Emily Dickinson’s existential dramas

 Dickinson’s existentialist sensibility has much in common with that of the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813–55). For Kierkegaard, life must be accepted for what it is – as a finite (that is, non-universal) existence.

Kierkegaard refutes Hegel’s universal synthesis because it ignores reality at the individual level. Individual existence is f l awed and filled with suffering and limitations (both physical and mental), but that defines life’s authenticity.

Kierkegaard criticizes the Romantic poets for using their powers of creative imagination to escape into inauthentic realms of their own making. Thus, they live “in a totally hypothetical and subjunctive way,”4 which causes them to lose touch not only with the authentic world but with themselves.

Aside from Kierkegaard, whose ideas probably had not yet spread beyond Europe in Dickinson’s day, a kind of proto-existentialist thought can be detected in America via Calvinist and Presbyterian Christianity, which advocated deep learning and self-discovery. The Presbyterian minister Charles Wadsworth, one of Dickinson’s spiritual mentors (aside from the rumored possibility that she was in love with him), asserted from the pulpit that “Man’s business on this sublunary platform is to work out his hidden character in the face of the universe” – this he proclaimed in his sermon “Development and Discipline.” (Note the similarity between this statement and Dickinson’s “My business is Circumference.”) Self-reliance was also behind Mary Lyon’s rigorous curriculum at the Mt. Holyoke Seminary for Women – it placed heavy emphasis on the natural sciences. Studying nature was an important prerequisite to becoming a good Christian; a sure path to God was through intense study of His creations. Henry David Thoreau, whom Dickinson had probably read, for she mentions him in a letter, advocated self-knowledge and self-betterment through deliberate intimate knowledge of the physical world and learning “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.”5

And of course, the plays of Shakespeare, her most beloved author, are filled with existential moments, from Macbeth’s “sound and fury” anguish over the meaninglessness of human destiny to Hamlet’s bitter assessment of human nature (“What a piece of work is a man! how inf i nite in faculty . . . in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”).

And Shakespeare would certainly have agreed with Dickinson’s speaker’s claim that “‘Hamlet’ to Himself were Hamlet – / Had not Shakespeare wrote – ” (J 741, Fr 776). Quite clearly, then, Dickinson had sufficient exposure to existentialist thinking for it to have influenced her at least indirectly.

Dickinson’s poems are existential for yet another reason: their speakers seldom feel secure in the promise of – or refuse to take refuge in – a transcen-dent reality as do the speakers in so much of Romantic poetry. Dickinson’s speakers ironically are most secure with the doubts and uncertainties of their flawed and finite existence – a disposition that John Keats, a proto-existentialist Romantic (whose immortality questing personae eventually confront their mortality), termed “negative capability.” There may exist an infinity of possible realms – Heaven itself among them – that beckon to be explored, but they never can be escaped into. The speaker can never venture beyond “circumference,” the word in this context effectively conveying the paradoxical human predicament of being both free and confined: free to explore while at the same time confined by the inescapable forces of gravity, mortality, and the limitations of individual human perception. Thus in the poem “I saw no Way – the Heavens were stitched – ,” all the speaker needs to do is “touch the Universe – ” . . .

And back it slid – and I alone – 

A Speck upon a Ball – 

Went out upon Circumference – 

Beyond the Dip of Bell – (J 378, Fr 633) 

This little poem – ironic even in its smallness, for its scope is epic – can be read as a drama of the Christian speaker’s discovery of her decidedly un-Christian plight: possessed with the desire to learn the secrets of the heavens, she soon realizes that such a discovery cannot be made. And yet, the very act of exploring – of venturing out “upon Circumference” despite her being a mere Speck upon the earth – is what makes her life purposeful and – paradoxically – more meaningful than before. To examine one’s life unflinchingly and learn to accept it for what it really is – the prime existential directive – is to liberate oneself from such inf l exible directives as church dogma (“the Dip of Bell”) that present themselves as the sole path to salvation. For her, a mortal woman whose paradigm of reality consists of domestic objects like thread and needle, the fabric of heaven can never appear more than “stitched.”

In another poem the speaker proudly proclaims, “The Queen discerns like me – Provincially – ” (J 285, Fr 256). 

The existentialist thus learns to accept her intrinsically restricted reality, just as the speaker in the following poem progresses from an enthusiastic expectation of reaching heaven to an enthusiastic acceptance of disbelief in that very expectation. Notice how skillfully Dickinson dramatizes the lapse of childlike faith as an existential awareness of the consequences of maintaining such faith takes hold:

Going to Heaven!

I don’t know when – Pray do not ask me how!

Indeed I’m too astonished To think of answering you!

Going to Heaven!

How dim it sounds!

. . .

Perhaps you’re going too!

Who knows?

If you should get there first 

Save just a little space for me 

Close to the two I lost – 

The smallest “Robe” will fit me 

And just a bit of “Crown” – 

For you know we do not mind our dress 

When we are going home – 

I’m glad I don’t believe it 

For it would stop my breath – 

And I’d like to look a little more 

At such a curious Earth!

I’m glad they did believe it 

Whom I have never found 

Since the mighty Autumn afternoon 

I left them in the ground.

(J 79, Fr 128) 

Like a three-act stage play, this three-stanza dramatic monologue captures the speaker’s dawning skepticism toward the Christian promise of an afterlife, a skepticism that leads her to a triumphant existential rejection of that afterlife. Act One: The speaker is highly agitated; she keeps exclaiming, “Going to Heaven!” too astonished by the concept either to believe or disbelieve that it’s true. It’s as if she has, for the first time in her life, dared to question the promise of heaven. As we soon realize, she is attending a funeral where everyone apparently is reassuring her that her recently deceased friends are most assuredly on their way to heaven. Act Two: The speaker’s tone shifts from astonishment to sarcasm: Well, if heaven is such a great place, you must be getting ready to go there yourself! If so, be sure to save a space for me – which shouldn’t be a problem because I’m so small.

 Like the speaker in “I saw no way the Heavens were stitched,” this speaker ironically equates space in heaven with ordinary domestic space: why should it be otherwise? Also, why should I dress any differently than I would for home? The comparison pokes fun at the uncritical acceptance of heaven as “up there,” taking up actual space, inhabited by departed souls wearing white robes. Act Three: The speaker’s tone changes from sarcasm to a triumphant, almost Nietzschean bravado in not only expressing disbelief in the heaven myth, but in equating it with annihilation of self – for if the myth were true, it would mean losing the world – the “mighty Autumn afternoon” – forever.

Faced with the resulting isolation and finitude, the individual must direct his or her own life with great deliberateness, despite the fact that there is no certainty of behavior, no divinely sanctioned moral code. As Kierkegaard asserts, “Fulfillment is always in the wish,” and “Doubt is a cunning passion.”6 Now lest the individual be overwhelmed by hopelessness and despair, Kierkegaard posits a way out, and that is to abandon reason and make a pure leap of faith across the unbridgeable gulf to God. As we shall see, Dickinson’s speakers do not make such a leap. They may be poised to do so, just as Dickinson herself had been poised to receive Christ during her student days, but they are unable to take that final step toward becoming a Christian.

In Dickinson’s case, her love of earthy things was a major deterrent: “It is hard for me to give up the world” (L 23) she states flatly to her close friend Abiah Root in 1848. More seriously, like the speaker in “Going to Heaven!” it was her inability to conceive of the existence of an afterlife that kept her from embracing Christianity. In 1846, when she was a mere fifteen years old, she wrote to Abiah, “I am continually putting off becoming a Christian . . . Does not Eternity appear dreadful to you. I often get thinking of it and it seems so dark to me that I almost wish there was no Eternity . . . I cannot imagine with the farthest stretch of my imagination my own death scene” (L 10). That last statement helps us to understand what is going on in poems like “I died for Beauty” (J 449, Fr 448), in which the speaker converses from inside her tomb with one “who died for Truth,” buried in the tomb beside her – or in her most famous poem, “Because I could not stop for Death” (J 712, Fr 479), in which the presumably dead speaker is merely being driven to heaven without ever arriving there – or in “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died” (J 465, Fr 591) in which the moment of death is occupied by a buzzing fly instead of the king who would escort her into heaven. One literally cannot transcend one’s own life, these poems argue dramatically; so long as there is consciousness, earthly existence must continue.

(...)

Reading Dickinson’s poems as existential dramas, both in the sense of staged scenarios and as dramatistic “language events,” – poems in which philosophical and religious ideas are delineated, not just expressed – gives us a better sense of the scope and complexity of her project. Dickinson’s poetry exemplif i es what Kenneth Burke calls sensuous apprehension of form. For all her metaphoric brilliance, her thematic and stylistic complexity, she is most of all a poet of the deliberately lived moment, of physical presence, of life’s unstoppable movement.

Fred D. White fromEmily Dickinson’s existential dramas 

Unusual hermit

 He kept going, “up and up and up.” Soon he reached the shore of Moosehead Lake, the largest lake in Maine, where the state begins to get truly remote. “I drove until I was nearly out of gas. I took a small road. Then a small road off that small road. Then a trail off that.” He went as far into wilderness as his vehicle could take him.

He parked the car and put the keys on the center console. He had a tent and a backpack but no compass, no map. Without knowing where he was going, with no particular place in mind, he stepped into the trees and walked away.

But why? Why would a twenty-year-old kid with a job and a car and a brain abruptly abandon the world? The act had elements of a suicide, except he didn’t kill himself. “To the rest of the world, I ceased to exist,” said Knight. His family must have suffered; they had no idea what had happened to him, and couldn’t completely accept that he was dead. When his father died, fifteen years after the disappearance, Knight was still listed as a survivor in the obituary.

His final moment as a member of society—“I just tossed the keys on the center console”—seem particularly strange. Knight was raised with a keen appreciation for the value of money, and the Brat was the most expensive item he’d ever purchased. The car was less than a year old, and he threw it away. Why not hold on to the keys as a safety net? What if he didn’t like camping out?

“The car was of no use to me. It had just about zero gas and was miles and miles from any gas station.” As far as anyone knows, the Brat is still there, half-swallowed by the forest, a set of keys somewhere within, by this point as much a part of the wilderness as a product of civilization, perhaps like Knight himself.

Knight said that he didn’t really know why he left. He’d given the question plenty of thought but had never arrived at an answer. “It’s a mystery,” he declared. There was no specific cause he could name—no childhood trauma, no sexual abuse. There wasn’t alcoholism in his home, or violence. He wasn’t trying to hide anything, to cover a wrongdoing, to evade confusion about his sexuality.

Anyway, none of these burdens typically produces a hermit. There’s a sea of names for hermits—recluses, monks, misanthropes, ascetics, anchorites, swamis—yet no solid definitions or qualification standards, except the desire to be primarily alone. Some hermits have tolerated steady streams of visitors, or lived in cities, or holed up in university laboratories. But you can take virtually all the hermits in history and divide them into three general groups to explain why they hid: protesters, pilgrims, pursuers.

Protesters are hermits whose primary reason for leaving is hatred of what the world has become. Some cite wars as their motive, or environmental destruction, or crime or consumerism or poverty or wealth. These hermits often wonder how the rest of the world can be so blind, not to notice what we’re doing to ourselves.

“I have become solitary,” wrote the eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “because to me the most desolate solitude seems preferable to the society of wicked men which is nourished only in betrayals and hatred.”

Across much of Chinese history, it was customary to protest a corrupt emperor by leaving society and moving into the mountainous interior of the country. People who withdrew often came from the upper classes and were highly educated. Hermit protesters were so esteemed in China that a few times, tradition holds, when a non-corrupt emperor was seeking a successor, he passed over members of his own family and selected a solitary. Most turned down the offer, having found peace in reclusion.

The first great literary work about solitude, the Tao Te Ching, was written in ancient China, likely in the sixth century B.C., by a protester hermit named Lao-tzu. The book’s eighty-one short verses describe the pleasures of forsaking society and living in harmony with the seasons. The Tao Te Chingsays that it is only through retreat rather than pursuit, through inaction rather than action, that we acquire wisdom. “Those with less become content,” says the Tao, “those with more become confused.” The poems, still widely read, have been hailed as a hermit manifesto for more than two thousand years.

Around a million protester hermits are living in Japan right now. They’re called hikikomori—“pulling inward”—and the majority are males, aged late teens and up, who have rejected Japan’s competitive, conformist, pressure-cooker culture. They have retreated into their childhood bedrooms and almost never emerge, in many cases for more than a decade. They pass the day reading or surfing the web. Their parents deliver meals to their doors, and psychologists offer them counseling online. The media has called them “the lost generation” and “the missing million.”

Pilgrims—religious hermits—are by far the largest group. The connection between seclusion and spiritual awakening is profound. Jesus of Nazareth, after his baptism in the River Jordan, withdrew to the wilderness and lived alone for forty days, then began attracting his apostles. Siddhārtha Gautama, in about 450 B.C., according to one version of the story, sat beneath a pipal tree in India, meditated for forty-nine days, and became Buddha. Tradition holds that the prophet Muhammad, in A.D. 610, was on a retreat in a cave near Mecca when an angel revealed to him the first of many verses that would become the Koran.

In Hindu philosophy, everyone ideally matures into a hermit. Becoming a sadhu, renouncing all familial and material attachments and turning to ritual worship, is the fourth and final stage of life. Some sadhus file their own death certificates, as their lives are considered terminated and they are legally dead to the nation of India. There are at least four million sadhus in India today.

During the Middle Ages, after the Desert Fathers and Mothers of Egypt died out, a new form of Christian solitary emerged, this time in Europe. They were called anchorites—the name is derived from an ancient Greek word for “withdrawal”—and they lived alone in tiny dark cells, usually attached to the outer wall of a church. The ceremony initiating a new anchorite often included the last rites, and the cell’s doorway was sometimes bricked over. Anchorites were expected to remain in their cells for the rest of their lives; in some cases, they did so for over forty years. This existence, they believed, would offer an intimate connection with God, and salvation. Servants delivered food and emptied chamber pots through a small opening.

Virtually every large town across France, Italy, Spain, Germany, England, and Greece had an anchorite. In many areas, there were more females than males. A woman’s life in the Middle Ages was severely bound, and to become an anchorite, unburdened by social strictures or domestic toil, may have felt paradoxically emancipating. Scholars have called anchorites the progenitors of modern feminism.

Pursuers are the most modern type of hermits. Rather than fleeing society, like protesters, or living beholden to higher powers, like pilgrims, pursuers seek alone time for artistic freedom, scientific insight, or deeper self-understanding. Thoreau went to Walden to journey within, to explore “the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being.”

An endless list of writers and painters and philosophers and scientists have been described as hermits, including Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, Emily Brontë, and Vincent van Gogh. Herman Melville, the author of Moby-Dick, largely withdrew from public life for thirty years. “All profound things,” he wrote, “are preceded and attended by Silence.” Flannery O’Connor rarely left her rural farm in Georgia. Albert Einstein referred to himself as a “loner in daily life.”

The American essayist William Deresiewicz wrote that “no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without solitude.” The historian Edward Gibbon said that “solitude is the school of genius.” Plato, Descartes, Kierkegaard, and Kafka have all been described as solitaries. “Not till we have lost the world,” wrote Thoreau, “do we begin to find ourselves.”

“Thoreau,” said Chris Knight, offering his appraisal of the great transcendentalist, “was a dilettante.”

Perhaps he was. Thoreau spent two years and two months, starting in 1845, at his cabin on Walden Pond in Massachusetts. He socialized in the town of Concord. He often dined with his mother. “I had more visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period in my life,” he wrote. One dinner party at his place numbered twenty guests.

While Knight lived in the woods, he didn’t think of himself as a hermit—he never put a label on who he was—but when speaking of Thoreau, he used a particular phrase. Knight said that Thoreau was not a “true hermit.”

Thoreau’s biggest sin may have been publishing Walden. Knight said that writing a book, packaging one’s thoughts into a commodity, is not something a true hermit would do. Nor is hosting a party or hobnobbing in town. These actions are directed outward, toward society. They all shout, in some way, “Here I am!”

Yet almost every hermit communicates with the outside world. Following the Tao Te Ching, so many protester hermits in China wrote poems—including poet-monks known as Cold Mountain, Pickup, Big Shield, and Stonehouse—that the genre was given its own name, shan-shui.

Saint Anthony was one of the first Desert Fathers, and the inspiration for thousands of Christian hermits who followed. Around A.D. 270, Anthony moved into an empty tomb in Egypt, where he stayed alone for more than a decade. He then lived in an abandoned fort for twenty years more, subsisting only on bread, salt, and water delivered by attendants, sleeping on the bare ground, never bathing, devoting his life to intense and often agonizing piety.

According to his biographer, Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, who met with him in person, Anthony ended his retreat with a pure soul and would go to heaven. But for much of his time in the desert, the biography adds, Anthony was inundated by parishioners seeking counsel. “The crowds,” Anthony said, “do not permit me to be alone.”

Even the anchorites, locked up by themselves for life, were not separate from medieval society. Their cells were often in town, and most had a window through which they counseled visitors. People realized that speaking with a sympathetic anchorite could be more soothing than praying to a remote and unflinching God. Anchorites gained widespread fame as sages, and for several centuries, much of the population of Europe discussed great matters of life and death with hermits.

In the forest, Knight never snapped a photo, had no guests over for dinner, and did not write a sentence. His back was fully turned to the world. None of the hermit categories fit him properly. There was no clear why. Something he couldn’t quite feel had tugged him away from the world with the persistence of gravity. He was one of the longest-enduring solitaries, and among the most fervent as well. Christopher Knight was a true hermit.

“I can’t explain my actions,” he said. “I had no plans when I left, I wasn’t thinking of anything. I just did it.”

The Stranger in the Woods

by Michael Finkel

I don’t know how Corneliu Codreanu will be judged by history

The fact is that four months after the phenomenal electoral success of the Legionary movement, its head found himself sentenced to ten years at hard labor, and five months after that he was executed— events that reconfirmed my belief that our generation did not have a political destiny. Probably Corneliu Codreanu would not have contradicted me. For him, the Legionary movement did not constitute a political phenomenon but was, in its essence, ethical and religious. He repeated time and again that he was not interested in the acquisition of power but in the creation of a “new man.” He had known for a long time that the king was planning to kill him, and had he wished he could have saved himself by fleeing to Italy or Germany. But Codreanu believed in the necessity of sacrifice; he considered that every new persecution could only purify and strengthen the Legionary movement, and he believed, furthermore, in his own destiny and in the protection of the Archangel Michael.

In 1937-38 the most popular theme among the Legionaries was death. The deaths of Mota and Marin constituted the exemplary model.* The words of Mota: “The most powerful dynamite is your own ashes,” had become like a Gospel text. A good part of the Legionary activity consisted in worship services, offices for the dead, strict fasts, and prayers. And the most pathetic irony of that spring of 1938 was that the crushing of the only Romanian political movement which took seriously Christianity and the church was begun under the administration of the Patriarch Miron.

I don’t know what Codreanu thought when he realized that in a few hours he would be executed. I am not thinking of his faith, but  of his political destiny. He had assured Armand Calinescu through numerous circulars that the Legionaries would not react, even if hung by their feet and tortured. He had given strict orders for nonviolence, even for renunciation of passive resistance, and he had even dissolved the party, Totul pentru Tard (all for country). Calinescu’s tactics succeeded: all the Legionaries had let themselves be trapped and were now in cages, waiting, like rats, to be drowned alive. Probably Codreanu, like so many other Legionaries, died convinced that his sacrifice would hasten the victory of the movement. But I wonder if some of them didn’t see in their imminent death, not necessarily a sacrifice, but the fatal consequence of a catastrophic error in political tactics. [know only that Mihail Polihroniade, who was one of the very few leaders concerned with political victory rather than with the salvation of souls, said once to his wife in the prison at Ramnicul Sarat, after the execution of Codreanu: “See what all our liturgies and offices for the dead have gotten us!” In less than a year he too would be executed—he who did not even have the consolation of liturgies and requiems. But he died no less serenely than the others, the believers. He asked for a cigarette, lit it, and walked smiling to the wall where the machine guns waited.

In the summer of 1938, to be a Legionary or a Legionary “sympathizer” entailed the risk of losing everything: job, freedom, and perhaps, ultimately, life. It is easy to see why, for someone like me who did not believe in the political destiny of our generation (or in Codreanu’s star), a declaration of dissociation from the Legionary movement seemed not only unacceptable but downright absurd. I could not conceive of dissociating myself from my generation in the midst of its oppression, when people were being prosecuted and persecuted unjustly.” Thus it was that, by refusing to sign the declaration, after about three weeks of detention at Security headquarters, I was sent to the camp at Miercurea Ciucului.

* Translator’s note: Ion Mota and Vasile Marin were two Legionary leaders who were killed in January 1937 in Spain, where they had gone as volunteers for Franco in the Civil War. Eliade was acquainted personally with both men, who were about the same age as he.

from the book Autobiography, Volume 2 1937-1960, Exiles Odyssey (Mircea Eliade, Mac Linscott Ricketts (trans.)

On Simone Weil

 Weil identified specific contingencies that she set as preconditions for engaging with the divine. Paying attention was necessary, attention being a state of mind to be cultivated and mastered in order to make oneself available for the possibility of grace, for the presence of God. “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer,” she insisted. Attention required an active condition of waiting, of expectation. At the very moment we achieve emptiness, the presence of the divine floods into us. We are simultaneously drained and filled.

Weil was distrustful of the imagination, holding it in disdain, seeing it as antithetical to attention. “The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.” She felt that the imagination’s fostering of personal identity threatened to obstruct the threshold to God. To be attentive to reality in all of its mystery, she claimed, we must be far from our own individual desires and anxieties. “We only attain to real prayer after we have worn down our will.” This did not sit well with Czapski, for whom imagination and will were both necessary. Will, he believed, had saved him, kept him from descending into atonie. Czapski knew that Weil, too, had been driven by will and that these dictates were cautionary checks on herself as much as on her readers.

(...)

Weil believed the perfection of an individual spiritual life was predicated upon a consent to be nothing. The role of imagination, by contrast, is to generate something. “The imagination, filler up of the void, is essentially a liar.” She described the imagination as a combleuse du vide, a usurper of the emptiness, through which God might otherwise approach us. “There is the real presence of God in everything which imagination does not veil.” Czapski, for whom imagination was the very breath of life, struggled with Weil’s vehemence. How could he possibly accept any thought of discarding imagination or, by extension, abandoning art? All the same, he was able to find in Weil’s emphasis on attention the very condition he sought when drawing, the prayer-like activity he engaged in on a daily basis with a degree of faith equal to any other he held dear. Imagination, made manifest in drawing, had helped him to survive.

He found Weil’s deliberate asceticism a problem, aggravating him at a time when he was not painting but only still dreaming of his return to it. Could art really be vanity, a delusion, an obstacle to God’s grace? Certainly Weil’s great mentor, Blaise Pascal, thought so, and she conscientiously followed his footsteps on the path to knowledge and faith. She had undergone a profoundly unsettling religious conversion not unlike Pascal’s. Weil found in Pascal “that transcendent realm to which only the truly great minds have access, and wherein truth abides.” She looked to Pascal as a role model, as a teacher from whom she could learn, with whom she could argue, in full awareness of her insignificance in relation to his genius. Czapski would come to look to Weil in much the same way.

He saw that Pascal’s retreat from the world and his contempt for the senses were not entirely incompatible with the concerns of Proust, among the most worldly and epicurean of writers:

It’s not in the name of God, nor in the name of religion, that the protagonist of À la recherche rejects everything, yet he, too, like Pascal, is struck by a shattering revelation: he also buries himself, half-alive, in his cork-lined room (here I willingly blur the distinction between the hero and Proust himself since in this case they are one) to serve until death what became for him an absolute, his artistic work. The last book of his novel, Le Temps retrouvé, is likewise mixed with “tears of joy,” is the triumphant hymn of a man who has sold all his worldly possessions to buy a single precious pearl, who has measured all the ephemera, all the heartbreak, all the vanity of the joys of the world, of youth, of fame, of eroticism, and holds them up in comparison with the joy of the artist, this being who, in constructing each sentence, making and then remaking each page, is in search of an absolute he can never entirely attain, and which, besides, is ultimately unattainable.

Forming an alliance between the distinct but overlapping universes of Pascal and Proust, Czapski shaped himself intellectually, and in this mind-set his rapprochement with Weil was finally forged. “The supreme function of reason,” Pascal suggested in Pensées, “is to show man that some things are beyond reason.” In this territory “beyond reason” lay the dominion where Pascal, Weil, Proust, and Czapski found common ground. Czapski’s demands upon himself, often repeated—“How can I be better?” and “How can I remain true to myself ?”—intersect at this juncture where his thoughts met Weil’s. Her words unsettled and agitated him, but he held his ground. Her presence in his spiritual life, often adversarial, was enormously welcome, fortifying, and affirming.

from Almost Nothing

The 20th-Century Art and Life of Józef Czapski

by Eric Karpeles

Evening with Tolstoy and Akhmatova

 The most interesting evening I spent with Tolstoy was devoted to the plan to translate some Polish poems written during this war. Suddenly detained, Sokolovsky was absent just this one time, so I was able stay at the writer’s house until late at night without an escort.

Tolstoy had invited mostly translators, and a few Russian writers, including Anna Akhmatova, whom I had not met before. A well-known publisher called Tikhonov was also present, an old friend of Gorky, who came across as a modest, quiet man. Gorky’s daughter-in-law was there too. At about ten in the evening we gathered in the large drawing room around a table with wine, superb kishmish (raisins), and other sweetmeats. The heat of the day had passed. It was fresh and breezy.

We established that Tikhonov was prepared to publish the volume, and that it would be divided into three parts: poems from occupied Poland (some of these had reached us via London), poems by Polish writers from London, and poems written within the Polish Army being formed in the Soviet Union. As at the evening in Yungiyul, here too I read the London poems off the cuff.

The atmosphere and the ardor of the Russians’ reaction exceeded my boldest expectations. I can still see the tears in the large eyes of the silent Akhmatova, as I clumsily translated the final stanza of the “Warsaw Carol”:

And if you want Him born in the shadow

Of Warsaw’s smoking ruins,

Better put the newborn

Straight up on the cross.

“The Ballad of Two Candles” and “Chopin’s Homeland” (both by Baliński), and Słonimski’s “Alarm for the City of Warsaw” made a shocking impression. I had to read them all in turn, poem after poem, and was not allowed to omit a single one. In the past, I had very often tried to attract foreigners to Polish poetry, especially French people, with a minimal result; never before had I sensed such receptivity among my audience, never had I managed to evoke such a lively, genuine frisson as among this surviving handful of Russian intellectuals.

Akhmatova agreed to take on the translation of the “Warsaw Carol,” although she claimed never to have translated poetry before. Tolstoy loudly bemoaned that nobody in the Soviet Union wrote about Russia like that, complaining that the only poems being written about their homeland were “cold and artificial.”

That evening I was struck by the vacuum that had arisen in Russia in the sphere of art after twenty-something years of supervised culture; what a hunger for genuine poetry prevailed there. The great tradition, from Derzhavin and Pushkin to Blok, right through to Mayakovsky and Yesenin, seemed to have been broken off, apart from a few survivors of the stature of Pasternak or Akhmatova. But profound, disinterested communication between Poles and Russians is possible, it occurred to me—how easy it was to penetrate each other’s cultures, to infect each other with poetry, the sound of a poem, or to transmit the tiniest little tremor in each other’s language.

Tolstoy scoffed that in Russia nobody knew a thing about Polish poetry, how in general Polish literature was “nothing but Przybyszewski!” He joked that it was thanks to Przybyszewski that he had learned to drink, and that nowadays it was hard for him to imagine what a literary event Przybyszewski had been in Russia in his youth. Tikhonov agreed, saying that as a young man he had once seen Przybyszewski in Saint Petersburg, playing Chopin wonderfully in the hall of a great restaurant, despite being completely drunk, while rambling on about “Chopin...the Bible...Nietzsche...”

“For the young,” Tolstoy repeated, “drinking and discussing Przybyszewski was sheer ecstasy.”

We spent the whole of that evening talking about literature, or rather I did, trying to show that Polish literature has far more to offer than just Przybyszewski. I talked about Słowacki and Norwid. When I started to translate Norwid’s “Fatum” from memory:

Like a wild beast Misfortune came to man

And fixed its dreadful eyes upon him

Waiting

For him to turn aside . . .

Tolstoy was so interested that he helped me to translate it into Russian, wrote it down, and kept it.

I had Norwid’s letters with me and translated the one he wrote to Zamoyski in 1864 about patriotism, which describes it as “a creative force, and not a force for isolating oneself and pushing others away.” He writes that our sense of nationality relies on the force of appropriation but not on the force of Puritan exclusivity.2 Tolstoy went into raptures and insisted that I come back for an evening of Norwid, claiming that he had finally found an apt definition of patriotism.

That evening Tolstoy showed me a fine edition of a Russian translation of Bolesław Prus’s novel The Pharaoh, fairly recently published by Tikhonov, who was there that evening. I asked why this particular book had been so beautifully published.

“I don’t regard it as a very great book,” replied Tikhonov. “Its portrayal of Egypt is operatic and artificial, but,” he added in a whisper, dropping his gaze, “it’s Stalin’s favorite book.”

As for Akhmatova, I had read her poetry many years earlier; I knew she was the wife of Nikolai Gumilyov, a Russian poet shot by the Bolsheviks in 1921, and also that she had a son, a student who had been arrested and exiled in 1938. The boy was in the eastern languages faculty and had dreamed of going to Central Asia; nobody knew where he had been exiled to, or on what charge. Before the war there was talk of Norilsk, then there was a rumor that he’d been seen at Nakhodka Bay on the way to Kolyma. What was this woman doing, the mother of a convict, in the house of the regime’s most devoted writer?

Then I was told that Stalin had praised one of Akhmatova’s poems; as a result, she was not just tolerated but even protected. In 1946 she was violently attacked by the Communist Party Central Committee and Zhdanov for “refusing to walk in step with the people” and was banned from publishing her work. But then, in 1942, she was still in “the highest care”; apparently on Stalin’s personal orders a special plane had been sent to Leningrad for her when the besieged city was suffering famine.

That evening Akhmatova was sitting under a lamp, wearing a modest dress, in between a sack and a light habit, made of very poor material; her slightly graying hair was smoothly combed and tied with a colored scarf. She must once have been very beautiful, with regular features, a classic oval face, and large gray eyes. She drank wine and spoke little, in a slightly strange tone, as if half joking, even about the saddest things. Once I had read out the Polish poetry, we asked her to recite some of her own for us. She agreed willingly.

She declaimed a few passages from her as-yet-unpublished “Leningrad Poem.” All those present treated her with the greatest respect, giving me to understand that she was a great Russian poet. The verses she recited in a strange, singsong tone, as another Russian poet, Igor Severyanin, used to, contained none of the optimistic propaganda or praise for the Soviet Union and Soviet heroes that even Tolstoy sank to time and again, with his “stern and just” Soviet knights. But her “Leningrad Poem” was the only work that moved me and gave me a brief evocation of what the defense of the starving, devastated, heroic city must have been like.

Akhmatova’s poem began with memories of youth: difficult metaphors, commedia dell’arte, peacocks, violets, lovers, and a maple tree with yellow leaves in the window of the former Sheremetyev Palace, and ended with Leningrad cold and hungry under bombardment, besieged Leningrad. I never forgot the lines about the hungry little boy who during the bombing, in early spring or late fall, brought her some travinki (blades of grass) that had grown between the cobblestones.3I was eager to get to know her better, to see her on her own, and go further into her world, but I didn’t dare. Once already an innocent visit that I had made to a woman, without Sokolovsky as my escort, had had very tragic consequences. I have retained a memory of Akhmatova as someone “special,” with whom contact was difficult because of a certain affectation, or perhaps she just had a more singular manner. I felt as if I were communing with a wounded person trying to mask her wounds, defending herself with that affectation. Her poem—she then recited more of them—is linked with my memories of the Russian symbolists and sometimes of Rilke. Before 1914 Akhmatova had lived in Paris, where she was a friend of Modigliani. Many of his letters and drawings which she had kept were destroyed during the siege of Leningrad.

The evening at Tolstoy’s went on until three or four in the morning. We spent a long time saying goodbye outside the writer’s house, under the crowns of the spreading trees. Tolstoy was in full flow, talking about the old days, about Russian writers from before the revolution, and about Remizov, to whom, as he put it, he owed everything, as far as feeling for the Russian language was concerned. He mentioned Rozanov and his passionate sensuality, like that of old Karamazov. “I like to leave the bathhouse, get in my sled, and feel the frost nipping my face as I savor some sweet grapes,” Rozanov had told the young Tolstoy.

Tolstoy told his stories artfully, and he had an excellent memory, but in talking about Rozanov, he only captured a single aspect of the writer, the one most closely related to himself, as if he hadn’t noticed his tragic split personality.

We parted, promising to meet many more times. At dawn I reached the apartment at the edge of the city, where thanks to a helpful intermediary from Poland I had found a bed for the night.

A couple of people were already filling the room with loud snores.

The impression stirred by the poetry, and the wish to hurry up the translations and have them published in Russian prompted me to remain in Tashkent for another day. I got permission to occupy a room in the main hotel reserved for the commander in chief. I had with me a few cans of corned beef, some real tea, and even some sugar—all I needed to hold a feast, by local standards.

I invited some of the people who had been present at Tolstoy’s house. They were going to bring a few of their friends, who also wanted to hear the Polish poetry. But at the last moment my plan failed to materialize. Akhmatova sent a message to say she was unwell, Yakhontov, one of the best known Soviet declaimers of poetry (who lived in the same hotel), suddenly had to go somewhere. I received the same sort of refusals from the other invited guests, who only the night before had so warmly agreed to come and see me. I suspected “diplomatic” illnesses—an official ban.

Evening came, and I was alone in the room, when suddenly a young woman came in. She introduced herself as a friend of Tolstoy, and she had been informed that I was going to read some poetry, but clearly the instruction cancelling the gathering behind my back had not reached her. Tall and slender, with fair hair as light as down, she had subtle, pedigree features and a strikingly natural manner. Seeing that she had come alone, she wanted to leave at once, but I made her stay. We sat on a narrow stone balcony overlooking the street, where there were two old poplar trees. We spent the evening together on that balcony.

Once again I experienced that rare, so very Russian, instant contact with someone whom I had never met before, and will probably never meet again.

I read the poetry just for her, translating it into Russian, then reading it in Polish, and again I felt the same acute, wonderful reaction. She didn’t say a word but just kept asking for precision, for the sound of a word, for an exact rendition of the meaning in Russian. And then suddenly she said: “So you have already found ways to express what you have endured . . . though we . . . have not yet . . .” and fell silent. She dropped her gaze, and the corners of her mouth were trembling.

“You know what’s happened to Leningrad. I’m from there, it’s my city—now it’s a heap of rubble. Do you know what it’s like in a city where two million people have died as the result of bombing, cold and hunger? I have nowhere to return to now. Our young Soviet intelligentsia no longer exists—they’ve all perished, especially the Leningrad intelligentsia. After the Finnish war there was no family that hadn’t lost a son, a husband, or a father—the entire burden of the Finnish war was borne by the Leningrad district, and now all the rest have died on the front, the university students were all sent to the front in the first dreadful months of the German attack . . . I feel alien here in Uzbekistan, there’s nothing to connect me with this country, but I have no home to go back to, none of the people who mattered to me from my generation is still alive.”

We talked for a long time, and it felt as if we had always known each other. We parted late that night on the narrow, dusty hotel balcony.

from Józef Czapski Inhuman Land

Regina Belser - Preface to Jewish Ritual Murder

 I was first approached nearly a year ago by researcher Mark Farrell, with a request for help in translating Hellmut Schramm's book, Der jüdische Ritualmord : Eine historische Untersuchung [Jewish Ritual-Murder : a Historical Investigation]. I agreed to translate one chapter into English, with the possibility of my making a deeper commitment should I deem the book worth such an investment of my time and energy. To my great surprise, I not only found Schramm's work to be worth translating, but I became determined to perform the entire translation myself and see it made available in English. 

 Perhaps this is the place for me to state my own educational/political background and my approach to this topic. I have a bachelor's degree in Mathematics, but I also took a heavy course concentration in European History, particularly of the period prior to 1600, and I have fluency in reading German. 

In high school — this was before the long slow slide of the educational system into its present lobotomized condition — I took four years of Latin and have periodically refreshed my Latin skills. Aside from formal course work, I've maintained a life-long interest in History and consider myself well-read (for a lay person) in the subject. I do not hold any advanced degrees; nor can I point to a long list of credentials which might imbue my writing with the aura or status which attends the opinions of 'experts.' Therefore, as you read my comments — and as you read Schramm — it is your own intelligence, common sense, and life experience which must be the final arbiter of the validity or invalidity of the phenomenon of Jewish ritual-murder (JRM). 

 I believe that it is becoming increasingly clear — and even to those disinclined to think or analyze events around them — that Jewish/Zionist control of what I term the 'Propasphere' * is very real; in Germany, Austria, France, and other European countries, to voice mere doubts about the so-called 'Holocaust' — the number of Jewish dead and/or the cause of their deaths — is punishable as a felony-level crime, and there have been literally thousands who have been imprisoned for writing forensic analyses and/or carefully reasoned and well-documented articles which contest the 'party line' on such issues. 

'Israel' — occupied Palestine — directs the foreign policy of the United States and other countries, and billions in foreign aid, military help, grants (outright gifts), loans, 'reparations' for supposed crimes, have flowed in one direction — toward Israel — ever since the end of the Second World War. The actual circumstances involved in the creation of the Soviet state, of the Third Reich, and the truth as opposed to the propaganda about the 'Jewish Question,' are finally emerging after years of distortion. Many who are reading this are already well aware of the scholarly work of Kevin MacDonald — as well as the honest writing of such Jews as Shahak and Freedman. The essence of what they have to say was succinctly captured by Nietzsche, when he wrote: 

 The two sets of valuations, good/bad and good/evil, have waged a terrible battle on this earth, lasting many millennia; and just as surely as the second set has for a long time now been in the ascendant, so surely are there still places where the battle goes on and the issue remains in suspension... The watchwords of the battle, written in characters which have remained legible throughout human history, read: "Rome vs. Israel, Israel vs. Rome." No battle has ever been more momentous than this one. 

 That deep and abiding antipathy felt by Jews (whether religious or not) toward non-Jews and in particular toward Aryans, runs like a poisonous theme throughout the Talmud, and has been explicitly expressed by many prominent Jews — rabbis, politicians, financiers, writers, etc. — in unmistakably clear words. Jewish boasting about the degree of control which Jews now have in all facets of the media, banking, and government has been well documented and the sources for all of this are widely available through the Internet and in any large library; it is not my purpose to rehearse them here, but only to make it quite clear that that control and that marrow-deep animosity are factors which I took as a given from the very beginning of the project of translation. 

 But it is important that I also make it clear that, in regard to the subject of JRM, I was totally skeptical at the beginning; had I been asked to make a wager, I certainly would have bet that JRM was not a real phenomenon. I suspected that, like a lot of mythical material, it expressed a metaphysical truth: that it was a metaphor for the essence of the relationship between the various Jewish communities in the Diaspora and their host populations in Europe and elsewhere over the centuries. At most, I thought that perhaps a sporadic case or two of Jewish murderers killing children, or the like, had taken on lurid overtones in the retelling. After all — whenever this topic is encountered in print or is spoken of anywhere in the Propasphere, is it not always referred to as the "blood-libel" ? And isn't an entire package of images contained in this term? 

What comes to mind is a scene from Frankenstein, with a mob of peasants, carrying torches and howling, about to set upon some hapless victim of its ignorance and superstition. The substitution of such images in lieu of a genuine neutrality toward the question is a rather fine example of how insidious the media, particularly television, have been in transposing such issues to a pre-set frame of reference which guarantees how discourse will occur and how it will terminate. The official 'party line' on JRM is that all such incidents were crimes which ignorant and superstitious peasants blamed on innocent Jews during the Middle Ages. The truth, however, is different: these accusations predate both the Middle Ages and the start of the Christian era. Reports from a range of sources, varying widely in chronology and geographical setting, show remarkable consistency, and learned, conscientious investigators were often involved in ascertaining what actually occurred. In many cases — such as the Damascus double murders — men of known rectitude, intelligence and of wide experience in the world, such as Sir Richard Burton, confirmed its existence.

The position I have come to after translating this work, is that the accusation of JRM has always been based upon a real and not an imaginary, phenomenon, a historical reality. I believe that, for all practical purposes, and for a variety of reasons, genuine cases of JRM were beginning to peter out at around the turn of the 20th century. I believe that they were perpetrated by what are usually referred to as the "ultra-Orthodox" Jews; after the mid 17th century, that means the Hasidim in particular; that up until the late 19th century, the existence of JRM was more generally known to exist by the Jews themselves, although its practice was anything but universal among them. I believe that today, very few Jews know its history and most of them do indeed honestly regard it as a "libel." What has convinced me of it as historical reality are the following: 

 1. Descriptions of the various incidents go back in the historical record to around 170 B.C., and then occur over the next approximately 2000 years wherever a Jewish community of any size has lived; 

2. The details of the cases — what today would be called the "signature" and the modus operandi of these crimes are remarkably consistent, especially considering the lack of communication over widely separated geographical locations during much of that millennium-and-a-half. 

3. Contrary to the way it is always portrayed, JRM is not just an hysterical collection of horror stories originating in ignorant peasant minds, but has been considered genuine by educated persons who actually had opportunity to investigate the crimes committed, and who left detailed documentation in the form of trial protocols, etc. 

4. There have been rare but genuine defections by Jews who left Judaism voluntarily and not in an attempt to gain leniency or favors, and who wrote about this practice. 

5. Even assuming confessions were gained by torture, in several cases the judicial authorities saw to it that witnesses and accused were questioned separately, with no opportunity to compare notes. In some of these cases, physical evidence was found which corroborated the statements of the accused in such a way as to establish their guilt beyond question. In other cases, Jews were actually caught in the act. 

6. As with other phenomena associated with the Jews, this one has been associated with no other "minority group" world-wide — rather odd if it were just the result of some sort of myth-creating tendency, or something analogous to it. 

7. The details of purported cases of JRM, separated by more than 500 years, show the same patterns, the same confessional features, and so forth. 

8. There are highly suggestive passages even in Jewish sacred writings which indicate that this practice was not only condoned but prescribed. 

References to the use of sacrificial human blood appear in various religious Jewish works, and in the writings of well-known Jewish luminaries, as Schramm delineates; according to the tractates of the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, blood obtained by the piercing of the body is a curative beverage — the blood of animals is not what is meant. In a very rare and little-known book by Rabbi Chaim Wital, Ets-Chaim (XVII Century), we read that "the murder of goys and the drinking of their blood increases the holiness of Israel for the Jews."

What must be appreciated is the nature of Judaism itself. As many have begun to perceive, Judaism has a sort of Siamese twin relationship with 'anti-Semitism,' and it is the kind of Siamese twinship in which the two entities are conjoined at vital organs — which renders their separation an impossibility, which, if it were performed, would doom them both. As a culture, the Jewish people have not produced any science, technology, art, or writing (aside from the Talmud, the Jewish scriptures, and other religious works). They have performed well — sometimes brilliantly — in the arts and sciences of Aryan culture, but the Jewish race itself — and it is a race or sub-race/taxon — has never created a specifically Jewish art or science of any kind. This, indeed, makes it unique. Its own sense of identity is so bound up with a sense of being chosen, of being not only superior to all other peoples, but a different order of being entirely. Not only this, but the central meaning of human (i.e. Jewish only) life and even of the Universe itself is inseparably related to the existence of the Jews and of their enemies, the goyim. In 1994, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the 'Lubavitcher Rebbe,' and leader of the Chabad sect of Hasidim, died. This man — who had received countless honors, testimonials, etc. from heads of state and who had followers throughout the world, who had enormous influence in 'Israel,' and who was regarded as the Messiah by his disciples and as a paragon of humanitarianism by many in the Gentile world — had this to say about why non-Jews are allowed to exist: 

 [...] the body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of [members] of all nations of the world.... A non-Jew’s entire reality is only vanity. It is written, ‘And the strangers shall guard and feed your flocks’ (Isaiah 61:5). The entire creation [of a non-Jew] exists only for the sake of the Jews... [Excerpt from Allan C. Brownfeld's review of Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Pluto Press, London, 1999.]. 

 As readers will discover, this Schneerson was a member of a famous dynasty of Jews, each of which succeeded in turn to the position of Zaddik — holy man — of the Chabad Hasidim. The Propasphere face of the Hasidim — that presented to the public — is that of a group of 'fools for God,' who sing and pray their way through the day and eschew worldly pleasures. The reality is very different. Several prominent Hasidim have been convicted of large swindles (of course, by Talmudic logic, Jews are only required to deal uprightly with other Jews); the ultra Orthodox/Jews enjoy what amounts to control of the world diamond market — hardly an 'unworldly' endeavor. In addition, no fewer than three of Schneerson's direct forebears were implicated in various ritual-murders, including the Beilis case (1911). 

 Another feature of the religion is that there are degrees of access to knowledge; for a long time before the Talmud was written down, its core existed as oral law; in Judaism, the oral law is at least co-equal to the written law, and is sometimes viewed as superior to it. Beyond the Talmud itself, there is the Cabbala, which is really a system of magic, with esoteric rituals, many of which exist only as oral tradition and which have never been committed to writing.

Schramm completed his book in 1941. The future must have seemed hopeful due to the early military victories of Germany, and before Britain proved to be intransigent and America became involved in the war. Schramm writes as one utterly convinced of the truth of what he is saying, and he makes no pretense at 'objectivity' — for him, the case for JRM has been proved beyond doubt. 

 After having read the entire work, I find that I disagree in some minor points with Schramm's views: 

 1. I believe that some (although fewer than one might think.) cases of alleged JRM were garden-variety 'regular' murders — although not any of the cases which Schramm chose to explore at chapter length. 

2. I do not believe that the practice of JRM was quite as common as Schramm believes it to have been. But we must also keep in mind that the situation in Europe and Asia Minor vis-a-vis the Jews was radically different during the first decades of the 20th century. Jewish communities were unimaginably more insular and more traditional than is the case today for any but the most ultra-Orthodox Jews. 

3. I believe that the practice of JRM was waning even during the last decade or so of the 19th century, that it continued to do so after the turn of the century, and that, if it still exists today, it exists as a very rare phenomenon. 

 I believe that, as concerns JRM, there has been a process of forgetting, deliberate only in the sense that it is purposeful and not in the sense of having been consciously invoked, by Jewry. This mechanism, I think, is not so very different from the process of creation of the gas chamber/ 6-million-died myth of the 'Holocaust' — it's a rearrangement and distortion of what actually happened in the (perceived) interests of Jewry. 

 In the final analysis, the reason why I have performed this translation is that I see a 1984-like surgery being performed on History; this is, of course, not restricted to the topic of the 'Holocaust' and related subjects, but is interposing a distorting lens between the present and the past — a lens which skews and warps one people and one people only: non-Jewish Whites. In fact, something much more profound than a simple distortion is taking place. The historical sense itself is being destroyed. This is, in part, a result of the notions of Modernism and Progress, which sees all that came before the present as prelude, which views the past of any era as if it were a Hollywood costume drama — in other words, a way of seeing the world (for the past is an inescapable part of the world) as a fashion statement, no more, no less. The real tragedy of our times, concurrent with and connected to the threat to White racial survival, is this robbing of life of its depth and contact with Nature, and its reduction to an entirely derivative and artificial experience of the lowest common denominator.

* The Propasphere is every facet of public life — educational institutions, the media, government, churches, entertainment — as a complete and seamless system of propaganda, with each part reinforcing the message of the others. As such, the great and profound effectiveness of this sphere of deception lies in the fact that it is perceived as reality itself. It is a world of surfaces only - of verbal and non-verbal cues, of inferences, innuendos, and it makes use of one of the key behavioral levers in the psychology of most people: the fear of the contempt or disapproval of others. For example, the 'correct' attitude toward: interracial dating (trendy and 'cool'); the Jews and 'Israel' (innocent victims always and to be supported unequivocally and without limit); toward the White race (the 'cancer of the human race') — is conveyed continually and relentlessly by television. The context in which these messages appear may run the gamut from situation comedy, dramatic series, talk show, or even a sporting event; whatever the venue, the globalist, NWO, anti-White, pro-Zionist ethos is omnipresent as the 'default setting' like a carrier wave. 

 Because of its masquerade as reality in the public sphere, it is simultaneously incorporated into private life. Television, by its property of literally bringing public life into the center of private life (i.e., the living room, bedroom, or kitchen), by the fact that it is present almost universally in every home and actually provides a sort of 'white noise' background for daily life — and by the fact that it is a highly visual medium, has an innate tendency to atrophy the active mental processes — analysis, synthesis, and imagination and to supply a homogeneous Weltanschauung. To an astonishing degree, the images which accompany thought are the images provided by television; the catch- words, rationales, etc. — even the conversational exchanges of daily life — follow a furrow already pre-plowed by those presented on television. In essence, an alarming percentage of the population is living a second-hand life within the parameters set by television.

Acknowledgements ... 

 I would like to thank researcher Mark Farrell for assisting me in this difficult project. His help has been invaluable in finding other pertinent information regarding this subject. 

 It seems that this topic has again resurfaced, thanks to Dr. Schramm's book now having been translated, and other efforts as well. In particular, among these efforts to renew the research into the topic of Jewish occult murder is a new and highly controversial video tape about Jewish ritual murder by Worldwide Revisionist News & Views, entitled Human Sacrifice among the Fanatical Hasidic Jews and Other Cults from Ancient Times to the Present. 

 Many people have praised this video effort. Dr. Ed Fields of the newspaper The Truth at Last has called this video "a real breakthrough." Harrell Rhome, M.Div., Ph.D., said that "this fast-paced documentary," which is nearly 2 hours long, is "virtually irrefutable, and is most educational." Rev. Dr. Matthew F. Hale (J.D.) says that "this is an excellent video demonstrating without question that the accusation of Jewish ritual-murder is indeed true."  This video is available from the following address for $25.00 including shipping and handling: 

 Eagle Publications POB 6303 Corpus Christi  TX 78466-6303  USA  There are other recent efforts to stop this cruel and extremely vicious act from occurring by revealing its nature as well. For instance, Michael Hoffman wrote about this in an article that appeared in one of his newsletters. Syrian Defense minister, attorney, and Dr. (of History) Moustafa Tlass has published a book in English called The Matzo of Zion, which may be available shortly. The book Blood Ritual, another investigative study into this matter by Philip DeVier, Ph.D., has recently been published, and is available through the National Alliance. 

 In the Russian language, linguist Vladimir Dal's book Notes about the Ritual Murders, has recently been republished, which may be available soon in English. Also in Russian, Yuri Vorobyevsky's Path to the Apocalypse, Vol. III, has an interesting chapter about ritual murder as well. A new Web site — http://www.RitualMurder.org — also describes many such incidents. In short, efforts to reveal this phenomenon and stop this terribly vicious act from occurring are taking place more every day across the globe. 

 R. Belser 

December, 2001

The Tarantula's Bite

     According to an old Italian tradition, the bite of the tarantula leads to a condition of hysteria and extreme agitation bordering, by certain accounts, on madness. Accordingly the name tarantism was given to this condition, and it was a common condition in the south of Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The tarantella dance takes its origin from this sickness, first because those who were gripped by tarantism felt a desperate need for frenetic physical activity, and later because this very need was formalized into a form of dance which was held to be therapeutic for the disease. In the present case, the furious contemporary desire to work, to be productive, to engage in commercial activity, is likened to this old malady.

Story has it that in the land of an ancient civilization far from Europe, an American expedition, bemoaning the poor competitivity of the native inhabitants who had been recruited for work, believed a suitable means could be found for spurring them on: the Americans doubled the hourly pay. Failure: following this raise, the better part of the workers came to work only half the hours of before. Since the natives held that the original reward was sufficient for the natural needs of their life, they now thought it altogether absurd that they should have to seek more for themselves than that which, on the basis of the new criterion, sufficed for the procuring of those needs.

This is the antithesis of what we have recently begun to call Stakhanovism.*   This anecdote might act as a testing stone for two worlds, two mindsets, two civilizations, by which one of them might be judged sane and normal, and the other deviant and psychotic.

* After Alexey Stakhanov, a Russian miner who became renowned throughout Soviet Russia for his remarkable stamina. He set the world record for coal mining, reportedly mining 227 tons of coal in one day. This record was later disputed by some who believed he had been aided by the Soviet authorities themselves in order to produce propaganda for the workers, but Stakhanov’s name remains to this day crystallized in the Italian language in the term staconovista, meaning a man of tireless work ethic.

From Julius Evola

RECOGNITIONS

Studies on Men and Problems from the Perspective of the Right

Otium. This term has undergone a change exactly inverse to that of the preceding one: almost without exception, it has acquired a pejorative meaning. According to modern usage, someone is idle58 when he is useless to himself and to others. To be idle is more or less the same as to be indolent, distracted, inactive, listless, and prone to the ‘dolce far niente’ of today’s mandolin-playing Italy for tourists.59 However, the Latin otium once meant a period of free time essentially corresponding to a meditative state of concentration, calm, and transparent contemplation. Idleness60 in the negative sense — which was also known in antiquity — indicated only what this can lead to when misused: only in such cases could the Romans say, for example, hebescere otio or otio diffluere, that is to become stupid or dissipated through idleness. But this is not the predominant sense. Cicero, Seneca, and other Classical authors chiefly understood otium as the healthy and normal counterpart to all forms of action, and even as a necessary condition for action to truly be action, and not agitation, business (negotium) or ‘work’.

We could also refer to the Greeks, as Cicero wrote: Graeci non solum ingenio atque doctrina, sed etiam otio studioque abundantes — ‘The Greeks are rich not only in innate gifts and learning but also in otium and diligence’.

Of Scipio the Elder it was said: Nunquam se minus otiosum esse quam cum otiosus esset, aut minus solum esse quam cum solus esset — ‘He was never less idle than when he was idle, and never less alone than when he enjoyed solitude’, which stresses an active (in a higher sense) type of ‘idleness’ and solitude. And Sallust wrote: Maius commodum ex otio meo quam ex aliorum negotiis reipublicae venturum — ‘My leisure will be more useful to the State than the busyness of others.’ To Seneca we owe a treatise entitled De otio, in which ‘idleness’ gradually takes on the character of pure contemplation.

It is worth mentioning some of the characteristic ideas expounded in this treatise. According to Seneca, there are two States: a greater State, without exterior and contingent limits, which encompasses both men and gods; and the particular, earthly State, to which one belongs by birth.

Now, Seneca says, there are men who serve the two States at once, others who serve only the greater State, and others that serve only the earthly State.

The greater State can also be served through ‘idleness’, if not better through idleness — by investigating what constitutes virtus, strength and virile dignity: huius maiori rei publicae et in otio deservire possumus, imno vero nescio an in otium melius, ut quaeremus quid sit virtus. Otium is closely linked to the tranquillity of mind of the sage, to the inner calm that allows one to attain the summits of contemplation. If understood in its correct, traditional sense, contemplation is not an escape from the world or a distraction, but an immersion within oneself and elevation to the perception of the metaphysical order that every true man must never cease to keep in sight when living and struggling in an earthly State.

Moreover, even in Catholicism (before the Church came up with Christ the Worker — to be honoured on May 1 — and before it ‘opened itself to the left’) one found the phrase sacrum otium, ‘sacred idleness’, which referred precisely to a contemplative activity. But in a civilisation in which all action has taken on the dull, physical, mechanical and mercenary traits of work, even when that work is done in one’s mind (‘intellectual workers’, who naturally also have their ‘unions’ and fight for the ‘demands of their professional sector’), the positive and traditional meaning of contemplation was bound to be lost. This is why in relation to modern civilisation we should speak not of an ‘active civilisation’ but of a restless and neurotic one.

As compensation for ‘work’ and a reaction against the strain of a life that has been reduced to a vain acting and producing, Classical otium — contemplation, silence, the state of calm and pause allowing one to return to oneself and find oneself again — is foreign to modern man. No: all he knows is ‘distraction’ (the literal meaning of which is ‘dispersion’);61 he looks for sensations, for new tensions, and new stimuli — almost as psychic narcotics. Anything, as long as he can escape himself, as long as he can avoid finding himself alone with himself, isolated from the noise of the outside world and interaction with his ‘neighbour’. Hence the radio, television, cinema, cruises, the frenzy of sports or political rallies in a regime of the masses, the need to hear things, to chase after the latest or most sensational news, ‘supporters’ of all kinds, and so on. Every expedient seems to have been diabolically brought into play in order to destroy any kind of genuine inner life, to prevent any internal defence of one’s personality, so that, almost like an artificially galvanised being, the individual will let himself be swept away by the collective current, which — naturally, according to the famous ‘meaning of history’ — moves forward according to an unlimited progress.

From Evola The Bow and the Club