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