“Eternal life is not life beyond the grave, but the true spiritual life,” said a philosopher. What a time it has taken me to realize the full import of such a statement!… A whole century of Russian thought (the nineteenth) was preoccupied with this question of “the end,” of the establishment on earth of the Kingdom of God. But in North America it was as if that century, those thinkers and searchers after the true reality of life, had never existed. True, now and then a rocket exploded in our midst. Now and then we did receive a message from some distant shore. Such events were regarded not only as mysterious, bizarre, outlandish, but as occult. This last label meant that they were no longer serviceable or applicable to daily life.
Reading Spengler was not precisely a balm. It was more of a spiritual exercise. The critique of Western thought underlying his cyclical pattern had the same effect upon me as the Ko-ans have for the Zen disciple. Again and again I arrived at my own peculiar Western state of Satori. Time and again I experienced those lightning flashes of illumination which herald the breakthrough. There came excruciating moments when, as if the universe were an accordion, I could view it as an infinitesimal speck or expand it infinitely, so that only the eye of God could encompass it. Gazing at a star outside my window, I could magnify it ten thousand times; I could roam from star to star, like an angel, endeavoring all the while to grasp the universe in these supertelescopic proportions. I would then return to my chair, look at my fingernail, or rather at an almost invisible spot on the nail, and see into it the universe which the physicist endeavors to create out of the atomic web of nothingness. That man could ever conceive of “nothingness” always astounded me.
For so long now the conceptual world has been man’s whole world. To name, to define, to explain.… Result: unceasing anguish. Expand or contract the universe ad infinitum—a parlor game. Playing the god instead of trying to be as God. Godding, godding—and at the same time believing in nothing. Bragging of the miracles of science, yet looking upon the world about as so much shit. Frightening ambivalence! Electing for systems, never for man. Denying the miracle men through the systems erected in their names.
On lonely nights, pondering the problem—only one ever!—I could see so very clearly the world as it is, see what it is and why it is the way it is. I could reconcile grace with evil, divine order with rampant ugliness, imperishable creation with utter sterility. I could make myself so finely attuned that a mere zephyr would blow me to dust. Instant annihilation or enduring life—it was one and the same to me. I was at balance, both sides so evenly poised that a molecule of air would tip the scales.
Suddenly a most hilarious thought would shatter the whole setup. An idea such as this: “However deep one’s knowledge of abstruse philosophy, it is like a piece of hair flying in the vastness of space.” A Japanese thought, this. With it came a return to a more ordinary sort of equilibrium. Back to that frailest of all footholds—solid earth. That solid earth which we now accept as being as empty as space.
“In Europe it was I, and I alone with my yearning for Russia, who was free,” said Dostoevski somewhere. From Europe like a true Evangel, he spread the glad tidings. A hundred, two hundred years hence, the full import of this utterance may be realized. What is to be done meanwhile? A question I propounded to myself over and over.
In the early pages of the chapter called “Problems of the Arabian Culture,” Spengler dwells at some length upon the eschatological aspect of Jesus’ utterances. The whole section called “Historic Pseudomorphoses” is a paean to the Apocalyptic. It opens with a tender, sympathetic portrait of Jesus of Nazareth vis-à-vis the world of his day. “The incomparable thing which lifted the infant Christianity out above all religions of this rich Springtime is the figure of Jesus.” So begins this section. In Jesus’ utterances, he points out, there were no sociological observations, problems, debatings. “No faith yet has altered the world, and no fact can ever rebut a faith. There is no bridge between the course of history and the existence of a divine world-order.…”
Then follows this: “Religion is metaphysic and nothing else—“Credo quia absurdum”—and this metaphysic is not the metaphysic of knowledge, argument, proof (which is mere philosophy or learnedness), but lived and experienced metaphysic—that is, the unthinkable as a certainty, the supernatural as a fact, life as existence in a world that is nonactual, but true. Jesus never lived one moment in any other world but this. He was no moralizer, and to see in moralizing the final aim of religion is to be ignorant of what religion is.… His teaching was the proclamation, nothing but the proclamation, of those Last Things with whose images he was constantly filled: the dawn of the New Age, the advent of heavenly envoys, the Last Judgment, a new heaven and a new earth. Any other conception of religion was never in Jesus, nor in any truly deep-feeling period of history.… “My kingdom is not of this world,” and only he who can look into the depths that this flash illumines can comprehend the voices that come out of them.
It is at this point that Spengler voices his scorn for Tolstoy who “elevated primitive Christianity to the rank of a social revolution.” It is here he makes a pointed allusion to Dostoevski who “never thought about social ameliorations.” (“Of what profit would it have been to a man’s soul to abolish property?”)
Dostoevski and his “freedom”…
Was it not in that same time of Tolstoy and Dostoevski that another Russian asked—“Why is it stupid to believe in the Kingdom of Heaven but intelligent to believe in an earthly Utopia?”
Perhaps the answer to this conundrum was inadvertently given by Belinsky when he said: “The fate of the subject, buried themselves in their mortuary creations. The heraldic landscape has vanished. The air belongs to the giant birds of destruction. The waters will soon be ploughed by Leviathans more fearful to behold than those described in the good book. The tension increases, increases, increases. Even in villages the inhabitants become more and more, in feeling and spirit, like the bombs they are obliged to manufacture.
But history will not end even when the grand explosion occurs. The historical life of man has still a long span. It doesn’t take a metaphysician to arrive at such a conclusion. Sitting in that little hole-in-the wall back in Brooklyn twenty-five years or so ago I could feel the pulse of history throbbing at late as the 32nd Dynasty of Our Lord.
Nevertheless, I am immensely grateful to Oswald Spengler for having performed this strange feat of skill—describing to a nicety the unholy atmosphere of arteriosclerosis which is ours, and at the same time shattering the whole rigid thought-world which envelops us, thus liberating us—at least in thought. On every page, virtually, there is an assault upon the dogmas, conventions, superstitions and mode of thinking which have characterized the last few hundred years of “modernity.” Theories and systems are battered about like ninepins. The whole conceptual landscape of modern man is devastated. What emerges are not the scholarly ruins of the past but freshly recreated worlds in which one may “participate” with one’s ancestors, live again the spring, the fall, the summer, even the winter, of man’s history. Instead of stumbling through glacial deposits one is carried along on a tide of sap and blood. Even the firmament gets reshuffled. This is Spengler’s triumph—to have made Past and Future live in the Present. One is again at the center of the universe, warmed by solar fires, and not at the periphery fighting off vertigo, fighting off fear of the unspeakable abyss.
Does it matter so much that we are men of the tail end of the individual, of the person is more important than the fate of the whole world and the well-being of the Chinese Emperor.”
At any rate, it was definitely Fedorov who quietly remarked: “Each person is answerable for the whole world and for all men.”
A strange and exciting period in “the land of holy miracles” nineteen centuries after the birth and death of Jesus the Christ! One man writes The Apology of a Madman; another writes a Revolutionary Catechism; another The Metaphysics of Sex. Each one is a revolution in himself. Of one figure I learn
that “he was a conservative, a mystic, an anarchist, an orthodox, an occultist, a patriot, a Communist—and ended his life in Rome as a Catholic and a Fascist.” Is this a period of “historic pseudomorphosis?” Certainly it is an Apocalyptic one.
My misfortune, metaphysically speaking, is that I was born neither in the time of Jesus nor in holy Russia of the nineteenth century. I was born in the megalopolis at the tail end of a great planetary conjunction. But even in the suburb of Brooklyn, by the time I had come of age, one could be stirred by the repercussions of that Slavic ferment. One World War had been “fought and won.” Sic! The second one was in the making. In that same Russia I speak of, Spengler had a precursor whom you will scarcely find mention of even today. Even Nietzsche had a Russian precursor!
Was it not Spengler who said that Dostoevski’s Russia would eventually triumph? Did he not predict that from this ripe soil a new religion would spring? Who believes this today?
The Second World War has also been “fought and won”(!!!) and still the Day of Judgment seems remote. Great autobiographies, masquerading in one form or another, reveal the life of an epoch, of a whole people, aye, of a civilization. It is almost as if our heroic figures had built their own tombs, described them intimately, then and not of the beginning? Not if we realize that we are part of something in eternal process, in eternal ebullition. Undoubtedly there is something far more comforting for us to apprehend, if we persist in searching. But even here, on the threshold, the shifting landscape acquires a more pregnant beauty. We glimpse a pattern which is not a mold. We learn all over again that the death process has to do with men-in-life and not with corpses in varying stages of decomposition. Death is a “counter-symbol.” Life is the all, even in the end-periods. Nowhere is there any hint of life coming to a standstill.
Yes, I was a fortunate man to have found Oswald Spengler at that particular moment in time. In every crucial period of my life I seem to have stumbled upon the very author needed to sustain me. Nietzsche, Dostoevski, Elie Faure, Spengler: what a quartet! There were others, naturally, who were also important at certain moments, but they never possessed quite the amplitude, quite the grandeur, of these four. The four horsemen of my own private Apocalypse! Each one expressing to the full his own unique quality: Nietzsche the iconoclast; Dostoevski the grand inquisitor; Faure the magician; Spengler the patternmaker. What a foundation!
In the days to come, when it will seem as if I were entombed, when the very firmament threatens to come crashing down upon my head, I shall be forced to abandon everything except what these spirits implanted in me. I shall be crushed, debased, humiliated. I shall be frustrated in every fiber of my being. I shall even take to howling like a dog. But I shall not be utterly lost! Eventually a day is to dawn when, glancing over my own life as though it were a story or history, I can detect in it a form, a pattern, a meaning. From then on the word defeat becomes meaningless. It will be impossible ever to relapse.
For on that day I become and I remain one with my creation.
On another day, in a foreign land, there will appear before me a young man who, aware of the change which has come over me, will dub me “The Happy Rock.” That is the moniker I shall tender when the great Cosmocrator demands—“Who art thou?”
Yes, beyond a doubt I shall answer: “The Happy Rock!”
And if it be asked—“Didst thou enjoy thy stay on earth?”—I shall reply: “My life was one long rosy crucifixion.”
As to the meaning of this, if it is not already clear, it shall be elucidated. If I fail then am I but a dog in the manger.
Once I thought that I had been wounded as no man ever had. Because I felt thus I vowed to write this book. But long before I began the book the wound had healed. Since I had sworn to fulfill my task I reopened the horrible wound.
Let me put it another way.… Perhaps in opening the wound, my own wound, I closed other wounds, other people’s wounds. Something dies, something blossoms. To suffer in ignorance is horrible. To suffer deliberately, in order to understand the nature of suffering and abolish it forever, is quite another matter. The Buddha had one fixed thought in mind all his life, as we know. It was to eliminate human suffering.
Suffering is unnecessary. But one has to suffer before he is able to realize that this is so. It is only then, moreover, that the true significance of human suffering becomes clear. At the last desperate moment—when one can suffer no more!—something happens which is in the nature of a miracle. The great open wound which was draining the blood of life closes up, the organism blossoms like a rose. One is “free” at last, and not “with a yearning for Russia,” but with a yearning for ever more freedom, ever more bliss. The tree of life is kept alive not by tears but the knowledge that freedom is real and everlasting.
* The Greek wrestler.
Henry Miller, Plexus
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