Hitler As Victim - On Wyndham Lewis

 

HE SLAPDASH SERIES OF NEWSPAPER articles in which Lewis conveyed his impressions of Berlin immediately after the first great Nazi victories in the Reichstag in September 1930, and which were published as Hitler (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931), are as notorious as they are unread: the following brief account of this work, whatever its general usefulness, will indeed lead us to some unexpected conclusions.

With his satirist’s feeling about cities, Lewis could hardly omit an initial tableau of Berlin (“Chicago, only more so if anything, but minus Bootleg, and with that great difference—that politics account for much of the street violence” [18]). The political point made here is that Nazi street violence is essentially a reaction to Communist violence and provocation; yet the inevitable narrative point is rather different: “But elegant and usually eyeglassed young women will receive [the tourist], with an expensive politeness, and he will buy one of these a drink, and thus become at home…. Then these bland Junos-gone-wrong, bare-shouldered and braceleted (as statuesque as feminine show-girl guardees) after a drink or two, will whisper to the outlandish sightseer that they are men. …” (24). With this characteristic and obsessive motif out of the way, we come to the political analysis proper, which I will resume as a series of theses:

1. “Adolf Hitler is just a very typical german ‘man of the people’. … As even his very appearance suggests, there is nothing whatever eccentric about him. He is not only satisfied with, but enthusiastically embraces, his typicalness. So you get in him, cut out in the massive and simple lines of a peasant art, the core of the teutonic character. And his ‘doctrine’ is essentially just a set of rather primitive laws, promulgated in the interest of that particular stock or type, in order to satisfy its especial requirements and ambitions, and to ensure its vigorous survival, intact and true to its racial traditions” (31-32). This is very different from the hero-worshipping tones with which Pound salutes Mussolini’s “genius”; it also conveys the stance of Lewis’ articles. He means to convey the spirit, to the British public, of a phenomenon culturally alien to it; he intends to translate and to explain the Nazi movement as a matter of some historical significance, but not necessarily to endorse it. “It is as an exponent—not as critic nor yet as advocate—of German National-socialism or Hitlerism, that I come forward” (4). It seems to me that this didactic stance is essential in grasping the symbolic value Hitler (and Germany) had for Lewis: not only are they doubly oppressed—by Marxist provocation and by the Versailles Treaty—but this oppression is formally inscribed within his text as the misunderstanding and miscomprehension of the British reader, against which Lewis must write.

2. The Nazi conception of race is a welcome antidote to the Marxian conception of class: “The Class-doctrine—as opposed to the Race-doctrine—demands a clean slate. Everything must be wiped off slick. A sort of colourless, featureless, automaton—temporally two-dimensional—is what is required by the really fanatical Marxist autocrat. Nothing but a mind without backgrounds, without any spiritual depth, a flat mirror for propaganda, a parrot-soul to give back the catchwords, an ego without reflection, in a word a sort of Peter Pan Machine—the adult Child—will be tolerated” (84).

3. Hitler’s program is exemplary as a defense of Europe, at a time when Europe’s intellectuals are at work undermining its legitimacy through their “exotic sense” (a “sentimentalizing with regard to the Non-White World” [121]). In effect, the Hitlerist has this message for the ruling classes of other European countries: “When, respected sir, and gracious lady, are you going—oh short-sighted, much indulging, sentimentally-renegade person that you are!—when may we hope that you will turn for a change to more practical interests? How about giving your White Consciousness a try for a little—it is really not so dull as you may suppose! A ‘White Australia’—that may be impracticable. But at least there is nothing impracticable about a ‘White Europe’. And today Europe is not so big as it was. It is ‘a little peninsula at the Western extremity of Asia’. It is quite small. Why not all of us draw together, and put out White Civilization in a state of defense? And let us start by mutually cancelling all these monstrous debts that are crushing the life out of us economically” (121).

4. The Nazi program recapitulates many of Lewis’ most deeply felt polemic themes: “A ‘Sex-war’, an ‘Age-war’, a ‘Colour-line-war’, are all equally promoted by Big Business to cheapen labour and to enslave men more and more. I do not like the present Capitalist system” (97). Hitlerism not only repudiates the call to hatred and division of Marxian class war, and the pernicious “trahison des clercs” of the “exotic sense,” it also gives the welcome example of a transformation of Western “youth cults” into a genuine political movement (97).

5. “Race” essentially stands for the affirmation of the specificity of the national situation: this is the sense in which Lewis deals with Nazi antisemitism. The latter is, according to him, a German national characteristic, however unlovely, and must be understood as such. But here Lewis has a counter-sermon for the Germans themselves, as they try to explain themselves to other nations: “The Hitlerite must understand that, when he is talking to an Englishman or an American about the ‘Jew’ (as he is prone to do), he is apt to be talking about that gentleman’s wife! Or anyhow Chacun son Jew! is a good old english saying. So if the Hitlerite desires to win the ear of England he must lower his voice and coo (rather than shout) Juda verrecke! if he must give expression to such a fiery intolerant notion. Therefore—a pinch of malice certainly, but no ‘antisemitism’ for the love of Mike!” (42).

6. Hitlerian economics are those of the German peasant, essentially an anticapitalist attack on banks, loan-capital, and the War Debt. Hitler is a “Credit Crank.” The Nazi opposition to Communism (“which has taken the mechanical ways of Megalopolis into the villages”) “attacks the substitution, by the Communist, of the notion of quantity for that of quality…. Upon some points, of course, the Communist and the Nationalsocialist are in considerable agreement. Ultimately, the reason why their two doctrines could never fuse is this: the Marxist, or Communist, is a fanatically dehumanizing doctrine. Its injunctions are very rigidly erected against the continuance of ‘the person’. In the place of ‘the person’ the Communist would put the thing—quantity in place of quality, as it is stated above. … So, even if Hitlerism, in its pure ‘germanism’, might retain too much personality, of a second-rate order, nevertheless Hitlerism seems preferable to Communism, which would have none at all, if it had its way. Personality is the only thing that matters in the world” (182-183). Thus, “the Weltanschauung of the Hitlerist or his near-relation (the egregious ‘Credit-Crank’) is laughing and gay compared to that of his opponent, the Communist. … On principle—for his is a deliberately ‘catastrophic’ philosophy (the word is Marx’s)—the Communist views everything in the darkest colours…. The Hitlerist dream is full of an imminent classical serenity—leisure and abundance. It is, with them, Misery-spot against Golden Age!” (183-184).

Most discussions of this book (which is generally passed over in embarrassed silence) have centered on the false problem of whether, on the strength of this “misguided” assessment of Hitler before he came to power, Lewis is to be thought of as a fascist or fascist sympathizer. The reader is generally reminded that Lewis changed his mind, and on the eve of World War II wrote an anti-Nazi counter-blast, The Hitler Cult and How It Will End (1939). But Lewis’ opinion of Hitler is by no means the most significant feature of the earlier work.

What is essential from our point of view is that Hitler is informed by all the ideological positions which will remain constant to the very end of Lewis’ life: those fundamental themes do not change, even if his view of Hitler did. Among them, and far more central than his attitude towards Hitler as a historical figure, is his attitude towards fascism as a historical force. Here, but to the end of his career, fascism remains for Lewis the great political expression of revolutionary opposition to the status quo. This fundamentally historical vision of fascism—this structural place of “fascism” in Lewis’ libidinal apparatus—is not altered by his later (and impeccable) anti-Nazi convictions, and is in fact recapitulated in Monstre gai, published only two years before Lewis’ death in 1957:

Hyperides represented the most recent political phenomenon—hated or disliked by everybody. Here was the Fascist, the arch-critic of contemporary society. On earth this newcomer proposed to supplant the enfeebled Tradition, of whatever variety, no longer able to defend itself. So this enfeebled Power of Tradition, and its deadly enemy, the Marxist Power, joined forces to destroy this violent Middleman (a borrower from both the new and the old).

(MG, 220)

Coming in the midst of the Cold War, and after the utter annihilation of Nazism as a presence on the world political scene, this retrospective evaluation of World War II may seem anachronistic, and the reader may be tempted to see it as a tired survival of thoughts that were alive for Lewis in the 20’s and 30’s. Yet the fact that fascism continued to stand as the political (and libidinal) embodiment of Lewis’ chronic negativity, his oppositionalism, his stance as the Enemy, long after the defeat of institutional fascism itself, may, I think, be better grasped from a somewhat different perspective. The figural value of fascism as a reaction is determined by the more central position of Communism, against which the anticapitalist posture of protofascism (of which Lewis approved) must always be understood. We have touched on a number of reasons why Communism could not, for Lewis, be a satisfactory solution. The ultimate one now proves to be his feeling—paradoxical after all that has been said—that Communism was a historical inevitability, and thus, in a sense, the final and most irrevocable form of the Zeitgeist, that against which the oppositional mind must somehow always take a stand.

In this sense, and in the spirit of the present study, which has been an immanent analysis of Lewis’ works, disengaging the self-critique always structurally implicit in them, we may allow his own truth-in-jest to have the final word:

I know that at some future date I shall have my niche in the Bolshevist Pantheon, as a great enemy of the Middle-class Idea … I say: “I shall be among the bolshie prophets!” My “bourgeois-bohemians” in Tarr—and oh, my Apes of God!—will provide ‘selected passages’ for the schoolchildren of the future communist state,—of that I am convinced—to show how repulsive unbridled individualism can be.

Fables Ofaggression ...

Frideric Jameson 

Contemporary Men Hermits Around The World

 

Historical hermits have often reflected a religious motive, as have modern counterparts. Here are six religious men hermits, followed by non-religious.

Benedictine monk and hermit Dunstan Morrissey (1923–2009) founded Sky Farm Hermitage in 1977, in Sonoma, California. Sky Farm served as his dwelling, adding several cottages for retreatants over the years. After his death, two hermits have managed Sky Farm and continue to offer retreats.

Richard Withers (b. 1955) is a canonical hermit living modestly in a poor Philadelphia neighborhood. He adheres to a religious schedule but also engages in social and charitable work in his neighborhood.

Priest and hermit Charles Brandt (1923–2020) resided within old–growth forest on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in Canada. Once an ornithologist, Trappist monk, and active book conservator, Brandt remained an avid photographer and naturalist, offering meditation retreats at his cabin. He is author of Meditations From The Wilderness: A Collection of Profound Writing on Nature as the Source of Inspiration (1997).

Daniel Bourguet (b. 1946) is a French Protestant hermit of the Reform sect, a former pastor and university professor, author of over two dozen books on Christian topics, none particular to eremitism. When studying as a youth, Bourguet felt a desire for solitude, discovering that his superiors approved of his aspiration. He spent time at a Trappist monastery and Dominican community before undertaking solitude at his own hermitage in a wooded area of Cevennes, southern France.

Bourguet lives in a single–room log cabin completely off grid, including the absence of media, yet like a starets, visitors seeking his counsel are numerous and regular. Bourguet has served as prior of the Order of Watchers, a virtual network of spiritually–minded hermits.

Maxime Qavtaradze (b. 1954) can be counted a modern stylite. The Georgian Orthodox priest lived alone atop Katskhi pillar, in a cottage adjacent to a chapel, 130 feet high (forty meters), from 1993 to 2015. Maxime would lift by pulley supplies prepared by fellow monks, though he descended the pillar twice a week. The pillar and chapel date from the tenth century; accessing the top of the pillar was forbidden by Patriarch Ilia II to preserve the site.

Norman Davies is a Jewish contemplative living in Malaga (Spain) as a hermit. He describes his daily life as “the practice of a dedicated and intentional prayerful lifestyle akin to solitary monasticism or eremitism. This is decided rarety in Jewish history and in twenty–first century Jewish practice it is virtually non–existent.” Davies, a former music teacher in the UK, cites Philo of Alexandria and the Essenes as ancient models, acknowledging the influence of his pre–conversion life as a Carmelite monk.

Motives among solitaries may converge around creativity, as Anthony Storr noted in his book Solitude: A Return to the Self. Two examples of creative hermits are Valerio Ricetti (1898–1952) and Manfred Gnädinger (1936-2002).

Ricetti, an Italian immigrant to Australia, arrived as an adolescent. He found work on steamboats. One day chancing upon a series of caves he decided to dwell in one. Over time he enhanced the caves via galleries into adjoining rock to create finished masonry passages and rooms, adding a water well, ample gardens, and wall iconography. Ricetti lived like a hermit. Injured one day, he was discovered by a passer–by, taken to hospital, and his dwelling–place revealed. Visitors praised his creation and he discovered the Italian community around Griffith, New South Wales, where he lived. Ricetti was interned with other Italians during World War II, put on road maintenance crews, where he shared his building skills, and returned to dwell in his cave after the war. In 1952, beset by mental illness, Ricetti returned to Italy, where he died shortly afterwards. The cave is today called “Hermit’s Cave,” maintained on the provincial registry for historic architecture.

Born in Germany, Manfred Gnädinger settled in Camelle on the coast of Galicia (Spain) in his twenties. He took up residence in a seaside hut, sculpting rock and driftwood in Gaudi–like configurations, dubbing the coast that displayed his works his museum. Man, as he was called, tall, long-bearded, and gaunt, lived a simple hermit life, with a small garden and neither electricity nor running water. He sculpted scores of figures and filled hundreds of notebooks with thousands of artistic sketches. Thirty years later, a horrific oil spill from the off–shore British tanker ship Prestige destroyed all of his work, bringing down all the sculptures and coating the beach and shoreline past his hut in thick black oil. Man was distraught. He died a month later. His “museum” has since been partially recovered by the village and preserved in commemoration of the hermit–artist.

If not creativity or overt belief, other contemporary hermit men are motivated by a personal response to the world.

Scottish–born Jake Williams has been a sailor, musician, handyman, and hermit. Williams lives in the Scottish Highlands, in the middle of a forest, where he contrives everything from tools to gardens using found objects recovered during expeditions to distant urban areas. He is the subject of the 2011 documentary film Two Years at Sea and continued media attention.

Sometimes the lure of escape overcomes the potential hermit, as in the example of Masafumi Nagasaki (b. 1936), who once worked in a factory in Osaka, Japan, dreaming of living on a deserted island. One day in 1989 he left civilization behind to live alone on the deserted Japanese island of Sotobanari (Okinawa Prefecture). He lived without electricity, water (except rainfall), animal food—or clothing, given that no one ever visited the deserted island.

Nagasaki is the subject of several news reports and films, wherein he would insist he wanted to live out his life on the island. But in 2018, a passing boater noticed him and notified authorities. Nagasaki was involuntarily removed from the island, placed in public housing, and refused permission to return to the island.

Italian–born Pietro Lentini sought to escape years of dissipation, becom-ing a hermit in the Umbrian region of the Apennines, on Mt. Aspra, in Valnerina. He found a ruined dwelling, furbished it—acquaintances later helping in the task— and lives there in silence and solitude, lacking running water and electricity, now with a solar-charged mobile phone gifted to him for emergencies. Occasionally Lentini descends to the town for provisions. He pursues a makeshift Christianity of his own crafting and frequently plays a worn flute. Lentini is seventy years old.

Since 1965, Chilean–born Faustino Barrientos lives alone on the shores of Lake O’Higgins in Patagonia, southernmost Chile. His dwelling is the remnant of a boat cabin. He lives from herds, livestock, and supplies from a boat that passes every ten days. He has no electricity, but uses battery–powered short wave and ham radios. Barrientos visits the nearest town every few years, riding by horse the twenty–five miles over mountains to exchange his animals for food and batteries. The inhabitants think he is crazy. He expresses no spiritual or other motive for his hermit lifestyle.

In 2001, Canadian researcher Robert Kull journeyed to a tiny deserted island in southern Chile to begin a year–long experiment in solitude wilderness. Kull had recently earned degrees in biology and psychology, and was scheduled to pursue a fellowship in behavioral studies in British Columbia, specifically interested in the effects of deep wilderness solitude. He convinced his doctoral faculty to accept his project, assembled food, clothes, supplies, and tools, and embarked. While pursuing observations and notes, Kull developed a routine of meditation; in his last months on the island, he quit reading and writing to concentrate on meditation, listening, stillness, and observation. Kull attributes the gradual realization that the self and all of nature is sufficient and sacred to the simplification undergone by the self–sufficiency and solitude he was able to experience. Kull recounts his year in his book Solitude: Seeking Wisdom In Extremes (2008).

Neil Ansell lived alone in Penlan Cottage in the rural isolation of Wales for five years, without car, phone, clock, or fossil fuel. In 2011, Ansell published a book on his solitude years, Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills, imminently observant while self–effacing about his routines and the wild creatures that shared his forest. Ansell observed birds, grew food, and foraged. The silence outside reflected a growing silence within. Interior monologue quieted to a whisper, then fading away entirely. While he had not practiced meditation beforehand, Ansell notes that he came to under-stand the Buddhist concept of no–mind. The self becomes as much a part of the landscape as a stone. Ansell’s five years were cut short by a virus he contracted, perhaps carried by bats or mice.

David Glasheen (b. 1943) enjoyed an elite and privileged life as a mil-lionaire stock broker in Australia until the 1987 stock market crash wiped out his wealth. Glasheen decided to quit society, eventually moving to deserted Restoration Island, where he learned to fish, cook, and survive with a poor solar–powered internet connection and an annual boat trip to buy supplies. He was frequently visited by journalists and old acquaintances; his wife divorced him as soon as he fell into poverty. Seventy–seven year old Glasheen has published a memoir titled Millionaire Castaway celebrating over twenty years of solitary life.

Since 1989, Mauro Morandi (b. 1939) has lived alone on the Italian island of Budelli, near Sardinia, a national park. Morandi has assembled solar panels, collects rainwater, makes furniture out of driftwood, and takes photographs of the island, enough to fill a book. Morandi gives occasional interviews, displaying a confident and relaxed perspective on solitude and self–sufficiency. A gentle skeptic, he nevertheless keeps up with family, acquaintances, and the world via mobile phone and social media. Pressured by national park authorities, Morandi quit the island April 2021.

Many other men have pursued a hermit life, in a variety of places around the world: British–born Brendon Grimshaw (1925–2012) moved to an island of Seychelles, East Africa. Pedro Luca (b. 1937) has lived in a cave in Argentina for the last forty years. New Zealander Tom Neale (1902–1977) spent sixteen years alone on a South Pacific island, more a survivalist than hermit. “Pete” has lived in a cave off the Kaikoura coast of New Zealand for over thirty years.

Russia counts many hermits beside the media–famous Agafia Lykova. For reasons suggesting a criminal past, “Viktor” moved to Siberia sixteen years ago to live in solitude, while Nikolai Gromov (b. 1947) presents the strange case of having left to the Siberian taiga in fear and remorse that he had slain his wife in a pique of drunkenness. Twenty–four years later, Gromov returned to his old dwelling. His wife had not been killed after all, but had died in an accident during Gromov’s self–exile. Gromov remains alone with the burden of his history.

Some apparent or aspiring hermits reveal pathological motives. Carlos Sanchez Ortiz, a young medical doctor, disappeared from his home in Spain, to be found twenty years later in a Tuscany forest in Italy. Mushroom pickers who crossed his path passed information on to a European missing persons organization. His family was contacted, describing then twenty–six year old Carlos as severely depressed. They prepared to visit him, if only for a short meeting, but the forest hermit had disappeared again.

A similar motive may have impelled Filipino Mang Emigdio. He took off suddenly, abandoning wife and children, when a typhoon destroyed their home in 1987. Emigdio was found living in a mountain cave, refusing to leave, his pitying family and villagers helping him eke out a solitary life with regular visits.

Wilderness solitude is not equated to survivalism by hermits. The case of Chris McCandless (1968–1992) remains perplexing and elusive. McCandless may have grown up suffering childhood trauma, but its effect was, typically, unnoticeable to others. He expressed an enthusiasm for nature, outdoors, and wilderness when young, also demonstrating a strong empathy for homeless people with whom he sometimes mingled in Washington, D.C., offering them food, clothing, and comfort, in the shadow of the comfort-able suburban home where he grew up with his parents. Over the years, his favorite reading was Tolstoy and Thoreau.

Upon college graduation, McCandless announced to family and friends a planned road trip. He had just given away his savings of $24,000 to charity, and disappeared, traversing the United States to end up in Alaskan wilderness. McCandless was intent upon plunging into wilderness survival, though he carried no food or gear, nor had acquired survival skills, only an expanded idealism. At first he attended to an evocative journal paralleling Thoreau’s, but the late entries change tone. His successes had waned in just four months. He foresaw a fast–approaching fate.

As McCandless biographer Jon Krakauer notes, McCandless had a copy of Louis L’Amour’s memoir Education of a Wandering Man, a page quoting from Robinson Jeffers’s poem “Wise Men in Their Bad Hours”:

Death’s a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made

Something more equal to the centuries

Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness.

On the other side of the page, which was blank, McCandless penned a brief farewell: “I have had a happy life and thank the Lord. Goodbye and may God bless all!” McCandless died from starvation or food poisoning, at the age of twenty–four.

The case of Christopher Knight (b. 1965) is described in Michael Finkel’s 2017 book The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit. Knight spent twenty–seven years in a wooded camp in Maine close to tourist and visitor cabins, from which Knight stole food and provisions with great deftness. The biographer’s dogged interviews and identification of details reveal Knight to be a classic recluse (versus hermit). Knight was eventually caught, publicly rued his thievery, and has slipped into obscurity.

The Book of hermits: the history of hermits from antiquity to the present / Robert Rodriguez

Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger History of a Love

 Introduction

AT THE END of her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt writes about the internal devastation wrought by the power of totalitarianism, “the iron band of terror” that succeeds in creating an atmosphere of desolation around and within each person. One might have the impression, she writes, “as though a means had been found in which the desert had set itself in motion, setting loose a sandstorm that blew over all the inhabited areas of the earth.”1

My book is about this sandstorm, and its effect on people who, with élan and self-awareness, wished to renew the world.

In the fall of 1924, Hannah Arendt, a young woman from Königsberg, came to Marburg on the Lahn with a group of like-minded friends. She was following a rumor that one could learn to think with a young philosopher at the university there. She was a student hungry for knowledge; he was a rebel among philosophers. She was eighteen years old and a free spirit; he was thirty-five and married. What connected them was the passion of love and the fascination for philosophical thought.

Both entered into a precarious love that was at the same time the beginning of an adventurous path of thought that would push them apart and bring them together time and again. With the publication of Being and Time in 1927 Heidegger rose to world fame. He owed this flight of thinking in part to her love. At the same time Arendt turned to Zionism, wanting to fight against murderous anti-Semitism. The seizing of power by the National Socialists ripped both from their paths. She and her friends were forced to flee. He awaited a national awakening and a leading role as educator for himself in National Socialism. Heidegger’s “mission” destroyed their love as well as the friendship of many of his teachers, colleagues, and students.

The lovers became enemies. Still, meeting seventeen years later, the old feelings of connectedness surfaced. A friendship of twenty years began, a friendship broken time and again by crises.

Those who came after have had their problems with this history. Not a few contemporaries considered it a scandal. Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger! How could a Jewish woman find herself with a Nazi in spe? With the abyss that lay between them, how could she seek this connection again after the war, as was clearly the case?

Those who remain as voyeurs cannot understand that in this relationship two themes intersect constantly: love and thought. Along all the meanderings of the story and its characters, the theme that appears is love in all its shadings: eros and agape, faithfulness and betrayal, passion and banality, reconciliation, forgetting, remembering. Amor Mundi, “Love of the World,” also appears, clearly not a sentimental issue. From Arendt comes the question of how a new beginning may be made after the self-destruction of Europe through war and genocide. With this, however, the question of thinking itself becomes a theme. At the beginning of their relationship stood the following questions: What is the purpose of philosophical thought? Can a well-understood existential philosophy be transferred to the world of human action?

Heidegger failed in his aspiration to be the educator of the nation. When this failure became clear to him, he withdrew deep into philosophy.

Hannah Arendt, violently pushed by her enemies in 1933 into the same question, had a radically different response: thinking must reach into the world and engage human beings and their experiences, ruptures, and catastrophes more profoundly.

Above all, Arendt and Heidegger were painfully aware that they were witnesses to a break with tradition that could not be healed. In their different ways, they were both on the path to a new beginning, a “thinking without banisters,” without support in the tradition. One of the richest philosophical discourses of the twentieth century emerged from this political antagonism, a discourse between a thinking of the political world (Arendt) and a philosophical discourse on Gelassenheit or letting-be (Heidegger). It is a confrontation that defined the last century and continues today in its endless variations.

The double relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, as lovers and thinkers, will be told against the backdrop of the last century, its fissures, catastrophes, and personal dramas. The more entwined the history of the century becomes with Arendt and Heidegger, the more characters enter the stage. Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger: a young doctor and psychiatrist from the northern German provinces and a young philosopher from the southern Bavarian province link up to radically remake philosophy and with it their universities. Their friendship began as they both followed the same thought: philosophy was no longer adequate to the existential questions of the present. They rebelled against the inherited structures of university philosophy. They would be the emissaries of a new way of thinking, existential philosophy. Their friendship collapsed in1933 as Jaspers condemned the new leaders and antisemitism. He was driven from the university by these events. Toward the end of the war, he was afraid for his life and that of his wife’s. After the war he emerged as a harsh critic of Heidegger—at the same time he appealed to their old connection. Friendship, however, was not possible.

For Hannah Arendt, her doctoral supervisor, Karl Jaspers, was the trusted person she could turn to after 1945 as she encountered a Germany she barely recognized. Jaspers was ever present as the third party to her new relationship to Heidegger. Heidegger suffered under the loss of friendship with Jaspers. Arendt was never able to effect a reconciliation between the two.

Heinrich Blücher, Arendt’s second husband, appears; his encouragement of her work was invaluable. Jasper’s wife, Gertrud, also emerges. This is the woman who Jaspers thanks for his “humanity” and whose contribution to their discussions in the Jaspers’ house can only be surmised. Finally, Elfride Heidegger enters, a woman who embarked on her marriage full of hope as an emancipated woman; she was fascinated with National Socialism early and never escaped from this legacy. Throughout her life she fought against Heidegger’s connection to his Jewish students; his insistence on a life with eros made her bitter.

The students appear: Karl Löwith, the talented early critic of his teacher Heidegger; Elisabeth Blochmann, the excellent student with a calling in pedagogy; Hans Jonas, who as Zionist and Jewish scholar studied with Heidegger; Herbert Marcuse, who was fascinated by Heidegger before turning to another fascination, Marxism; the highly intelligent Günther Anders, Arendt’s first husband.

What seems to those who come after to have been a clearly delineated world (the teacher as perpetrator, colleagues and students as victims) was at the time a shared world in which the traditions of communists and messianics, Jews and Christians, Zionists, nationalists and racists all interacted with, clashed against, and influenced one another simultaneously. Between the lines we also find the discussion of just how violent the separation of “German” from “Jewish” thinking in the intellectual history of Germany was.

And as though that were not enough for our protagonists, they also lived on two different continents for forty years. Hannah Arendt found a new circle of thinking in the United States, and, with her friends, she made a new home for herself there. She involved herself in the debates surrounding the founding of the state of Israel and worked on establishing a new foundation for political thought. Her friends Mary McCarthy, Alfred Kazin, Waldemar Gurian, Hermann Bloch, Dwight MacDonald, and many others, brought the American world closer to her and debated with her the future of Europe.

Martin Heidegger saw in America the embodiment of the age of doomed technology. Hannah Arendt, on the other hand, wanted to bring the “American perspective” into European thought. Her lifelong disputes also stemmed from this, namely, how the political will of a people could find expression in a form other than that of the European nation-state. In this respect one can rightly speak of a “transatlantic relationship.”

Where do the protagonists stand at the end? Unmasked, damaged, rehabilitated? If the book has been successful at counteracting these images, then it has accomplished its goal.

Note

1. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1951), 478.

(...)

Heidegger now wanted to practically implement what he and Jaspers had been discussing, namely, the transformation of the university into an institution that produces intellectual leadership. Plato’s idea of the academy resonated in the background. Hannah Arendt would take up this idea in her plan for a book on politics. Of course, such an elite concept required the right students. They should be highly intelligent, but not studying out of purely theoretical interest. Heidegger and others accused the Jewish intelligentsia of just this, being too one-sided, living only in their heads, neglecting the other side of life: embodiment, work. Against this, the new students were to be exhorted to lead an authentic life, to engage in physical as well as intellectual exercise. Heidegger had already diagnosed the alienation between the two poles of human existence as a sign of self-alienation in the age of the masses. Already in the 1920s, there were reports of the campfire romanticism at the Todtnauberg cabin where visitors told ancient myths, sang songs, and played sports.

Academic teaching was to be completely transformed. Many complaints about the faculty in the 1920s—especially in letters between friends—often culminated in the derisive cry that the majority of colleagues did not belong in a university deserving of its name. Competitive thoughts and feelings of social inferiority may well have been at play here, but so was the conviction that too many compromises had been made in academic teaching. True thinking, however, as Heidegger had learned under difficult and trying circumstances, did not admit compromises. Those born after the Second World War were the first to understand that while lack of compromise can be fruitful and inclusive, under different circumstances, it can also be devastating and destructive. However, in the time after the First World War, another idea held sway, namely, that the renunciation of radicalness leads to mediocrity. It remains a mystery as to why so many people of that time consciously accepted the view that uncompromising thinking, in circumstances where it seeks to make an impact, may become violent, indeed, must become violent. Was it the First World War that made the dimension of violence in thinking so acceptable? An entire generation in different camps (socialism, communism, messianism, Zionism, national ideology) enthusiastically welcomed radical thinking. They believed that only those who pushed thought to its most extreme consequences could accomplish something in this world of decay. The danger of this uncompromising thinking escaped Heidegger, as well. He was certainly not alone in this.

But what astonishes us even more, from today’s point of view, is that the philosopher Heidegger must have really believed that he could leap from thinking to action, without first crossing over the transitional space where the two seemed to directly oppose each other.

In Being and Time, Heidegger foreclosed the possibility of thinking this transitional space; there he thoroughly demonstrated that authentic Dasein exists in the rejection of everything having to do with the “they,” of everything having to do with the evental-historical with-world (Mit-Welt), with the public domain, culture, and technology. From the background of this exclusion of the everyday world, a world defined as distracting, emerges this naïveté—a naïveté that seems so monstrous to us today—out of which Heidegger saw the euphoria of National Socialism materialize as a convincing concept. Hannah Arendt would later write a parable about this: Heidegger, the fox, fell into the trap that he himself set.

Heidegger hoped that the new way of thinking that he was working on would lead to a new kind of academy, a new form of thinking, teaching, and educating at the University of Freiburg. He believed that the opportunity to accomplish his project would present itself in one way or another. Did he hope that the National Socialists would come into power? He certainly did not wish for the banal orgies of violence that began after 1933. However, early on he saw in the “movement,” and apparently also in its militarization, the auspicious alternative to the everydayness of the 1920s, to the boring monotony of democratic procedures and practices. He saw a possibility, a forum, for the renewal of the nation’s spiritual potential. He must have believed that there was a task left unaccomplished by the ancients, a task that was now possible to fulfill with National Socialism. Not that he thought the task would be fulfilled by the National Socialist movement itself. In his view, the latter needed to be educated. The task was up to him; he had taken it upon himself long ago. He wanted only to be called.6Heidegger shared the epochal illusion of the emergence of National Socialism with many others, from Gottfried Benn to Carl Schmitt to Arnolt Bronnen, and others. National Socialism became the bearer of hope; many people saw in it an alternative to the chaos of the mass age, to being at the mercy of technology, to the self-forgetting loss of German culture, and the decline of the national state. The return to the “German essence” was the promise that hid the violence and terror, the modern means of technological domination and the formation of the totalitarian system.

Antonia Grunenberg

The Poundian Gists' and Maxims

Into what he variously described as 'gists', maxims, axioms and aphorisms, Pound encapsulated the essence of his critical thought or intuition, commonsense or wisdom in a memorably epigrammatic way. The Dantesque clarity, concision and concreteness he aspired to-and often succeeded in achieving- in his poetry, he also succeeds in achieving in his pithy comments and conclusions which are comparable with the best of their kind by Dr Johnson, Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, Eliot and Leavis. Unbounded confidence in him-self, in his judgement and perception, and in his 'high and final EZthority', enabled him to pinpoint, with extraordinary incisiveness and simplicity, the various facets of the art of poetry - especially of modem poetry - as well as of the practice and profession of literary criticism. These dicta bring out, no less than does his most 'personal' poetry, the way Pound's mind and intelligence, and his critical perception and intuition work, enabling him to see 'fitfully and by starts' what other critics have to toil, dissect and analyse long to explore.

Apart from those we have already come across in the course of this book. here are some salient examples of the Poundian dicta on poetry, criticism, culture, art, religion:

1. Without constant experiment literature dies.
2. There is gongorism in critical writings as well as in bad poetry.
3. Parody is the best criticism - it sifts the durable from the apparent.
4. Lope de Vega is not a man, he is a literature.
5. Aristotle was so good at his job that he anchored human thought for 2000 years.
6. You could call Orage a damn fool and respect him.
7. Virgil is a second-rate, Tennysonianized version of Homer.
8. No one will ever gauge or measure English poetry until they knew how much of it, how full a gamut of its qualities, is already THERE ON THE PAGE OF CHAUCER.
9. Try to find a poem of Byron or Poe without seven serious defects.
10. It is hard to drop an enthusiasm.
11. Glory is a damned inedible substance.
12. Dogma is bluff based on ignorance.
13. Belief is a cramp, a paralysis, an atrophy of the mind in certain positions.
14. The essence of religion is the present tense.
15. The syllogism, time and again, loses grip on reality.
16. By genius I mean an inevitable swiftness and right-mindedness in a given field.
17. There is no democracy in the arts.
18. [To his mother] No periodical is ever much good. I hope you don't think I read the periodicals I appear in.
19. The quintessence of style is that it should be swift and mordant.
20. Science is unpoetic only to minds jaundiced with sentiment and romanticism.
21. No one knows enough, soon enough.
22. A writer dies when he ceases to have, and exercise, omnivorous curiosity.
23. The trained never think.
24. It is very often easy to do for another what one couldn't possibly do for one's self.
25. The UNprintable part of my writing is what deals with ANYthing of importance.
26. One's preparation for a real job is possibly never what one does when one thinks one is preparing.
27. Tenny rate, stagnation comes from inside; and not from the circumst.
28. Ownership is often a damned nuisance, and anchor.
29. Xtianity is a poor substitute for truth.
30. One definition of beauty: aptness to purpose.
31. He [Christ] is not wholly to blame for the religion that's been foisted upon him. As well blame me for all the bunk in vers libre.
32. Je revere plutot le bon sens que l'originalite.
33. Only a small part of any epoch or decade survives.
34. NO GOOD WORK EVER KNOCKED OUT ANY 0THER GOOD WORK.
35. Truth is not untrue'd by reason of our failing to fix it on paper.
36. The miracle of Homer is that great poesie is everywhere latent and that literary finish is up to Henry James.
37. A narrative is all right so long as the narrator sticks to words as simple as dog, horse, and sunset.
38. Music is excellent discipline for the writer of the prose.
39. Knowledge is to know man. Mr Alexander Pope rubs it a bit too smooth. If you translate him, the proper study for man is anthropology, you get nearer the source of error.
40. Only in basicly pagan Italy has Christianity escaped becoming a nuisance.
41. A REAL book is one whose words grow ever more luminous as one's experience increases or as one is led or edged over into considering them with greater attention.
42. The cult of beauty is the hygiene, it is the sun, air and the sea and the rain and the lake bathing. The cult of ugliness, Villon, Baudelaire, Corbiere, Beardsley are diagnosis. Flaubert is diagnosis. Satire is surgery, insertions, amputations.
43. 'Good writing' is perfect control.
44. All criticism should be professedly personal criticism.
45. Poetry, the lordliest of arts.
46. The function of criticism is to efface itself when it has established its dissociations. Let it stand that from 1912 onward for a decade and more I was instrumental in forcing into print, and secondarily in commenting on, certain work now recognized as valid by all competent readers.
47. The sonnet was not a great poetic invention. The sonnet occurred automatically when some chap got stuck in the effort to make a canzone. His 'genius' consisted in the recognition of the fact that he had come to the end of his subject matter.
48. For most translation one would merely say, take it away and start again.
49. All criticism is an attempt to define the classic.
50. A sound poetic training is nothing more than the science of being discontented.
51. When a civilization is vivid it preserves and fosters all sorts of artists - painters, poets, sculptors, musicians, architects.
When a civilization is dull and anemic it preserves a rabble of priests, sterile instructors, and repeaters of things second-hand.
52. Beauty is a brief gasp between one cliche and another.
53. An idea is only an imperfect induction from fact.
54. Civilisation is individual.
55. It is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.
56. The infinite gulf between what you read and enjoy and what you set up as a model.
57. Italian concept of poetry: something oppressive and to be revered.
58. The more a man goes over a real writer the more he knows that no reader ever read anything the first time he saw it.
59. The Bible should be read after the reader is literate.
60. The basis of a state is its economic justice.

From Ezra Pound as Critic G. Singh

Tracks and Voices in the Wilderness

1

In the month of May, 1877, the American consul in Bremen received the following letter:

The undersigned – Born in Charleville (France) – Aged 23 – 5ft 6 height – Good healthy – Late a teacher of sciences and languages – recently deserted from the 47th Regiment of the French army – actually in Bremen without any means, the French consul refusing any Relief. Would like to know on which conditions he could conclude an immedi-ate engagement in the American navy. Speaks and writes English, German, French, Italian and Spanish. Has been four months a sailor in a Scotch bark, from Java to Queenstown, from August to December 76.Would be very honoured and grateful to receive an answer.

The ‘undersigned’ in question was Arthur Rimbaud, a French poet who had deserted from France, from the literary scene, recently from the Dutch army to which he’d joined up in order to get to the East Indies, who was ready to join up with any outfit that would stake him to grub and get him to somewhere around the world, an outf i t that he would promptly desert with his eye on somewhere else.

Rimbaud’s life-line is marked by breaks, his mind-line too. All in all, he marks a break in Western culture, out for something he never found and was never able to define. Anyone interested in thought, in poetics, in anything that can be called deep culture, whether West or East, North or South, can usefully take his existence and work as a point of departure.

This was the case with the Breton poet and writer, Victor Segalen, born in Brest, who, after studying to be a naval doctor in Bordeaux, himself travelled the world, mainly in Polynesia and China, but often passing by or stopping over in the territory Rimbaud fi nally ended up in: Aden, Djibouti, the Somali coast, the desert of Abyssinia.

If ever a figure haunted Segalen, and that for years on end, it was Rimbaud. Passing through Aden, in May 1909, on his way to China, Segalen notes in his diary: ‘At Aden a painful ghost with an ambiguous message rose up before me: Arthur Rimbaud’, and at that same period he writes to his wife: ‘The image of Rimbaud turns up again and again on my path.’ Rimbaud was a riddle to him, on several levels: psychological, poetic, intellectual, and in his mind question followed question concerning his enigmatic predecessor. The most complete formula of all this questioning is probably to be found in his journal, under the date January 10th 1905, when he was passing through Djibouti: ‘On the basis of the handful of documents available, I’ve been trying to make out the exact nature of the explorer in Rimbaud. The poet we know, others have gone into that. Might it be possible to reconcile those so very distant aspects of the one being? Or might it rather be that we’re in presence of a paradox, and that those two aspects are parts of a higher unity we have as yet no conception of?’

There we have the point of departure and the leitmotiv of the present essay. While endeavouring, in Segalen’s company, to answer subsidiary questions (why did Rimbaud, apparently, stop writing?
why did he change so suddenly and so brutally the course of his life?), its principal aim will be to draw at least the outlines of that hitherto unconceived ‘paradoxical unity’.

2

Where Segalen tried for the first time in a consequential way to analyse ‘the case of Rimbaud’ was in an essay begun at Djibouti in the form of scattered notes, written up at Toulon and at Brest, and finally published in Paris, in a number (15 April 1906) of the Mercure de France, under the title Le Double Rimbaud.

This essay comprises a biographical sketch, a critical and exploratory reading of Rimbaud’s work, and the approach to a theory.

Segalen starts of f with a presentation of Rimbaud‘s extraordinarily precocious and poetically explosive beginnings: the texts of Poems, The Illuminations, A Season in Hell. Thereafter, he attempts to trace Rimbaud’s movements in space. Rimbaud had always been exceptionally mobile – moving incessantly from Charleville to Brussels across the Ardennes, and from Charleville to Paris. But as from the age of nineteen, the movement spreads and speeds up. We fi nd him in England, in Belgium, in Germany, Austria, Holland, Java, Cyprus. ‘He wandered about in a way no one else ever did’, comments Segalen. ‘He was always on the move.’ And he quotes one of Rimbaud’s letters: ‘I’d like to travel the whole world over.’ Segalen interprets this extreme mobility in several ways. In the first place, mere fortune-hunting. Then, the desire to live through as much experience as possible. And finally, sheer wanderlust. A clinical approach to such wanderlust (remember, Segalen was also a doctor) would catalogue it as ‘ambulatory mania’, or ‘dromomania’, a diagnostic which Segalen sets aside as being intellectually facile and existentially lazy, contributing in no way to a solution to the radical problem posed: ‘Rimbaud’s double life, with, on the one hand, productive artistic fertility, and, on the other, the most arid of arid nomadisms’.

Especially as the ‘dromomania’ seems to calm down when Rimbaud settles in Abyssinia, where the excited movement turns into the harassed displacement of a commercial traveller, where all the existential turbulence runs down into grinding business.

That’s how Segalen saw the context and the problem. I’d suggest, though, that both context and problem were even more drastic.

3

When, in Djibouti, Segalen started asking around about Rimbaud’s life in Abyssinia, questioning one eye-witness after the other, he got very strange answers. The Rhigas brothers (Athanase at the Café de la Paix, Constantin at the Café de France), who had known Rimbaud well, had this to say: ‘He was a tall, lean fellow, with no fat to him at all, and could he walk! [. . .] Never seen anyone like him for walking! Away he’d go, his coat flapping open, a little fez on his head, and walk, walk, walk.’ According to the same witnesses, Rimbaud, there in the Harrar desert, was ‘very sober, never touched a drop of liquor, drank only coffee, Turkish style’. All this sounds like a kind of asceticism – unless of course it was only to save money that Rimbaud drank no wine (I don’t really think, as some have suggested, it was because he had something better than wine, that is, haschisch). When Segalen asks those veteran merchants how good a businessman Rimbaud was, he’s told this: ‘He was good at figures, but business didn’t really interest him . . . His mind was elsewhere and he was thinking bigger thoughts . . . He lived close to the bone, worked hard, never let up, but the mere amassing of a fortune would never have satisfied him.’ Segalen then wonders if Rimbaud was maybe interested in ethnology, and asks what his relationship was with the natives. Back comes the answer: ‘He didn’t hang around them . . . He had an Abyssinian woman with him for a while, but it didn’t last long . . . He had nothing much in common with anybody.’ The ethnological angle also out, Segalen now asks how Rimbaud felt about literature in general and poetry in particular – had anybody ever seen him writing? Again, he gets a straight answer: ‘Oh, yes, and fine things too . . . reports to the Society of Geography, and a book on Abyssinia.’ While gathering in further bits of information about Rimbaud (‘He could speak English, German, Spanish, Arabic and Galla . . . and what a talker, an amazing talker, all of a sudden with some remark he’d make you laugh your head off !’), Segalen focuses more and more on those ‘writings’ he’d heard about.

Back in France, he gets in touch with members of Rimbaud’s family: his sister, Isabelle, and her husband, Paterne Berrichon, the author of the first Rimbaud biogaphy, whom Segalen considers intellectually hardly adequate to the task. Examining himself Rimbaud’s letters from Abyssinia, he finds them disappointing. If it isn’t requests for technical books (on forestry and agriculture) and instruments (barometer, sextant, telescope, theodolite), it’s a perpetual string of complaints and laments: ‘I just hope we’ll be able to enjoy a few years of real rest in this life, fortunately the only life there is, which is obvious enough, because no life could be imagined more full of boredom than this one’; ‘To enjoy some rest, you have to have some capital, to get married, you have to have some capital, and capital I have none. Which means I’m condemned to trekking about in search of a living, wearing myself out to scrape together the wherewithal to buy myself a little peace.’ Running through this correspondence, Segalen learns that at one point Rimbaud had approached the newspaper Le Temps with the idea of writing a series of articles on the Italo-Ethiopian War. The editor had written back to tell Rimbaud how devoted a group of writers in Paris were to him, considering him as a legendary figure. He added that he himself, the editor of a popular newspaper, and one of his friends, ‘a successful novelist’, often spoke about him. Rimbaud hadn’t replied. He maybe needed cash, but apparently couldn’t bring himself to doing journalism in order to get his hands on some. As to being the cynosure of some little literary circle made up of ‘popular newspaper editors’ and ‘successful novelists’, how could that interest him? The space Rimbaud’s mind evolved in was radically, totally different.

Paying scant attention to certain aspects of Rimbaud’s Abyssinian existence which, on my reading, give at least some indications of that other space, Segalen concludes his initial investigation into Rimbaud’s itinerary by stating rather peremptorily that Rimbaud was neither a topnotch trader (‘he talked several languages, was diligent, had an eye to the main chance, and yet always remained a subaltern’), nor a meticulous explorer – and could he even be defined as a poet in any accustomed sense of the word? The personality that combined the author of Les Illuminations and ‘the Harrar gun-runner’ remained an enigma.

4

Sweeping away in a few quick sentences vaguely religious, culturally wornout, banal literary themes such as ‘devil and angel’, Segalen gets down to experimental psychology: ‘It will be worthwhile to spend some time on the data experimental psychology has piled up concerning double personality, and on the theories arising from those data.’ Among the theoreticians, his preference goes to Pierre Janet, the author of L’automatisme psychique, who had studied many cases of personality alternance and the superposition of variant states of conscience. But if these studies interest Segalen, he quickly comes to the conclusion that they simply do not apply to Rimbaud: none of those psychological cases had the coherence, the stamina, the will-power and life-force evident in the existence of this man.

In short, Rimbaud’s ‘case’ is not pathological, is not the result of some psychic disturbance. It cannot be fitted into a clinical frame-work, it cannot be pinned down to complications in ‘personality’.

At this point in his examination, Segalen turns to the work of Jules de Gaultier: books such as De Kant à Nietzsche or Le Bovarysme. Gaultier’s studies are neither strictly psychological, nor strictly philosophical, nor strictly literary. They move tentatively along the fron-tiers of philosophy, life-economy and poetics.

The name of Jules de Gaultier is hardly one of those that turn up habitually in discussions of twentieth-century philosophy, but since he aroused the interest of minds like Rémy de Gourmont and Victor Segalen, he no doubt deserves more attention than many a ‘philosopher’ more heavily quoted on the ideological stock exchange. Rémy de Gourmont refers to him (‘New dissociations of ideas’, Le Chemin de Velours, 1902) in the following terms: ‘M. Jules de Gaultier has worked out a new kind of manicheism which, used with care, may prove a useful tool in the handling of certain problems. He talks of a life instinct and an intellectual instinct. Not that one is good and the other bad. They both have a part to play in the work of civilization.

For if one of those principles develops the intellect at the expense of the forces that preserve the functions of life, at the same time it enables the intelligence to better enjoy life.’ As for Segalen, he considered Jules de Gaultier as his philosophical mentor. In a letter to Gaultier written at Brest, dated April 20th 1906, he says that he has long been ‘a fervent admirer’ of the ‘fertile work’ of this thinker. In another letter to Gaultier, dated December 28th 1908, he goes on to say this:

‘If I take a close look into my own thought, I see that I’ve been able to accept as masters only the Hindus and yourself.’ And in yet another (28 July 1914), when Segalen was already well out on his own way, we have this: ‘There will be hours – precious for me – when we’ll be able to bring together all kinds of elements. On your side, it will be the fruits of a masterly philosophy, of which I remain more than ever a disciple. For my part, it will be the rough elements of reality – rough elements, but still homages to thought and imaginative power.’ In that last fragment, Segalen was being over-modest. In his later work, conceived on the way to Tibet, for example, there was going to be a conjunction between sharp intellectuality (sharper than anything to be found in Jules de Gaultier) and brute reality that was powerful in the extreme.

But let’s keep to the progression.

Rimbaud’s movement was meteoric, Segalen’s was more measured – but with breaks.When he finds himself face to face on the spot with the enigmatic figure of Rimbaud, wondering which is the ‘true Rimbaud’ (the ‘real’ Rimbaud, the ‘essential’ Rimbaud), the visionary poet or the  merchant-explorer, he thinks he has a clue, a key, in Jules de Gaultier’s concept of ‘bovarysm’: ‘We now have an instrument that permits us to see into phenomenality, and we can give a name to the spectacle.’ I find the term ‘bovarysm’ totally inadequate, but let’s look into the reality behind it, that strange ‘phenomenality’.

Bovarysm as defined by Jules de Gaultier is ‘the faculty a human being has to conceive of himself or herself other than he/she is’, the exercise of this faculty sometimes causing ‘strange divergences from the apparently rigorous line of conduct and thought’. This general definition established, it’s possible to distinguish several categories. In addition to a perfectly normal bovarysm, necessary for evolution (‘the bovarysm of humanity’), there are various types of more extravagant bovarysm: the tragic bovarysm of the heroine in Flaubert’s novel, the bovarysm of the snob, and the bovarysm of genius, marked by excess and dispersal of energy. Rimbaud obviously enough, obviously enough for Segalen, belongs to the latter type – alongside (these are the examples brought forward by Gaultier) Ingres, who laid more store by his violin-playing than by his talents as a painter; Chateaubriand, who valued the politician and statesman in himself above the writer; Goethe, more interested in his naturalist studies than in his literary work. There, thinks Segalen, is an exact portrayal of Rimbaud: on the one hand, great poetic gifts, used nonchalantly; on the other, an obstinate determination to be a successful merchant and make a fortune – the overall result, an existence that seems totally incoherent.

Beyond the general defilnition and the various categories, Gaultier also tries to draw up a kind of psycho-sociological cartography, or existential geometry: ‘Imagine two lines emerging from the same ideal point in the human being. One represents all that is both real and virtual in that being: inherited tendency, natural disposition, native direction of energy. The other represents the image the person forms of himself, herself and of what he or she can become, ought to become – an image formed largely by environment, circumstance, education. Those two lines coincide to become one only if the drive coming from circumstantial environment moves in the same direction as the thrust of native energies.’ There again Segalen tries to convince himself that this schema applies perfectly to the case of Rimbaud: ‘In Rimbaud’s life, that converging of the two lines never took place, so that his total energy was prematurely dispersed in two entirely different directions.’

Quod erat demonstrandum.

After his essay Le Double Rimbaud (originally entitled Le Bovarysme d’Arthur Rimbaud ) had come out, Segalen wrote to Jules de Gaultier from Brest (letter of 20 April 1906), asking him if, in the case in point, he’d made a good application of the theory. Jules de Gaultier wrote back (letter from Condésur-Escaut, dated 25 April 1906) saying that in all honesty he didn’t really know. Certainly Segalen had handled the theory well, it seemed obvious enough that the case was one of ‘deviation from excess’ and that there was ample evidence of dispersal and aberration, but Gaultier confesses he just can’t see where Rimbaud was going, can’t make out ‘the image that hypnotized him’, the image that made him despise the activity to which his native gifts had predisposed him. He then tries himself, very tentatively, to get further into Rimbaud’s fi eld, saying that what strikes him about Rimbaud is ‘an extraordinary urgency, brutal in its force’, capable of transcending any image, and hence any imitation.

In Rimbaud’s case, he concludes, it looks as if there was some kind of ‘subconscious debate, going on in a region of turbulence prior to any distinct motivation’. Segalen replies (from Brest, May 15th 1906) that he’s perfectly willing to accept the hypothesis of a subconscious turmoil, but that he nonetheless feels he can distinguish several def i ned motivations: at the start, a tremendous desire for activity and power, later translated into a desire for wealth, security and peace. That said, concludes Segalen, he can’t be absolutely positive.

Rimbaud’s ‘field’ remains open, his ‘case’ unresolved.

5

Segalen’s letter of 15 May 1906 had begun with words in which it’s possible to discern a slight impatience, a desire to close the file and move on: ‘A final word on the Rimbaud question . . .’ But it was not to be. Three years later, in a letter dated 16 May 1909, he’s writing to Yvonne, his wife, about another essay on Rimbaud he has on the stocks, to be entitled Spectres (Ghosts) and which was to contain this piece of polemic: ‘You were out for the Real. You wrestled with it.

What vanity! To do so you cast off the most splendid of armours. You denied the poet in yourself, delighting in muscle and bone. But it was the poet you despised who was still leading your life. And out of vengeance, because you’d so ill judged him, he lead it to its ruin.’ Here the impatience in the letter of 1906 has become exasperation. But at the same time, Segalen is making a desperate attempt to trace, despite everything to the contrary, a coherence in Rimbaud’s life: the poet was always there. What’s obvious here too, in the very vocabulary (‘the most splendid of armours’), is how a certain Segalen, Segalen the artist, felt personally offended by the Rimbaud who’d laid aside all aesthetic trappings and walked naked. At one stage, compared to the stark, ravaged figure of Rimbaud in the desert of Abyssinia, Segalen comes across as an over-accoutred, symbol-ridden, attitudinizing dandy. But he himself still had long roads to travel, and he travelled them.

At the time when Segalen was finishing his essay ‘Le Double Rimbaud’, he had in his papers the rudiments of an essay on Gauguin, Gauguin dans son dernier décor (Gauguin’s fi nal setting). Both essays were to form part of a book, Les Hors-la-Loi (The Outlaws), that would also have contained a study on the mathematician Evariste Gallois, author of a revolutionary treatise on mathematics rejected as incomprehensible by the French Academy of Science. If Segalen had managed to complete this book, it would, I think, have been more significant, if perhaps less picturesque, than Verlaine’s Les Poètes maudits (The Outcasts). I think also that, during its composition, he might have changed his conception of Rimbaud and perhaps opened up a larger field. The bovaristic approach hadn’t really convinced him, and he was now beginning to see the real possibility of that paradoxical unity I evoked at the outset: ‘It may be that the two apparently so divergent aspects unite in an element that transcends them.’

6

Before trying to go farther, a few words about Gauguin, the closest parallel to ‘the man with the wind on his heels’, as Verlaine had called Rimbaud. Gauguin’s life is marked by the same kind of brownian movement as Rimbaud’s. At the age of 17, he was midshipman on the Luzitano, on the Le Havre-Rio line. Later on, he was mate on the Chili, before leaving the sea to become a banker in Paris, where he did well on the Stock Exchange until the financial crisis of 1882 made him decide to drop the money game (though he had recurrent pipe-dreams about making a fortune – for example, in the Pacific Ocean pearl-business), and leave for the painters’ colony in the little Breton village of Pont-Aven, before moving on, via Paris and Copenhagen, to the Panama Canal, Martinique, Tahiti and, finally, Hiva-Oa, where he penetrated deeper and deeper into a desert of solitude enlivened by flamboyant images of hell and paradise that yielded, in the very last instance, to that of a little Breton village under snow.

It was in the Marquesas, in early August 1903, that Segalen met the ‘ghost’ of Gauguin. At the offices of the island administration, he was lucky enough to come across ‘bits and pieces’ left by the painter, among them a box of papers containing Gauguin’s ‘scattered notes’ written, as Gauguin said in his preface, ‘with no logical sequence, like dreams, and made up of fragments, like life’. Segalen copied out passages, among them two which would seem, at least in part, to apply also to Rimbaud. One goes like this: ‘I’ve known misery, real rock-bottom misery – that is, hunger, cold and the rest. But that’s nothing, or almost nothing [. . .]. The really terrible thing about misery is that you can’t work, you can’t develop your intellectual faculties [. . .] Running after cash takes up three quarters of your time. It’s true that suffering puts an edge to genius. But not too much of it. Too much of it, and you’re dead.’ Here is the other: ‘I want to be happy, and you can be happy only if you’re free. But you’re free only if you are what you can be and what you must be. To be free means to satisfy the intimate needs of your being. You have to feel that you belong to yourself, that all your actions correspond to your nature. . .’

7

What still remains to be explored is Rimbaud’s final field.

If ‘bovarysm’ afforded Segalen a first significant approach to Rimbaud, its main function in the economy of this essay was to light up the early problematics of Segalen himself. Evident in the name of Emma Bovary invented by Flaubert is the conflict between aspiration and imagination on the one hand (Emma, close to the verb aimer, and which can be read, in quasi-lacanian terms, as ‘aime A’) and the opaque heaviness of reality on the other (Bovary, bovine). This of course is one of the main themes, if not the theme, of the novel in general, and for many still constitutes the basis of all art, with accent laid in various proportions on this or that side. Segalen begins in this context (idealism, realism), but the primary dialectic is gradually exhausted as he moves along the roads of Équipée and Thibet. 

And Jules de Gaultier’s theory shows up as totally inadequate in the presence of someone like Goethe. When Goethe plunges into studies on botany, geology, optics, he is not, I submit, being unfaithful to himself, he is not diverging from his native talent and identity, he is attempting to extend the field of poetics, he is trying to open up a field beyond the habitual divisions and categories. Gaultier himself is obliged to admit that Goethe was ‘the first in botany to put forward the idea that the flower is the reproduction of the leaf, able as he was to see beyond superficial differences the unity of the physiological scheme’. In other words, not only is botanical information material for the extension of poetry, but poetic thinking can reveal hidden aspects of botany.

Another area that has to be looked into and cleared up before moving forward is that of religion. The influence of Christianity on Rimbaud is hardly to be denied. Not that he was a believer. Segalen was absolutely right to reject Claudel’s religious-visionary interpretation of that phrase in Le Bateau ivre, ‘At times I’ve seen what man thought he saw!’ ‘Rimbaud’, he writes in a letter of 15 March 1915 to Claudel, ‘gave expression above all to the indefinite anxiety of the human mind in its struggle with knowledge. It’s hardly justified to define this anxiety as the yearning towards such a definite and dogmatized God’. No, Rimbaud had long given up anything like faith, or the desire for faith – but he did feel himself ‘contaminated’.

If he spent so much of his life in wandering and, at the latter end, trudging along tracks of fire lined with the sun-bleached bones of camels, it was maybe to burn that contamination out of his body and mind.

But let’s look at the poetry.

In his reading of Rimbaud’s poems, Segalen distinguishes several tones and tendencies: a ‘note of pathos’, a ‘fine pagan inspiration’, and, above all perhaps, as he says in his commentary on Le Bateau ivre, ‘the move from a country to a world.’ Among all the Rimbaud poems, it’s Le Bateau ivre that attracts Segalen most. In its ‘thirty stupendous stanzas’ he sees not only ‘the most poignant, the most profound, of all poems of the sea’ (written, paradoxically enough, by someone who as yet had never been to sea or even seen the sea), but a kind of prophecy wherein Rimbaud foresees his future torments (‘tired martyr of the zones and poles’). In this poem, among a multitude of sense data, there are, says Segalen, moments when the mind escapes from the language of the senses and becomes aware of ‘unseen horizons’, ‘unheard of sensations’, all this expressed, most of the time, with ‘everyday, ordinary words.’ What marks for Segalen the poetry of Rimbaud in the last analysis is not ‘mere verbal skill’, not ‘sequences of images’ (still the hallmark of poetry for many), but a capacity to ‘assemble powerfully all the forces around’, ‘a telepathic grasp of space ’.

I emphasize that phrase, for there we are really going places.

As always in poet-to-poet readings of this type, Segalen is lining up there elements of the poetics he wants to practise himself. He finds them in Rimbaud, but not everywhere in Rimbaud, and even where they exist, they’re often overlaid with excrescences. What Segalen does not appreciate in Rimbaud (those ‘excrescences’) is his ‘extreme individualism’, his ‘obstinate obscurity’ (the famous ‘I alone hold the key to this wild pageant’), the lack in his work of ‘generality’. For Segalen, then, in Rimbaud’s work, among passages that illuminate the world like white lightning, there are too many personal evoca-tions, too many ‘associations of ideas that the incidents of mental life can create in any one brain but not in others’.

Segalen’s criticism might well have been accepted by Rimbaud. His own indictment, ‘it was wrong’, might apply to an activity he considered excessively introverted. And it could be, as I’ve suggested, that while, on the surface, hunting for a fortune, what Rimbaud was doing in the course of his wild stravaigings and during the askesis of his Abyssinian days was wearing out, burning out that ‘inside’. Throughout his essay, Le Double Rimbaud, Segalen wonders if ‘business over, fortune made’, Rimbaud would have come back to poetry. Who knows? Certainly, I would say, not to the same poetry, the same poetics. But to another, in time? The hypothesis will remain forever open. What must never be forgotten is that, with regard to literature, poetry, art, Rimbaud had demands which, to say the least, are not common. Take, for example, among his many unambiguous declarations, this: ‘Writers everywhere, but where’s a real author?’ By declarations such as this, by his general attitude, even more by his paradoxical movement, Rimbaud showed the distance between his ‘field’ and ‘the world of art and letters’. It wasn’t even contempt, it was total indifference. Rimbaud was not ‘a man of letters’ – Segalen himself recognized this, who concealed for long a ‘man of letters’ behind the ‘navy doctor’ of his social front. Let’s go further. If, at least up to Thibet, Segalen thinks metaphysically, Rimbaud lives, if I may say so, ultra-physically. In the final instance, there’s no ‘essential self’ in him – no self, no essence, nothing but an enormous energy and a burning silence.

8

As some no doubt will have already noticed, what I’m doing here is trace the path leading from egopoetics to geopoetics . . .

For Jules de Gaultier, and for Segalen (the early Segalen), the Goethe that turned to botany and geology had gone off the track, lost his way. As I’ve already indicated, I think the contrary. When he was writing his essay on granite, for example, he had the feeling both of giving a new foundation to his existence, and of opening up a new field of poetics.

I suggest (it’s my working hypothesis in this essay) that something similar happened to Rimbaud. Among those declarations I evoked, there is this (from the poem Fêtes de la faim): ‘If I have any taste left at all, it’s for earth and stones.’ There in Djibouti, Rimbaud’s ultimate place, his burning zone, Segalen comes face to face, on the Somali coast, with the Desert (he writes the word with a capital D):

. . . light that pulverizes, earth more raw and unrelenting than the sky itself, flavid sands [. . .]. The yellowish camels, bound at the knees, hobble to an upright position with jerks of the head. Little goats come to take an inquisitive look at you. Then it all starts to move forward on the endless track [. . .]. The light grows. Even the shadows are sharp to the eye. Thin sounds in the air, like the tinkling of little bells, the clink of camels’ bones. All kinds of golden, acrid dust make you think of incense – not the edulco-rated stuff you find in rich parishes, but those impure resins still redolent with other aromas of the earth . . .

He copies out passages from volume 13 (‘Southern Africa’) of the Géographie universelle composed by Reclus: ‘The Somali country:

that neat triangle, two sides of it maritime, meeting at Gardafui, the old “Promontory of Perfumes”, the other line mountainous, with the Harrar at the centre’; ‘Those of the North are strict Muslims but in the South and inland the Somali have kept to animistic superstition. They revere trees and stones.’ And it’s in the pages of Elisée Reclus that Segalen comes across a report on the desert of the Harrar sent in by Rimbaud to the Geographical Society of Paris (first published in the annals of that Society, n° 3, 1 February 1884):

On some well-watered mountain sides, such as those of the Gan-Libache, there is superb vegetation, no less beautiful than that of the hills of Ethiopia. Mengès the naturalist has noted the presence of giant juniper and the magnificent djibara [. . .]. The central area, Ogaden, is, according to Sottiro, a vast steppe region. After the light rains that fall there, it’s a sea of tall grass, interrupted in several places by fields of stones.

A text ‘written by a merchant, not an artist’, is Segalen’s verdict.

I’m not so sure.

Maybe it’s neither an artist’s text, nor a merchant’s text, but the tentative approach to another type of text altogether.

Could it be that Rimbaud’s ‘Abyssinia book’ would have been an approach to geopoetics?

from the book The Collected Works of Kenneth White, Volume 2 Mappings Landscape, Mindscape, Wordscape 

The puppet theatre

Contrary to what people usually think, as they torment themselves, a holiday doesn't need cares, but rather freedom from them. And this freedom first and foremost is achieved through a strict isolation from the workday world. By now all peoples have forgotten about the commandment concerning the sabbath and the impenetrable divisions between sabbath and the other six days have been removed. On the other hand, only the frame, the border, and the immaculate edge can reveal the distinctive space of artistic creativity. This space is idle in the evaluation of external space, which is, however, saturated with joy and important meaning and which every working day pulsates with the springs of life.Out of humaneness we do not stone people for breaking the sacred precinct of the sabbath, but out of vapidness we have preferred to replace the stone wall with an uncommitting string rope. On the other hand, we have ceased to see the sun, life has  grown dim and dried up and the world has become poisoned with boredom.

So we all turned up here in this fenced off space and discovered an isolating frame. It ist rue that man needs very little to experience thrilling joy. A few dozen trees and a sturdy high fence, together with a ditch and places to cross it, proved an adequate isolation from all kinds of terrors, the weariness of life, and the countless cares of existence in these difficult times.

The Revolution, the ruin of the year 1922, the poverty and unreliability of life in all its aspects-all this remained on the other side of the fence. And when the sky suddenly cleared and the washed sun, descending into evening, lit up the birch trees, the brightly coloured crowd, and a few beautiful scraps fold fabric that the Efimovs had tenderly brought to the puppet theatre from the trunks of grand-mothers, a living fairytale lit up in the consciousness like a sunbeam. The puppet booth, the puppets and the children surrounding the theatre, everything together was fashioned into a single art form, one that was more than an art form, because apart from the pre-existing intention of the performers there sounded the prophetic voices of the soul, and the mysterious forces of nature crept in. Words, which in other circumstances would probably have gone unnoticed, when spoken in this setting by the puppets acquired an unexpected weight, and the popular sayings really did sound like the condensed wisdom of life. Dolls made of rags, pieces of wood and papier mache came to life as clear as can be and acted independently. They no longer followed the movements of the hand that directed them, but on the contrary they themselves directed the hand, they had their own desires and tastes, and it became perfectly obvious that in a certain setting special forces were acting through them. This performance started out as a game, but later on it grew into the very core of life and verged on either magic or mystery.

Of course, the puppeteers, who bear a crusading responsibility and are carried away by the whirlwind of the action, have no time to think about what is happening, and it would be a hindrance to split themselves in two, in order to compare their puppet consciousness with their usual one. But as the present book shows, even they recognise the puppets as 'wanting' or 'not wanting' this or that, as 'approving' or 'disapproving' the setting in which they have turned up. As for the spectators, or more precisely the co-participants in this puppet ritual, for them its even more patently evident that the puppet theatre is something incomparably greater than the Eflmovs plus the puppets, that in this ritual some third element takes part, and this third is the thing for which theatre itself exists.

Cut off from everyday existence by a fence, together with their choir made up of spectators, the puppeteers raise higher still the potential of mysterious forces acting within them, through a second isolation, their own puppet booth. And finally, in clothing their hand with the persona of the puppet and permitting the reason of their hand to take on an independent face, they liberate it [the reason of the hand] from its subservience to intellectual reason, which conversely becomes a subservient organ of manual [reason]. Thrice removed from the external world by three successive degrees of isolation, the hand becomes a body, a transmitter and organ for the influence of forces other than those that are known in our everyday consciousness. In the puppet theatre there appear the principal devices of imitative magic, which always begins with play, with imitating, with teasing, to make way later for the other forces that have thus been attracted, which accept the challenge and fill the receptacle that has been offered them.

No one, of course, is taken in by the illusion. The puppet theatre has the great virtue of not being illusionistic. But while they are not 'like the real thing' and make no claim to appear so, the puppets do in fact bring to life a new reality Itenters into the space it has liberated and fllls the holiday frame of life.

The choir of spectators is united by the puppet and the choir itself nurtures it, via the puppeteer, with its own profound emotions, which have no place in the everyday world. Most profound and cherished for us is our childhood, which lives in us, but is tightly screened off from us.We have forgotten about it, about this primordial proximity tovall existence, when we still nestled close to the life of nature. We have forgotten it, but it continues to live in us and it declares itself unexpectedly at certain times.

So, American psychology has elucidated well enough that the psychological process of religious conversion is nothing less than a return to childhood, the surfacing of the most profound strata of the personality that have formed during the very early years. 'If you don't convert yourself (ie., do not overturn your personality) and do not become as children (i.e.,not just children in general, but precisely as the children you once were), then you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.'5 Indeed the Kingdomo of Heaven is 'peace and joy through the action of the Holy Spirit'.6 So, the spiritual harmony, which is suddenly revealed in religious conversion, lives in those same layers of the personality that the puppet awakens in us. The puppet theatre is the hearth that is nourished by the childhood submerged within us and which in turn awakens within us the slumbering palace of the childhood fairytale.

Once united in this 'paradise', now we are divided from one another, because this 'paradise' has become hidden from the eye. But through the puppet theatre we see once more this lost Eden, even if only dimly, and so we embark upon an intercourse with one another in what, like a secret, we cherish most, what each of us guards within ourselves - and guards not just from others, but from ourselves too. Shining in the rays of the setting sun, the theatre opens like a window onto an eternally living childhood.

Pavel Florensky
Beyond Vision Essays on the Perception of Art

The desert is a powerful, unique sensorium

 

The desert is a powerful, unique sensorium. Silence and emptiness are the ambiguous descriptions of sounds and landforms. The desert is at once a place of sensory depriva-tion and awesome overload—too little life, too much heat, too little water, too much sky. Its cool shadows offer "thermal delight," and yet the desert evokes the terrors of the inferno. Its distance and scale, the sweep between horizons and the loftiness of stars, its winds and mirages, its hidden life and conspicuous shapes seem at once to dwarf and to emphasize the human figure. Its sensory impact is profoundly stimulat-ing and disturbing, a massive shock to the human limbic sys-tem—the neural basis of emotional response—which seems to demand some logic or interpretation.

Between the senses and the logic is perception—that is, the biopsychological screening devices, filters, combined forces of inherent tendency and individual experience that direct attention and focus possibilities. Thus, what the desert means is preceded by preconscious selection of what is seen and how it is seen. Myriad qualities of the desert beg for interpretation: the firmness of outline; the linearity of horizon and movement; the separateness of things and their static, fixed quality as though made by some absent artisan; the way light and dark, sky and earth, life and death insist on contrast and duality; the ephemerality of creatures and transience of man; the flickering vitality of things distant, such as the planets; things unseen but heard, opposed to the frozen immobility of stone. These are some of the preconscious pointers toward interpretation.

Nature and Madness
Paul Shephard