Dhamma

Saturday, July 27, 2024

Cioran - Meeting the Moments

 

IT IS NOT BY GENIUS, it is by suffering, by suffering only, that one ceases to be a marionette.

When we fall under the spell of death, everything occurs as if we had known death in a previous existence, and as if now we were impatient to get back to it as soon as possible.

Once you suspect someone of having the slightest weakness for the Future, you can be sure he knows the address of more than one psychiatrist.

“Your truths make it impossible to breathe.”

“Impossible for you,” I immediately replied to this innocent. Yet I might have wanted to add; “And for me, too,” instead of swashbuckling. . . .

Man is not content to be man. But he doesn’t know what to revert to, nor how to recover a state of which he has no clear memory. His nostalgia for it is the basis of his being, and it is by such nostalgia he communicates with all that remains of what is oldest in himself.

In the deserted church, the organist was practicing. No one else there, except a cat that wreathed itself around me. . . . Its eagerness was a shock: the inveterate tormenting questions assailed me. The organ’s answer did not seem satisfying to me, but in my condition, it was an answer nonetheless.

The ideally truthful being, whom we are always permitted to imagine, would be someone who, at any moment, would not seek refuge in euphemism.

Unrivaled in the worship of Impassivity, I have aspired to it frantically, so that the more I strained to achieve it, the further from it I found myself. A just defeat for a man who pursues a goal contrary to his nature.

Man proceeds from one chaos to the next. This consideration is of no consequence and keeps no one from fulfilling his destiny — from acceding, in short, to the integral chaos.

Anxiety, far from deriving from a nervous disequilibrium, is based on the very constitution of this world, and there is no reason why one should not be anxious at every moment, given that time itself is merely anxiety fully expanded, an anxiety whose beginning and end are indistinguishable, an eternally victorious anxiety.

Under an incomparably desolate sky, two birds, indifferent to that lugubrious background, pursue one another. . . . Their obvious delight is more apt to rehabilitate an old instinct than the entire body of erotic literature.

Tears of admiration: sole excuse for this universe, since one must be found.

Out of solidarity with a friend who had just died, I closed my eyes and let myself be flooded by that semi-chaos preceding sleep. After a few minutes I began to realize that infinitesimal reality which still binds us to consciousness. Was I on the threshold of the end? A second later I was at the bottom of an abyss, without the slightest trace of fear. Then was no-longer-existing so simple? Probably, if death were only an experiment; but it is The Experiment. And what a notion, to play with a phenomenon that occurs but once! One does not test the unique.

The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

As if I didn’t have enough troubles, here I am harassed by those that must have been known to the caveman.

We hate ourselves because we cannot forget ourselves, because we cannot think of anything else. It is inevitable that we should be exasperated by this excessive preference and that we should struggle to triumph over it. Yet hating ourselves is the least effective stratagem by which to manage it.

Music is an illusion that makes up for all the others. (If illusion is a term doomed to disappear I wonder what will become of me.)

To no one is it vouchsafed, in a state of neutrality, to perceive the pulsation of Time. To achieve this, a malaise sui generis is necessary, a favor, proceeding from who knows where?

When we have glimpsed vacuity and offered sunyata, a worship alternately patent and clandestine, we are helpless to ally ourselves with a personal, incarnated, paltry god. From another aspect, nakedness unscathed by any presence, by any human contamination, scoured of the very idea of a self, compromises the possibility of any worship whatever, necessarily linked to a whiff of individual supremacy. For as a hymn of Mahayana Buddhism has it, “if all things are empty, who is celebrated, and by whom?”

Much more than time, it is sleep that is the antidote to grief. Insomnia, on the other hand, which enlarges the slightest vexation and converts it into a blow of fate, stands vigil over our wounds and keeps them from flagging.

Instead of paying attention to the faces of people passing by, I watched their feet, and all these busy types were reduced to hurrying steps — toward what? And it was clear to me that our mission was to graze the dust in search of a mystery stripped of anything serious.

The first thing I was told by a friend who had dropped out of sight for many years: though he had accumulated a stock of poisons over a long period, he had not managed to kill himself because he could not decide which one to take.

We do not undermine our reasons for living without at the same time undermining those for writing.

Nonreality is an obvious matter I forget and rediscover every day. So intimately does this farce become part of my existence that I cannot dissociate them. Why this buffoonery of starting all over again? Yet it is no such thing, for by this means I belong among the livings or appear to do so.

Every individual, as such, even before actually falling, has already fallen, and to the antipodes of his original model

How to explain that the fact of not having been, that the colossal absence preceding birth, seems to disturb no one, and that even the person who is troubled by it is not troubled to any excessive extent?

According to a Chinese sage, a single hour of happiness is all that a centenarian could acknowledge after carefully reflecting upon the vicissitudes of his existence. . . . Since everyone exaggerates, why should the sages constitute an exception?

I should like to forget everything and waken to a light before time.

Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.

To have passed one’s youth at a demiurgic temperature. . . .

How many disappointments are conducive to bitterness? One or a thousand, depending on the subject.

To conceive the act of thought as a poison bath, the pastime of an elegaic viper.

God is the conditioned creature par excellence, the slave of slaves, prisoner of His attributes, of what He is. Man, on the contrary, has a certain leeway insofar as he is not — insofar as, possessing only a borrowed existence, he struggles in pseudoreality.

To assert itself, life gives evidence of a rare ingenuity; and no less to deny itself. What it has invented as ways of getting rid of itself! Death is far and away its greatest find, its most prodigious success.

The clouds passed by. In the silence of the night, you could have heard the noise they were making as they rushed overhead. Why are we here? what meaning can our infinitesimal presence have? Questions without answers, though I reply spontaneously, without the shadow of reflection and without blushing at uttering such a distinguished banality: “It is in order to torment ourselves that we are here, and for no other reason.”

Had I been informed that my moments, like all the rest, were going to abandon me, I should have felt neither fear, nor regret, nor joy. Flawless absence. Every personal accent had vanished from what I thought I was still feeling, but in truth I was feeling nothing, I was surviving my own sensations, and yet I was not a living dead man: I was alive, but as one is seldom alive, as one is alive only once.

To frequent the Desert Fathers and yet to be moved by the latest news! In the first centuries of our era, I would have belonged among those eremites of whom it is said that after a certain time they were “wearied with seeking God.”

Though we ourselves have come too late, we shall be envied by our immediate successors, and still more by our remote descendants. In their eyes we shall have the look of privileged characters, and rightly so, for everyone wants to be as far as possible from the future.

Let no one enter if he has spent a single day in stupor’s refuge!

Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing — between two fictions.

The other, it must be confessed, seems to us more or less of a lunatic. We follow him only up to a point; after that he necessarily strays, since even his most legitimate concerns strike us as unjustified, inexplicable.

Never ask language to furnish an effort out of proportion to its natural capacity; in any case, do not force it to yield its maximum. Let us avoid all extravagance with words, lest, bewildered, they can no longer bear the burden of a meaning.

No thought more corrosive nor more reassuring than the thought of death. Doubtless it is because of this double quality that we brood over it to the point of being unable to do without it. What luck to meet up, in one and the same moment, with a poison and a remedy, a revelation that kills yet gives life, a roborant venom!

After the Goldberg Variations — “superessential music,” to employ the mystical jargon — we close our eyes, giving ourselves up to the echo they have raised within us. Nothing more exists, except a plenitude without content, which is indeed the sole way of approaching the Supreme.

To attain deliverance, we must believe that everything is real, or else that nothing is. But we distinguish only degrees of reality; things strike us as more or less true, more or less in being. And so it is that we never know where we are.

To trace back to the sovereign zero, out of which emerges that subaltern zero that constitutes ourselves. . . .

The Serious is not quite an attribute of existence; the Tragic is, for it implies a notion of gratuitous disaster, whereas the Serious suggests a minimum of finality. And the charm of existence is that it allows of none.

Each of us passes through his Promethean crisis, and all we do afterward is revel in or revile that past.

To exhibit a skull in a showcase: already a challenge; a whole skeleton, a scandal After even the most furtive glance, how will the passing wretch attend to his affairs, and in what mood will the poor lover proceed to his assignation? With all the more reason, a prolonged halt before our ultimate metamorphosis can only discourage desire and delirium. . . . And thus it is that as I walked away, there was nothing for me to do but curse that vertical horror and its uninterrupted sneer.

“When the bird of sleep thought to nest in my pupils, it saw the lashes and fled in fear of the net.” Who better than this Ben al-Hamara, an Arab poet of Andalusia, has perceived the unfathomability of insomnia?

Those moments when a memory or even less is enough to slip out of the world.

Even as a runner who stops in the heat of the race, trying to understand the meaning of it all: to meditate is an admission that one is winded.

Enviable form of renown: to attach our name, like our first ancestor to mud that will dazzle the generations of men.

“What is impermanent is suffering; what is suffering is non-self. What is non-self is not mine; I am not that, that is not I” (Samyutta Nikaya). What is suffering is non-self. It is difficult, it is impossible, to agree with Buddhism on this point, crucial though it is. For us, suffering is what is most ourselves, most self. What a strange religion! It sees suffering everywhere yet at the same time declares it to be unreal.

On his countenance, not a trace of mockery remaining. It is because he had an almost sordid attachment to life. Those who have not deigned to cling to it wear a scornful smile, sign of deliverance and of triumph. They are not going into nothingness; they have left it behind.

Before his serious health problems, he was a scholar; since . . . he has fallen into metaphysics. To be accessible to that essential divagation, the cooperation of loyal miseries is necessary — those eager to recur.

To have borne the Himalayas all night long — and to call that sleep.

What sacrifice would I not make in order to be free of this wretched self, which at this very moment occupies, within the All, a place no god has dared aspire to!

It takes an enormous humility to die. The strange thing is that everyone turns out to have it!

These waves and their sempiternal prattle are eclipsed, in futility, by the yet more inept trepidation of the city. If you close your eyes and let yourself sink beneath this double rumbling, you imagine yourself present at the sketches for the Creation, and you rapidly lose your way in cosmogonie lucubrations. Wonder of wonders: no interval between the first agitation and this unnameable point we have reached.

Every form of progress is a perversion, in the sense that being is a perversion of nonbeing.

You may have endured insomnias of which a martyr would be jealous, but if they have not marked your features, no one will believe you. Without witnesses, you will continue to seem some kind of joker, and acting the part better than anyone, you yourself will be the first accomplice of the incredulous.

Proof that a generous action goes against nature: it provokes — sometimes immediately, sometimes months or years later — an uneasiness one dares not admit to anyone, even to oneself.

At that funeral service, everything was shadow and dream and dust returning to dust. Then, without transition the deceased was promised eternal joy and all that follows from it. So much inconsistency vexed me, and I forsook both the Greek Orthodox pope and the late-lamented. As I left, I could not help thinking that I was in no position to protest against those who so ostensibly contradict themselves.

What a relief to throw into the garbage a manuscript, witness of a fallen fever, of a disconcerting frenzy!

This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.

Everything that inconveniences us allows us to define ourselves. Without indispositions, no identity — the luck and misfortune of a conscious organism.

If to describe a misery were as easy as to live through it!

Daily lesson in reserve: to realize, if only for the wink of an eye, that one day people will speak of our remains.

People insist on the diseases of the will; they forget that the will as such is suspect, and that it is not normal to will.

After having palavered for hours, I am invaded by the void. By the void and by shame. Is it not indecent to display one’s secrets, to proffer one’s very being, to tell and to tell oneself, whereas the fullest moments of one’s life have been known in silence, in the perception of silence?

As an adolescent, Turgenev tacked to his bedroom wall a portrait of Fouquier-Tinville. Youths always and everywhere, has idealized executioners, provided they perform their task in the name of the vague and the bombastic.

Life and death have little enough content, the one as well as the other. Unfortunately we always know this too late, when it can no longer help us either to live or to die.

You are calm, you forget your enemy, who meanwhile watches and waits. Yet there is every reason to be ready when he attacks. You will triumph, for he will be weakened by that enormous consumption of energy, his hatred.

Of all things one feels, nothing gives the impression of being at the very heart of truth so much as fits of unaccountable despair; compared to these, everything seems frivolous, debased, lacking in substance and interest.

Weariness independent of the organs’ wear and tear, timeless weariness, for which no palliative exists, and over which no rest, even the last, can triumph. . . .

Everything is salutary, save to question ourselves moment by moment as to the meaning of our actions: everything is preferable to the only question that matters.

Having once been concerned with Joseph de Maistre, instead of explaining the figure by accumulating details, I should have recalled that he managed to sleep only three hours a night, at the most. This suffices to account for the extravagances of a thinker, or of anyone at all Yet I had neglected to observe the phenomenon — an all the more unforgivable omission in that human beings are divided into sleepers and makers, two specimens of beings, forever heterogeneous, with nothing but their physical aspect in common.

We should really breathe better if one fine day we were told that the quasi-totality of our kind had evaporated as if by magic.

You must have powerful religious dispositions in order to utter with conviction the word being; you must believe simply to say about an object or about someone that it or he is.

Every season is an ordeal; nature changes and renews herself only in order to scourge us.

At the source of the least thought appears a slight disequilibrium. What then are we to say about the kind from which thought itself proceeds?

If in “primitive” societies the old are disposed of a little too readily, in “civilized” ones, on the other hand, they are flattered and overfed. The future, no doubt about it, will retain only the first model

Though you abandon all religious or political faith, you will preserve the tenacity and the intolerance that impelled you to adopt it. You will still be in a rage, but your rage will be directed against the abandoned belief; fanaticism, linked to your very essence, will persist there independent of the convictions you can defend or reject. The basis, your basis, remains the same, and it is not by changing opinions that you will manage to modify it.

The Zohar puts us in a quandary: if it is telling the truth, the poor man presents himself before God with only his soul, while the others have nothing to offer but their bodies. Given the impossibility of making a choice, best to keep on waiting.

Do not confuse talent and verve. Most often verve will characterize the charlatan. From another point of view, without it, how give any spice to our truths, to our errors?

Not a moment when I am not incredulous at finding myself in just that moment.

Out of dozens of our dreams, only one has any meaning, and even then! The rest — discards, simplistic or vomitive literature, imagery of sickly genius. The dreams that are long-drawn-out testify to the indigence of the “dreamer,” who cannot see how to conclude and struggles unsuccessfully to find a dénouement, just as in the theater the playwright multiplies peripeties, not knowing how and where to stop.

My problems — or rather, my pains — follow a policy that is beyond me. Sometimes they are concerted and advance together, sometimes each goes its own way, very often they oppose each other, but whether they agree or dispute, they behave as if their maneuvers had nothing to do with me, as if I were merely their flabbergasted spectator.

Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been.

To dream of an enterprise of demolition that would spare none of the traces of the original Big Bang.


ANATHEMAS and ADMIRATIONS

Translated from the French by

RICHARD HOWARD

Is the anāgāmī liable to phassa?

 

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"Your argument as I understand it assumes that the anāgāmī is liable to phassa, and concludes that, since all phassa is sa-āsava sa-upādāna therefore the anāgāmī has upādāna. I shall do my best to do as you ask and refute you.

1. I shall take your second question first. 'Is there phassa apart from being sa-āsava sa-upādāna?' The answer is: no, there is not.

2. 'Is the anāgāmī liable to phassa or not?' It is evident that your argument depends upon an affirmative answer to this question, and that this, in turn, depends upon the absurdities of a negative answer—i.e. that the anāgāmī is not liable to phassa, which can be truly said only of the arahat. It follows from this that your argument is dependent upon the assumption that the question is one that can be answered categorically—if the answer 'no' is absurd, then the answer 'yes' must be correct.

In the Anguttara (III, 67: i,197; IV,42: ii,46) the Buddha speaks of four kinds of questions: those that can be answered categorically, those that require a discriminating answer, those that require a counter question, and those that must be put aside. Perhaps the question, 'Is the anāgāmī liable to phassa or not?' cannot be answered categorically and is one that must be set aside.

We know that the puthujjana is liable to phassa, and that the arahat is not. But your question asks about the anāgāmī, who is neither puthujjana nor arahat. It is quite true that if I deny that the anāgāmī is liable to phassa I confound him with the arahat; but it is no less true that if I allow that he is liable to phassa I fail to distinguish him from the puthujjana. Thus the question cannot be answered.

To this it can be objected that since both puthujjana and anāgāmī are liable to re-birth, that since neither of them has reached the goal and become arahat, in this respect at least, they are indistinguishable, and consequently that the question can in fact be answered affirmatively. It will be noticed, however, that we are now no longer debating whether or not the anāgāmī is liable to phassa, but whether or not your question 'Is the anāgāmī liable to phassa?' is answerable. And whether we decide that it is answerable or not depends upon whether we regard the paticcasamuppāda formulation as a Universal Law (which will include the sekha) or as a pedagogical device (which treats the sekha as irrelevant). In this way we establish that your argument does not in any way invalidate my view of paticcasamuppāda; at most it represents a rival point of view; and we are free to choose between them."

L. 146 |156] 21 November 1961 - Ñāṇavīra Thera

Wednesday, July 24, 2024

Cioran - The Lure of Disillusion

 

IT IS NEVER ideas we should speak of, only sensations and visions — for ideas do not proceed from our entrails; ideas are never truly ours.

Glum sky: my mind masquerading as the firmament.

Ravaged by boredom, that cyclone in slow motion.

There exists, I grant you, a clinical depression, upon which certain remedies occasionally have an effect; but there exists another kind, a melancholy underlying our very outbursts of gaiety and accompanying us everywhere, without leaving us alone for a single moment. And there is nothing that can rid us of this lethal omnipresence: the self forever confronting itself.

I assure this foreign poet, who after hesitating among several capitals has decided on ours, that he has chosen well, that here he will find, among other advantages, that of starving to death without troubling a single soul. To encourage him further, I explain that here failure is so normal that it is a kind of Open Sesame. This detail provided the finishing touchy judging from the gleam I detected in his eyes.

“The very fact that you have reached the age you have proves that life has a meaning,” I was told by a friend I hadn’t seen in over thirty years. This remark often comes back to me, more striking each time, though it was made by someone who has always found a meaning in everything.

For Mallarmé, who claimed he was doomed to permanent insomnia, sleep was not a “real need” but a “favor.” Only a great poet could allow himself the luxury of such an insanity.

Insomnia appears to spare the animals. If we kept them from sleeping for a few weeks, a radical change would occur in their nature and their behavior. They would experience hitherto unknown sensations, the kind that seemed to be specifically human. Let us wreck the animal kingdom, if we want it to overtake and replace us.

In each letter I send to a Japanese friend, I have got into the habit of recommending one or another work by Brahms, She has just written that she is leaving a Tokyo clinic where she was taken by ambulance for having excessively sacrificed to my idol, I wonder which trio, which sonata was responsible. It doesn’t matter. Whatever induces collapse is thereby deserving of being listened to.

There is no speculation about Knowledge, no Erkenntnistheorie in which so many philosophers, German or otherwise, revel that offers the slightest homage to Fatigue as such — the state likeliest to lead us to the heart of the matter. This neglect or this ingratitude definitively discredits our philosophy.

A stroll through Montparnasse Cemetery. All, young or old, made plans. They make no more. Strengthened by their example, I swear as a good pupil, returning, never to make any myself — ever. Undeniably beneficial outing.

I ponder C., for whom drinking in a café was the sole reason to exist. One day when I was eloquently vaunting Buddhism to him, he replied, “Well, yes, nirvana, all right, but not without a café.” We all have some mania or other that keeps us from unconditionally accepting supreme happiness.

Reading Madame Périer’s testimony — specifically, the passage in which she tells how her brother Pascal, from the age of eighteen, by his own admission never spent a single day without suffering — I was so astounded that I stuffed my fist into my mouth to keep from crying out. This was in a public library. I was, it is worth noting, eighteen myself. What a presentiment, but also what madness, and what presumption!

To rid oneself of life is to deprive oneself of the pleasure of deriding it. (The one possible answer to someone who informs you of his intention to be done with it all.)

“Being never disappoints,” declares a philosopher. Then what does? Certainly not nonbeing, by definition incapable of disappointing. This advantage, so irritating to our philosopher, must have led him to promulgate so flagrant a countertruth.

The interesting thing about friendship is that it is — almost as much as love — an inexhaustible source of disappointment and outrage, thereby of fruitful surprises it would be madness to try to do without.

The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so . . .

He offers me an unconscious hand. I ask him many questions and lose my courage in the face of his outrageously laconic replies. Not a single one of those useless words so necessary to dialogue. Dialogue indeed! Speech is a sign of life, and that is why the chattering lunatic is closer to us than the tongue-tied half-wit.

No possible defense against a flatterer. You cannot agree with him without absurdity; nor can you contradict him and turn your back. You act as if he were telling the truth, you let yourself be sent up because you don’t know how to react. He of course believes you are taken in, that he has you where he wants you, and enjoys his triumph without your being able to open his eyes. Generally he is a future enemy who will take his revenge for having prostrated himself before you — a disguised aggressor who ponders his blows while he pours out his hyperboles.

The most effective method for making loyal friends is to congratulate them upon their failures.

This thinker has taken refuge in prolixity as others do in stupor.

When you have circled around a subject for a certain amount of time, you can immediately offer a judgment on any work that relates to it. I have just opened a book on the gnostics, and I immediately perceived that it was quite unreliable. Yet I read only one sentence and am only a dilettante, an incompetent in such matters.

Now imagine an absolute specialist, a monster — God, for example: whatever we do must to Him seem botched, even our inimitable successes, even those that ought to humiliate and embarrass Him.

Between Genesis and Apocalypse imposture reigns. It is important to know this, for once assimilated, such dizzying evidence renders all formulas for wisdom superfluous.

If you have had the weakness to write a book, you will not fail to admire that Hasidic rabbi who abandoned the project of writing one since he was not sure he could do so exclusively for the pleasure of his Creator.

If the Hour of Disappointment were to sound for everyone at the same time, we should see an entirely new version, either of paradise or of hell.

Impossible to enter into a dialogue with physical pain.

To withdraw indefinitely into oneself, like God after the six days. Let us imitate Him, on this point at least.

The light of dawn is the true, primordial light. Each time I observe it, I bless my sleepless nights, which afford me an occasion to witness the spectacle of the Beginning. Yeats calls it “sensuous” — a fine discovery, and anything but obvious.

Learning that he was going to marry soon, I decided to conceal my amazement by a generality: “Everything is compatible with everything.” To which he replied, “You’re right, since man is compatible with woman,”

A flame traverses the blood. To go over to the other side, circumventing death.

That favorable look one assumes on the occasion of a blow of fate. . . .

At the climax of a performance superfluous to specify, one longs to exclaim “Consummatum est.” The clichés of the Gospels, and singularly of the Passion, are always good to have at hand for those moments when you might imagine you could do without them.

Skeptical observations, so rare in the Fathers of the Church, are today regarded as modern. Obviously, since Christianity, having played its part — which at its beginnings heralded its end — is now a subject of delectation.

Each time I see a filthy, raving, drunken bum, prostrate with his bottle in the gutter, I think of a future humanity experimenting with its future, and pulling it off.

Though seriously deranged, he utters nothing but banalities. Occasionally a remark that borders on cretinism and genius. Dislocation of the mind must indeed serve some purpose.

When you imagine you have reached a certain degree of detachment, you regard as histrionic all zealots, including the founders of .religions. But doesn’t detachment, too, have a histrionics of its own? If actions are mummery, the very refusal of action is one as well. Yet a noble mummery.

His nonchalance leaves me perplexed and admiring. He shows no haste, follows no direction, generates enthusiasm for no subject. As if at birth he had swallowed a tran-quilizer whose effect has never worn off, and which allows him to preserve his indestructible smile.

Pity the man who, having exhausted his reserves of scorn, no longer knows what to feel about others, about himself!

Cut off from the world, having broken with all his friends, he read me — with an almost indispensable Russian accent, given the situation — the beginning of the Book of Books. Reaching the moment where Adam gets himself expelled from paradise, he fell silent, dreamily staring into the distance while I thought to myself, more or less distinctly, that after millennia of false hopes, humanity, furious at having cheated, would finally receive the meaning of the curse and thereby make itself worthy of its first ancestor.

If Meister Eckhart is the only “scholastic” who is still readable, it is because in him profundity is matched by charm, by glamour— an advantage rare in periods of intense faith.

Listening to some oratorio, how can we admit that such beseechings, such poignant effusions, conceal no reality and concern no one, that there is nothing behind them, and that they must vanish forever into thin air?

In a Hindu village where the inhabitants wove cashmere shawls, a European manufacturer made an extended stay while examining the weavers’ unconscious methods. Having studied them thoroughly, he revealed them to these simple souls, who thereupon lost all spontaneity and became, indeed, very poor workers. Excess of deliberation frustrates all actions. To expatiate upon sexuality is to sabotage it altogether. Eroticism, scourge of deliquescent societies, is an offense against instinct, an organized impotence. We do not reflect with impunity upon exploits that dispense with reflection. Orgasm has never been a philosophical event.

My dependence on climate will forever keep me from acknowledging the autonomy of the will Meteorology determines the color of my thoughts. One cannot be more crudely determinist than I am, but I am helpless to alter the case. . . . Once I forget I have a body, I believe in freedom, but I immediately abandon such belief when my body calls me back to order and imposes its miseries and its whims. Montesquieu belongs here: “Happiness or misery consists in a certain arrangement of organs.”

Had I done what I intended, would I be happier today? Certainly not. Having set out to travel far, toward the extremity of myself, I have begun, on the way, to doubt my task, all tasks.

It is under the effect of a suicidal mood that one usually becomes infatuated by a person, an idea. What a light cast upon the essence of love and of fanaticism!

No greater obstacle to deliverance than the need for failure.

To know, in vulgar terms, is to get over something; to know, in absolute terms, is to get over everything. Illumination represents one further step: the certainty that henceforth we will never again be taken in, a last glance at illusion.

I strive to conceive the cosmos without . . . myself. Fortunately death is here to remedy my imagination’s inadequacy.

Since our defects are not surface accidents but the very basis of our nature, we cannot correct them without deforming that nature, without perverting it still more.

What dates most is rebellion — that is, the most vital of our reactions.

In Marx’s entire oeuvre, I don’t think there is a single disinterested reflection on death. . . . I was pondering this at his grave in Highgate.

I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.

In Vedic mythology, anyone raising himself by knowledge upsets the comfort of Heaven. The gods, ever watchful, live in terror of being outclassed. Did the Boss of Genesis behave any differently? Did he not spy on man because he feared him? Because he saw him as a rival? Under these conditions, one understands the great mystics, desire to lee God, His limits and His woes, in order to seek boundlessness in the Godhead.

By dying, one becomes the despot of the world.

When you get over an infatuation, to fall for someone ever again seems so inconceivable that you imagine no one, not even a bug, that is not mired in disappointment.

My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission.

Coming from a country where failure constituted an obligation and where “I couldn’t fulfill myself” was the leitmotif of all confidences . . .

No fate to which I could have adjusted myself. I was made to exist before my birth and after my deaths not during my very existence.

Those nights when you convince yourself that everyone has evacuated this universe, even the dead, and that you are the last living being here, the last ghost.

In order to reach compassion, you must carry self-concern to the saturation point, to nausea, such paroxysms of disgust being a symptom of healthy a necessary condition for looking beyond one’s own trials and tribulations.

The true? Nowhere; everywhere effigies, from which nothing is to be expected. So why add to an initial disappointment all those that follow and that confirm it with diabolic regularity, day after day?

“The Holy Ghost,” Luther instructs us, “is not a skeptic,” Not everyone can be — and that is really too bad.

Discouragement, ever at the service of knowledge, hides the other side, the inner shadow, of persons and things — hence the sensation of infallibility it gives.

The pure passing of time, naked time, reduced to an essence of flux, without the discontinuity of the moments, is realized in our sleepless nights. Everything vanishes. Silence invades — everywhere. We listen; we hear nothing. The senses no longer turn toward the world outside. What outside? Engulfment survived by that pure passage through us that is ourselves, and that will come to an end only with sleep or daylight. . . .

Seriousness is not involved in the definition of existence; tragedy is, since it implies a notion of risk, of gratuitous disaster, whereas what is serious postulates a goal. Now, the great originality of existence is to have nothing to do with such a thing.

When you love someone, you hope — the more closely to be attached — that a catastrophe will strike your beloved.

No longer to be tempted save by what lies beyond . . . extremes.

If I were to obey my first impulse, I should spend my days writing letters of insult and adieu.

There is a certain shamelessness in dying. Indeed, there is something indecent about death. This aspect, understandably, is the last that comes to mind.

I have wasted hour after hour ruminating upon what seemed to me eminently worthy of being explored — upon the vanity of all things, upon what does not deserve a second’s reflection, since one does not see what there is still to be said for or against what is obvious.

If I prefer women to men, it is because they have the advantage of being more off balance, hence more complex, more perspicacious, and more cynical — not to mention that mysterious superiority conferred by an age-old slavery.

Akhmatova, like Gogol, wanted to possess nothing. She gave away the presents given to her, and a few days later they would be found in other people’s houses. This characteristic recalls the behavior of nomads, compelled to the provisional by necessity and by choice. Joseph de Maistre cites the case of a Russian prince and his friends who would sleep anywhere in his palace and had, so to speak, no fixed bed, for they lived with the sentiment of being transitory there, of camping out until it was time to pull up stakes. . . . When Eastern Europe furnishes such models of detachment, why seek them out in India or elsewhere?

Letters one receives filled with nothing but internal debate, metaphysical interrogations, rapidly become tiresome. In everything there must be something petty if there is to be the impression of truth. If the angels were to write, they would be — except for the fallen ones — unreadable. Purity passes with difficulty because it is incompatible with breathing.

Out in the street, suddenly overcome by the “mystery” of Time, I told myself that Saint Augustine was quite right to deal with such a theme by addressing himself directly to God: with whom else to discuss it?

Everything that disturbs me I could have translated, had I been spared the shame of not being a musician.

A victim of crucial preoccupations, I had taken to my bed in the middle of the afternoon, an ideal position from which to ponder a nirvana without remainder, without the slightest trace of an ego, that obstacle to deliverance, to the state of non-thought. A sentiment of blessed extinction initially, then a blessed extinction without sentiment. I believed myself on the threshold of the final stage; it was only its parody, only the swerve into torpor, into the abyss of ... a nap.

According to Jewish tradition, the Torah — God’s work — preceded the world by two thousand years. Never has a people esteemed itself so highly. To attribute such priority to its sacred book, to believe it predates the Fiat Lux! Thus is created a destiny.

Having opened an anthology of religious texts, I came straight off upon this remark of the Buddha: “No object is worth being desired.” I closed the book at once, for after that, what else is there to read?

The older we grow, the more we lack character. Each time we manage to “have” such a thing, we are uncomfortable, we feel inauthentic — whence our uneasiness in the presence of those who smell of conviction.

The felicity of having frequented a Gascon, an authentic Gascon. The particular Gascon I am thinking of, I have never seen depressed. All his disasters — and they were considerable — he described to me as triumphs. The gap between him and Don Quixote was infinitesimal. Yet he tried, my Gascon, to see clearly from time to time, though his efforts came to nothing. He remained to the end a trifler in disappointment.

Had I listened to my impulses, I should be, today, unhinged or hanged.

I have noticed that following any internal shock, my reflections, after a brief flight, take a lamentable and even grotesque turn. This has been invariably the case in my crises, whether decisive or not. As soon as one makes any sort of leap outside of life, life takes its revenge and brings one down to its level.

Impossible for me to know whether or not I take myself seriously. The drama of detachment is that we cannot measure its progress. We advance into a desert, and we never know where we are in it.

I had gone far in search of the sun, and the sun, found at last, was hostile to me. And if I were to fling myself off a cliff? While I was making such rather grim speculations, considering these pines, these rocks, these waves, I suddenly felt how bound I was to this lovely, accursed universe.

Quite unjustly, we grant depression only a minor status, well below that of anguish. Actually it is the more virulent affliction, but refractory to the manifestations it affects. More modest and yet more devastating, it can appear at any moment, whereas anguish, being remote, reserves itself for great occasions.

He comes as a tourist, and I always encounter him by chance. This time, being especially expansive, he confides to me that he is wonderfully healthy, that he is conscious of a sense of well-being at all times. I reply that his health seems suspect to me, that it is not normal to feel in continual possession of health, that true health is never felt. Watch out for your well-being, were my last words when I left him. Unnecessary to add that I have not encountered him since.

At the slightest vexation and, a fortiori, at the slightest affliction, hurry to the nearest cemetery, sudden distributor of a peace to be sought elsewhere in vain. A miracle cure, for once.

Regret, that backward transmigration, by resuscitating our life at will, gives us the illusion of having lived several times.

My weakness for Talleyrand . . . when one has practiced cynicism exclusively in words, one is filled with admiration for someone who has so magisterially translated it into action.

If a government decreed in midsummer that vacations were to be indefinitely extended and that, on pain of death, no one was to leave the paradise in which he was sojourning, mass suicides would follow, and unprecedented carnage.

Happiness and misery make me equally wretched. Then why does it sometimes happen that I prefer the former?

The depth of a passion is measured by the low feelings it involves — feelings that guarantee its intensity and its continuance.

Grim Death, a “poor portraitist,” according to Goethe, gives faces something false, something outside of truth; it is assuredly not Goethe who, like Novalis, would identify death with the principle that “romanticizes” life. It must be said in his defense that having lived fifty years longer than the author of Hymnen an die Nacht, Goethe possessed all the time required to lose his illusions about death.

In the train, a middle-aged woman of a certain distinction; beside her, an idiot of thirty, her son, who occasionally took her arm and kissed it, then stared at her blissfully. She was radiant, and smiled back. What a petrified curiosity might be, I did not know. I know now, because I experienced it in the presence of this spectacle. A new variety of consternation was revealed to me.

Music exists only so long as hearing it lasts, just as God exists only so long as ecstasy lasts. The supreme art and the Supreme Being have this in common, that they depend entirely on ourselves.

For some — indeed, for the majority — music is stimulating and consoling. For others it is a longed-for dissolving agent, an unhoped-for means of losing themselves, of melting into what may be the best of themselves.

To break with one’s gods, with one’s ancestors, with one’s language and one’s country, to break tout court, is a terrible ordeal, that is certain; but it is also an exalting one, avidly sought by the defector and, even more, by the traitor.

Of all that makes us suffer, nothing — so much as disappointment — gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth.

As soon as one begins to “fail,” instead of being upset about it, one should invoke the right of no longer being oneself.

We obtain almost everything, except what we secretly crave. No doubt it is fair that what we most desire should be unattainable, that the essential of ourselves and of our course through life should remain hidden and unrealized. Providence has managed things well; let each of us derive the pride and the prestige linked to intimate debacles.

Remaining consistent: to this end, according to the Zohar, God created man and recommended frequentation of the Tree of Life. Man, however, preferred the other tree, located in the “region of variations.” His fall? A craving for change, fruit of curiosity, that source of all misfortunes. Thus what was only a whim in the first among us was to become law for us all.

A touch of pity enters into any form of attachment, into love and even into friendship, though not into admiration.

To leave life unscathed — this could happen but doubtless never does.

A too-recent disaster has the disadvantage of keeping us from perceiving its good sides.

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, in the last century, spoke best of love and of music. Yet each frequented only brothels and — of all composers — the former adored Rossini, the latter Bizet.

Happening to encounter L., I remarked that the rivalry among the saints was the sharpest, and the most secret, of all. He asked me for examples; I found none at the moment, and find no more now. Nonetheless the fact seems to me established. . . .

Consciousness: summa of our discomforts from birth to the present. Such discomforts have vanished; consciousness remains — but it has lost its origins, it doesn’t even know what they were.

Melancholy feeds on itself, and that is why it cannot renew itself.

In the Talmud, a stupefying assertion: “The more men there are, the more images of the divine there are in nature,” This may have been true in the period when the remark was made, but it is belied today by all one sees and will be still further belied by all that will be seen.

I anticipated witnessing in my lifetime the disappearance of our species. But the gods have been against me.

I am happy only when I contemplate renunciation and prepare myself for it. The rest is bitterness and agitation. To renounce is no easy thing, yet nothing but striving for it affords some peace. Striving? Merely thinking of it suffices to give me the illusion of being someone else, and this illusion is a victory — the most flattering one, and also the most fallacious.

No one had to the same degree as he a sense of the world’s absurdity. Each time I alluded to it, he would utter, with a smile of complicity, the Sanskrit word lila — absolute gratuitousness, according to the Vedanta, the creation of the world by divine caprice. How we laughed at everything together! And now, he — the most jovial of the disabused — here he is, cast into this slough by his own fault, since he has deigned, for once, to take nothingness seriously.

ANATHEMAS and ADMIRATIONS

Translated by

 RICHARD HOWARD

Sunday, July 21, 2024

Pessoa on his generation + watch without watchmaker

 1I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it – without knowing why. And since the human spirit naturally tends to make judgements based on feeling instead of reason, most of these young people chose Humanity to replace God. I, however, am the sort of person who is always on the fringe of what he belongs to, seeing not only the multitude he’s a part of but also the wide-open spaces around it. That’s why I didn’t give up God as completely as they did, and I never accepted Humanity. I reasoned that God, while improbable, might exist, in which case he should be worshipped; whereas Humanity, being a mere biological idea and signifying nothing more than the animal species we belong to, was no more deserving of worship than any other animal species. The cult of Humanity, with its rites of Freedom and Equality, always struck me as a revival of those ancient cults in which gods were like animals or had animal heads.

And so, not knowing how to believe in God and unable to believe in an aggregate of animals, I, along with other people on the fringe, kept a distance from things, a distance commonly called Decadence. Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.

For those few like me who live without knowing how to have life, what’s left but renunciation as our way and contemplation as our destiny? Not knowing nor able to know what religious life is, since faith isn’t acquired through reason, and unable to have faith in or even react to the abstract notion of man, we’re left with the aesthetic contemplation of life as our reason for having a soul. Impassive to the solemnity of any and all worlds, indifferent to the divine, and disdainers of what is human, we uselessly surrender ourselves to pointless  sensation, cultivated in a refined Epicureanism, as befits our cerebral nerves.

Retaining from science only its fundamental precept – that everything is subject to fatal laws, which we cannot freely react to since the laws themselves determine all reactions – and seeing how this precept concurs with the more ancient one of the divine fatality of things, we abdicate from every effort like the weak-bodied from athletic endeavours, and we hunch over the book of sensations like scrupulous scholars of feeling.

Taking nothing seriously and recognizing our sensations as the only reality we have for certain, we take refuge there, exploring them like large unknown countries. And if we apply ourselves diligently not only to aesthetic contemplation but also to the expression of its methods and results, it’s because the poetry or prose we write – devoid of any desire to move anyone else’s will or to mould anyone’s understanding – is merely like when a reader reads out loud to fully objectify the subjective pleasure of reading.

We’re well aware that every creative work is imperfect and that our most dubious aesthetic contemplation will be the one whose object is what we write. But everything is imperfect. There’s no sunset so lovely it couldn’t be yet lovelier, no gentle breeze bringing us sleep that couldn’t bring a yet sounder sleep. And so, contemplators of statues and mountains alike, enjoying both books and the passing days, and dreaming all things so as to transform them into our own substance, we will also write down descriptions and analyses which, when they’re finished, will become extraneous things that we can enjoy as if they happened along one day.

This isn’t the viewpoint of pessimists like Vigny,* for whom life was a prison in which he wove straw to keep busy and forget. To be a pessimist is to see everything tragically, an attitude that’s both excessive and uncomfortable. While it’s true that we ascribe no value to the work we produce and that we produce it to keep busy, we’re not like the prisoner who busily weaves straw to forget about his fate; we’re like the girl who embroiders pillows for no other reason than to keep busy.

I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don’t know where it will take me, because I don’t  know anything. I could see this inn as a prison, for I’m compelled to wait in it; I could see it as a social centre, for it’s here that I meet others. But I’m neither impatient nor common. I leave who will to stay shut up in their rooms, sprawled out on beds where they sleeplessly wait, and I leave who will to chat in the parlours, from where their songs and voices conveniently drift out here to me. I’m sitting at the door, feasting my eyes and ears on the colours and sounds of the landscape, and I softly sing – for myself alone – wispy songs I compose while waiting.

Night will fall on us all and the coach will pull up. I enjoy the breeze I’m given and the soul I was given to enjoy it with, and I no longer question or seek. If what I write in the book of travellers can, when read by others at some future date, also entertain them on their journey, then fine. If they don’t read it, or are not entertained, that’s fine too.

***

175The generation I belong to was born into a world where those with a brain as well as a heart couldn’t find any support. The destructive work of previous generations left us a world that offered no security in the religious sphere, no guidance in the moral sphere, and no tranquillity in the political sphere. We were born into the midst of metaphysical anguish, moral anxiety and political disquiet. Inebriated with objective formulas, with the mere methods of reason and science, the generations that preceded us did away with the foundations of the Christian faith, for their biblical criticism – progressing from textual to mythological criticism – reduced the gospels and the earlier scriptures of the Jews to a doubtful heap of myths, legends and mere literature, while their scientific criticism gradually revealed the mistakes and ingenuous notions of the gospels’ primitive ‘science’. At the same time, the spirit of free inquiry brought all metaphysical problems out into the open, and with them all the religious problems that had to do with metaphysics. Drunk with a hazy notion they called ‘positivism’, these generations criticized all morality and scrutinized all rules of life, and all that remained from the clash of doctrines was the certainty of none of them and the grief over there being no certainty. A society so undisciplined in its cultural foundations could obviously not help but be a victim, politically, of its own chaos, and so we woke up to a world eager for social innovations, a world that gleefully pursued a freedom it didn’t grasp and a progress it had never defined.

But while the sloppy criticism of our fathers bequeathed us the impossibility of being Christians, it didn’t bequeath us an acceptance of the impossibility; while it bequeathed us a disbelief in established moral codes, it didn’t bequeath us an indifference to morality and the rules for peaceful human coexistence; while it left the thorny problem of politics in doubt, it didn’t leave our minds unconcerned about how to solve it. Our fathers blithely wreaked destruction, for they lived in a time that was still informed by the solidity of the past. The very thing they destroyed was what gave strength to society and enabled them to destroy without noticing that the building was cracking. We inherited the destruction and its aftermath.

Today the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. Today the right to live and triumph is awarded on virtually the same basis as admission into an insane asylum: an inability to think, amorality, and nervous excitability.

 ***

I’ve never understood how anyone who has stopped to consider the tremendous fact of this universal watch mechanism can deny the watchmaker, in whom not even Voltaire disbelieved. I understand why, in light of certain events that have apparently deviated from a plan (and only by knowing the plan could one know if they have deviated from it), someone might attribute an element of imperfection to this supreme intelligence. I understand this, although I don’t accept it. And I understand why, in view of the evil that’s in the world, one might not acknowledge that the creating intelligence is infinitely good. I understand this, although again I don’t accept it. But to deny the existence of this intelligence, namely God, strikes me as one of those idiocies that sometimes afflict, in one area of their intelligence, men who in all other areas may be superior – those, for example, who systematically make mistakes in adding and subtracting, or who (considering now the intelligence that rules aesthetic sensibility) cannot feel music, or painting, or poetry.

I’ve said that I don’t accept the notion of the watchmaker who is imperfect or who isn’t benevolent. I reject the notion of the imperfect watchmaker, because those aspects of the world’s government and organization that seem flawed or nonsensical might prove otherwise, if we only knew the plan. While clearly seeing a plan in everything, we also see certain things that apparently make no sense, but if there’s a reason behind everything, then won’t these things be guided by that same reason? Seeing the reason but not the actual plan, how can we say that certain things are outside the plan, when we don’t know what it is? Just as a poet of subtle rhythms can insert an arrhythmic verse for rhythmic purposes, i.e. for the very purpose he seems to be going against (and a critic who’s more linear than rhythmic will say that the verse is mistaken), so the Creator can insert things that our narrow logic considers arrhythmic into the majestic flow of his metaphysical rhythm.

I admit that the notion of an unbenevolent watchmaker is harder to refute, but only on the surface. One could say that since we don’t really know what evil is, we cannot rightfully affirm that something is bad or good, but it’s true that a pain, even if it’s for our ultimate good, is obviously bad in itself, and this is enough to prove that evil exists in the world. A toothache is enough to make one disbelieve in the goodness of the Creator. The basic error in this argument seems to lie in our complete ignorance of God’s plan, and our equal ignorance of what kind of an intelligent person the Intellectual Infinite might be. The existence of evil is one thing; the reason for its existence is another. The distinction may be subtle to the point of seeming sophistic, but it is nevertheless valid. The existence of evil cannot be denied, but one can deny that the existence of evil is evil. I admit that the problem persists, but only because our imperfection persists.

***

The Book of Disquiet

 

Cioran - Fractures

 WHEN ONE HAS EMERGED from the circle of errors and illusions within which actions are performed, taking a position is virtually an impossibility. A minimum of silliness is essential for everything, for affirming and even for denying.

To glimpse the essential, no need to ply a trade. Stay fiat on your back all day long, and moan. . . .

Whatever puts me at odds with the world is consubstantial with myself. How little I have learned from experience. My disappointments have always preceded me.

There exists an undeniable pleasure in knowing that everything you do has no real basis, that whether or not you commit an action is a matter of indifference. The fact nonetheless remains that in our daily gestures we compromise with Vacuity — that is, we turn and turn about, and occasionally, at the same time, we take the world as real and unreal. We mingle pure truths and sordid truths and this amalgam, the thinker’s disgrace, is the living man’s revenge.

It is not the violent evils that mark us but the secret, insistent tolerable ones belonging to our daily round and undermining us as conscientiously as Time itself.

After a quarter of an hour, no one can observe another’s despair without impatience.

Friendship has scope and interest only for the young. For an older person, it is apparent that what he dreads most is being survived by his friends.

One can imagine everything, predict everything, save how low one can sink.

What still attaches me to things is a thirst inherited from ancestors who carried the curiosity to exist to the point of ignominy.

How we must have loathed each other in the pestilential darkness of the caves! Easy to understand why the painters who managed to keep body and soul together there had no desire to immortalize the image of their kind — why they preferred the figures of animals.

“Having renounced sanctity . . .”: to think I could have uttered such a thing! I must have an excuse, and I don’t despair of finding it.

Except for music, everything is a lie, even solitude, even ecstasy. Music, in fact, is the one and the other, only better.

How age simplifies everything! At the library I ask for four books. Two are set in type that is too small; I discard them without even considering their contents. The third, too . . . serious, seems unreadable to me. I carry off the fourth without conviction.

One can be proud of what one has done, but one should be much prouder of what one has not done. Such pride has yet to be invented.

After an evening in his company, you were exhausted, for the necessity of controlling yourself, of avoiding the slightest allusion likely to wound him — and everything wounded him — ultimately left you depleted, irritated with him and with yourself. You resented having to side with him out of scruples carried to the lowest degree of flattery; you despised yourself for not having exploded instead of letting yourself in for so wearying an exercise in . . . delicacy.

We never say of a dog or a rat that it is mortal. Why is man alone entitled to this privilege? After all, death is not man’s discovery, and it is a sign of fatuity to imagine oneself its unique beneficiary.

As memory weakens, the praise that has been lavished upon us fades, too, to the advantage of the censure. And this is just: the praise has rarely been deserved, whereas the censure sheds a certain light on what we did not know about ourselves.

If I had been born a Buddhist, I should have remained one; born a Christian, I ceased being one in early youth when, much more so than today, I would have abounded in the sense of Goethe’s blasphemy when he wrote — the very year of his death — to Zelter, “The Cross is the most hideous image on this earth.”

The essential often appears at the end of a long conversation. The great truths are spoken on the doorstep.

What is dated in Proust: those trifles swollen by a dizzying prolixity, the eddies of the Symbolist manner, the accumulation of effects, the poetic saturation. As if Saint-Simon had undergone the influence of the Précieuses. No one would read him today.

A letter worthy of the name is written in the wake of admiration or outrage — of exaggeration, in short. We realize why a sensible letter is a stillborn one.

I have known obtuse writers, even stupid ones. On the other hand, the translators I have managed to approach were more intelligent and more interesting than the authors they translated. After all, it takes more reflection to translate than to “create.”

Someone regarded as “extraordinary” by his intimates must not furnish proofs against himself. Let him take care not to leave traces, above all not to write, if he ever hopes to seem what he has been for the happy few.

For a writer, to change languages is to write a love letter with a dictionary.

“I feel you have come to hate what other people think quite as much as what you think yourself,” she told me straightaway, after a long separation. And just as she was leaving, she produced a Chinese fable to prove that nothing can equal the capacity to forget oneself. She, the most present being, the creature most charged with interior energy, with energy tout court, so closely clamped to her ego, so inconceivably full of herself — by what misunderstanding was she boosting effacement to the point of imagining that she offered a perfect example of it?

Ill-mannered beyond permissible limits, miserly, dirty, insolent, cunning, sensitive to the slightest nuance, shrieking with delight over any excess, any joke, scheming and slanderous — everything in him was charm and repulsion. A swine one regrets.

The mission of Everyman is to fulfill the lie he incarnates, to succeed in being no more than an exhausted illusion.

Lucidity: a permanent martyrdom, an unimaginable tour de force.

Those who want to tell us scandalous confidences count quite cynically on our curiosity to satisfy their need, which is to make a show of secrets. They know perfectly well, at the same time, that we will be too jealous of them to betray them.

Only music can create an indestructible complicity between two persons. A passion is perishable, it decays, like everything that partakes of life, whereas music is of an essence superior to life and, of course, to death.

If I have no taste for Mystery, it is because everything seems inexplicable — because I live on the inexplicable, gorged with it.

X reproached me for being a spectator, for not getting involved, for loathing the new. “But I don’t want to change anything,” I answered. He did not grasp the meaning of my reply. He took it for modesty.

It has been justly observed that a philosophical jargon ages just as rapidly as argot. Why? The first is too artificial; the second, too vital. Two ruinous excesses.

He has been living his last days for months, for years, and speaks of his end in the past tense. A posthumous existence. I am amazed that, eating virtually nothing, he manages to survive: “My body and my soul have taken so much time and so much effort to get together that they can’t succeed in separating.” If he doesn’t have the voice of a dying man, it is because it has been so long now that he is no longer “in life.” “I am a snuffed candle” is the most accurate thing he said about his latest metamorphosis. When I suggested the possibility of a miracle, “It would take more than one” was his reply.

After fifteen years of absolute solitude, Saint Seraphinus of Sarow would exclaim, in the presence of any visitor at all, “O my joy!” Who, continually rubbing up against his kind, would be so extravagant as to greet them thus?”

To survive a destructive book is no less painful for the reader than for the author.

We must be in a state of receptivity — that is, of physical weakness — for words to touch us, to insinuate themselves into us and there begin a sort of career.

To be called a deicide is the most flattering insult that can be addressed to an individual or to a people.

Orgasm is a paroxysm; despair, too. One lasts an instant; the other, a lifetime.

She had the profile of Cleopatra. Seven years later, she might just as well be begging on the street. Enough to cure you forever of idolatry, of any craving to seek the unfathomable in a pair of eyes, in a smile, etc.

Let us be reasonable. No one can see through everything completely. Nor, without universal disillusion, can there be universal knowledge, either.

What is not heartrending is superfluous, at least in music.

Brahms represents “dieMelancholie des Unvermögens.” the melancholy of impotence, according to Nietzsche. This judgment, passed on the brink of the philosopher’s collapse, forever dims its luster.

To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.

Those imbecilic people one passes —how have they come to this? And how to imagine such a spectacle in antiquity — in Athens, for example? One moment of acute lucidity among these damned souls, and all illusions collapse.

The more you loathe humanity, the riper you are for God, for a dialogue with no one.

Extreme fatigue goes quite as far as ecstasy, except that with fatigue you descend toward the extremities of knowledge.

Just as the advent of the Crucified One has cut history in two, in the same way this night has severed my life.

Everything seems debased and futile once the music stops. You understand that music can be hated, and one is tempted to identify its absolute status with fraudulence. This is because we must react at any cost against it when we love it too much. No one has realized this danger better than Tolstoy, for he knew that music could do with him as it liked. Hence he began execrating it out of fear of becoming its plaything.

Renunciation is the only kind of action that is not degrading.

Can we imagine a city dweller who does not have the soul of a murderer?

To love only the indefinite thought that never reaches words, and the instantaneous thought that lives by words alone: divagation and boutade.

A young German asks me for one franc. I begin a conversation with him and learn that he has traveled round the world, that he has been to India, whose beggars he likes to think he resembles. Yet one does not belong with impunity to a didactic nation. I watch him solicit: he looks as if he had taken courses in mendicancy.

Nature, in search of a formula likely to content everyone, let her choice fall on deaths which — as was to be expected — has satisfied no one.

Heraclitus has a Delphic side and a textbook side, a mixture of lightning-bolt perceptions and the primer: a man of inspiration and a schoolteacher. A pity he did not drop learnings did not always think outside learning!

I have so often stormed against any form of action that to manifest myself in any way at all seems an imposture, even a betrayal.

— Yet you go on breathing.

— Yes, I do everything that is done. But . . .

What a judgment upon the living, if it is true, as has been maintained, that what dies has never existed!

While he described his projects to me, I listened to him without being able to forget that he would not survive the week. What madness on his part to speak of the future, of his future! But once I had left, once I was outside, how to avoid thinking that after all, the difference was not so great between the mortal and the moribund? The absurdity of making plans is only a little more obvious in the second case.

We always date ourselves by our admirations. As soon as we cite anyone but Homer or Shakespeare, we risk seeming old-fashioned or dotty.

It is just possible to imagine God speaking French. Christ, never. His words do not function in a language so ill at ease in the naive or the sublime.

So long to have questioned ourselves about man! impossible to carry the taste of the morbid further.

Does fury come from God or from the Devil? From both; otherwise, how explain that our rage dreams of galaxies to pulverize and that it is inconsolable at having nothing but this wretched planet within reach?

We go to such lengths — why? To become again what we were before we were.

X, who has failed in everything, complained in my presence of not having a destiny.

— Oh yes, certainly you do. The sequence of your failures is so remarkable that it seems to reveal a providential plan.

Woman mattered as long as she simulated shame, reserve. What inadequacy she reveals by no longer playing the game! Already she is worth nothing, now that she resembles us. Thus vanishes one of the last lies that made existence tolerable.

To love one’s neighbor is inconceivable. Does one ask a virus to love another virus?

The only notable events of a life are its rifts. And it is they that are the last to fade from our memory.

When I learned he was quite impermeable to both Dostoyevsky and music, I refused — for all his great virtues — to meet him. I much prefer a slightly backward type, sensitive to one or the other.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live — moreover, the only one.

Since day after day I have lived in the company of Suicide, it would be unjust and ungrateful on my part to denigrate it. What could be healthier, what could be more natural? What is neither healthy nor natural is the frantic appetite to exist — a grave flaw, a law par excellence, my flaw.

Anathemas And Admirationsirations

Translated from the French by

 RICHARD HOWARD

Saturday, July 20, 2024

Count Potocki Of Montalk


“The course of my life is an indictment of the whole 

dishonest racket which calls itself democracy.”

—Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk 389

 

Geoffrey Potocki was one of the generation of the Golden Age of New Zealand literati, which included Potocki’s friend and fellow poet Rex Fairburn, Allen Curnow, R. A. K. Mason,  D’arcy Cresswell, and others. As one would expect, most of those who were politically inclined during this inter-war period turned to Marxism. Like Ezra Pound, 390 however, Rex Fairburn rejected Marxism in favor of Social Credit, 391 and also like Pound he even considered fascism, 392 albeit briefly. 393

Potocki, on the other hand, turned unequivocally to the Right. Among bohemian eccentrics, he was surely the most noticeable in the London literary milieu in which he spent a significant amount of his life. 

Potocki emerged from a New Zealand that was very much a British cultural outpost. Depression-era New Zealand afforded the country the opportunity to forge a sense of national and cultural identity that was something other than an imitation of Britain, while striving for its own level of excellence. Such was not to be the case, however, and what developed instead was a parochial form of Americanization, and consumer culture, particularly as the period following the Second World War saw the eclipse of British authority in favor of U.S. commercial banality.

Potocki, Fairburn, and even Marxists such as Mason were acutely aware of their responsibility to forge a “new civilization” in the antipodes, and some, such as Potocki in particular, self-exiled to Britain and elsewhere in the hope of finding a more fruitful cultural environment. Disgusted at the cultural climate, Potocki had left New Zealand and persuaded Fairburn to join him in London. As Potocki put it, New Zealand prevented them from doing what they were born there for, “to make and to mould a New Zealand civilization.” 394

However, in Britain, neither Fairburn nor Potocki were impressed with bohemian society, although Potocki dressed and conducted himself as an eccentric bohemian par excellence. 395 Nor were they impressed with the Bloomsbury intellectuals, who were riddled with homosexuality, for which both Potocki and Fairburn had an abiding dislike. 

 

FORMATIVE YEARS

Potocki was born in Remuera, Auckland, New Zealand, on October 6, 1903. His description of his birth, related to Greig Fleming in 1993, consists mainly of astrological correspondences, showing his lifelong mystical inclination. 396 Potocki also speaks from the beginning about his own “heathenism,” a problematic tendency for the claimant to the throne of Poland and Hungary, mentioning elsewhere that he “hated and despised Christian morality.” 397

Potocki, ever flamboyant, was not inclined to modesty, describing his countenance from childhood as one of great nobility which appeared “fabulous in comparison to the low level of New Zealand in that regard,” one that indicated a person destined for talent and brilliance. 398

Potocki began writing poetry at the age of eight, and decided from then that he was to be a poet. 399 Having lost his mother at an early age, and living with a step-mother who was unsympathetic, the life of Potocki and his brother became hard, including frequent starvation when his father, an architect, had financial difficulties. 400A Renaissance Man out of his time (a “man against time”? 401), Potocki was fluent in French, Provencal, Latin, Greek, Polish, Hungarian, Italian, German, and Sanskrit, and in the last years of his life was learning Maori (he considered the Maori to be superior to the common run of New Zealanders). 

Known for his outspokenly pro-fascist and pro-Nazi sentiments—an outspokenness not dampened by the war and life in wartime England—Potocki was, however, more than anything a traditionalist and a royalist, a neo-aristocrat who in some respects can be compared to another mystic, Julius Evola. Potocki was profoundly conscious of his identity and his lineage, and New Zealand—which prides itself on being the egalitarian society par excellence—could do nothing but repulse such a man. Potocki was to reminisce of his native land: “Life in New Zealand is a wonderful training for a future King—a superb lesson in ‘How a nation ought not to be governed.’” 402His appearance was that of another era. In London, he sported flowing hair, a billowing cloak, large beret, and sandals. In later life, including his years back in New Zealand, he adopted the appearance of a large-bearded, robed magus, a style that during and immediately after the war was also supplemented by a self-designed “uniform” in the manner of the Polish army. 

Potocki’s claim to Polish royal linage was legitimate enough, despite being dismissed as an “embarrassment” by his New Zealand family. 403 Count Joseph Wladislas Edmond Potocki de Montalk dispensed with his title and reduced his name down to de Montalk upon migrating to New Zealand from France in 1868, as befits a land without noble traditions other than those of the Maori. 404 The Potocki family is of ancient royal lineage, and is prominent in the history of Poland, being one of the oldest families of the nation. 405

 

EARLY MUSINGS

Potocki’s family moved to Nelson, in the South Island, in 1917. He did well at High School, winning a prize for excellence in English, French, Latin, and history, and was regarded by the headmaster as having a very personable character. 406 Moving to Wellington in 1918, Potocki continued to excel at school. 407 In 1919, at only 16, he became a teacher and privately studied Greek at Victoria University College. In 1921, he returned to Auckland with the aim of studying law and entered the employ of a law firm as a clerk. 

By 1923 Potocki had entered the literary scene, and had met R. A. K. Mason. Despite being a newcomer, a literary group formed around him, which saw itself as a “poetic aristocracy” 408 which would revitalize English poetry. Potocki still had faith that New Zealand, as a colony, had not been infected by the decadence of the “old world.” He published his first collection of poems as a four-page leaflet. 

Potocki then dropped law and entered a seminary to study for the Anglican priesthood, not because he felt he had a divine calling but because he was attracted to the ritual and liturgy. This did not leave him in his later years, as he would attend Evensong at the Anglican Cathedral in Wellington for the same reason as he had done in his youth at the Christchurch Cathedral, despite his continued adherence to paganism. It was in seminary that he learned about missionary printing in the 19th century, and this prompted his own lifelong interest in self-publishing limited editions of his works on antiquated presses. 

Potocki was briefly married in 1924. It was perhaps predictable that he could not settle down to family responsibilities. He tried to work as a milk vendor, although he could not compel himself to demand the money owed him by poor families, nor did he have an interest in money-making per se, surely itself a sign of innate aristocracy. He returned to Christchurch with his family and re-entered law for a short time, but continued with his real passion, poetry. 409

In 1926 Potocki received a letter from Rex Fairburn, whom he had briefly known at primary school, and a life-long friendship ensued. Potocki assumed the role of mentor, as the more worldly-wise of the two. 410 At Easter 1927, Potocki published his first collection of poems, Wild Oats, which he dedicated to Fairburn. 411

Not surprisingly, given the Left-wing character of much of the literary milieu, Fairburn was flirting with communism as a means by which the artist could become economically independent to pursue his profession. However, he was not by temperament a rationalist or a materialist, and was also drawn to a spirit of aristocratic feeling that did not settle easily with socialism. Others of an artistic or literary calling who turned to the Right around the same time, men such as Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, and Wyndham Lewis, did so for similar reasons, fearing that a cult of the proletariat or of mass, undifferentiated humanity, as much democratic in spirit as communistic, would result in the drowning of all real individual excellence. 

Fairburn asked his royalist friend Potocki to read Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 412 to show him that the aristocratic spirit and the creative genius could be accommodated under socialism. 413 However, in 1931 when Fairburn met A. R. Orage, editor of the New English Weekly, 414 he discovered that such freedom for creativity could not only be maintained but also enhanced by the economics of Social Credit. (Orage’s magazine was from 1932 on discussing new social and political ideas, with a focus on Maj. C. H. Douglas’ proposals.) 415 Fairburn had in 1930 already read and been heavily influenced by Spengler’s Decline of the West, 416 so his rejection of Marxism was a natural development. 

Fairburn was avid in promoting Social Credit and in opposing usury, whereas Potocki’s perspective must be discerned from more meager sources. For example, in his pamphlet on New Zealand race relations written in 1987, Potocki stated: “But as far as I am concerned the present financial system busy plundering and misgoverning the world is in its higher reaches a criminal anti-human conspiracy.” 417

Stephanie de Montalk writes of the significance of Potocki and his contemporaries of this period:

 

Although Wild Oats collected the writings of youth and, in keeping with a young man’s follies, contained moments of extravagance and grandeur, it was nonetheless one of the starting points in the development of New Zealand’s poetic identity. It placed Potocki among the generation of writers who would lay the basis of New Zealand literature as it developed in the 1930s. 418

 

This was the Golden Age of New Zealand culture, and one which Fairburn, Potocki, Mason, Curnow, and others of the time wanted to see flourish. However, unlike what might be called the New Zealandist commitments of the rest, including Marxists such as R. A. K. Mason, and above all Potocki’s protégé Fairburn, Potocki was not foremost a New Zealander but a royalist and a traditionalist. 

While Fairburn and others achieved wide recognition in New Zealand, Potocki left, and only returned much later in life. He was keeping the commitment he had made to Fairburn when Wild Oats appeared, that his first collection was a “test” which, if it failed to gain a good response in New Zealand, would prove that the country was not fit for Potocki and he would have done with the place. 419 Potocki got mixed reviews, partly because of the bias against someone who was “in the process of dissolving his marriage.” Fairburn too had had enough of New Zealand, and Potocki wrote to him that poets are treated badly there, in “this land of white savages and All Blacks” while “they are feted, laurelled and crowned in Merrie England.” In October 1927, he left for England.

By 1931 Potocki was earning sufficient money to devote himself to writing and was being published regularly back home in the Auckland and Christchurch newspapers as a feature writer. 420 It was his imprisonment in 1932 on “obscenity” charges in relation to poetry, together with his actions during the Second World War, that were to block his path to the sort of success achieved by Fairburn, Mason, and others. 

By 1930, Potocki’s poetic vision was already showing aristocratic and elitist traits. That same year Surprising Songs was published, in the foreword to which Potocki condemns “Christianity and democracy,” against which he “raises the banner of the aristocratic gods, and their sons, the kings and the poets.” He describes New Zealand as “Hell” from which he had fled as soon as he could. In both mystical and traditionalist tenor Potocki states that poetry is the expression of the “great spirit, the outrider of the hordes of men, the king proclaiming his kingdom, the avatar bearing in his own being a light against the darkness.” 421 This and other volumes were favorably, even enthusiastically, reviewed from Europe to New Zealand.

Fairburn too now arrived from New Zealand, as disheartened by the low cultural level as Potocki, and seeing the hope of establishing a “native literature” as unlikely. However, to Potocki’s disappointment, Fairburn, the quintessential New Zealander, was more interested in pub-crawls than in cathedrals. 

 

ENGLISH LITERATI & PRISONS

At this time, Potocki was learning more about his lineage and began a tentative claim to Poland’s throne, the main obstacle as he saw it being that he was not a Catholic. The claim was strengthened several years later when, in Poland, he found that the Potockis had married into the Piast family, which had reigned over Poland until the mid 17th century. 422

By now a rather well-established poet, Potocki embarked on a controversial publication that was to end his acceptance among mainstream publishers. Here Lies John Penis was a collection of poems, including translations from Rabelais and Verlaine, and some explicit verses in an account of some sexual misadventures by Rex Fairburn. It was intended only for distribution among friends, and was to be printed by Potocki himself on his small press. 423

Potocki’s efforts to get the type set by  Leslie de Lozey resulted in the MS being taken to the police. Potocki’s room was raided, and he was arrested, along with fellow New Zealand expatriate Douglas Glass. 424 Both were remanded in custody in Brixton Prison. At trial Sir Ernest Wild warned three women jurors that “this was a very filthy case indeed,” two of whom excused themselves from service. 

Potocki’s refusal to swear on the Bible caused some consternation in court, and there was the question as to whether a pagan’s oath would be acceptable. 425 The oath he swore in court was to Apollo, raising his right arm “in the Roman salute,” “like Julius Caesar or Benito Mussolini,” he was to later recount. 426 The verdict was “guilty.” Justice Wild had not only made it very clear how the vote should proceed, he had not even allowed the jury leave to deliberate. Potocki was sentenced to six months in Wormwood Scrubs. 

The case was widely reported and commented upon, generally with sympathy for Potocki. Among those who tried to help financially were W. B. Yeats, J. B. Priestly, H. G. Wells, T. S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Rebecca West, Aldous Huxley, and Augustus John. 427 Leonard and Virginia Woolf organized a campaign for Potocki, and questions were asked in the House of Commons for the case to be reviewed. 428 In the end, actual support from his well-wishers turned out to be meager. 429 The appeal heard in March 1932 was rejected.

Potocki was to relate much later to his cousin and biographer Stephanie that he believed his predicament, which ended his success as a recognized poet, 430 had actually been the result of Douglas Glass muttering unfavorable remarks about Jews in front of de Lozey when they had taken the proofs to the publisher for typesetting. Potocki had not known de Lozey was Jewish and did not understand Glass’s references at the time. Potocki was informed after trial by the publisher Knott that de Lozey had taken exception to Glass’s comments, and wanted him arrested, which could not be done other than by also having Potocki arrested. Potocki opined that it was really Glass that the police had been after, because he was a petty thief and a swindler. 431 These experiences in Britain left Potocki embittered towards both the justice system and the British class system. An antagonism towards Jews also emerged at that time. 432

Some, such as the Woolfs, assumed that Potocki would go “Left,” like the common run of Bloomsbury. But it is evident from his general character and outlook that Potocki was, like his contemporaries Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Roy Campbell, and others, innately and indelibly of the “Right.” His royalist sympathies were manifest at an early age, and well prior to his escapades with the British Establishment. 

In a chapter called “Quack, Quack” in his Social Climbers in Bloomsbury, 433 Potocki was to record his one meeting with the Woolfs in which Virginia sought agreement on her belief that her husband’s race was much more civilized than the English and had been since ancient times. Potocki replied that, to be frank, he did not at all agree. 

After his release from prison, Potocki assumed the style he was to retain throughout his life: medieval robes and a crimson cloak, modeled after the clothing of Richard II, with sandals, a velvet beret adorned with the Polish royal eagle and the Potocki coat of arms, and waist length hair that he had first allowed to grow out while in jail. 

He set off for Poland in 1933, where he was welcomed by the literati and obtained employment as a translator of Polish poetry and prose into English. He was greeted with celebrity status by the press, which recognized his royal pedigree—despite the ill-informed denigration it had received from the Court in England—and remarked upon his aristocratic character and bearing. 434

Stephanie de Montalk hypothesizes that his “anti-Semitism” might have been galvanized in Poland, having been seeded by experiences in England. However, at that time there was little need to visit Poland to draw conclusions about Jews, given on their conspicuous roles in communism and the “Left” in general. That was how Jews were widely perceived among well-informed and high-born quarters since the time of the 1917 Revolution.

 

THE RIGHT REVIEW

The outbreak of the Civil War in Spain in 1936 polarized the intelligentsia and literati. Some, such as Potocki and in particular Roy Campbell, 435 identified with the rebel cause. In 1935, Potocki returned to England in 1935. The following year, with funds from Aldous Huxley and Brian Guinness, Potocki bought a printing press, and began publishing his long-running literary and political journal TheRight Review. TheRight Review, like all of de Potocki’s works, was printed as limited editions but did garner the adverse attention of John Bull and the positive reaction of the reviewer for The New English Weekly and T. S. Eliot’s Criterion. 

Potocki’s editorial in the first issue, which appeared in October, cogently describes his position: 

 

It is our aim to show that the Divine Right of Kings is the sanest and best form of government. . . .

We are as much opposed to Capitalism, if by that term is meant Plutocracy, as any communist could be—but we are not opposed to capitalists so long as they function without damaging the interests of the whole State. . . . 

Neither do we consider Fascism as anything but a very bad form of government, being as it is based on demagogy, but we point out that it is a natural reaction, based on a thoroughly justifiable instinct of self-protection, whereby nations rid themselves of the socialist and communist plague. . . . 436

 

Thus, Potocki’s support for fascism was critical and conditional. Fascism is a populist movement, and elitists such as Potocki were suspicious of such movements, in whatever form they took, whether Left or Right. Others of similar opinion were Evola and Wyndham Lewis.

His views on Jews did not constitute the common sort of “anti-Semitism,” where Jews are generally placed in a no-win position no matter what they do. Potocki saw certain actions of many Jews as detrimental to humanity as a whole due to their own ethnocentricity and support for communism. “Aryan racialism,” which presumably means Hitlerism, was therefore seen also as a “reaction” to Jewish exploits since the time of the Old Testament. Nonetheless, in disagreeing with both fascists and communists on the question of race, Potocki stated “men are to be judged by their worth as members of the human race as a whole—by their beauty, breeding, wisdom, and good will.” This applies “even to Jews,” but there was a duty to be “very suspicious of a race” which itself “invented inhuman racialism” to the detriment of non-Jews. 437With TheRight Review being published on a rudimentary press in small numbers, Potocki nonetheless started to become known among the British “Right,” and he met both Sir Oswald Mosley and Mosley’s propaganda chief, William Joyce, 438 the later “Lord Haw Haw” for whom Potocki’s affection never wavered. Potocki seems to have retained his aristocratic suspicion of fascist demagogy, but he did undertake printing for the British Union of Fascists. 439

As we shall see, whatever Potocki’s suspicions regarding fascism and Hitlerism before the war, it was after the war that Potocki (in contrast to many others, such as Wyndham Lewis, who had supported fascism before the war) became an avid supporter of National Socialism and fascism. Perhaps he felt obliged to make a commitment as both a diehard rebel against the democratic status quo, and in realization that the post-war world was one of global democratization and Sovietization. At any rate, his sympathies after the war became more radical, rather than moderate. 

The abdication of Edward VIII in 1936 was the occasion for what Potocki calls his “first political manifesto,” 440The Unconstitutional Crisis. Accompanied by the writer Nigel Heseltine, who assisted with editing TheRight Review, and the artist George Hann, who provided the woodblock illustrations for Potocki’s publications, they distributed large quantities of the pamphlet supporting the King in Whitehall, “at the very moment the arch-traitor Baldwin was announcing the abdication.” 441 He and Heseltine were later arrested for obstruction and briefly held at Buckingham Palace. At court, Whitehall tried to intervene and have Potocki charged on the text of the pamphlet, but the judge refused, and minor fines were imposed for obstruction. 442In 1939 Potocki set up The Right Review Bookshop in his flat, barred to “communists and racial enemies.” 443 During the late 1930s he also elaborated on his pagan religious views, stating in Whited Sepulchers that he opposed Puritanism, Calvinism, Democracy, Christianity, and appealed to fellow pagan avengers of “the great Apostle of Paganism, Divine Julian.” 444 Potocki’s primary deity was Apollo and remained so throughout his life. He was by now also in the habit of greeting friends with the “Roman”—fascist—salute, a gesture that was surely part of his rebellious nature. 

 

KING OF POLAND

In 1939, Potocki crowned himself “Wladilsaw 5th, King of Poland, Hungary and Bohemia, Grand Duke of Lithuania, Silesia and the Ukraine, Hospodar of Moldavia, etc., etc., etc., High Priest of the Sun” in a Rite of the Sun. 445

In 1940, he and his wife Odile were jailed for two months and one month, respectively, for resisting arrest, having barricaded their flat against the police, on a “black-out offence.” 446 Their occupations were entered in the register as King and Queen of Poland.

Potocki’s effort to register as a conscientious objector was unsuccessful, but he did succeed in evading military service. He founded the Polish Royalist Association and exchanged his robes for a military style uniform adorned with the Polish eagle and Potocki coat of arms. In the midst of war, a photograph of British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley adorned Potocki’s cottage in Surrey, which belonged to a member of Arnold Leese’s Imperial Fascist League.

 

KATYN 

Apart from his escapades connected to the controversy surrounding Here Lies John Penis, Potocki was most proud of being the first person in England to expose the Katyn massacre of Polish officers by the USSR. The Soviets insisted (until quite recently) that Katyn was a German war crime, and the British authorities tried to suppress knowledge to the contrary during the war lest it reflect badly on the British-Soviet alliance. 

As claimant to the throne of Poland, Potocki was of course interested in Poland’s future after the war. He regarded the USSR as the greatest threat to Poland’s nationhood, and foresaw the likelihood of a Soviet Poland emerging from the war. 447 He put his printing skills to work for Polish exiles, which included reports that were censored in the British press. He believed that occupation by Germany was preferable to that of the USSR, despite his liking for Russians as individuals. 448 Potocki’s contempt for Britain was increased by its failure to come to Poland’s aid when the USSR invaded, and his support for fascism and Hitlerism in this context became more pronounced, particularly when the USSR and Britain became allies in 1941. 449In 1943, hearing rumors of Soviet atrocities among the Polish community, Potocki sought the help of the Duke of Bedford, an opponent of the war and an avid proponent of banking reform, which the Duke—like Potocki 450—saw as a major aspect of the Hitler regime, and incidentally as a cause of war. The Duke in correspondence with Potocki also alluded to the rumors he had heard about the massacre of Polish officers by the Soviet Union. 451In May 1943 Potocki was asked by Poles in London to expose the atrocity to the British public, and so he wrote the Katyn Manifesto. This was distributed by the thousands with the help of the Polish-government-in-exile. It was a “Proclamation to the English, the Poles, the Germans and the jews [sic],” 452 from the King of Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia, etc. Potocki spelled out the basic facts behind Katyn and called for a negotiated peace with the hope that Germany would recognize a united Poland and Hungary, that the “jews” would be helped “if they will even at this late hour repent and behave themselves,” the Tsar to be restored to Russia, and the King to France. 453

Potocki was placed under surveillance, questions were asked in Parliament, and Potocki was attacked by the press, including the Communist Party’s Daily Worker, which described the manifesto as “poisonous filth,” 454 calling Potocki a “crazy Fascist Count.” It was at this time that Potocki was jailed for “insufficient black-out,” his wife Odile having left him for fear of his anti-government views during the war. 455 After release he was ordered by the Ministry of Labour to serve six months in an agricultural camp in Northumberland, which he attended in preference to conscription, adorned with his royal attire. After a month, he bade a “Heil Hitler” to the camp manager and left. 

 

POST-WAR ENGLAND & PROVENCE

During another four years in England, Potocki maintained himself by printing and translations for the Polish-government-in-exile. 456 After seeking help from the Duke of Bedford for the renewal of his passport, Potocki left for France. Seeking employment at an Indian University, Potocki wrote that he had had problems with the English because of his “violently pro-Axis” outlook during the war, an attitude that would not have been necessarily offensive to an Indian given that India continues to maintain esteem (probably about equal to that held for Gandhi) for the pro-Axis Subhas Chandra Bose. He also wrote to the American Ambassador offering his services to the USA against the USSR, his naiveté concerning the USA presumably being the result of judgment clouded by his hatred of the Soviet Union. 457

In 1949, Potocki settled in Provence, which would be his home for much of the remainder of his life, apart from sojourns in New Zealand in later years, now thoroughly “hating” the “english” (sic), 458 a word that he never seems to have capitalized. Before he was able to leave, however, the British legal system had one last go at him, charging him with assault on a female admirer after he pushed her out of his flat when she attempted to prevent his departure. 

Before being fined £2, he had been assessed for several weeks at a psychiatric ward, but was found to be “perfectly healthy in every respect, both in body and mind.” The authorities had expected to find a New Zealand-born claimant to the throne of Poland to be mentally unsound, but the psychiatrist was instead treated to a lucid exposition of the possibility, albeit unlikely, of Potocki becoming King on the basis that in the event of confrontation between the USA and USSR the Americans would be looking for someone who could be trusted by both Germans and Poles. 459

Potocki settled into an old cottage in the Draguignan countryside, bought for him for £100 by the Countess de Bioncourt. Chris Martin, who knew Potocki, writes of this period:

 

The Count spent his later years living in a beautiful farmhouse surrounded by olive trees in Provence. He was accompanied by a variety of lady friends and continued to work on his press. Driving around in a Citroën 2CV, flying the Polish Royal Standard he was a well-liked local figure. He also produced a translation of  Adam Mickiewicz’ Dziady, or Forefathers, which is the Polish national epic and the translation of which is now a standard text in a large number of American universities. The irony, if one should look for one, is that this same standard text, beautifully produced, comes with an introduction by a Jewish professor. 460 The work was—characteristically—the subject of a prolonged legal tussle between the Count and the Polish Cultural Foundation, at whose instigation the work had been translated. (It is, in passing, worth mentioning that parts of the work were recited by the translator at a concert at Leighton House, West London, together with a recital by the Count’s compatriot, the pianist  Richard Bielicki.) 461 

Stephanie de Montalk states that by 1958 there was a renewed interest in Potocki as part of a general interest in the literati of the 1930s and 1940s, and there was again media reportage, and his publications—mostly limited, small-run, hand-bound editions—became collectors’ items, as they still are, fetching high prices. 462

 

POST-WAR FASCISM

Directly after the war Potocki was not only defiantly pro-fascist but also expressed overtly pro-Nazi sympathies. His 1945 Christmas card To Men of Goodwill had the “X” of “Xmas” printed as a swastika, and included a six-verse poem including the words “to save his life, our William Joyce.” This was at the time when Joyce, the infamous “Lord Haw Haw,” was hanged for treason for his wartime broadcasts to England from Germany. It clearly shows the nature of Potocki’s contempt for the era of democracy. Equally as rebellious is his 1946 four-page leaflet, The Nuremberg Trials, including the words “Hitler und Goering Sieg Heil.”

Not surprisingly, then, it was Potocki who printed Savitri Devi’s 11,000 swastika-emblazoned leaflets and posters that she distributed throughout war-ravaged Germany, throwing them from the back of a train and surreptitiously posting them on walls, an action that not surprisingly resulted in her detention by the Occupation Authorities. Savitri had met Potocki in England in 1946 463 and also spent time with Potocki when she returned to London in the early 1960s. 464

In 1959, Potocki obtained a hundred-year-old platen press and started The Mélissa Press. He now resumed his special editions, and had maintained friendships with a number of prominent literary figures, in particular Richard Aldington, who admired his efforts. Aldington wrote to Potocki that his creative work is “the only answer to the lavatory-seat wipers of literature who naturally don’t recognize a poet and a gentleman when by chance they meet him.” 465Despite his disgust at England he nonetheless commuted between Provence and Dorset, set up a press there, and issued a pamphlet advising residents of A New Dorset Worthy, who was “opposed to virtually every movement or line of thought triumphant at present,” but that was to be expected of a “genius.” 466 Among his publications was Two Blacks Don’t Make a White: Remarks about Apartheid, published in 1964. He also printed The National Socialist, the journal of Colin Jordan’s British National Socialist Movement. 467Remarks about Apartheid begins with lines from fellow Right-wing (but Catholic) poet Roy Campbell, expressing a cynicism in regard to humanitarianism as a façade for ignoble purposes: “The old grey wolf of brother love / Slinks in our track with slimy fangs.” Secondly, from William Blake: “One law for the lion and for the ox is oppression.” 

Potocki’s outlook on South African Apartheid was based decidedly on the general inferiority of the blacks to whites, insofar as they had not, and could not, make a civilization. However, Potocki did not extend this white supremacy to other races, for he considered the Japanese, Chinese, and Hindus equals. In the case of white New Zealanders, he considered the Maori to be a superior race, deserving cultural and language accommodation as well as land compensation—the illiberal Potocki being far ahead of the liberals in his pro-Maori outlook. 468

Attacks on Apartheid, Potocki claimed, were the result of the post war era of “universal humbug,” the product of a coalition of Christians, communists, and democrats. He pointed to the selective hypocrisy of the liberal conscience, which was silent about communist dictatorships, and to the record of the British Empire in their treatment of colored colonials. He drew heavily on South African Government publications citing the services that had been rendered to the blacks under Apartheid, pointing out that the Afrikaners did not dispossess indigenous blacks, but had met the Xhosa while both were migrating from opposite directions. He believed that whites should react against “racial hatred” from fellow whites “whether in South Africa, Rhodesia, Smethwick or in the Deep South.” 469 According to Stephanie de Montalk, the authorities in England placed an injunction against the sale of the pamphlet. 470In 1966, Potocki took up the cause of Rhodesia. His solution to the crisis was for “Sir Ian Smith” (sic) and the Rhodesian people to proclaim Rhodesia a Kingdom and to “offer the Crown to His Grace the Duke of Montrose.” 

 

In this way the Rhodesians will set the whole world a good example, take the wind out of the sails of the minority of piratical hypocrites in England, & provide a turning-point for the Good in the history of the world, at a time when it never needed it more. This would also be a piece of poetic justice, whereby the Grahams would be rewarded for their courage and loyalty during the disgraceful wars which England waged under the criminal Cromwell against Scotland and against the true interests of humanity. 471 

Potocki then outlined the genealogy of the Duke to legitimize claims to royal blood, suggesting that Rhodesia adopt the Montrose Arms as its own, which would make the country “the first of the (ex) British colonies to acquire a blazon which is a decent piece of heraldry and not an offence against good taste as e.g. the so-called coat of arms of New Zealand. . . .”

In regard to Queen Elizabeth II, Potocki declared himself to be “a pious Legitimist” and that the only lawful King of England and territories is Albrecht, “de jure King of Bavaria,” and suggested that the Duke of Montrose might even be ahead of Elizabeth in royal succession, through Baden. Nonetheless, Potocki considered Elizabeth “an intelligent and honest girl” who should be “liberated from her servitude to her humbugging inferiors & allowed to use Her Own words as She sees fit.” 472 Hence, Potocki remained as ever foremost a Royalist.

In 1977 Potocki returned to Southern African themes, namely:

 

Let The Rhodesians Not

Be surprised that England should try and sell them down the river to a gang of bolsheviks and other terrorists.

For after having plotted the most gigantic blood-bath and world-wide flood of misery that the world has ever seen, and carried it through by fiendish means (Dresden etc.) backed up by Hellish lies (six millions etc.) on the pretext of safeguarding the independence and territorial integrity of Poland, England shamelessly sold that great country (once the largest kingdom in Europe) to the wickedest terrorist of known history, calling himself Stalin. England has Holy Joes enough, proclaiming that “your sins will find you”—but even more surely the crimes of your country, connived at by you, will find you out. Nemesis is completely impartial. 473 

In 1987, the Count addressed New Zealand race relations, pre-empting much of what the liberals and Maori activists have subsequently sought and obtained. Potocki’s plan was to restore authority to the traditional chieftains, and with the setting up of land tribunals to address grievances, to place compensated resources under the trusteeship of the Maori Sovereign. Potocki was concerned about outside interference and subversion utilizing the Maori radicals, and the likelihood of United Nations meddling in such matters or supranational law courts, which would mean that New Zealand would be “muzzled and hamstring by all the odious humbug she herself has gone in for about South Africa.” Once again, he was prescient. 

He regarded the Maori as having genuine grievances, which he did not accord to the Blacks in South Africa, as they had not settled that region prior to the Afrikaners, and furthermore he had an altogether higher regard for the racial qualities of the Maori than for either the Africans or for the pakeha. 474 He believed that a racial clash was coming, and that in the long run the pakeha might get the worst of things. He advocated Maori language programs and held that “they should become an integral part of the social and political organization of Aotearoa.” He also sought to remind New Zealanders that he was the most high-born individual who had ever been conceived in New Zealand. 475In the arts, he predictably saw little to praise and considered that a cultural renaissance could still be launched from New Zealand, with his assistance. 476 This optimism is surprising, since he had left New Zealand at what now transpires to have been the country’s Golden Age of culture, dominated by his friends such as Rex Fairburn and R. A. K. Mason. Certainly, it reflects a degree of optimism and idealism that also accounts for it “not being impossible,” given the circumstances of the post-war world, that he could have been named king of Poland.

Unsurprisingly, as part of the New Zealand literati, his cousin and biographer Stephanie de Montalk agonizes over Geoffrey’s “bigotry.” Yet she recalls his avid support for Maori, the genuinely warm manner with which he mingled with students of all races at Victoria University, and his enthusiastic interest in their cultures. Students for their part were impressed by his learning and his personality, Indian students by his knowledge of Sanskrit. 477

 

NEW EUROPEAN ORDER

In 1969 Potocki received an “amiable invitation from the Secretary General of the New European Order to attend the biennial Assembly of the Order at Easter in Barcelona, as Polish delegate.” 478 Potocki was skeptical, having had bad experiences with “English Fascist, semi-Fascist & pseudo-Fascist organizations,” which he considered, at least among the leadership, to have been police agents and agents provocateurs. He was particularly scathing of Colin Jordan’s’ British National Socialist Movement, but regarded as genuine William Joyce’s National Socialist League.

The New European Order had emerged as a radical faction from out of the European Social Movement, or Malmo International, founded in 1951 at the suggestion of Swedish fascist Per Engdahl, and including support from the British Mosleyites, the Italian Social Movement, Germany’s Socialist Reich Party, etc. The leaders of the New European Order were the Frenchman Ren Binet, and the Swiss Guy Amaudruz, 479 who continues to publish a bulletin of that name. 

Potocki replied to the invitation by writing that his attendance was conditional on Colin Jordan not being there, and that he could propose a motion “recognizing the nullity of the Partitions of Poland (18th century) and Hungary (20th century).” The acceptance of his conditions gave Potocki “a very good opinion of the honorableness of the New European Order.” 480 Potocki recounts: “I was elected enthusiastically Delegate for Poland, and my motion passed unanimously.” 481 The motion reads:

 

Poland and Hungary

The Assembly did not believe a new order can be based on the domination of another European nation, and recognizes the invalidity of the partitions of Poland (late thirteenth century) and Hungary.

The meeting considers that an understanding between the peoples directly concerned is desirable and is awaiting proposals based on the agreement of representatives of nations touched by this problem.

 

Potocki mentions that a few days after the congress the Croatian Delegate, General  Vjekoslav Luburić, was murdered on what Potocki believed to have been the orders of Tito. He states that Luburić was “sincerely friendly to Poland and Hungary and spoke fluent Hungarian. PRAISE BE TO HIS NAME.” 482

Potocki also moved another resolution calling for recognition of “any human freedom” so long as it does not harm the citizen or the state, stating that some social and moral changes are irreversible and there can be no return to the 19th century. “Mindful also of a renaissance of European culture, the New European Order recognizes that ‘a state of rigid disciplinary spirit could harm the development of the arts.’” The resolution deplores the political consequences of Puritanism, starting with the Cromwellian revolution. Potocki, as an advocate of aristocracy and traditional hierarchy, also considered the rebirth of high culture to be predicated on the freedom from the burden of work by the culture-bearing stratum, and the necessity of “a leisured class as useful to the culture.” 483

 

RETURN TO NEW ZEALAND

Potocki returned to New Zealand in late 1983, after an absence of fifty-six years, accompanied by some media interviews and commentary, and the publication of his Recollections of My Fellow Poets. 484 His respect among certain sections of New Zealand intelligentsia endured, however, and he was given access to an old platen press at Victoria University. Traveling to the South Island, he stopped off at Christchurch Cathedral and expressed dismay at the modernization of Anglican procedure there. 

He also visited the University of Otago. The Otago Daily Times described Potocki as “vigorous, learned and cosmopolitan,” “an avowed royalist and an enemy of democracy.” Potocki was reported as stating: “The whole thesis upon which democracy is based is totally unjust . . . like one man, one vote. The biggest idiot can have a vote whereas a valuable person also has one vote.” The undimming of his aristocratic views in the aftermath of the victory of democracy might be accounted for by the Times comment that, “he said he did not care about public opinion because the public were stupid.” 485 With such views, it is clear enough why he had not been in New Zealand, the epitome of democratic and egalitarian values, for 56 years, “where no creative life exists except in animal form, and where all the loveliness of European civilization exists only in a weird state of caricature.” 486 An interesting and worthy account of his life was produced and aired on the Tuesday Documentary of Television One in 1984, entitled The Count—Profile of a Polemicist. 

Spending the summer in Provence in 1985, he returned to New Zealand later that year, and moved into a friend’s house in Hamilton, a city of loathsome pseudo-academics and charlatans with an equally loathsome university administration. 

Dr. F. W. Nielsen Wright, an energetic poet, critic, and chronicler of New Zealand culture, describes Potocki as “the all time bad boy of Aotearoa letters.” 487 Wright, a notable figure in New Zealand literature, and former professor of English at Victoria University, also involved in the obscure and short-lived Communist Party of Aotearoa, states that “nobody else comes close to Potocki,” and that he was “treated as a pariah by New Zealand academics 488 without exception to the day of his death.”

 

Potocki should long ago have been awarded a Doctorate of Letters for his translation into verse . . . of the Polish classic, Forefather’s Eve, a romantic verse play by Adam Mickiewicz. This translation has a higher standing internationally than any other piece of New Zealand verse. 489

 

In 1990, Potocki travelled to Poland at the invitation of Dr.  Andrzej Klossowski of Warsaw University and the Polish National Library and gave well-attended readings of his poetry. 490 In 1993 Fleming’s collection of interviews and writings by Potocki was launched. That same year, Potocki returned to Provence despite declining health. 

Potocki died on April 14, 1997 at Draguignan. His grave was marked by a simple granite slab etched “G. Potocki de Montalk 1903–1997.” 491

Wright states that on Potocki’s death in France of “extreme old age” his personal papers were shipped back to New Zealand. This caused protest from the French Government which regarded them as a French cultural treasure. To Wright it was Potocki who was 

 

. . . the leading figure in a group of Aotearoa writers who in the 1920s asserted the value of poetry and challenged their fellow countrymen and women to give them recognition and honor as poets. . . . All felt that the country in fact rejected them and all went into external or internal exile. But their claim remains true. They are the most outstanding group of poets so far in our literature in English.

He has never been forgiven in New Zealand for espousing fascism, even though other literary figures who went the same way have long since been rehabilitated and count as honored writers: people like Knut Hamsun in Norway, Maurras in France, Ezra Pound in the United States, and P. G. Wodehouse in Britain. 492

 

“A GOOD EUROPEAN”

In pondering the Count’s character, Chris Martin wrote: 

 

How best to describe the Count? Whilst possessed of opinions with which I personally often disagreed, he was a small and handsome figure, extremely attractive to the ladies, exceptionally well-spoken (to the extent of correcting my own English), obviously extremely talented but, equally obviously, an embittered victim of the English judicial system, and what in 1932 passed for reality. His nephew Peter Potocki described him as “Uncle Nero.” I can state personally that the Count was an extremely interesting person to know; his position in literary history is pretty well irrefragable. However, I will say that he was most interesting company and one of the most informed people one has met about virtually any aspect of European history. For a person born in New Zealand in 1903, the Count was what, with Nietzsche, we might term “a good European.” 

 

Counter-Currents/North American New Right

August 14–16, 2010