle idealizations of the starved, the impotent, the
“lost”, the damned—this itinerant preacher and barbarian in epaulettes.
“For the common good” is a phrase that has been the motive for every
crime perpetrated against the individual. There is no greater enemy of
the human soul than an organized ideal.
The Highest Man is not a moral being, but an aesthete. Life to him is a
spectacle, not an aspiration.
Schopenhauer says if one knocked on the graves and asked the dead
whether they wished to rise again they would shake their heads “no.”
That is a mistake. Ninety-nine out of every hundred would rise again,
for men would rather will evil than not will at all.
Universal tolerance is an agreement whereby each may tolerate the
other’s intolerances.
Those who cannot digest their pasts will be afflicted with a kind of
spiritual constipation. This disorder is called remorse.
The “joy of giving” is only a joy when it implies a power to withhold.
At the bottom of each kind act there lurks the thought, “I could wound
this creature if I would,”—and this adds to the expansive power, the joy
which comes over one who gives freely.
What is admirable in great “bad” men is that they survive in spite of
the most unfavorable conditions. They are the flower of struggle.
Conventional goodness requires the greatest degree of favorable
conditions before it affirms itself. Morality shrinks from opposition.
Hence most “good” people are characterless.
The universe is beautiful in so far as I am beautiful; it is ugly in so
far as I am ugly. There is no universe but my universe; there is no
divinity but myself. There is no sanity or rationality apart from my
desires.
If man must be grateful to one thing more than to another in this world
it should be to the devil within him. Pain and terror and danger deepen
perception, and with the deepening of perception we excavate the ground
for the erection of the columns of the Temple of Independent Selfhood.
Out of the perception of precisely the same fact—that all life involves
a putting to death, that conflict is not only the first function of life
but is probably the metaphysical cause ot life—there is born the
attitude of Thomas a Kempis and that of Napoleon. The cowl and the sword
are attitudes, symbols that are ultimates. Merely to exist is to take. A
mind that is subtle enough to perceive the threads of its thefts and
murders will turn to Machiavelli or a Kempis, being either stricken with
a kind of mirthful diabolism or the progressive paralysis which is known
as a keen conscience.
Perfection is a perfect relation between what I desire and what really
happens; it is the harmonies of egoism. It is the perfect marriage
between Subject and Object; that is, supreme satisfaction. There can
thus be only perfections, and never a Perfection, as there are as many
perfections as there are individuals or variations. The crime of the
dreamer, the idealist, is that he seeks to make an absolute out of a
relation, to impose upon others by force his special dream of
perfection—whether it be religious, social, economic or aesthetic. My
perfection is the only perfection. Your perfection is the only
perfection, too. The curse of the world is the “social spirit,” that
masked venom which drivels about making me and thee “better through
discipline,” that seeks to impose its perfection on me and sends my
perfection to the shooting-wall.
The moral conscience has to do with “good” and “bad;” the intellectual
conscience has only to do with pain and pleasure. It is the former—the
moral conscience, “social” conscience—which has formulated, embodied and
applied all the hells that man is heir to—the hell of the divine right
of majorities, the hell of “responsibility to God”, the hell called the
Church. The moral conscience conceives good and bad to be
things-in-themselves; independent of circumstance and relation, an
absolute. It cannot conceive that a murder may be good and bad at one
and the same time or that theft may be right and wrong. The intellectual
conscience admits only pleasure and pain as ingredients. What pains me
is bad for me; what gives me pleasure is good for me. No notion of
“morals” enters into this conscience. Napoleon and St. Francis of
Assisi, Paul Verlaine and St. Theresa are all “acquitted” by the
intellectual conscience.
The parish beadles of morality never tire us with telling us of the
“soul of goodness in things evil.” There is yet a man to come who shall
write for us the “Natural History of Irony, Being an Examination of the
Will-to-Goodness,” Especially must this include a history of the effect
of the do-good-to-others doctrine, that dogma of blood that is now
passing from its religious phase into its social phase. Roman
Catholicism is reincarnated in Communism.
Hilda Wangel, in “The Master Builder”, tells Halvard Solness that he has
a “sickly conscience” and then speaks in glee of a “Viking conscience.”
But is not all conscience sickly? Conscience is a knowledge of good and
evil and involves remorse, penitence and the whole interior hell that
Christianity has sanctified. Wherever there is conscience there is
modernity and disease and ditch-diggers and all manner of ecclesiastical
buzzards. All pondering on good and evil makes for weakness, impotency
and despair of self. As the perfectly healthy man is unaware of the
existence of his body and its functions, so the perfectly healthy mind
is one free of the knowledge of “right” and “wrong.” It plans and
executes and knows only one evil—that is, failure.
For what is evil, perverse, wicked, rebellious, morally oblique there is
a future, an immortality of growth; but for goodness, perfection,
balance, conformity there is no tomorrow; it is confronted with the
terror of terrors: extinction, annihilation. Moral perfection—perfection
of any sort—I conceive as a stoppage, a decay of force, the one miracle
that is not desirable—that is, the transformation of something into
nothing. It is the sleep of energy, for in order that energy may
exist—nay, in order that it may be conceived—there must be limits to its
activity, and all limits are “evils”. Limitation is the mother of
tragedy; the barriers of instinct are the things we hate and love. The
more complete our individualization the more limits we find to our
activity. And the social and intellectual rebels and “sinners” remain
immortal in this paradox: that the unlimited, which is the object of
their passion, is composed of an infinite number of limits. Perfection
is annihilation. Unqualified goodness is the same as unqualified evil:
nothing.
The past extracts from us ceaseless toll. It preys upon us from the
cradle to the grave. But the great artist, the thinker, the creator, can
neutralize matters by himself levying a toll on that past. Like
everything free and marauding in nature, he should be “indifferent
honest.” All men have up until this moment labored and sweated and
dreamed and embodied their dreams for me. I loot and pillage where I
please. I take what is necessary to my artistic, mental, moral or
physical sustenance. That past that waylays me at each minute shall also
serve as my suit of mail; that past to which I am in lifelong pawn shall
find no way of guarding her treasures against my plucking instinct. I am
a thief of time. I, too, stand at the toll-gate, O Past!
They who are always talking about “justice” secretly desire to be
judges, to be the dispensing Popes, the ultimate lawgivers, the definers
of justice itself.
The debauches of great men are nature’s method of always keeping them at
the centre of gravity. That which weakens the body often strengthens the
mind. Genius without vice is unbalanced.
We like to believe that the man who is stronger than us is evil. This is
a “moral compensation” we allow our weakness, the compensation of our
own holiness.
The momentary or definite well-being of the individual is always
procured at the expense of the community. The latter is the meat on
which the Caesars of individualism feed. And those who militantly oppose
the community as a social organization have to thank that social
organization for their happiness.
If the eye of the mind were subtle enough to see all the consequences of
our acts and thoughts the doctrine of individual human responsibility
would have to be given up in order to prevent universal insanity or
universal suicide.
Deliberate crime, deliberate “transgression” should never be
punished—would never be if we had the logic of our admirations. Only
weakness is unforgivable. There is in a deliberately planned crime
something of the heroic—an exhibition of the origin of the ego of the
individual in all its starkness. But the crimes that flow from mere
weakness of character show us the exact reverse of this picture—the ego
of the individual in its last pewling degeneracy.
A moral hero is one who has been chosen by Necessity to do something
that he would not have done had he free will.
A thinker’s or poet’s debaucheries are often only necessary
counter-irritants against the dangers of a greater poisoning.
To make a profession of judging and punishing—is not that the supreme
irony of the Christian era? Judges, lawyers, juries, legislators—are not
they the last word in Christian buffoonery? Judging as a trade by the
disciples of him who uttered “Judge not lest ye be judged”—it breaks the
grimness of Golgotha and I hear—at last!—torrents of laughter from the
Holy Sepulchre.
The genius tries to walk the earth with his tremendous wings. And those
who have only legs do not understand.
The herd has confounded Epicureanism with sensuality because it cannot
understand that the word “pleasure” is the most religious word in
use—religious in that it means, summed up, the complete expression of
self.
The feeling of guilt is always inextricably bound up with the feeling of
shame, and shame is the consciousness of loss of self-respect. More of
the tinsel that covers the beast!
There is no pleasure like the pleasure of disobedience. Until you have
disobeyed you cannot properly be said to have a soul. Impact, revulsion
and denial are not only the bases of consciousness but of
self-consciousness as well. Obedience takes us back to the infinite, the
One, the static. Disobedience is the root of variety, color and form,
with the ironic twinkle of Pyrrhonism as its final evolutionary stage.
I can conceive of no greater love than that inspired by the passion for
universal individual liberty; to rejoice in seeing each live after his
own nature, irrespective of its likeness to me. “Unless ye follow me!”
was uttered by a fanatic and a spiritual tyrant. “Unless ye follow
yourselves!” say I
“Is it good or bad?”—we believe this to be an act of reflection in the
mind and that we will decide the matter logically. But self-interest—who
is both questioner and answerer—has already decided. The ethical
epicurean delights in nothing so much as a “moral dilemma.” It is a
splendid game of mental solitaire, where one person always wins and no
one ever really loses anything.
Lying at the very basis of the sentiment of remorse is the longing we
have to tread the road of our transgression again—this time
imaginatively, with neck bowed and the cross weighing us down. We love
to see ourselves in some unusual light. The soul is an inexorable
coquette, always attitudinizing before the mirror of the Past or the
Future.
In worldly matters the ignoble in us is our greatest surety of success.
The way to fail is to have an ideal. It is in this way that nature,
reaching through men, puts the eternal stamp, again and again, of her
disapproval on anything that savors of “personal morals” as opposed to
tribe morals.
A “truth” is a prejudice raised to a principle.
There is no knowledge; there is only belief.
All belief is an error because it excludes another belief.
“The truth shall make you free”. But it is Error that bringeth peace.
What we call the truth is a strong conviction about a prejudice; and a
“universal truth” is a universal mental state based on a universal
illusion of the senses.
The “longing for truth” is the lust for pleasure in its highest
desensualized form.
All life—the “evolutionary process”—tends to dissonance, complexity.
Differentiation is estrangement, jangle. We dream more passionately of
the Great Harmony the further we get away from it. It is the desire of a
thing for its opposite. Harmony is a deadening monotone; differentiation
is dramatic discord. Progress is an illusion of motion. All prospects
are imaginary. Horizons that are evoked and melt are evoked again in a
continuous play of motion that has no beginning, end or purpose. The
fatuity of cosmic optimism and the pursuit of truth! Man’s destiny
cannot be dissevered from the astronomical destiny of the planet. His
dreams and systems and moral cosmologies and mental inventions will last
no longer than the planet, on which he stands a dreaming apparition. His
dreams of truth—all dreams whatsoever—depend for their longevity on the
antics of that inferno of brute flame—the Sun.
After a lie has existed for a thousand years it becomes authoritative.
It has then the same importance as a truth.
“Truths” are the mathematics of temperament—never anything more.
Suppose Truth—the ultimate Truth; that is, the Truth that will explain
the universe—is no more concerned with man, his destiny, his pains, his
pleasures, his hopes, than a shoemaker who fits a heel to a shoe is
concerned with the number of ants it will some day grind into the dust?
Each truth is only a half truth because each thing possesses the
inherent possibility of becoming its opposite.
“All truths are half truths”—the other half being a lie. Which half? To
find which one of the halves is the “other half”—that is the task of the
“truth-seeker.”
“A truth is a thought in the mind which tallies with an external fact.”
As all matter is a Ghost, the thought about it is the mere shadow of it,
or vice versa. The seeming of a seeming, an illusion compounded and
formulated—nothing more.
“As dull as a fact”, some day. But there are no facts—there is only
dullness. Facts are the nostrils of Mystery, through which are blown the
smoke of illusions called the “substantial universe.”
There are two kinds of faith. One is founded on the proposition that
“what has been will be”—that is, that nature is uniform in her
processes. The other kind of faith believes that what never was will be.
The first s an error because no one knows a fraction of Nature’s laws,
no one knows what “has been.” No one has an eternity of memory. The
second is an error because it denies the doctrine of Eternal Recurrence.
Still, both may be right. Proof or disproof of any single proposition
would require an eternity for observation.
The “eternal laws” are rope bridges that swing us over the abysmal
negations. They have a “practical value,” but they, too, will disappear
in Eternity, which is the Time of Oblivion.
The “Freethinker” is tolerated now more than ever he was before because
intolerance, which is primal and necessary, has received a slight veneer
of curiosity.
Wisdom—what is it? Is it not the term Pride uses when talking of
Necessity.
Scepticism is Negation in search of an Affirmation.
Truth is a vanity of the Will. Truth has nothing to do with fact or
probability. “My truth” is merely my life-preserver. Self-preservation
is the first law of reasoning.
The influence of one positive nature tends to make us more positive; the
influence of two positive natures tends to make us sceptical. Too many
positives breed their own negatives. When a thing is “beyond question”
doubt begins.
There are two orders of perceptions—the perceptions we hold
intellectually and the perceptions we feel. All youths of twenty know
they will some day be sixty, but they smile—it is mere mathematics. Some
youths of twenty feel they will some day be sixty, but they never smile.
Happy is he who is not sixty before he is twenty!
The mass of human effort called history seen from the plane of the
Infinite conveys to the mind the idea as nothing else can the
grotesquerie of human illusion, especially of the master human illusion,
that the actions of men affect life. Human needs are fatalities; the
lizard that clambers over the cracked plinths in the Coliseum has a
clearer knowledge of his movements than man because they are simpler and
more direct. For man to lay out a straight course ahead he would have to
know the laws that govern the whimsical, for even Law seen from the
plane of the Infinite laughs at its own “inexorableness.” The
mathematics of the curve are rotten reeds to lean on. The subconscious
at each moment affects the conscious plans of men, but the conscious
plans of men never directly affect the subconscious, and that is why the
passion for liberty brings forth Napoleons and Robespierres and Christ
was parent of Torquemada and Calvin.
There are two ways of loving truth—our truth: robustly and
conscientiously. The robustious lover of truth will act out his
instincts in public, like Christ or Falstaff, and be well cudgelled for
his courage. The conscientious lover of truth will pick his truth apart
and finally chase it from him as another illusion on his path to
Reality. The truth-seeker is a martyr long before he reaches his
Calvary. Merely to have the will-to-truth is to put on the hair-shirt.
To love a lie robustly, there is a virtue in that, too; and to be a
conscientious self deceiver, who shall say that that, too, is not as
worthy as plucking at the veil of Isis or standing beneath the pitiless
sun of sincerity in solitudes of sand, waiting for the Sphinx to blab or
trace on the air its nonsensical tales?
Nietzsche has a profound saying that there are no contrasts in
nature—there are only differences of degree. Yet there must be a clean
canvas, a tabula rasa behind the mind, against which these vari-colored
pictures with their “differences of degree” are projected. It may be
true that in the phenomenal world there are no differences or contrasts
between which there lie bridgeless abysms but that each thing is its
opposite dressed differently. But to arrive at this very conclusion
presupposes a substance existent in the interior of man which is not
susceptible of “differences in degree” of any kind. Or is this absolute
of knowledge only infinite relation’s ultimate relation? In philosophy,
as in life, we are snared and confounded whichever way we turn. All
roads lead to roads. No one has yet revealed anything about anything for
the simple reason that no one has discovered if there is any Thing.
Truth has nothing to do with logical rules, reasoning, retorts or
crucibles. Truth is the thing I have found at the end of my desire, the
lees or the pearl I have found at the bottom of the goblet of wine. A
truth cannot be proved; it must be experienced. Philosophers, reasoners
occupy themselves with laying out roads to the Tavern of Divine Content;
but the disciple of Bacchus who squats in the tavern knew his way there,
through briars and brambles and over ditches maybe, but there he is. He
has found his truth, while Intellect still breaks stones on the roads
and pushes its way into swamps with its surveying instruments. Truth is
Satisfaction.
All intelligence is hearsay, a consciousness built up of a million
million echoes of the past, rags that the Will-to-Think has covered
itself with in its frenzied fear of remaining a nude abstract nothing.
All philosophy, all thought—all action, too—is merely a constant
rearrangement and readjustment of the goods in the shop-window; the
materials themselves never change. Originality of any kind presupposes
the suspension of the law of cause and effect.
To me the world has always seemed to be more of a painted representation
of a place than a place itself. Whatever is seems to be only an image of
a thought that no human being has ever thought. It is something of a
sketch, a plan, a prelude to something, completed here, not touched at
all there—at best a daub, put aside many times, taken up many times
again, tossed aside impatiently, as though some obstacle had interposed
itself between the Artist’s dream and its materialization. Reality is
not yet.
What is that that will not change and pass away and exist only
thereafter as ghostly recollection in the mind of the World-Imp, a
sportive memory in the eye of Puck, the hoyden god? Or, the things that
were and are now no more do they live as ghost-entities somewhere in the
windy hollows of space, those countless windy hollows that are said to
make the Infinite? Or is change only a facet of the eternal immobility
at the heart of things? This man dies, this planet cracks and founders
in space, this spring evanesces into summer; but men and planets and
springtime are immortal. So instead of change—a passing of a thing from
one place to another place or from one state to another state—there may
be only scintillation, the waxing and waning of countless immovable
points on a circle.
“Believe me,” said Voltaire, “error, too, has its merits.” As though
there were anything else but error! All views are erroneous because all
views are partial. Not to be in error one must have all the data, and to
have all the data about any particular fact presupposes omniscence. All
that has heretofore been thought, imaged, felt and done are errors, and
at most their legitimacy has only the value of expedients. We may be
logical, but we can never be truthful. Our deductions from the premises
given us are rigid and exact, but if the premise is an error of vision
all that flows from it will be erroneous. Error has its merits! Voltaire
speaks as though there could possibly be truth in a transitory,
phantasmal universe such as this. Error is a path which leads to wider
errors, and the ecstasies of philosophic abstractions are the joys of
living in open, unhorizoned spaces, not the ecstasies of “Truth,” which
can only be conceived as inconceivable.
“History repeats itself,” but the facts of history do not—there is
merely a recurrence of laws that govern all things. The seasons repeat
themselves. Youth, manhood and old age recur perpetually. The individual
facts are always different, for a fact is merely a momentary relation.
“Little facts, minute facts, facts thoroughly proven!” exclaims Taine.
“Let us build the future with these.” But the facts of the past will not
be the facts of the future. Each new discovery modifies an old one.
Facts are perpetually abolished by facts. The science of a hundred years
is nothing but a study in the acrobatics of readjustment. The most
general law we know is birth, growth, decay; aside from that all
experience is my experience, your experience; my facts, your facts. The
experimentalists always forget the law of reaction, the undertow in
matter, mind, history. Reaction is the irony of “Law.” It is a perpetual
reminder of the omnipresent aimlessness of things. If history repeats
itself, it is aimlessness alone that it repeats. Experience,
observation—let us walk in the light of these suns! Whose “experience”?
Whose “observation”? The Preacher’s or Herbert Spencer’s? Taine’s or
Flaubert’s? Karl Marx’s or Schopenhauer’s?
All history is a cemetery of which the generation in which one lives is
merely the uneasiest ghost.
The pagan accepts the world as a legitimate gymnastic for mind and body;
the Christian rejects it as the invention of the Evil One to keep him
away from Home. The Christian is impatient of Eternity; the pagan says
Eternity is here, always will be here, and what he seeks is not God, but
the continual revelations of God.
We should learn to face the truth and hate it. For he who has found his
truth and loves it has stopped thinking. We must learn to hate all
pleasant things and despise all flatterers. And what flatters like the
thought that we have the truth?
Things separated by the greatest distances are closer to one another
than things that cohere and are neighboring. That is why Huysmans,
Turner, Verlaine and Hearn loved filth. When Pegasus in his flight
reaches zenith he is overcome by a nostalgia for nadir. Love at the
moment of extreme rhapsody is careless of death. The passion for the
beautiful, as in Rabelais and Shakespeare, swoops back to the mud from
its highest attainable heaven. It is the protest of the Absolute. It is
the soul’s knowledge of the proximity of the Absolute to annihilation.
At the extremest point of hallucinating beauty there is a passage that
leads into the ironic and a ground-pipe to the cesspools.
One thing alone is certain—that is, the Absolute. That relations exist
at all is a pure hypothesis. Buddha and Spinoza have said the last
things that will ever be said by human intellect that still works in
three dimensions. What commonsense calls the Real World is simply a
conglomerate of wraiths that have detached themselves from the body of
Reality. This, in appearance, a monstrous paradox, is the simplest of
truths, and seems paradoxical only because all insight negatives
“common-sense”—a good gravel road for the old mule, Humanity, to travel.
The Ideal is a woman whose breasts are soft but whose clasp is deadly.
There is a reality about our instincts that our intellect—our
thoughts—does not give us. We think one way and act another. We distrust
our judgments but obey our intuitions. Still, that reality which we call
our instincts is built up of illusions and has ultimately no more value
than our formal judgments. Reality is something beyond either instinct
or intellect.
The genius is the legicographer of the race. We go to him for
definitions and accents and new nuances for old words. He can give us
nothing original.
The Absolute is present from moment to moment, is the spirit of each
moment. The secret of uniting one’s self with it is a problem of
concentration. Be the spirit of each moment absolutely and you are the
Absolute.
Each one reaches his special, final truth by rejecting the truths of
others. All other gods but my God are heathen gods. Truth seems to be
only a matter of a capital letter—my God against your god.
Wisdom is a runner who runs away from goals.
Taine, Balzac, Bourget have all said that the salvation of society lies
in Christianity—meaning by this, of course, Catholicism. This is the
most pessimistic confession ever made. Salvation through humbug and
ignorance! Rather hell, decadence and death than that! Rather evil with
light than “righteousness” with darkness!
Science is the instinct for the novel—not the instinct for truth. Beauty
is the instinct for exaltation, which is at bottom also the instinct
enkernelled in the instinct for the novel. Thus, at bottom, Science and
Poetry are one and the same. Their seeming opposition is an opposition
of method.
We mistake habit for knowledge. I am familiar with my voice, but of the
origin of sound I know no more after years of listening to my own speech
than I knew before my birth.
I desire some great affirmation only to dissect it. I seek the truth in
order to destroy it and place in its stead some other truth. One thing I
love about God—his everlasting apostasy.
There will never be a truth (that is, an eternal, unmodifiable fact)
while there is temperament.
Pain is the rent the Soul pays for living in the House of Flesh.
“Pain is the incitement to all progress!” exclaims Renan. Progress
toward what? More pain?
All sorrow springs from the belief that the impossible is possible.
Those who hope for happiness hope for miracles.
Perfection is neither a place nor a state of mind. We habitually speak
of it in either one or the other of these senses. Perfection is the
negation of desire. So long as desire for anything exists in any heart
there cannot be perfection, for where there is desire there is still
need, and the state of need is an imperfect state. Perfection carries
with it the implication of completion, and universal perfection will
mean universal completion—rest, death, sleep, nonentity.
Those who are easily satisfied are either very stupid or great seers.
But the difference between them is the difference between those who have
not lived and those who have.
An optimist is one who dines off of his own fat.
Humor was born after everything possible had been suffered.
A cynic is an idealist with a critical organ.
A great sudden joy should be received by us suspiciously, for it is like
the gift of a golden casket studded with kohinoors in which lies coiled
a python.
The “blessings of civilization” are always chanted by the successful.
I have known persons so frightened when about to enter a dentist’s chair
that they began to hum a cheerful tune. That is professional optimism
when analyzed.
Happiness would be a force that could move on everlastingly without ever
meeting an obstacle. But this force could never attain consciousness,
which is a spark of light emitted by friction. Antagonism is the mother
of life. Absolute happiness would be the absolute of non-being.
States of mind influence Time. Duration dwindles under the influence of
pleasure, expands under the influence of pain.
It matters not how well-conditioned we are, we believe there is at least
one condition that would be better.- This is an illusion. It matters not
how ill-conditioned we are, we believe there are any number of
conditions that might be worse. This is no illusion. From this may be
deduced the infinite possibilities of evil in an infinitely evil
universe and the limits set to good in a universe of limited good.
Above the egg of every Hope there broods Despair.
Happiness can only know itself in the degree that it remembers pain.
Happiness without its perspectives of agony is joy without
consciousness. Children are happy, but know nothing of happiness. They
gambol in a celestial kingdom, but they are as ignorant of their
whereabouts as a somnambulist. Pure joy is thus negative. It is the
sleep of pain, the swoon of the positive, which is pain, which requires
no memory of pleasure to create a poignant consciousness of itself. Pain
is pain, but pleasure is not pleasure.
No man sees deeply into life until he begins to grow weary of life. For
despair is a kind of power. Courage gives us vast outer perspectives.
Despair gives us vast inner perspectives. It was Nietzsche who sneered
at despair-philosophy and despair-morality; yet all his wonderful
dreaming was mothered by despair and fathered by a too intensive love of
the moral.
Ideals are the courtesans that the jaded Spirit of Life ceaselessly
creates to feed its eternally unassuaged sensation-satyriasis.
Nietzsche has a saying that “our defects are the eyes through which we
see the ideal.” Rather, he should have said that “the ideal is an eye
through which we become conscious of our defects.” The ideal precedes
the real; an imaginative standard or eidolon exists in the brain before
actual experience. All defects are declensions from ideals; all pain is
the pinprick in the fabric of our illusions. It is the ideal that stands
between us and final realities. The ideal is symbolized by the ancients
as the veil of Isis. We all wear that veil. Nothing “measures up,” all
things deceive and are defective because the World-Spirit in order to
attain its incomprehensible end has stuck into the eye-sockets of the
soul the colored lenses of dreams instead of putting there a naked
mathematical recorder. Wise old hidden Witch! Wise with the wisdom of
all demons and satirists. Her life depends on those colored lenses.
The immolation of the Real on the bloody altars of the Ideal, the
sacrifice of this day’s certainties to that insatiable Moloch,
To-morrow: therein lies the very core and secret of all human
unhappiness.
The aspiration for perfection is the cause of all the ills of life.
Man believes in happiness and progress—two terms utterly contradictory.
“Progress” is not only conditioned in pain, but each movement forward
reveals newer obstacles to be overcome, more ills to be faced. Progress
has Want as rearguard and Disillusion as advance guard.
Humanity, Progress, Liberty are ideas of the second order. Those who
dogmatize on these themes still have a sense of direction. But the mind
that has apprehended the Infinite, which is the hub of all spokes (and
spooks), has no sense of direction. It tastes at once Nothing and
Something. Humanity, Progress and Liberty are for it merely
sex-utensils, the little panting, blowing, wheezing tugboats that take
the gigantic hulks of humanity out into the open, and leave them there.
There is but one thing needful: doubt. To doubt is to have a soul.
Indeed, it is the very condition of a living life. Faith bringeth rest,
but doubt bringeth restlessness. He who is a candidate for the ultimate,
the last truth, must forever doubt, and when he has found peace, he must
deny it.
Disproportion is the law of life; otherwise there would be no
unhappiness—hence no wisdom. For wisdom is the harmony born of discords.
A life symmetrical and proportioned at every period in its growth will
know happiness, but of final wisdom it will know nothing.
All weakness mimics strength; everything apes aristocratic ideals. The
secret dream of the oppressed is not liberty so much as it is a dream of
pleasure, to put on the weaknesses and vices of the upper classes and
shed its own enforced virtues and the pricking haircloth of poverty.
When we despair we renounce, and when we have renounced we begin to hope
again. For Pride is a giant whose shadow stretches from nadir to zenith.
The pursuit of happiness is one of the methods of disillusion.
Each moment in our lives is devoted to answering the question how not to
be bored.
On the day that you are born somewhere there is born, too, the man that
will fashion your coffin.
The great problem is how to live without being conscious of the fact
that we have got to live; how to divert ourselves without thinking of
why we should seek diversion; not only to escape the spectre of Ennui,
but how to act as though we did not know of its existence. We are all
playing near a great fearful Presence, and our object should be to rivet
our gaze so completely on our work and busy ourselves so closely with
our toys that we shall not have time to look up and see the Thing. The
Thing—stark, nude, sleepy-eyed, ghastly Thing—is always right there over
our shoulder. The most active beings are those who are trying,
unconsciously, the hardest to dodge Its gaze. Man has no mission in life
except to escape the “Black Man who will come and get you,” as we tell
the children.
There is a great penalty imposed upon those who lack foresight, but a
still heavier one for those who possess it.
Man has achieved the most perfect kind of imperfection of which we know:
he is all means and no End.
Youth is a brilliant exordium to a discourse never delivered.
Having once decided on a line of action it is well for us to spin around
on the heel of our resolution. The grotesque character of our special
destiny will appear to us after several pirouettes.
Most of us steer clear of the great vortexes of Destiny; it is the
whirlpools of the petty that suck us to destruction.
No action ever achieved its purpose; all physical movement is a satire
on Intention.
We seek violent sensations in order to prove that we exist; it is the
way we pinch ourselves to find out whether we are awake. Then we run
away from sensations to prove the reality of sensation. Thus we test one
illusion by another, pit hallucination against hallucination, oscillate
between opposing lies that illumine one another; and in the end are
filtered through the sieves of Time into a hypothetical Eternity.
The disillusion of possession does not have its genesis in
possession—that is, we are not disillusioned because we possess, but
because we have desired to possess. The greatest joy in the world is the
joy that comes unexpectedly, just as unexpected pain is the most
poignant.
The moment we have decided upon some undertaking is the moment that
signals the rise of a host of oppositions. The phantom armies of the
contingent, the incalculable undoers of things about to be done, the
waylaying, never-sleeping negatives that lie buried as latencies in all
affirmatives, are only awaiting that mental gesture known as decision.
Action is the lightning-rod that draws the death-bolts from the Infinite
that surrounds us.
The less we desire the more we have. Every time I grasp an object I lose
something. We swap Being for Possession, and are cut up by the fine
knives of our desires and apportioned to the things that possess us.
The Spirit of Pursuit and the Spirit of the Thing Pursued are one and
the same.
Every disease breeds a remedy, but every remedy also breeds a disease. A
“change for the better” will ultimately be a change for the worse. All
“progress” is artificial stimulation, a narcotic.
The state of mind called expectancy is an exciting pause between two
disillusions.
What are facts?—the longest persisting optical illusions of the greatest
number.
Vigor may be a disease, a disease of motion. Immobility is only achieved
through battle. To be sick of this world is a healthy instinct. As a
force leaves a body the body shrinks, but this is no proof of that
force’s extinction. Indifference is the serenity of despair—it requires
a Hercules not to act. Weak men are never indifferent. As we outgrow the
impulses of childhood we become more thoughtful. The instinct to
participate in the “world’s work” is nothing but the play-instinct of
the nursery without its harmlessness. There is a vigor that is negative,
a power that stays, a strength that is impassive.
Action is at high tide when reflection is at ebb. Action implies the
“going out” of thought. For this reason a pleasurable action is never
realized until it is past. Hence the illusion in believing that any line
of action will beget pleasure. All pleasure lies in contemplation.
Childhood only realizes its happiness in age.
Our past we believe to be irrevocable; but the future we believe to be
subject to our will—the will which is the product of our irrevocable
past!
We, the pain-gutted; we, the pitiful pariahs; we who are always
inopportune or just too late; we, the drivelling, snivelling religious
animal that etymologists call man—what must we do? Nothing! Nothing!
Nothing! Let us seat ourselves on the throne of Indifference, fold the
toga of scepticism over our sackcloth and ashes, our motley and
bells—and wait! wait! wait!
What is most known is least known. Details multiply details. The new
thing I have just discovered about my subject is the centre of an
infinite number of other things; but the circumference of my fact I will
never find. The more I know about a thing the more lives I need to live
to discover all that is to be known about that thing. Suggestion breeds
from suggestion; my latest addition to my knowledge is only the
beginning of- a new series.
We are always being invited to live, which is to say we are always being
invited to die. All action is the dodging of ennnui—ennui that is more
feared than death because it is Nothing come to consciousness. We toil
from point to point with the knowledge that that undying Thing is in
everlasting pursuit. The invitation to life is the invitation of the
serpent’s eyes, the enchantment of the horrible.
The salvation of the human being consists in having a work to do and
doing it; that is, he must convince himself that his special mania is a
healthy mania, that his illusion is the only divine illusion, that his
conceit is exceptional.
“Desire to know, desire to love, desire without name”—the philosopher,
the lover, the mystic, three stalks from the common root of Desire.
Desire to know and desire to love, all experience these in some form,
but the nameless desire, that innominable, obscure outreaching for what
cannot even be imaged in thought—that is the desire that encroaches
without being seen, a shadow that submerges in its sombre pits all other
desires and leaves its victim a mere wistful hanger-on to life. This
craving for the unvisioned what-not is a surplusage of Will, an excess
of world-sap; or is it the precursor of our own superhuman destiny, the
ill-timed memory of another kind of experience?
All action is an illusion because it presupposes free-will and truth.
To scratch your name on the Sphinx and then to be swallowed up in the
simoon of the desert like all the rest—that is fame.
Where there is the greatest opportunity for the greatest number of
people the competition is keener, and where the competition is keener
the struggle for existence tends to become more and more bitter. Hence,
ultimately, all freedom tends to the maximum of unhappiness. The modern
world is a pessimistic world because we reach the end of our illusions
too easily. All roads to unhappiness are thrown open to the people. The
modern face reveals the ghastly joke called “Opportunity for all.” There
never was a sadder face than this modern face. By throwing open all
doors the individual has fallen into all traps. Individualism is paving
the way for another “age of faith,” with its anodynes and drugs and
Authority. So the pendulum swings eternally from one lie to another; and
over all there reigns only the Invincible Mockery, with its monstrous
gray wings and shining bullet-eyes.
Illusion is the phenomenon of concentration. All belief is focus,
attention—the scenery of pride, the crutch of the human ego. Direction,
purpose are the psychological bases of error. Motion, change are the
mechanics of illusion. But a purposeless, blind surrender to the
“Eternal” is the final paradox because it implies belief, faith. Hence
total, irretrievable annihilation is the only remedy for illusion.
Deconcentration is ultimate salvation. The Ballet of the Aeons will
disappear only with the disappearance of the last spectator.
Human accomplishments of whatsoever kind are only the breathing-places
of the Eternal Becoming, pleasant points of observation, little
stopping-stations where this tireless Traveller lingers to survey the
past and the future.
Wise or ignorant, it is the futile that we follow. We can never escape
it. For Futility is the shadow of Pride.
Patience is the time consumed in waiting for an illusion to disrobe.
The value of all we do today can be ascertained by throwing into the
mind the belief that tomorrow is the last day of the world.
If the target of the instincts is happiness, the target of the intellect
should be quiescence. But this instinct must be absorbed in intellect
before quiescence can be attained. And when quiescence has been reached
Ennui nudges us at the elbow and we begin again to spin the unmeaning
web. And the veil of Isis—which is of our own weaving—covers, not a
face, but a hollow circle.
Adventure is the spirit of Curiosity that has got for itself a lusty
body. It is the restless eye of Temerity seeking to enclose within its
sphere finer and newer circles of experience.
The Imagination is a daredevil. It is a picklock, a break-bolt, the
knight-errant of Man. Back of and inciting the spirit of adventure and
the spirit of curiosity stands Don Quixote, for the Knight of La Mancha
is no other than the personified ironic spirit of the adventurous
imagination.
In all ages non-religious adventure has been loved for itself. It has
never admitted allegiance to the cant words “right” and “wrong;” it has
never muddled its enterprises by yoking itself to morals or the other
ogres for which the dull spirits among men drudge. Adventure, like
motion and light, is its own excuse for being. It is a primal passion,
coeval with the birth of matter and movement. The first movement of the
first atom was an adventure in space. The last movement will be an
adventure in Nihility.
The spirit of adventure—whether it be in the material or mental sphere,
whether it be embodied in a D’Artagnan or a Zarathustra—chooses for its
realm of operations the Unknown. The Unknown is not only that world that
lies beyond experience, but it includes as well that more intimate world
that can be created by finding new relations with old materials. There
is a North Pole at each man’s door that invites to the spirit of
adventure. The adventures of Edison are as thrilling to him as the
adventures of Marco Polo were. The intellect is a born marauder—that is,
if it be really intellect, and not merely a medium between the stomach
and the objects that the stomach needs for its digestive apparatus.
The spirit of adventure is a rebellious spirit. It is at war with
Routine and Respectability. Routine starves body and brain, and in its
deadly clutch we begin to measure off the days of life on the walls of
consciousness like men condemned to death chalk on the walls of their
cells the passing of the days that finally fetch them to rope and
trapdoor.
Life itself is the adventure of the soul in matter. The buccaneering
spirit of man is the one thing that renders the world sublime. It is
better to pluck the forbidden fruit and be everlastingly damned than to
accept the safe-conduct of Conformity and drowse away an eternity in a
heaven of ennui.
Cerberus guards the door to Hades, but his bark is worse than his bite.
He is only firmly intrenched to the cowardly eye. Cerberus is a toy pug
and his teeth are papier mache.
Which of us has not dreamed of following some black flag? Which of us
who is healthy has not in a figment of the brain, in a fiction of
action, stormed some forbidden Gibraltar, laid his Petersburg mine or
swum some raging Hellespont of the spirit? Those are marked days in our
lives on which we dared something—ivory days, days we would live over
again, with their venturesome hours and the sense of danger face to face
with that nondescript kingdom, the Unknown.
In literature it is adventure that lives. “Tell me a tale,” says the
world. The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, Robinson
Crusoe, Don Quixote and the Three Guardsmen are the answers.
What is lawless and awful and novel appeal to all men in all time.
Civilization, the arts and peace are only saved from stupidity by the
progressive inversion of the adventurous spirit. In politics, science,
art and industry the new man, the new idea, the adventurous thought
startle and dazzle. We smell an adventure in a man who says “I deny.” A
Rodin, a Blake, a Nietzsche, an Ibsen, a Shelley glow in the romantic
halos with which we crown them. They stand on the firing line of Man’s
invasion of the country of the enemy, the Unknowable; vicariously, they
give relish to the bread-and-water fare of a pointless existence.
Man lives for vivid sensations. Some feed the craving with—alcohol,
others with the blasting dreams of religious mysticism. The pirate of
the South Seas and the hermit of the Gobi are both moved by the same
impulse, the love of adventure. One finds his exquisite moment in the
bloody butcheries of hand-to-hand contests and the other in slaying his
“animal nature” and in an ecstatic frenzy rising to his last divine
adventure—union with the Eternal.
As immortal as error, fairer than vice—being herself the first vice, the
omnipresent decoy—squats that painted Jezebel, the Ideal, at the
crossroads of thought, of instinct, of action. She has trafficked with
our blood and brain and soul—is the malshapen spirit of time and space
itself; and she had lured us time out of memory to her painted
paradises, her pasteboard Utopias, her mirages set in bubbles.
Tantalus walks in our streets and rubs our elbows. On the faces, of men
are the chagrin of a million ancient deceptions, the grief and tease of
things lost out of hand. But the newer generations pour out from the
ever-fruitful wombs and are swift upon the scents of life before the
elder dupes have died. And the ancient Blower of Bubbles has her smile
again, for she knows that the newer generations are the dead generations
come again.
A history of the evolution of the Ideal would be the history of the
evolution of Illusion, a fable of a continuously evoked Image and a
chronicle of a persistently recurring disaster.
Every action presupposes an ideal of action; each thought is only a
tentacle feeling blindly for another thought which shall be its own
perfection. So all action and all thought in this passionate quest are
hurried into their own tombs, perpetually erasing themselves,
telescoping one another.
Once the attainable becomes the attained Purpose steps into its
winding-sheet—only, in perfect amaze, to resurrect as another purpose.
And it is so the circular days of Brahma are spun, and it is thus we
phantoms play upon his shining films.
If it be defeat that constitutes the tragedy of individual lives, it is
the endless deception practised upon us that gives that tragedy meaning.
The chagrin of defeat is not so poignant as the mockery of success.
Ah! the mockery of success—that is the sting of victory: the suddenly
perceived incongruity—the gap sinister—between the thing I willed and
the thing that has come to pass. Can that be it I labored to
produce—labored in that sweaty purpose—that poor thing standing just
there in front of me, nude, accomplished, out of hand, the gray light of
reality pouring upon it, standing there before me with that question in
its eye:
“Where are my purple robes?”
There are as many ills as there are souls. Each has its special disease,
unique, incommunicable; a special characterization, one may say, of the
universal malady: progressive disillusion.
We have all nibbled at some rare bait only to feel the carefully
concealed steel hook enter the raw flesh.
We wear about us the beautiful rags of our grief as best we may, some
dragging in the mire, others flaunted in a kind of defiance to the
stars.
Into our hands, in our heyday, we took so confidently, so buoyantly, and
with what an acceleration of the blood!, this heathenish, elfish matter,
thinking to mould it to some likeness of the mind’s native dream; to
stamp upon it, as one stamps upon a disc of gold, some everlasting
memento of ourselves, some souvenir of our too transitory presence here
upon the earth.
But youth knows nothing of that eternal flux which makes of all things
its own paradox, of that endless flowing away and simultaneous
reappearance of all visible things. His too substantial universe does
verily thaw and resolve itself into a shadowy monster before his
suddenly awakened perceptions, and, agape, he finds himself a hungry
speck of dust in that great hurricane of matter which blows steadily
from the no-beginning to the never-an-end. How rotten now the
underpinnings of his House of Life! How abysmal that fundament of void
over which he so lately frolicked!
The myriad trivial disappointments of the year-round are the little
nails that cleave the temples of Expectation. In Disappointment the will
of man stands face to face with his Mocker, with the sneering, prankish
god that has in secret fabricated the arrows of intent and so blunted
their heads that they will stick nowhere.
This god of merry deviltries peeps at us in that hour of baffled purpose
and asks with a kind of counterfeit grimness:
“How now, Earth whiffet! Where is thy whim?”
Was he not the soul of that laugh of Mephisto, the chuckle of insight,
of prevision, hidden in the scented garden when Faust and Margaret
decreed in joy their own pain?
All the ills of mankind can be traced to the idealizing instinct, to
that ineradicable remanticism that crowns the ass and calls it “My
Lord,” that calls a plain latrine a palace, sees in sewage-vents
something of “divine purpose,” that labels beautiful those cosmic
processes that are in reality the most obvious in their malignity;
flower-covered traps that, with exquisite irony, swallow up finally all
the petty princelings of Kingdom Come, the idealists themselves.
They are the sickly victims of a psychic glamour, a thaumaturgic light
streaming out of endless pasts, the dupes of that endless becoming that
bears on its crest the mystic ironic phosphors.
My intellect is a hideous juggernaut to whose wheels cling the blood and
bone and the flattened flesh of a million dead emotions.
Knowledge is what I know; wisdom is what I see.
“I believe” means I have stopped thinking.
Reason is the arithmetic of the emotions.
What seem to be contradictions are the illusions of angular vision.
The mind proposes; the passions dispose. The things we promise ourselves
through our brains are seldom performed. Mind forever misses its mark;
passion always overshoots its mark.
Thoughts are the lips of the Will.
The things that we know best were never learned. The things that we know
least are the things we study. Observation discovers ultimately nothing
but limitation.
It may be that the world is governed by ideas, but the ideas that govern
are only reflections from the deeps of the soul—multi-colored rainbows
of fire generated by the storms of desire in the heart of man.
The brain of man thinks; the brain of woman merely functions.
How near to me is the nearest thing if I see that thing with another
thing—the bodily eye! How far away is the nearest thing if I see that
thing with the eye that is not thing—the uncreate eye, the abstract
consciousness!
Consciousness probably sprang from Difference, as a spark emitted by
friction. This is proved by the fact that monotony tends to deaden, to
lessen the degree of consciousness, to make us less aware. Even God if
It be conscious, must be subject to this law of Difference; or else It
sleeps and dreams through us.
As a pebble dropped into a body of still water will radiate circles
until the last one is lost in the imperceptible, so a single fact
dropped into a seer’s mind will radiate and blend itself into circles of
wider and wider relations until it is finally lost in the ocean it
sprang from, the imperceptible Will.
Reasoning is the process that proves the obvious. We explain one thing
by another. It is the playful paradox. The “riddle of the universe” will
never be unriddled by reason, for we have nothing but a riddle to work
with.
There are persons whose griefs are generalizations.
There are distressful feelings but no mental pains. The mind has no
griefs. There is not an ill that cannot be thought away. To the mind our
griefs are delightful studies, and a man’s measure may be taken by his
ability to generalize his heartaches, to depersonalize his special form
of pain.
When I look at a thing I see nothing. When I close my eyes and think
about that thing it gathers about it the flames of the spirit. In this
retort it seeks with the sure instinct of atomic attraction its place in
the hierachy of values, linking itself, mysterious-wise, to a million
other things which to the bare eye seem unlikely relationships. A tree
is not just a tree; it is a ghost of the unimaginable. Life is not just
life; it is something else. Imagination is the key to the Real.
Minds that do not possess the power of abstraction are like fly-paper;
they catch with their stickiness every little buzzing fact that hovers
around, and when caught the little buzzing fact straightway dies.
Genius is knowing without learning.
There is no tyrant like the reason. If you are dominated by the
rational, prepare your shroud.
The first duty of religion is to make the absurd plausible. The first
duty of the seer is to make the plausible absurd.
Intuition perceives and possesses the truth immediately. Reason sets out
to find the truth that is necessary to it, but on the way generally
founders in its own bogs.
Impassioned contemplation—that is poetry; unimpassioned
contemplation—that is thought.
Great minds are like tall trees—they stand isolated in the body, but
mingle at the top.
What would life be devoid of the intellectual principle but not devoid
of consciousness? It would, I think, be most like a dream—panoramic,
unsequential, anarchic, fascinating, vivid to rapturousness, grotesque,
frightful, aimless, imbecile. Half-waking dreams are such, and in these
wild carnivals of color and nonsense in the brain we behold the universe
as it really is, or was before the growth—purely adventitious and
utilitarian—of the logical faculty, of what we style the rationalizing
instinct. Those who live on the impulsive plane have all the
characteristics of dream-figures to those whose intellects have gripped
life and squeezed it into some kind of logical straitjacket.
Cowardice is the mother of philosophy. The impotent soul plays ’possum
in life’s battle. This, with sublime effrontery, it calls philosophic
indifference.
Most professional psychologists are merely afflicted with a form of
satyriasis. To want to observe merely for the sake of observing, to
experience for the sake of experiencing, is mental lasciviousness.
Those who are most completely obsessed by the idea of Christ are those
who accept him unquestionably and those who reject him utterly, as, for
instance, St. Augustine and Nietzsche. Which proves the identity of
those apparent contraries, Love and Hate.
All philosophy is the attempt of Consciousness to interpret the will of
the Unconscious, and so it must ever fail; but, still, the philosopher
is the sublimest of human products because he dares to enter that
“pocket” in our souls. He has knocked at prohibited doors and questioned
vague shapes in dark passages and dug in damp cellars and swum beneath
frozen pools when the world sought only its swill.
Philosophy with all its pretensions is only the attempt of some
individual to escape pain—a poultice cut to look like a holy wafer.
Philosophy can be nothing but “his philosophy” or “my philosophy.”
Metaphysics is said to be “useless, unprofitable.” How can this be when
it has given pleasure to so many thousands? For pleasure is the highest
kind of use. That which is practically useful is still in the domain of
the Will. But that which gives the soul pleasure, exalts the mind and
intensifies the intellect without any corresponding achievement in the
practical world is useful without being utilitarian.
To act is not necessarily to be awake; for action is only the
somnambulism of thought, while aesthetic contemplation of the universe
is open-eyed consciousness, the greatest degree of awareness at which we
can arrive.
A natural, normal mental growth compels a constant change of opinions;
but there is a kind of pseudo-thinker who changes his opinions to make
believe he is growing. This pathetic impotent is an exhibition of
movement without growth.
Reverence should be a weakness of the knees, never of the intellect.
All new thoughts must run the ghost-gauntlet.
The dignity of man lies in his dreams, not in his works. The laboratory
in the brain is the only workshop that is not ugly, and it is there that
man will always come back, heavy-ladened and disillusioned, to work anew
at the old useless dreams, the old unsolvable problems. The useful, the
practical, the realizable are the transitory; dreams are the things that
are immortal. The Useful is the executioner of the Beautiful.
The brain of a thinker is a vampire that sucks the blood and breath from
every object presented to its gaze; the brain of the poet, on the
contrary, informs with blood and breath the spectres of dead matter
which we call the material universe.
A catchword—Socialism, Progress, Democracy—has saved many a man from the
gutter. A “sublime enthusiasm” differs in no respect from the
exaltations of opium and alcohol, though the dreamer is infinitely more
dangerous and asinine than the dipsomaniac and drug fiend. The drunkard
enslaves himself only; the dogmatic enthusiasts always end by enslaving
others. There is no maniac comparable to an active idealist.
A “scientific method” is an instrument for measuring Mystery. Nothing so
convinces philosophical scepticism of the rationality of its attitude as
the mass of “precise knowledge” which gets palmed off on the world.
The more we analyze the profounder grows our mysticism. Because of this
the professional scientist is never a mystic; he is too superficial. He
is a snail, not a mole.
The evocation of the “cosmic emotion” is the abridgement and epitomizing
of past, present and future, the retreat of space-and-time to its
ancestral spiritual molecule. It is the lightning-flash that winds up
all horizons on the bobbin of perception.
To tolerate your opposite, then to understand him, then, by an act of
the imagination, to pass into his body and literally become him, if only
for a minute—these are three stages in the evolution of the protean
intellect, the evolution of the soul from granite-imprisoned toad to
world-chameleon.
The imagination is a caricaturist, for it remembers first and last only
the oddnesses, the whimseys in things. There is nothing harder for the
mind than to recall a thing exactly as it is. It exaggerates,
attenuates, specializes. That is, it caricatures.
Veneration is the fossil of an extinct enthusiasm.
Wisdom is the net profit from Pain. Joy is heavily taxed.
A superstitious belief is a truth not yet rationalized by the intellect.
What was called witchcraft is known today as hypnotism or
auto-suggestion. The mental history of man is the rationalization of the
incredible.
To furrow the darkness with the light of his thought—such is the dream
of the thinker; but his furrow is like the ridge in the sea that a boat
makes in its rear, a thing of froth and spray, quickly identified again
with the mute, impersonal deeps.