I have believed every eyewitness account about German monstrosity

I’m on the mezzanine of the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. A Libertarian Party convention is taking place and there are a lot of people milling around. As I walk through the crowd I pause to accept a photocopy of a newspaper article that a man is passing out. The man quickly starts telling me that the stories about six million Jews being killed during World War II are not true.

I’m stunned. It’s as if some character from an outer space movie has come down to earth and zapped me with a beam from his ray gun. I’ve heard about people like the fellow who is confronting me, but I have never actually seen one. He’s a small, thin, middle-aged man with a white pointy beard, clear blue eyes, and a ruddy com-plexion—the picture of health. He speaks fast, in a well-mannered, articulate way, as if he’s afraid he might lose me to some other interest.

In the first instant I don’t truly grasp what he is saying. Then I understand that he is telling me that the stories about German gas chambers are not true, and that many of the stories I have heard all my life about gas chambers and the Holocaust are meant to gain sympathy for Jews at the expense of Germans. I feel sweat appear on the palms of my hands.

The first thing I want to do is to get away from the man. I’m excruciatingly aware of the many other people around us, that they can hear what he is saying. He has almost certainly proselytized those others before I arrived. The others, then, have already heard what I’m hearing now, and in my imagination each of them has one eye on me, waiting to see what my first move will be, waiting to judge me.

I feel ashamed listening to the man talk about Jews. I feel ashamed holding the photocopied article in my hand. I’m listening, but after the first few words I don’t understand anything he’s saying. My brain has closed itself down in self-defense. And yet, at the same time, I’m aware that the man sounds knowledgeable, and even sincere.

I feel trapped between what I take to be the man’s sincerity and my own embarrassment. I want to get away from him, to hand back his flyer and turn away so that those who are watching can see that I reject, out of hand, everything he is saying. At the same time, because of his honest and open manner, I don’t want to cause him to feel ashamed by rejecting him publicly. I have never looked into the history of the Holocaust. I’m ignorant of the whole business. What right do I have to do something that will embarrass another simply because he’s saying that he does not believe what I believe? And then the man makes my decision for me.

He turns to a new arrival and begins his spiel all over again.

Thankful, and at the same time feeling defiled by the fact that I am still holding the flyer in my hand, I walk toward a large trash can. Even at that moment I know that the problem for me is not so much that I am holding the flyer as that I am being observed by others to be holding it and that they know what it says. I had accepted the flyer innocently, in deference to another’s sincerity. The shame I feel, the defilement even, does not come from inside me but from the others, from what I understand to be the standards of my peers.

As I approach the trash can I glance down at the flyer’s head-line. It’s titled “The Problem of the Gas Chambers, or The Rumor of Auschwitz.” What rumor, I wonder? What problem? There isn’t anything there that rings a bell for me. The author of the article is a certain Professor Robert Faurisson. I’ve never heard of him. Then I notice that the article had originally appeared in Le Monde, the Paris daily. It’s confusing. I have no idea at all what the “problem” of the gas chambers might be, or what the “rumor” of Auschwitz refers to. It sounds crazy. And I have never heard of Faurisson. But I am familiar with Le Monde. Le Monde is one of a handful of world-class newspapers.

What, then, is Le Monde doing printing an article critical of the gas chambers, the Holocaust, or whatever? I had intended to drop the flyer into the trashcan on principle. In my circle you just do not read materials that might make Jews feel uncomfortable. It’s a principle. At the last moment, the mind caught by the mystery suggested by the association with Le Monde, I fold up the flyer and put it in my back pocket.

All day I go about my business at the convention, the flyer in my back pocket. Tonight, alone in my room, like a thief, I take it out and read it, all the while conscious of the fearfulness in my behavior, the lack of self-respect. I am aware that I am reading something that everyone I know, and all the people I like best, will think is bigoted and dirty, and that I am doing it at a time and in a place where they cannot find me out. I have spent years learning to accept the weaknesses in my character and to stand aside from them, yet here I am, forty-nine years old, hiding in my room with a photocopy of a translation of a newspaper article, fearful and ashamed.

Several weeks pass. How can I possibly explain what has happened to me? I have read a newspaper article written by a professor I have never heard of, which has been translated from the French by who knows who, given to me on a hotel mezzanine by a stranger who is probably a crank, forwarding a thesis that is outrageous—and dangerous.

Outrageous because it makes claims that I have never dreamed I would hear made. Dangerous because —why? I don’t know. But a sense of tension and danger envelops the thing. I sense immediately into the reading that if I do not reject everything that this Professor Faurisson has written, I will be in danger of suffering great losses, though I cannot say exactly what. At the same time, I was willing to read the Faurisson article with something of an open mind. Very carefully. Why?

I’ll probably never know the why of it. But the source of original publication is given, along with the date, so theoretically it is possible to check the accuracy of the translation. Key statements in the text are sourced. Anyone willing to spend an hour or so in a good library could discover for himself if Faurisson is being honest in those instances. I am impressed by the simplicity of his claims, the objectivity of his tone, dealing as he does with a matter of tremendous significance, from a point of view that is absolutely radical.

My being willing to read the article with an open mind, if I can use that term, might be due simply to my ignorance. I have never read a scholarly work on the Holocaust, and have not paid much attention to the stories of Holocaust “survivors.” Maybe it’s because there are no heroes in the stories I have heard. Masses of sheep-like people being herded to the slaughter. Helplessness, passivity, pathos. No heroes to create tragedy from catastrophe.

Maybe that’s it. Ignorance, a disinterest in suffering unredeemed by heroic action, and finally a kind of primary boredom with a wretched story told and told and retold far too often. That being so, how is it that I remain so stunned after reading Faurisson’s thesis? If the stories had not interested me in the first place, why should I be affected so profoundly by the discovery that there are those who do not believe the stories? Doesn’t my lack of interest in the Holocaust annul my right to be shocked by the possibility that Faurisson has his finger on something?

The really surprising fact for me is that despite my ignorance of the Holocaust and my realization, on reflection, that I was bored with hearing about it, I have believed everything I have ever heard about it. Not the shadow of a doubt has ever crossed my mind about even one Holocaust story, and over the years I have heard hundreds of them, some over and over and over again. I have believed every eyewitness account about German monstrosity that I have ever heard. It has never occurred to me to compare what such people say about Germans on the one hand, and what they say about Arabs and Palestinians on the other.

Maybe that’s why something broke in me that night in my apartment when I read Faurisson’s article. Maybe I had believed too rigidly for too long. There has been no room in my mind for doubt. The Germans committed every monstrous crime against the Jews that they have been accused of committing. I have absolutely believed that. My mindset has been that of an absolutist.

There was nothing there that would allow me to give a little. I was absolutely rigid in my believing. Intellectually then, psychologically, something had to break. My mind welcomed it—but in my heart I felt the awful anxiety that only great insecurity can create.

I knew that first night that I would have to do something about the break, the suspicion that had entered my mind. I knew that first night but I have done nothing. Week follows week and I do not lif t a finger to check out a single assertion made by Faurisson about Auschwitz or the gas chambers. I keep a daily journal, the purpose of which is to make an honest man of me, but there is not a whisper in it about one of the most stunning moments of my life. I’m aware of the evasion. I can’t make myself move on it.

Today, three months after the central event of my recent life, the last day of December, I telephone the Central Library in Los Angeles and ask the history department if it has a copy of Arthur Butz’s The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. I don’t think they will have it, but they do. I ask the lady to hold it for me at the desk. I feel a little apprehension, a little excitement. I try to identify the moment that I decided, at last, to make the telephone call, what was behind it in that exact moment after all the other moments that have passed these last three months, but I can’t.

As I climb the library steps I feel the body growing heavy and burdened. It’s comical. I feel an exhausting load accumulating on my shoulders. I can see the whole thing operating. It’s pathetic. I understand that I am afraid that I am going to find out something that I really do not want to find out. I’m not certain that I will find it out, but I sense that I will. I want to find it out, all right—curiosity killed the writer. What I do not want is to experience what I am afraid I will experience if the German gas chamber stories do begin to unravel before my eyes.

A middle-aged woman is at the reference desk. As I approach her to ask for Butz’s book I feel the shame rise up inside me. When I ask for the book the lady appears to avert her eyes as she hands it to me. It’s as if she recognizes the shameful act that I am about to perform but does not want me to see it in her eyes—that she understands that I want to read a book that no person with decent sensibilities would want to read.

At a reading table I discover that Arthur R. Butz is an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at Northwestern University. Electrical engineering? Computer sciences? Butz tackles this issue straightaway:

There will be those who will say that I am not qualified to undertake such a work, and there will even be those who will say that I have no right to publish such things. So be it. If a scholar, regardless of his specialty, perceives that scholarship is acquiescing, from whatever motivation, in a monstrous lie, then it is his duty to expose the lie, whatever his qualifications. It does not matter that he collides with all “established” scholarship in the field, although that is not the case here, for a critical examination of the “holocaust” has been avoided by academic historians in all respects and not merely in the respect it is treated in this book.

That is, while virtually all historians pay some sort of lip service to the lie, when it comes up on books and papers on other subjects, none has produced an academic study arguing, and presenting the evidence for either the thesis that the exterminations did take place or that they did not take place.

If they did take place then it should be possible to produce a book showing how it started and why, by whom it was organized and the lines of authority in the killing operations, what the technical means were and that those technical means did not have some sort of more mundane interpretation (e.g. crematoria), who were the technicians involved, the numbers of victims from the various lands and the time tables of their executions, presenting the evidence on which these claims are based together with reasons why one should be willing to accept the authenticity of all documents produced at illegal trials. No historians have undertaken anything resembling such a project; only non-historians have undertaken portions.

“With these preliminary remarks,” Butz writes, “I invite your study of the hoax of your century.” I am struck by the selfconfident and dispassionate tone of his voice. Who knows? Maybe he doesn’t have a case against Jews. I suppose—I am certain—that that is the question around which so much of my apprehension and evasiveness circles. While I understand, intellectually, that reasonable men can openly question the truth of any historical question, in my heart I have not believed it. In my heart I have believed that only men with an ax to grind against Jews would allow themselves to question the orthodox history of the Holocaust.

I begin looking carefully through The Hoax. It takes me less than two hours to decide that something I have believed for 35 years with all my heart and all my mind, that a uniquely monstrous German regime had intentionally murdered six million Jews in an attempt to physically destroy them as a people, has probably not been demonstrated to be true. Less than two hours.

The gigantic, brutal transfers of populations by the Germans and Soviets, the tremendous chaos of the war itself, the fact that the sources of “post-war primary data are private Jewish or Communist sources (exclusively the latter in the all-important cases of Russia and Poland)…”—if that’s true, there was no way to know how many Jews were left in Europe in 1945 or to know accurately how they were distributed around the planet.

It is not only that I have believed the “six million” figure with such certainty, but that I have believed so deeply all the implications—including the endless torrent of accusations of unique German monstrosity—that went along with it. I have believed without reservation, but in thirty five years I have not made the slightest effort to substantiate what my believing has accused others of. I have been willing to live my life believing something that morally condemns an entire people of complicity in horrifi  criminal behavior without ever bothering to investigate the evidence supporting a single charge made against them. The very least I could have done was to say: “I’ve heard the stories, I have heard them over and over, but I don’t really know if they are true or not.”
The only way I can explain such intellectually immature and, finally, contemptible life-long behavior is to admit, simply, that it has been easy to believe what everyone else believes and difficult not to. The believing takes no energy, no courage, no common sense. Trying to find out the truth about such terrible accusations against others would have taken all that and more. Merely standing aside from opinion and not participating in that of others— that would have taken energy, too. In my laziness I had allowed myself to be swamped with belief.

I go to the desk and ask the librarian to help me run down some comment on Butz’s Hoax. She takes a run at it but can’t turn up anything. I return to the text. I peruse the acknowledgements, the final remarks. I go over the appendices, notes, references, the index. Hoax is extensively documented, the established history of the Holocaust is confronted openly, and discounted in scores of places. And yet, so far as I can find out by consulting the stan-dard indices and guides, not one periodical, not one newspaper, not one historian, not a single journalist, critic, or scholar has published one word to either confirm or deny one statement, one shred of the evidence presented by Butz to the effect that the poison gas chamber stories are falsehoods and even deliberate lies.

The mind is racing and shooting around like crazy. I walk through the library from one department to another, upstairs and down. Something is wrong with the gas chamber stories.

Something is wrong with the story of the six million and what is wrong is being covered up. Something is wrong with the silence that has buried Butz’s book. Something is wrong in the academic community, and not only among the historians. Something tremendous is going on, or not going on as it were, and the ramifications could prove to be endless. There is an immense amount of work to do. The air in the library is thick with complication. I feel as if I’m swimming in a sea of suppression, censorship, and evasion. [...]

Now I start telling her about The Hoax of the Twentieth Century.

It’s been in the back of my mind that I have to tell her and a few minutes ago when I first saw her standing there, I think that’s what started the anxiety. I speak very carefully. Her family on both sides lost a lot of relatives in the Holocaust. Jenny and Sol both grew up on the Holocaust story. One night in Westwood Sol and Betty and Jenny and I watched a movie called The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. It was about a family of cultured Italian Jews, including an elegant daughter about Jenny’s age, who were rounded up and sent off to the Germans to who knows what. By the end of the film Jenny was sobbing uncontrollably. Her body was actually convulsing. It was unnerving.

This morning the first thing she says is: “Well, Bradley, where did all those people go?” She’s smiling very broadly like she does when she’s challenging someone and knows that the other person knows he’s being challenged. I say that nobody’s really looked for them yet and maybe there aren’t nearly so many missing as we’ve been told. I say: “The Germans said they put them in the Soviet Union. Who knows? The real issue is the gas chambers. It’s an easier approach to the problem. You don’t have to run down six million people one by one. The gas chambers were either there or they weren’t. I think Butz might be right. He says they weren’t there.”

She asks if I’ve been to the Simon Wiesenthal Center to ask the scholars in residence there what they think about Butz’s book.

I say no, I haven’t. We speak very quietly and carefully, standing across the dining room table from each other and in the end she says: “Well, Bradley, it sounds fascinating. It really does. I don’t know how it’s going to add up. It’s going to make trouble for you, that’s for sure. But it’s fascinating. I have to say that.”
“I was worried about telling you.”
“Were you, Bradley?”
“Yes.”
“Wait until you tell Sol.”
“I guess so.”
“Sol won’t feel the same way I do.” She’s smiling very broadly, in her challenging way.
“What worries me is that I’m afraid I’m going to be reviled.”
“You will be, Bradley. You’re going to be associated in every-body’s mind with all the worst kind of people. It’s all set up. It’s all set up. It’s right there waiting for you.”
“I really look forward to this.”
“It makes me think you’ve found a new way to be on the outside looking in.”
[...]

“Mommy says you’re the most moral person she knows.”
“Your mother has always been on my side.” I felt a lit t le uncomfortable. I fell silent. Marrissa was silent too, stroking Princess absentmindedly while the dog gazed up at her adoringly. I took the Sherman Way exit and headed west toward the pound.
“Bradley, are you going to do another issue of your paper?”
“I think so.”
“Why do you want to publish something that makes people feel bad?”
“Did you feel bad about something you read in the paper?”
“I don’t think of myself being Jewish. I just don’t have those feelings at all. I feel like everybody else. Like an American.”
“Did your mother feel bad about something I wrote?”
“I think she struggled with it. Mommy definitely feels Jewish.”
“I feel an obligation to publish it. There’s a lot of lying going on about the gas chamber stories. Straight out lying. I stumbled onto it. A lot of stuff's being covered up that shouldn’t be covered up. People are being accused of crimes they didn’t commit. I don’t like it. I’m going to write about it and I’m going to go on publishing what I write. I don’t know how far the lying goes but I think it goes right to the top. I don’t know how important any of it is but I’m going to go straight ahead with it. I’m doing the right thing, within the context of my life.”
“If you’re not sure it’s important, why would you go on writing things that hurt people’s feelings?”
“Marrissa, do you mean why would I write things that might hurt Jewish feelings?”
“That’s what you do, isn’t it?”
“What if your mother was German rather than Jewish, and you were told all your life that she had done horrible things when she was young, then you discovered that some of the things you had been told were false but people went on saying them anyhow?”
Marrissa didn’t say anything.
“What if you were told all your life that your German father had been a monster when he was young? What if it had been pounded into you year after year after year and then one day you found out that one, just one of the monstrous acts you had been taught to believe he had committed, he hadn’t committed? You found out by accident, because you had always been a true believer in your father’s monstrosity and guilt, but you found out? Do you think you’d let it slide?”
“I’ve never thought about how Germans feel.”
“Think about it now. Put yourself in the place of a German girl. How would you feel?”
“I still think I wouldn’t write something that made others feel bad.”
“That’s not fair, Marrissa. After all the war hate against the Germans you still see in the movies, on the television, that you read in the papers and in books and magazines. Has there ever been anything to compare with it? Have you ever heard of any society in history so obsessed with making a whole people feel bad?”
“I’ve never thought about Germans one way or the other.”
“I can understand that. One of the things a writer does is look at the others in the same light that he uses to see himself. That’s one of the things that separate artists from others. It’s natural for a Jewish kid to grow up trusting Jews and being suspicious of Germans. When you get older the time comes to start seeing through the implications of all that. If you want to.”
“I don’t think I like what you’re doing,” Marrissa said. “I can’t prove it’s wrong, but I don’t think I like it.”
“Uh huh.”
“Everybody says you’re wrong about the Holocaust. Everybody.”
“Not the Holocaust, Marrissa. The gas chambers. I am absolutely not wrong about the gas chambers because I’m only asking questions about them. I’m asking, is this piece of information about the gas chambers accurate? This particular gas chamber story, does it make sense? Is there any real evidence to support it, or am I supposed to take somebody’s word for it? I’m told it’s bad taste to ask questions about the gas chambers. I don’t think so. Not bad taste, not good taste. Not moral, not immoral. I ask questions about the gas chambers to find out what’s going on there. I’m not sneaking around about it either. You should look into your reasons for not liking it that I’m asking these particular questions when you’ve never thought that it was wrong to ask any of the other questions that I’ve gone around asking. Then you should look into the reasons your professors don’t like it either. If you do, you’ll get a whiff of what obsessive conformity and sniveling evasion are all about. You’ll see professorial bowing and scraping before received opinion that’ll turn your stomach. You’ll discover…”

“Why are you getting mad?”
“That’s not mad. That’s intensity.”
“I just don’t know what to think,” Marrissa said. “I don’t have the information to say that you’re wrong, or that you’re right either.”
“I understand that.”
“I have this gut feeling though.”
“Well, what do you think, Kid? Right or wrong?”
“Wrong, Asshole.” She put one hand to her mouth and laughed until tears came from her eyes.

From BRADLEY R. SMITH
A Personal History of Moral Decay

The King of Gaps

 

In glaring affinity with the Chinese and, most of all, with the Daoist experience of the world, the sense of the vague, undefined and indeterminate is central in Pessoa. This is not so much in regard to nature, as in Pascoaes, but more in the realm of the internal psychic experience. The sense of the vague is at the root of the heteronymous experience of the Self as a non-Self or meontological emptiness that may at each instant become other (outrar-se) and become everything, in limitless self-creating possibilities. Bernardo Soares writes this very polished sentence in The Book of Disquiet: ‘Because I am nothing, I can imagine being everything. If I were something, I wouldn’t be able to imagine’ (Pessoa 2015, 156; Borges 2017, 29–44). However, it is an English poem by the young Pessoa that foresees and configures the more explicit experience of that undetermined vagueness as an insubstantial and interstitial emptiness. The poem is The King of Gaps, which summons, in a fairy-tale atmosphere, an ‘unknown king / Whose kingdom was the strange Kingdom of Gaps’ (Pessoa 2006, 420). This is a sovereign of the gaps and spaces of indetermination between determined and distinct things and entities, that is, no-man’s land that Pessoa calls ‘interbeings’. Its territory is the non-delimited space of the in between, the non-distinction connecting that which is distinct in inner and outer experience: one ‘thing’ and another ‘thing’, the ‘waking’ and the ‘sleep’, the ‘silence’ and the ‘speech’, ‘us and the consciousness of us’. The in between one thing and another is neither one nor the other, distinguished only by its indistinctness. Only seemingly delimited by that which has limits, it is, in truth, the limitless and undetermined that at once transcends, envelops and contains everything that limits and determines itself in it. This is suggested by the characterisation of the ‘strange mute kingdom’ of that ‘weird king’ as an otherness, which is alien to the human categories of ‘time and scene’ (time and space).

The space without dimensions of this king-kingdom is that of the open and inconclusive, ‘between’ the ‘supreme purposes’ and the ‘deed undone’, as well as that of the ‘mystery’ opening ‘between eyes and sight’ or between subject and object, which evades determination as perception or non-perception (‘nor blind nor seeing’).

As ‘void presence’ which is nothing but a ‘chasm’, the strange ‘King of Gaps’ is the formless and the abyssal, similar to what is named in Sanskrit as kha, in Greek kháos and in Latin chaos. Without location and not being an entity, it is uncreated and imperishable (‘never ended nor begun’). It is a figure of emptiness and insubstantiality suggesting an openness without contours which is nothing and has nothing (‘The lidless box holding not-being’s no-pelf’) (Pessoa 2006, 420).

The ‘King of Gaps’ is a figure of the infinite, strange to all circumscription and condition, a positive negativity. His identification with God is therefore natural except for himself (‘All think that he is God, except himself’), since in this logic to be God is still to be something, a determination and a limit which the infinite does not bear. In the words of Hegel regarding a letter by Spinoza: ‘Omnis determinatio est negatio’ (Melamed, Yitzhak Y. 2012, 176). This theme, the theme of the God which is not God to himself, or even the theme of the ‘beyond-God’, is derived from the mystic apophatic Greek and Christian Neoplatonism (Plotinus, Damascius, Pseudo-Dionysus, Scotus Eriugena, Eckhart, Silesius) and is recurring in Pessoa’s thought and work (Borges 2017, 133–161), as well as in other Portuguese poets and thinkers such as Antero de Quental, José Marinho, Agostinho da Silva, and Teixeira de Pascoaes – who writes that God is the ‘only perfect atheist’ (Pascoaes 1945, 276) because He is not God to himself. The ‘King of Gaps’ is a figure of the Zero or Emptiness (Jünger 1995, 15–40), as the bottomless bottom of the metaphysics of the One and of Being. Sometimes intuited as Nothing (ouden) (by excess and not by defect) (Pareyson 2000; Givone 2009), this elusive ‘King of Gaps’ also manifests itself in those literary figures of ‘insignificance’ and ‘impersonality’ that are Nemo, Niemand, Nobody, Personne (with a fruitful ambivalence) and Ninguém (Breton 1987, 5–26), encountered in Homer and the Anglo-German literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and in Portuguese culture in Gil Vicente’s Fool, in Almeida Garrett’s Pilgrim, in the sonnet ‘Homo’ by Antero de Quental and in many passages by Teixeira de Pascoaes and Fernando Pessoa. As one can see, the ‘King of Gaps’ is a figure of the undetermined emptiness and is, for that reason, fertile and superabundant, around whom the affinities between the Daoist and the Pessoan experience constellate, alongside a certain kind of Western philosophical-literary tradition (Poulet 1985–1990; Breton 1992).
Since the Middle Ages, the word gap has, etymologically speaking, the sense of a rift in a wall or hedge, afterward acquiring the meaning of an opening between mountains and, in a wider sense, of an unfilled space, an interval, hiatus or interruption. Archaically, it refers to the image of an abyss, an empty space or a wide-open mouth. Its proto-Indo-European root, *ghieh-, points to that meaning and is akin, as I mentioned, to the Sanskrit kha, to the Greek kháos and to the Latin chaos.

In Sanskrit, kha means empty space and zero (Rendich 2014, 136–137). In the Rig-Veda, it names the empty centre of the wheel where its axle is inserted (Coomaraswamy 2001, 255), later being identified with Brahman, the infinite unconditioned primordial space (Zaehner 1992, 95), the bottomless bottom of everything. If the good movement of the car is dependent on the good insertion of the axle uniting the wheels in their empty centre, the wheel being the universal symbol for the movement of life (Chevalier and Gheerbrant 1990, 826–830) experienced as way or journey, then it is understandable that, in the same Indian, Hindu and Buddhist traditions, sukha, that is, the good insertion of the axle in the empty centre of the wheel, means happiness and dukkha, the bad insertion, means suffering (Droit 2010, 19). What remains implicit is that a life well-adjusted to, or well centred in, the infinite primordial empty space is a life that goes well, whereas an ill-adjusted or badly centred life in that same space is a life that goes bad.

In Sanskrit, kha also means zero, whose invention occurred in India with the ensuing revolution of calculus. Other Sanskrit words that also mean zero are śūnya, pūrna, ākāśa and ananta, that is, emptiness, plenitude, space and infinity. As the zero contains every possible number, so the emptiness entails the plenitude of possibilities. The space without centre or periphery is the infinite, complete emptiness (Coomaraswamy 2001, 255–262; Bäumer, Bettina and Dupuche, John R. (ed.), 2005; Borges 2018, 12–14). According to the Chāndogya Upanishad, all beings find their origin in and return to that ākāśa, the primordial space. For this text, that is the reason such infinite space is ‘the objective of this world’ (Zaehner 1992, 105). This infinite space, the matrix of all the cosmos, is not, however, exterior; it is rather the ‘space within the heart’ where ‘everything is concentrated’, the whole macrocosm (Zaehner 1992, 155). (...)

The experience of emptiness and indetermination dissolves the subject of experience, paradoxically leading him to proclaim himself as deprived of himself: ‘I realized, in an inner flash, that I’m no one. Absolutely no one’ (Pessoa 2015, 231). The experience of emptiness is the experience of the infinite whose centre resides in its absence, as stated by Aristotle: ‘the infinite has no centre’ (Aristotle 2014, 275b). 

The experience of a coincidence with the core of the unlimited leads Pessoa to express it in a paradoxical way, violating conventional logic and the common meaning of the words:

And amid all this confusion I, what’s truly I, am the centre that exists only in the geometry of the abyss: I’m the nothing around which everything spins, existing only so that it can spin, being a centre only because every circle has one. I, what’s truly I, am a well without walls but with the walls’ viscosity, the centre of everything with nothing around it. (Pessoa 2015, 232) Contrasting with the predominant perception and representation of the self as a determinate identity and an autonomous centre of perception, called I / subject and considered as distinct and separate from the world / object it perceives, Pessoa’s experience of the true ‘I’ is one of a paradoxical centre that conventional logic presupposes and demands, but that truly one does not find, since it is without form or shape. Instead, the experience of the self shows an abyssal depth, without contours – a ‘well without walls’, a ‘nothing’ around which everything spins, but an ‘everything’ that, on its turn, becomes ‘nothing’, since it has nothing delimiting and constituting it. This vertiginous ‘geometry of the abyss’, which annuls itself in the absence of dimensions, is clearly alike to the abyssal experience of the self expressed in this short poem in two verses:

The abyss is the wall I have
Being myself has no size

(Pessoa 1986a, 264) The ‘well without walls’ from The Book of Disquiet now corresponds to an ‘abyss’ as the only delimiting ‘wall’, which is tantamount to saying that there is no delimitation and that the experience of the self is the experience of the limitless. The latter may be understood either as the experience of a limitless self/I or as the absence of self/I (in fact, a limitless self/I is a non-self/non-I, since it has no otherness delimiting it and in reference to which it constitutes itself). Therefore, it is an ‘I’ without ‘size’ that, because it has no non-I differentiating it, is equivalent to a non-I or to the ‘nothing’ from The Book of Disquiet.

Like Zhuangzi, Pessoa presumes the original nature of the world and beings to be a chaotic indistinctness somewhat forfeited through the emergence of differentiation (Tseu 2007, 79), which he sometimes expresses in ways that are similar to the cosmogonic mythology of Neo-Orphism: ‘grandchildren of Destiny and stepchildren of God, who married Eternal Night when she was widowed by the Chaos that fathered us’ (Pessoa 2015, 44). From this perspective, humans come from Chaos and Night, potencies of undifferentiation and obscurity that have before them only ‘Destiny’, from which they may be a manifestation. The affinity with the cosmogony narrated by Aristophanes should be noted. It begins thus: ‘In the beginning there were Chaos and Night’ (Aristophanes in Ramnoux 1986, 177; Orpheus 1993, 31).

Álvaro de Campos goes in the same direction in his invocation to the ‘ancient and unchanging Night’ [Noite antiquíssima e idêntica] (Pessoa 2006, 161), in a longing aspiration that seems to come from the irreducible rooting of the ‘the most ancient part of us’ [Do antiquíssimo de nós] (Pessoa 2006, 162) in its primordial undifferentiation (Pessoa 1986a, 886–887), showing us as prior to time (Pessoa 2000, 70). This selfsame undifferentiation is also suggested by the ‘Indefinite’ whose contemplation at the beginning of ‘Maritime Ode’ (Pessoa 2006, 166) triggers the whole process of profound ecstatic change of consciousness that the poem so thoroughly narrates (Borges 2017, 83–116; Borges 2019). The same eagerness for the ‘Indefinite’ opens Campo’s poem ‘Lisbon Revisited’ (1926) and remains in the poet’s ‘yearning’ for experiences of self-effacement and trans-intellectual understanding of the emptiness of existence: ‘Those moments where I had no importance / Those where I understood all the emptiness of existence without intelligence to understand it’ (Pessoa 1986a, 1017). In Campos, there is explicitly ‘a desire for the indefinite / A lucid desire for the indefinite’  (Pessoa 1986a, 1046).

The primordial formlessness or emptiness remains latent, both in Daoism and in Pessoa, as the bottomless bottom of everything, the omni-embracing of which nobody can ‘deviate’ (Watts 1975, 37). As in Daoist wisdom, it is from this emptiness that emerge the ‘ten thousand beings’ (Tseu 2005, 63) or the infinity of possibilities and the possibility of an authentic life lacking self-centeredness (Tseu 2005, 71). In Pessoa, the overabundance of becoming other (outração) and of the experience of heteronymy emerges from that insubstantial emptiness of self and of everything – the ‘mystery’ and the ‘abyss’ of the ‘ultra-being’, greater than ‘gods and God and Fate’ (Pessoa 1986a, 1018–1019). It is the ‘great shadow’ that ‘merges in Night and Mystery’, the ‘Universe’ of ‘Matter and Spirit’ (Pessoa 1986a, 1025), as well as the power to be and ‘to feel everything in every way’ [Sentir tudo de todas as maneiras] (Pessoa 2003, 146) – following the sensationism of Campos. It is the possibility of a full life in the acknowledgement of the absence of substantial existence and in the affirmation of an ‘abyss’ (Pessoa 1986a, 1036) or gap, such that Campos writes: ‘I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist / I’m the gap between what I’d like to be and what others have made me’ (Pessoa 2003, 200). This is the ‘abyss’ of one who is in the divine, the ‘abyss’ of being prior to oneself, or prior to defining oneself by naming oneself, that emerges as the ‘gap’ that is ‘between’ the self and itself (Pessoa 1986a, 1117). The most authentic and full life takes place in the evasion from the oppressive hegemony of the egological principle:

To be one is prison, To be me is not being.
I will live in evasion But truly alive I will be.
(Pessoa 1986a, 316)

As in the Daoist universe, ‘the great Way’ does not intend to be the ‘master of the beings of which it is the matrix, the nurturing bottomless bottom’ (Tseu 2005, 197), as an anarchic and acratic arché that leaves them to process themselves instead of defining and governing them, as occurred in the political drift of the Greek metaphysics of the arché as hegemonic principle (as has been the case since Anaxagoras) (Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 1994, 383).

Thus, in the immanence of the Pessoan heteronymic experience, the subject is less a definite ‘being’ (Pessoa 1986a, 283) than an unsubstantial erring in constant metamorphosis. The subject is a rootless soul that, not even belonging to itself, lives ‘being other constantly’ on an indefinite endless journey. As Pessoa writes in a poem in 1933:

To travel! To change countries!
To be forever someone else,
With a soul that has no roots,
Living only off what it sees!
To belong not even to me!
To go forward, to follow after
The absence of any goal
And any desire to achieve it!

(Pessoa 2003, 264) By carrying out a return to the odologic (from the Greek odós, way, path) and pre-ontological origins of Western thought, prior to the sedentarisation of categorical reason, the Pessoan experience suggests a nomadic erring in the intimacy of a [non-]self open to unpredictable metamorphoses that evokes the poetic and libertarian spirit of the fengliu Daoism, which may be translated as a ‘going with the wind’ (Marcel 2010, 12) and recalls the allusion to the elusive Daoist character Lie-Tseu: ‘Lie-Tseu moved riding the wind’. Writing not long after that ‘the perfect man is without I, the inspired man is without work; the holy man leaves no name’ (Tseu 2007, 31), Zhuangzi invites us to think of Pessoa as the man whose multifaceted work sprang precisely from acknowledging himself as not being an I and as having no other name. If we think in French, then the paradoxical or enigmatic suggestion of its absence becomes present: Pessoa / Personne / / Nobody.

Paulo Borges
Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy

Note on “Nineteen eighty-four” conceptions of history

 

In that portion of his book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, dealing with the ideology of the totalitarian system into which the world is now slipping, Orwell describes the conceptions of history and the attitude toward the past which dominate that regime. It is obvious that these require the complete obliteration of accurate historical writing—the elimination of the very conception of any truthful history. To adopt even an historical attitude or perspective is seditious and not to be tolerated. This is the social system and intellectual pattern toward which our interventionist and global-crusading historians are rapidly, heedlessly, and recklessly driving us. Orwell thus sets forth the ideas that dominate the attitude toward history in “Nineteen Eighty-Four” society:

...orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body....Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability tobelievethat black is white, and more, toknowthat black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak asdoublethink.The alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons, one of which is subsidiary and, so to speak, precautionary. The subsidiary reason is that the Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions partly because he has no standards of comparison. He must be cut off from the past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries, because it is necessary for him to believe that he is better off than his ancestors and that the average level of material comfort is constantly rising. But by far the more important reason for the readjustment of the past is the need to safeguard the infallibility of the Party. It is not merely that speeches, statistics, and records of every kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party were in all cases right. It is also that no change in doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted. For to change one’s mind, or even one’s policy, is a confession of weakness. If, for example, Eurasia or Eastasia (whichever it may be) is the enemy today, then that country must always have been the enemy. And if the facts say otherwise, then the facts must be altered. Thus history is continuously rewritten. This day-to-day falsification of the past, carried out by the Ministry of Truth, is as necessary to the stability of the regime as the work of repression and espionage carried out by the Ministry of Love.

The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc [English Socialism, as fully developed in the “Nineteen Eighty-Four” regime]. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that though the past is alterable, it never has been altered in any specific instance. For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new versionisthe past, and no different past can ever have existed. This holds good even when, as often happens, the same event has to be altered out of recognition several times in the course of a year. At all times the Party is in possession of absolute truth, and clearly the absolute can never have been different from what it is now. It will be seen that the control of the past depends above all on the training of memory. To make sure that all records agree with the orthodoxy of the moment is merely a mechanical act. But it is also necessary torememberthat events happened in the desired manner. And if it is necessary to rearrange one’s memories or to tamper with written records, then it is necessary toforgetthat one has done so....{55} How these ideals and principles in dealing with the past were applied in the actual practices of the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four is thus portrayed by Orwell:

...This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound tracks, cartoons, photographs—to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place. The largest section of the Records Department, far larger than the one in which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction. A number of theTimeswhich might, because of changes in political alignment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have been rewritten a dozen times still stood on the files bearing the original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it. Books, also, were recalled and rewritten again and again, and were invariably reissued without any admission that any alteration had been made....{56} Such are the “historical” ideals and practices of the “Nineteen Eighty-Four” regime for which our court historians are preparing us. In another portion of his book Orwell shows how well they worked out in obliterating all memory of the past. At the risk of his life, Winston Smith, the central character in the book, decided to interview an aged man in the effort to find out what the actual conditions of life had been before the “Revolution” which instituted the “Nineteen Eighty-Four” era. After prolonged questioning of the old gentleman it became apparent to Winston that this was futile. Years of subjection to totalitarian propaganda, regimentation, and thought control had obliterated all capacity to remember the general patterns of life in the earlier and happier days. All that could be recalled were trivial snatches of petty personal experiences. The past, as a social and cultural reality had disappeared forever:

Winston sat back against the window sill. It was no use going on....Within twenty years at the most, he reflected, the huge and simple question, “Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?” would have ceased once and for all to be answerable. But in effect it was unanswerable even now, since the few scattered survivors from the ancient world were incapable of comparing one age with another. They remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister’s face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago; but all the relevant facts were outside the range of their vision. They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones. And when memory failed and written records were falsified—when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.{57} Many will contend that nothing like this could happen in the United States, but the fact is that the process is well under way. Much of the material in the preceding pages of this chapter shows how it is being promoted. We have noted that there is already a veritable army of paid official historians assigned to write current history as the administration wishes it to be written, to say nothing of the many historians who voluntarily falsify the historical record, especially that of the last quarter of a century. The destruction and hiding of vital documents has already begun. {58} The Army and Navy put great pressure upon witnesses to have them change their former testimony when appearing before the congressional committee investigating Pearl Harbor. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson sent Colonel Henry C. Clausen on a 55,000-mile junket to induce officers to distort or recant the evidence they had given previously on the Pearl Harbor tragedy. The vital “East Wind, Rain” message and other incriminating documents were removed from official files and presumably destroyed. The secret and all-important Roosevelt-Churchill exchanges, transcribed by Tyler Kent, have been hidden away and possibly destroyed. Legislation has been passed which would make it illegal to divulge their contents, even if the full record could be found. Once basic integrity is abandoned, there are no lengths to which falsification cannot easily and quickly proceed as the occasion and political expediency may demand. There is already a marked trend toward the rewriting of textbooks in the field of history, particularly with respect to the alteration of their treatment of the causes of the First World War and the entrance of the United States therein. Since few of the textbooks have told the truth about the events leading to the Second World War and Pearl Harbor, there has been no need to alter this material.

NOTE: AN ENGLISH VIEW OF THE HISTORICAL BLACKOUT

The editor sent copies of his brochures on The Struggle Against the Historical Blackout,The Court Historians versus Revisionism, and Rauch on Roosevelt to one of the most distinguished of English publicists, authors, and military historians, who wrote me the following letter relative to the historical blackout in general and in England in particular. Being aware of the retaliation which might be meted out to him in the American scholarly and book world, I am withholding his name, but it is one that is internationally known and respected:

Thank you for your very kind letter and the pamphlets, which I have read with enthusiastic interest. I love your phrases: “The Court Historians” and “the Blackout Boys.” How delightfully descriptive! But what a revelation these last seven years have been of the strength and power of both these classes of people and their myriad supporters in the Press and among the people.

To you and me, who lived in the mentally-free world of pre-1914, the determined rush of the historical Gadarenes into the sea of falsehood and distortion has been an astounding phenomenon. Which of us would have believed, in that first decade of the century, that the values which then seemed so firmly established in the historical profession could disappear so easily and rapidly, leaving only a tiny company of unheeded and derided protestors to lament their loss? And I must admit that the protestors in the U.S.A. are more numerous and courageous than they are in this blessed land of freedom which used to make such a fuss about its Magna Carta, the execution of Charles I, and other so-called landmarks in dealing with tyranny.

Here we are, a nation of 50,000,000. Ourofficialhistorian has just published his first book on the Norwegian campaign which shows, with official authority, that we were planning exactly the same aggression against Norway as the Germans, for which later the wretched Admiral Raeder was given a life sentence. But not one voice has been raised in England to say that, now that it is known that we were just as bad as he was, he might be let out. And I know that, if I wrote to theTimes, it would not go in. I will not deny that there are a few Beards, Chamberlins, Tansills and Barnes’ over here. But they do not find publishers here as they do with you, for which I give yours full marks. In this blessed sceptical isle and ancient land of the free, Revisionism is gagged. You must keep yours going at all costs or the darkness descends.My correspondent’s impressions need correction in one respect: apparently he imagines that American publishers are more hospitable toward revisionist books than the English. He does not realize that, aside from Dr. Beard’s books, all the revisionist volumes thus far published in the United States have been brought out by two small publishers. No large commercial publisher has brought out a revisionist volume since Pearl Harbor.

HARRY ELMER BARNES

PERPETUAL WAR FOR PERPETUAL PEACE:

A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF THE FOREIGN POLICY OF FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT AND ITS AFTERMATH

'Did Six Million Really Die?' Report of the Evidence in the Canadian 'False News' Trial of Ernst Zündel – 1988

This book began in the fall of 1987 as a series of witness evidence summaries to be used in the then rapidly approaching second Zündel trial (which commenced on January 18, 1988). Evidence from the second trial was later summarized for use in preparation of the appeal to the Ontario Court of Appeal in 1989. The project expanded considerably in 1990 when Ernst Zündel asked me to put the summaries in a form which could be published as a record of the evidence presented in the 1988 trial. This book is the result.

Most of the considerable testimony given at the trial over a period of three months has been condensed into summaries for the reader. The testimonies of important historians, however, have been included almost in their entirety. These historians are Raul Hilberg and Christopher Browning for the prosecution and Robert Faurisson and David Irving for the defence. Every attempt has been made to ensure the accuracy of direct quotes from the transcript and the accuracy of reproductions of exhibits referred to in the trial. It should be noted that the questions and comments made by defence attorney Douglas Christie, Crown Attorney John Pearson and Judge Ron Thomas are not direct quotes unless indicated by quotation marks.

My own involvement in the Zündel case began in early 1985 when I worked part time in the County Courthouse library in Toronto at the time of the first trial. I attended the proceedings during my free mornings and was shocked by what I saw. There can be nothing more disgusting than watching a man being forced to justify his writings, his beliefs and his opinions before a criminal tribunal in a supposedly civilized and "free" country.

Zündel was being portrayed in the media as a man of hatred; but the man I saw in the courtroom was calm and always gracious to everyone he dealt with. When he testified, he did not repudiate his belief in Germans or Germany or Adolf Hitler. He expressed clearly his admiration for their accomplishments and his disbelief that they had committed what is known as the "Holocaust". Perhaps I had never really known what it meant to be courageous before that trial; but I knew what it meant after I watched Ernst Zündel testify to his true beliefs notwithstanding his knowledge that the voicing of those beliefs would almost certainly seal his conviction.

And everyday as I watched defence attorney Douglas Christie, his legal assistant Keltie Zubko and the various defence witnesses make their way through crowds of hostile Jews, some of whom spat on them, as I watched them being savaged by a hysterical media, as I experienced the lynch-mob atmosphere of that trial day after day, I learned again and again what real courage was and what real dedication to the principles of a free society meant. It affected me profoundly. When the second Zündel trial began in 1988, it was no accident that I had also become part of the defence team.

While Jewish organizations and the mass media expressed satisfaction that Zündel had been convicted, many ordinary people in Canada were shocked at the implications of the trial for freedom of speech and thought. In a letter to the Toronto Sun, Lynda Mortl of Toronto wrote:
Why are we Canadians allowing a certain pressure group to act as censors for us? And worse, to have a member of society brought to trial, probably jailed, and/or deported for saying something we will not even be allowed to read. The more I think about the implications of this trial, the more angry and frightened I become. I am one Canadian who does not want Sabina Citron, Alan Shefman or Julian Sher to decide what I will read or what I will call the truth.

Indeed, the purpose of the prosecution of Ernst Zündel was to make sure that ordinary Canadians would not have access to the type of information contained in Did Six Million Really Die?. Even today, Canadians do not realize how far the original "Holocaust" story has disintegrated in the face of ongoing historical research and forensic studies of the alleged Auschwitz execution gas chambers. The tight control of information in this regard is a wonder to behold to those of us involved in this case.

Canadians who believe they enjoy a "free" press in North America are sadly mistaken.
There is never any attempt in the mass media to analyse why more and more people no longer believe in the "Holocaust"; there is no transferal of any basic information to the average reader to let them decide for themselves whether there is anything to what the revisionists say or whether it is hogwash. Instead, Zündel and anyone else who questions Holocaust claims are simply branded as "evil" and "hatemongers".

This book ensures that both sides of this ethnic dispute are at least available to the general reader. The record of the 1988 trial is unique in that the major historians on both sides of the issue testified and were cross-examined relentlessly on their research methods, bias, sources and findings. It records the only instance where Holocaust historians have been forced to defend their assertion that the Jews of Europe were exterminated (mainly in gas chambers) by the Nazi government during World War II.

For the reader it is a rare opportunity to see how in fact history is written, how indeed history has become the tool of politics.

British historian David Irving testified that it is the reader who decides what constitutes a "historical fact"; it is the reader who decides what has been proven to happen in history and what has not. I therefore invite the reader to read the evidence of one of the most significant trials of our century and with respect to the story of what really happened to the Jews of Europe during World War II, to decide for himself.

Barbara Kulaszka August 1992

'Did Six Million Really Die?'  Report of the Evidence in the Canadian 'False News' Trial of Ernst Zündel – 1988

Tesla and Crookes

 At the end of the lecture “Mr. Tesla tantalizingly informed his listeners that he had shown them but one-third of what he was prepared to do, and the whole audience…remained in their seats, unwilling to disperse, insisting upon more, and Mr. Tesla had to deliver a supplementary lecture…It may be stated, as Mr. Tesla mentioned but which hardly seems to be realized, that practically the whole of the experiments shown were new, and had never been shown before, and were not merely a repetition of those given in…America.”27

Having seen the inventor handle such enormous voltages “so unconcernedly,” many of the attendees mumbled surprise among themselves and gathered the courage to inquire how Tesla “dared to take the current through his body.”

“It was the result of a long debate in my mind,” Tesla replied, “but though calculation and reason, I concluded that such currents ought not to be dangerous to life any more than the vibrations of light are dangerous…Consider a thin diaphragm in a water-pipe with to and fro piston strikes of considerable amplitude, the diaphragm will be ruptured at once,” the inventor explained by analogy. “With reduced strokes of the same total energy, the diaphragm will be less liable to rupture, until, with a vibratory impulse of many thousands per second, no actual current flows, and the diaphragm is in no danger of rupture. So with the vibratory current.” In other words, Tesla had increased the frequency, or alterations per second, but reduced the amplitude or power greatly. The wizard thereupon fired up the coil once again, sending tens of thousands of volts through (or around) his body and illuminated two fluorescent tubes which he held dramatically in each hand. “As you can, see,” Tesla added, “I am very much alive.”

“That we can see,” one member responded, “but is there no pain?”

“A spark, or course, passes through my hands, and may puncture the skin, and sometimes I receive an occasional burn, but that is all; and even this can be avoided if I hold a conductor of suitable size in my hand and then take hold of the current.”

“In spite of your reasons,” another concluded with a shake of his head, “your speculation resembles to me the feelings that a man must have before plunging off the Brooklyn Bridge.”28

In listening to Tesla’s statement that he had only shown part of what he had prepared, the perspicacious Professor Dewar, inventor of the Dewar flask, or everyday hot or cold thermos, took the inventor at face value and realized that there was more information to impart. The wizard had simply run out of time. As a member of the board of the Royal Institution, also situated in London, Dewar knew that there were many dignitaries who missed the grand event, especially Lord Rayleigh, so he set himself the task of persuading Tesla to present an encore the following evening.

After the talk Dewar escorted Tesla on a tour of the Royal Institution, where he displayed the work of his predecessors, especially Michael Faraday’s apparatus. “Why not stay for one more performance?” Dewar inquired.

“I must go to Paris,” Tesla insisted, keeping foremost in his mind his desire to limit the time of his visits at each stop so that he could return to the States as quickly as possible.

“How often do you think you will have the chance to visit the laboratories of such men as Crookes or Kelvin?” Dewar asked in his Scottish brogue. At the same time, he invited Tesla to visit his own lab, where he was creating extremely low temperatures that approached absolute zero and conducting pioneer studies of electromagnetic effects in such environments as liquid oxygen.29 “You’ve already lived in Paris. Now see London!”

“I was a man of firm resolve,” Tesla admitted later, “but succumbed easily to the forceful arguments of the great Scotchman. He pushed me into a chair and poured out half a glass of wonderful brown fluid which sparkled in all sorts of iridescent colors and tasted like nectar.”

“Now,” Dewar declared with a twinkle in his eye and a grin that brought one of reciprocation on the face of his captive, “you are sitting in Faraday’s chair and you are enjoying whiskey he used to drink.”

“In both aspects,” Tesla recalled, “it was an enviable experience. The next evening I gave a demonstration before the Royal Institution.”30At the culmination of the lecture, much of which, again, was new material not presented the previous evening (but integrated into the above discussion), Tesla presented Lord Kelvin with one of his Tesla coils,31 and Lord Rayleigh took over the lectern for the conclusion. Tesla recalled, “He said that I possessed a particular gift of discovery and that I should concentrate upon one big idea.”32

Coming from this “ideal man of science,” one who had worked out mathematical equations concerning the wavelength of light and who had also calculated the atomic weights of many of the elements, this suggestion made a great impression. A new sense of destiny swirled through Tesla as he began to realize that he would have to figure out a way to surpass his earlier discoveries in AC.

The next day, Tesla received an invitation from Ambrose Fleming to visit his lab at University College on the weekend. Fleming had been successful in setting up “oscillatory discharges with a Spottiswoode Coil as the primary and Leyden jars as the secondary,” and he wanted to show Tesla his results.33 Having been a consultant to Edison in connection with the lighting industry, Fleming would four years hence work with Marconi in the development of the wireless and a few years after that, come to invent the rectifier, a device for converting the incoming electromagnetic waves of AC into DC upon entering the receiving apparatus.34 Having attended both lectures, Fleming “congratulated [Tesla] heartily on your grand success. After th[is] no one can doubt your qualifications as a magician of the first order.” The English aristocrat concluded by dubbing Tesla a member of the new fictitious “Order of the Flaming Sword.”

Tesla had sparked the imagination of his British colleagues, and rapidly a number of them began to replicate his work and make their own advances. At Sir William Crookes’s lab, Tesla constructed a coil as a gift and taught Crookes how to build Tesla coils on his own, but Crookes complained: “The phosphorescence through my body when I hold one terminal is decidedly inferior to that given with the little one [that you made for me].”35As was his custom, Tesla toiled incessantly until the eclectic Crookes forced him to take a break, and at night, after dinner, the two scientists sat back and prognosticated. Topics ranged from discussions of the ramifications of their own research and potential future of the field to religion, Tesla’s homeland, and metaphysics.

Twirling an elongated waxed mustache that fanned out like the tail feathers of a bird of paradise, the bearded mentor revealed that he had experimented in wireless communication before even Hertz began his investigations in 1889. Crookes discussed the possibility that electrical waves would be able to penetrate solid objects, such as walls, and he argued against Kelvin’s suggestion that the life force and electricity were at some level identical. “Nevertheless, electricity has an important influence upon vital phenomena, and is in turn set in action by the living being, animal or vegetable.” Here Crookes was referring to various species, such as electric eels, iridescent sea slugs, and lightning bugs. Further speculation caused the two men to discuss the possibility that electricity could be utilized to purify water and treat “sewage and industrial waste.”

“Perhaps,” Crookes suggested, “proper frequencies could be generated to electrify gardens so as to stimulate growth and make crops unappealing to destructive insects.”

Expanding on the work of Rayleigh, Crookes discussed with Tesla the possibility of setting up millions of separate wavelengths so as to ensure secrecy in communication between two wireless operators. They also reviewed the work of Helmholtz on the structure of the physical eye, noting that receptors on the retina are “sensitive to one set of wavelengths [i.e., visible light], and silent to others.” In the same way, a receiving device for accepting electromagnetic signals might also be so constructed to receive certain transmissions and not others.

“Another point at which the practical electrician should aim,” Crookes said in response to one of Tesla’s more dauntless speculations, “is in the control of weather.” Such goals as the elimination of fog or the ghastly “perennial drizzle” that plagued the island and creation of great amounts of rain scheduled for specific days were also discussed.36

And if this were not enough, Crookes also introduced Tesla to a vigorous discussion of his experiments in mental telepathy, spiritualism, and even human levitation. As a member of the Society of Psychical Research and later president, Crookes was in good company. Other scientists who would rise to the helm of the psychic society included Oliver Lodge, J. J. Thomson, and Lord Rayleigh.37 Crookes straightforwardly presented a plethora of convincing evidence, including drawings by receivers that matched those created by senders, photographs from seances of ectoplasmic materializations generated by the clairvoyant Florence Cook, and eyewitness accounts of levitation by himself and his wife.38Those statements were enough to raise the eyebrows of anyone, and they served to rattle Tesla’s worldview. As a staunch materialist, up to that time Tesla had absolutely no belief in any aspect of the field of psychic research, including relatively tame occurrences, such as thought transference. But with Crookes’s documentation and the support of other members of the cognoscenti, especially Lodge, and with Tesla already exhausted from the strain of his severe schedule, the Serb’s mind began to spin. He would drop off in the middle of conversations and subsequently frightened his host. The reality that he had constructed and the world of superstition he thought he had left behind when he emigrated from the Old World swarmed through his brain like a hive of bumblebees and shattered mightily his worldview.

The pressure Tesla was under caused Crookes to offer some friendly advice in a letter. “I hope you will get away to the mountains of your native land as soon as you can. You are suffering from over work, and if you do not take care of yourself you will break down. Don’t answer this letter or see any one but take the first train.” Ending the letter on a waggish note, Crookes added, “I am thinking of [going] myself, but I am only thinking of going as far as Hastings.”39 Tesla wanted to take his advice, but he had to address the Paris society first.

From Wizard

by Marc J. Seifer

I could hear the ticking of a watch…three rooms away

 Niko was of school age, so he began his formal education at this time. However, he had great difficulty adjusting to city life, for he missed the farm and the idyllic existence he had once enjoyed. “This change of residence was like a calamity to me. It almost broke my heart to part from our pigeons, chickens and sheep, and our magnificent flock of geese which used to rise to the clouds in the morning and return from the feeding grounds at sundown in battle formation, so perfect that it would have put a squadron of the best aviators of the present day to shame.”32The boy would wake up in the middle of the night with nightmares of Dane’s death, which he claimed to have witnessed, and of the funeral, which probably involved an open casket. “A vivid picture of the scene would thrust itself before my eyes and persist despite all efforts to banish it…To free myself of these tormenting appearances, I tried to concentrate my mind on something else…[by] continuously [conjuring up] new images…I was opprest [sic] by thoughts of pain in life and death and religious fear…swayed by superstitious beliefs and lived in constant dread of the spirit of evil, of ghosts and ogres and other unholy monsters of the dark.”33It was at this time that Tesla began to have what today are known as out-of-body experiences, although he never ascribed anything mystical or paranormal to them. “Blurred [at first]…I would [see]…on my journeys…new places, cities and countries—live there, meet people and make friendships…and, however unbelievable, it is a fact that they were just as dear to me as those in actual life and not a bit less intense in their manifestations.”34

Tesla stated he had such great powers of eidetic imagery that he sometimes needed one of his sisters to help him tell which was hallucination and which was not. Like Dane, his thoughts were often interrupted with annoying flashes of light. These psychoneurological disturbances continued throughout his life. On the positive side, the problem was also attributed to his inventive bent. He could use his powers of visualization to mold his various creations, and even run and modify them in his mind, before committing them to paper and the material world.

*

Thus, by the age of twelve he was successfully experimenting with acts of self-denial and self-mastery, a paradoxical pattern which played itself out repeatedly throughout his life. Simultaneously, Tesla began to develop peculiarities, probably stemming from the stress associated with his brother’s death, strained relationship with his parents, and denial of his sexual desires.37 At this time he became ill and claimed that a heavy dose of Mark Twain’s writings turned his spirit and cured him. “Twenty-five years later, when I met Mr. Clemens and we formed a friendship…I told him of the experience and was amazed to see that a great man of laughter burst into tears.38

*

Niko became ostracized and avoided social interaction. Fortunately, he was able to redeem himself through his inventive mind. One day, the local firemen brought out their new engine and started a fire to demonstrate it. To the embarrassment of the officials, the hose, which drew its water from the local river, would not work. Intuitively, Tesla realized that there was a kink in the rigging. Tearing off his Sunday best, he dived into the water, unscrambled the line, and became the hero of the day. This event became a strong inducement for the boy to continue his interest in invention. Simultaneously, this act symbolized a new way to obtain love and admiration not only from his parents but also from society.

*

Reacting to the ridicule from other students, who resented Tesla for his monastic study habits and close association with the faculty, Tesla took up gambling. “He began to stay late at the Botanical Garden, the students’ favorite coffee house, playing cards, billiards and chess, attracting a large crowd to watch his skillful performances.”7 Tesla’s father “led an exemplary life and could not excuse the senseless waste of time and money…” “I can stop whenever I please,” he told his father, “but is it worth while to give up that which I would purchase with the joys of Paradise?”8

During his sophomore year, a direct-current Gramme dynamo was delivered from Paris to Professor Poeschl’s physics class. It was equipped with the customary commutator, a device that transferred the current from the generator to the motor. Electricity in its natural state is alternating. This means that its direction of flow changes rapidly. An analogous situation would be a river that flowed downstream, then upstream, then downstream, and so on many times per second.9 One can see the difficulty in harnessing such a river with, for instance, a waterwheel, for the wheel would constantly change its direction as well. The commutator is comprised of a series of wire brushes that serve to transfer the electricity into only one direction of flow, that is, a direct current (DC). It is a cumbersome device and sparks considerably.

When Professor Poeschl displayed this up-to-date equipment, Tesla intuitively deduced that the commutator was unnecessary and that alternating current (AC) could be harnessed unencumbered. He voiced this opinion, which appeared utterly fantastic at the time. Poeschl devoted the rest of the lecture to a detailed explanation of how this goal was impossible. Driving the point home, Poeschl embarrassed his student by disconnecting the “superfluous” commutator and noting with feigned surprise that the generator no longer worked.10 “Mr. Tesla may do many things, but this he can not accomplish. His plan is simply a perpetual motion scheme.”11 Tesla would spend the next four years obsessed with proving the professor wrong.

*

By his third year Tesla was running into difficulties at school. Having surpassed his classmates in his studies, he became bored and frustrated by his inability to find a solution to his AC problem. He began to gamble more heavily, sometimes twenty-four hours at a stretch. Although Tesla tended to return his winnings to heavy losers, reciprocation did not occur, and one semester he lost his entire allowance, including the money for tuition. His father was fuming, but his mother came to him with “a roll of bills” and said, “Go and enjoy yourself. The sooner you lose all we possess the better it will be. I know that you will get over it.”12The audacious youth won back his initial losses and returned the balance to his family. “I conquered my passion then and there,” he wrote, and “tore it from my heart so as not to leave a trace of desire. Ever since that time I have been as indifferent to any form of gambling as to picking teeth.”13 This statement appears to be an exaggeration, as Tesla gambled quite freely with his future and was known to play billiards when he came to the United States. An Edison employee recalled: “He played a beautiful game. [Tesla] was not a high scorer, but his cushion shots displayed skill equal to that of a professional exponent of this art.”14 It has also been suggested that years later, in the early 1890s, Tesla bilked some of the wealthy socialites in New York by feigning minimal ability in the sport.15

*

Except for friendly diversion with Szigeti, Tesla’s every spare moment was spent reworking the problem of eliminating the commutator in DC machines and harnessing AC without cumbersome intermediaries. Although a solution seemed imminent, the answer would not be revealed. Hundreds of hours were spent building and rebuilding equipment and discussing his ideas with his friend.35

He pored over his calculations and reviewed the work of others. Tesla later wrote: “With me it was a sacred vow, a question of life or death. I knew that I would perish if I failed.”36 Monomaniacal in pursuit of his goal, he gave up sleep, or rest of any kind, straining every fiber to prove once and for all that he was right and Professor Poeschl and the rest of the world were wrong. His body and brain finally gave out, and he suffered a severe nervous collapse, experiencing an illness that “surpasses all belief.” Claiming that his pulse raced to 250 beats per minute, his body twitched and quivered incessantly.37 “I could hear the ticking of a watch…three rooms [away]. A fly alighting on a table…would cause a dull thud in my ear. A carriage passing at a distance…fairly shook my whole body…I had to support my bed on rubber cushions to get any rest at all…The sun’s rays, when periodically intercepted, would cause blows of such force on my brain that they would stun me…In the dark I had the sense of a bat and could detect the presence of an object…by a peculiar creepy sensation on the forehead.” A respected doctor “pronounced [his] malady unique and incurable.” Desperately clinging to life, Tesla was not expected to recover.38Tesla attributes his revival to “a powerful desire to live and to continue the work” and to the assistance of the athletic Szigeti, who forced him outdoors and got him to undertake healthful exercises. Mystics attributed the event to the triggering of his pineal gland and corresponding access to higher mystical states of consciousness.39 During a walk in the park with Szigeti at sunset, the solution to the problem suddenly became manifest as he was reciting a “glorious passage” from Goethe’s Faust.See how the setting sun, with ruddy glow,The green-embosomed hamlet fires.

He sinks and fades, the day is lived and gone.

He hastens forth new scenes of life to waken.O for a wing to lift and bear me on,

And on to where his last rays beckon.

“As I uttered these inspiring words,” Tesla declared, “the truth was [suddenly] revealed. I drew with a stick on the sand the diagrams shown six years later in my address before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers…Pygmalion seeing his statue come to life could not have been more deeply moved. A thousand secrets of nature which I might have stumbled upon accidentally I would have given for that one which I had wrestled from her against all odds and at the peril of my existence.”40Tesla emphasized that his conceptualization involved new principles rather than refinements of preexisting work.

The AC creation came to be known as the rotating magnetic field. Simply stated, Tesla utilized two circuits instead of the customary single circuit to transmit electrical energy and thus generated dual currents ninety degrees out of phase with each other. The net effect was that a receiving magnet (or motor armature), by means of induction, would rotate in space and thereby continually attract a steady stream of electrons whether or not the charge was positive or negative. He also worked out the mechanism to explain the effect.41

M. Seifer Wizard

Books were the lifeblood of the monastic network that stretched across much of Europe

 Re-opening the Roads to Rome

The following year, 628, saw the birth of Benedict Biscop into a noble family in Northumbria. Few people today have heard of Benedict Biscop, yet his role in the history of England should not be overlooked. According to Bede, he was an old man in a young man's body and his sober nature disinclined him from the world of sensual pleasures. He grew up to be a valued member of the Northumbrian court and was favoured by the then king Oswiu. Yet he yearned after the spiritual life and decided at the age of twenty-five to give up his status and career and make a pilgrimage to Rome in order to visit the tombs of the Apostles.

Biscop's first port of call was the Roman Christian stronghold of Kent. It was there that he met a fellow Northumbrian noble  named Wilfrid. Wilfrid had been a monk at Lindisfarne where, at this time, the Celtic church still held sway. He was dissatisfied with their interpretation of Christianity, which was the very reason he had relocated to Kent. Yet he, like Biscop, wanted to go to the source. It was only the concerns for his safety voiced by the Kentish king Erconbert that had so far prevented him from making what was then the long and hazardous journey to Rome. The king, reassured by the arrival of Biscop, gave his blessing to the two would-be pilgrims to make their way there together.

One of the first places they stopped was Lyons, where the local archbishop convinced Biscop's companion to stay for about a year. Wilfrid later went on to Rome and returned home triumphantly with a copy of the much sought-after Benedictine Rule, probably the first to reach the shores of Britain. Biscop decided to press on alone. The route that he took across Europe is not clear but he arrived safely in Rome in 654. He spent about a year there before returning to Britain where he eagerly shared his experiences and new-found knowledge with his Christian brethren. We know next to nothing about the next ten years of his life, but it is likely that he travelled around Italy and Gaul, staying in a number of monasteries and absorbing everything he could. He reappears in the history books in 664, by which time he was back in Northumbria.

Almost straightaway his restless and inquisitive spirit led him to set out once again for Rome. One of the main aims of these early monks was to collect as many books as possible. Books were the lifeblood of the monastic network that stretched across much of Europe. In a Britain that was only just emerging from the non-literate traditions of the pagan kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxons, books were a genuine novelty. Yet they were far more than that. Books opened up a whole new way of transmitting and recording knowledge, not just about the Christian faith and the codes of conduct that monks were expected to follow, but they also provided a  window into the classical heritage that had long been obscured. Fuelled by the books and the learning they embodied, the monks from Britain had returned to their homeland and set about changing the intellectual and spiritual landscape for ever.

On his way back from his second trip to Rome in 664–5, Biscop decided to visit a monastic community that had achieved widespread fame for its leading role in the intellectual world which was being formed. Like so many other monasteries, that of St Honorat was deliberately founded far from the centres of commerce and political power. It was built on the small Mediterranean island of Lérins off the coast of Provence. It was there that Biscop finally committed himself for good to the monastic life and received the tonsure. He also decided to call himself Benedict as a mark of respect and allegiance to Benedict of Nursia (c. 480–550), the author of the hugely influential Rule bearing his name.

Rome called him for a third time in 667, where a twist of fate was to change his life. An entourage had been sent to Rome by Oswiu and Egbert (the new king of Kent). At its head was a man named Wighard who was to be consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury by the Pope. His royal patrons had given Wighard the job of reconciling the Celtic and Roman factions within the English Church. It was only three years since the Synod of Whitby had begun the healing of this divide. Fate decided that Wighard was not to live to see this happen. Both he and his companions died of the plague shortly after arriving in Rome. The Pope sought a replacement for the post of archbishop and selected Theodore of Tarsus as the most suitable candidate. He would, however, need an interpreter to help him in his mission, and Biscop's reputation and experience made him the ideal choice. The two arrived in Canterbury in 671.

Having helped install Theodore, Biscop found himself free again and went off to Rome for a fourth time. Book-buying was still  one of his main priorities and he collected numerous volumes on his travels. Before the era of printing, books were not easy to come by. Yet Biscop was part of a vanguard who realised just how important books would become and he managed to obtain many works that would become prohibitively expensive for his counterparts in the next generation. In 673 the great traveller Biscop was back in Northumbria tirelessly pursuing his goal. The new king Egfrith agreed to give him some land on the north bank of the river Wear (Wearmouth) to found a monastery, which was to be named St Peter's. Today Wearmouth is known as Monkwearmouth and is in the heart of Sunderland.

With his king's approval, a monk named Ceolfrith was made prior of St Peter's. Biscop wanted its church to be made of stone, but by this time there were no masons available – when the Romans left Britain they took their building technology with them. So Biscop went off to Gaul to find some, and shortly arrived home with the necessary craftsmen. No sooner was their work under way than he went back again, this time in search of glaziers whose art, known in Roman times, had also been lost in his homeland. The stained glass that was the result adorned the small church windows. It was almost certainly the first glass to be made since the Romans had left Britain.

He made sure that these foreign craftsmen taught the English to work in stone and glass so that future projects could be undertaken by native workmen. Work on the monastery proceeded quickly, allowing Biscop to go back again to Rome, this time with Ceolfrith at his side. In 681 they returned laden with books and all kinds of religious objects for adorning their church – relics, pictures, priestly apparel and icons. He also brought back one of Rome's most distinguished cantors, who taught the monks of Wearmouth how to chant and sing in the Roman style.

 The library he had so enthusiastically amassed was the inspiration for the scriptorium, the part of the monastery in which books were written and illuminated. Among his prize possessions were a number of books that he had obtained from the library of a famous Roman monk named Cassiodorus. These works in particular were a major influence on the output of the Northumbrian scriptorium. The most famous is the Codex Amiatinus Bible, which now lies in a library in Florence. J. A. Vaughan, a writer on Biscop's life and achievements, describes this mighty tome: 'It is an enormous work, ten inches thick, weighing seventy-five pounds, and requiring two men to carry it.'

Even for the bibliophile of today who has the luxury of being able to admire books from across the globe, it is a timeless work that is truly world-class in its stature. The technical and artistic magnificence of this manuscript was thought to be due to its Italian origin – until just over a century ago. Only careful analysis revealed that while it was greatly influenced by Italian works it was, in fact, made in Britain. It was on its way from Jarrow to be presented to the Pope but it never reached its intended destination. What had misled people for so long was the dishonesty of some Italian monks into whose hands it fell. They rubbed out the original inscription (which revealed its origin) and replaced it with an Italian one.

King Egfrith continued to support the Northumbrian church and endowed it with more land, this time on the south bank of the Wear at Jarrow. A twin monastery and a church, St Paul's, was built in 681, and Ceolfrith was made abbot. Biscop employed his cousin as a co-abbot for Wearmouth, and then set out on his sixth and last journey to Rome. He was to spend four years abroad; when he finally returned he was told that his cousin and many other monks had died of the plague.

After an eventful and fruitful life, Biscop suffered from a debilitating condition that left him bedridden. Despite the fact that he  had given his cousin such a prominent post, he could not be accused of nepotism. He left strict instructions that his brother should not take over as abbot of the monastery as he was not sufficiently advanced on the spiritual path. Biscop decided instead that Ceolfrith should be abbot of both the twin monasteries. Shortly after, on 12 January 690, he died.

Biscop had not only set up the twin monasteries and the best library in northern Europe, he had also made them famous far and wide. The organisation of the monasteries was based on the rule of St Benedict and became a model for many others both in Britain and beyond. He had re-established the Roman world in Britain – albeit a different Rome. One thing he cannot have foreseen was that his twin monasteries were also to count among their brethren one of the leading intellectuals of the age, a man who was to be known as the Venerable Bede.

From:

Barbarians Secrets of the DarkAges

Richard Rudgley

Love in the Forest

 Love in the Forest

I , too, had loved someone. Love had fulfilled its function: all else had disappeared. She was a pale, warm girl who lives in the forests of Landes. We would take walks along the pathways in the evening. The pine trees planted 150 years earlier had colonized the marshland, flourished in the hinterland behind the dunes, and exuded a warm, acrid smell: the sweat of the earth. We walked effortlessly along the rubbery ribbons of the pathways. “People should live at the pace of the Sioux,” she would say. We surprised animals, a bird, a roe deer. A snake slithered away. The man of antiquity—muscles of chiseled marble and vacant eyes—saw such animal appearances as the apparition of a god.

“It’s injured and can’t run away, she’s spotted it, it’s going to die.” For months I heard phrases like this. That evening, it was a spider—“a wolf spider,” she informed me—had come upon a longhorn beetle behind a frond of fern. “She’s going to inject it with a lethal dose, she’s going to devour it.” Like Munier, she knew such things. Who had instilled these insights into her? It was the wisdom of the ancients. A knowledge of nature flourishes in certain creatures who have never studied it. They are seers, they perceive the intricate structure of things while scientists are focused on a single part of the edifice.

She would read the hedgerows. She understood birds and insects. When the beachgrass blossomed, she would say, “It is the orison of the flower to its god the sun.” She would save ants that got swept away by a stream, snails caught in brambles, birds with broken wings. Faced with a scarab beetle, she would say: “It is a heraldic element, it deserves our respect, it is at one with nature.” One day, in Paris, a sparrow landed on her head and I wondered whether I was worthy of this woman whom birds chose as a perch. She was a priestess; I followed her.

We lived in the forests at night. She had a stud farm in Landes that spanned a dozen hectares on the western slopes of a dirt track whose deep rut seemed to her the guarantee of a covert life. On the outskirts of the forest, she had built a pine cabin. A large pond was the principal axis of the property. There, mallard ducks rested, and horses came to drink. All around, dense grasses drilled through the sand trampled by the animals. All of the comforts of the cabin: a stove, some books, a Remington 700 bolt-action rifle, all the necessities for making coffee, and an awning under which to drink it, and a tack room that smelled of pine resin. This kingdom was guarded by a sharp-eared Beauceron sheepdog, twitchy as the trigger on a Beretta 92, but friendly to those who were polite. He would have ripped the throat out of an intruder. I managed to escape with my life.

Sometimes, we would sit on the dunes. The ocean raged and pounded, while the waves crashed, indefatigable. “There must be some ancient quarrel between the sea and the land.” I used to say such things, she did not listen.

Nose buried in her hair, which smelled of boxwood, I allowed her to spin out her theories. Man had appeared on earth some millions of years ago. He had arrived uninvited, after the table had been set, the forests unfurled, the beasts frolicking. The Neolithic revolution, like all revolutions, fomented the Terror. Man declared himself head of the politburo of all living things, hoisted himself to the top rung of the ladder and made up screeds of dogma to legitimize his dominion. All in defense of the same cause: himself. “Man is God’s hangover!” I would say. She did not like these pronouncements. She accused me of launching damp squibs.

•   •   •It was she who first introduced me to the idea I explained to Léo amid the sand dunes of Tibet. Animals, plants, single-cell life forms and the neocortex are all fractals of the same poem. She talked to me about the primordial soup: four and a half billion years ago, a principal matter had existed, churning in the waters. The whole antedated the parts. From this prebiotic broth, something emerged. A separation occurred, leading to a branching of organic forms of increasing complexity. She worshipped all living things as a shard of the mirror. She would pick up a fox’s tooth, a heron’s feather, a cuttlefish bone, and whisper as she contemplated each shard: “We proceed from the Same.”

Kneeling in the dunes, she would say: “She is going back to find the column, she was drawn to the sap of the stonecrop, the others missed it.”

This time it was an ant rejoining its column after a detour via a patch of stonecrop. Where did she get her infinite tenderness for the minutiae of animal life? “From their willingness to do things properly,” she would say, “their preciseness. Humans aren’t conscientious.”

In summer, the sky was clear. The wind churned the sea, a cloud appeared from the eddies. The air was warm, the sea wild, the sand soft. On the beach, human bodies lay supine. French people had grown fat. Too much screen time? Since the sixties, societies had spent their lives sitting. Since the cybernetic mutation, images flickered in front of motionless bodies.

An airplane would fly past trailing a banner advertising an online dating site. “Imagine the pilot flying over the beach and seeing his wife lying next to some guy she met on that site,” I would say.

She was staring at the gulls surfing the wind, riding the crest, framed by the sunlight.

We would walk back to the cabin along smooth paths. Her hair now smelled of candle wax. To her, the rustle of the trees was filled with meaning. The leaves were an alphabet. “Birds don’t sing out of vanity,” she would say. “They sing patriotic anthems or serenades: this is my home; I love you.” We would arrive back at the cabin and she would uncork a wine from the Loire, of sands and mists. I drank greedily, the red venom swelling my veins. I could feel night welling inside me. A barn owl screeched. “I know that owl, it lives around here, the spirit of night, the commander-in-chief of dead trees.” This was one of her obsessions: re-creating a classification of living creatures, not according to Linnaean taxonomy, but according to a transversal taxonomy bringing together plants and animals according to their disposition. Thus, there was the spirit of voracity (shared by sharks and the carnivorous plants), the spirit of cooperation (a quality shared by jumping spiders and kangaroos), the spirit of longevity (the hallmark of the tortoise or the sequoia), of concealment (exemplified by the chameleon and the stick insect). It did not matter that these creatures did not belong to the same biological phylum so long as they shared the same skills. Hence, she concluded, a cuckoo and a flukeworm, through their opportunism and their intimate knowledge of their victims, were more closely related to each other than to certain members of the same family. To her, the living world was a panoply of stratagems, for war, for love and for locomotion.

She would go out to stable the horses. Unhurried, clear and precise, she was a Pre-Raphaelite vision as she walked beneath the moon, followed by her cat, by a goose, by horses with no halters, by her dog. All that was missing beneath the starry vault was a leopard. They glided through the darkness, heads held high, without a rustle or a sound, without touching, perfectly aligned and perfectly distanced, knowing where they were headed. An orderly troop. The animals stirred like springs at the slightest movement by their mistress. She was a sister of Saint Francis of Assisi. If she believed in God, she would have joined an order of poverty and death, a mystical nocturnal sisterhood that communicated with God without clerical intercession. In fact, her communion with the animals was a prayer.

I lost her. She rejected me because I refused to give myself over body and soul to the love of nature. We would have lived in a demesne, in the deep forest, a cabin or a ruin, devoted to the contemplation of animals. The dream dissolved and I watched her walk away as softly as she had come, flanked by her animals, into the forest of the night. I went on my way, I traveled far and wide, leaping from plane to train, going from conference to conference, bleating (in a self-important tone) that humankind would do well to stop rushing around the globe. I rushed around the globe and each time I encountered an animal, it was her vanished face I saw. I followed her everywhere. When Munier first talked to me about the snow leopard on the banks of the Moselle, he could not know that he was suggesting that I go and find her.

If I were to encounter the animal, my only love would appear, embodied in the snow leopard. I offered up all my apparitions to her ravaged memory.

From: The Art of Patience

By Sylvian Tesson