A rough draft. Written in a flurry of feeling. I’ll try to make it more coherent and expand on it, or write another, more ‘readable’ essay on the same theme, later.
[i][b]“My” Generation
Rough Draft[/i][/b]
Don’t talk of dust and roses –
Or should we powder our noses?
Don’t live for last year’s capers:
Oh, give me steel, give me steel, give me pulses unreal…
- David Bowie, “Big Brother”
[b]I.[/b]
We live in frightening times: but all times are equally frightful, particularly to those who lack a future against which their own can be contrasted. Apocalypticism is not the defining characteristic of this or any age, but is rather the perennial philosophy of those who grow weary of the endless Now and seek out respite in the past (or in the future; it is all one).
Romanticism is the name of this belief in the invaluability of the present. If I may speak plainly, I have observed that ours, or, at least, mine, numbers among the most romantic of ages. It is one of the most pietous, most patriotic, and certainly the most cantankerously petty generations to have been spawned in quite some time; also, the most pretentious and pathetic - and lacking in laughter. Everywhere one looks one happens to set one’s eyes upon a teenager dressed up like a black-clad little priest, mouthing belief in such moralistic flights of fancy as the ‘straight-edge movement’ and ‘abstinence’ and all the while indulging in little acts of hypocrisy for the thrill that comes with the violation of boundaries and borders of one’s own demarcation.
Romanticism. What have we to do with romanticism? We are not lovers, let alone romantics - we do not serve.
I am a man out of time. Neither boy nor adult - each has been denied to me, for good reason - I nevertheless know when I am. I have tested the spirit of the age (using methods both Pauline and Hegelian in origin) and have found it wanting. A great exorcism, then, is in order; a tremendous putting-out of the stagnant zeitgeist which has thickened so as to make it impossible to breathe cleanly today.
“But,” you will ask, “are you yourself not just as impassioned, just as inflammatory, and even just ask weak as those whom you profess such hatred for? Do you speak out of revenge, as a lover spurned? Or perhaps, as a poor social invalid, unwilling or unable to recognize the shifting winds of public sentiment?”
If so accused, I could hardly deny either charge. I am guilty of each; both as one who could not - ‘compete’ here would not at all be accurate; with me there is only subterfuge - for the affections of a woman, and one who could not, and, above all, would not, permit the effervescent flux of public opinion to impede upon my own self-possession. Moreover, I suspect that these two are quite as one in our current climate. When I speak, therefore, it is with the forked tongue of the hypocrite and liar: but also with the words of the accultured one who knows precisely what leitmotives have accrued themselves to his character and who has developed an ear to listen for when they make themselves heard.
Make no mistake, dear reader: there is no rancor, no overbearing malice in me. Neither is there any prejudice which I do not admit to with a smile. For, to be sure, I love even my displeasures: they bring such laughter, out of both cruelty (towards myself and towards the rest) and – pity? --, that I cannot but help be well-disposed towards them. I have no ‘social agenda’ to advance; rather that I could advance upon all of them–!
And so it is not out of an offended morality which I write (and those who know me well understand just what I lack in this regard), but out of taste, which has always taken precedence over the former in all such, to turn a phrase which is not mine, ‘untimely ones’. For in this infinite night of the aesthetic, what room is there for morality?
No. I condemn nothing, not even myself; and, though there be much self-pruning and purging in this essay, it is not, in any way, to be taken as a sermon against the fashion of the age. To the contrary: it is critique in the highest sense, the critique of the metaphysician who no longer believes but continues to find it clever to wear the mask of God, from time to time. Accordingly I shall take up the watch from the highest peaks; this means, to wit, looking down, from the tip of one’s nose, where it is required.
And such a God is required: for it is the Christly instinct against which I go to war, against the victim’s instinct - and especially modern self-victimization (as ecstatic resignationism). For a task such as this it is better by far to be a swordsman, to know how to parry and riposte; but insofar as I am not a swordsman, I ought instead to be a tank commander. For where the blade fails, the division surely triumphs in the end.
[b]II.[/b]
Historically speaking (take heed! when one speaks of ‘history’, one speaks with seriousness itself: for ‘history’ is a laughing matter), our modern culture constitutes a regressus to the worst excesses of the Black Death. Our means have increased in accordance with our sciences - the syringe has replaced the flail, for instance - but our methods remain every bit the same; chiefly, self-abnegation in favor of an abandoned and abandoning God, as a means to reclaim some semblance of spiritual substance long since vacated.
This is the ‘cure’. One must first understand the cure to glean what it is intended to cure. And what is the disease? Certainly not our age’s imagined ‘moral turpitude’ (this line of reasoning is as diseased as that which it wants to cure, for it draws from the same tainted romantic wellspring; further, all moral turpidity constitutes a cure and a liberation), but a decline of the ecstatic spirit. Or, more accurately, a mutation of the self-same.
For let us ask here: what is ecstasy? Is it not a feeling of triumph, of ascension, joyful and free? Whatever it is, it most certainly is not the slavish enrapture of the martyr as he flogs the flesh from his back, or that of the pathetic junkie as he presses down on the plunger - the individual under the thrall of enthousiasmos would rather flagellate others than be himself flagellated. This answered, let us ask once more: wither does this degeneration of the ecstatic feeling come?
The answer which almost gives itself, which wants to be given to him with the gall to ask, is soul-belief. For this belief denies to the ecstatic that strange and wondrous ability to take leave of oneself, to dispossess one’s self, which is so necessary to the ecstatic-ritualistic method of induced experience that any effort to engage in such a divine and macabre undertaking is necessarily thwarted by the presence of such a prejudice. So defeated, it is only natural that this premature ecstatic ought to turn to despair as a measure to vindicate his own sense of completeness without which he grows increasingly incapable of suffering life. So completed, it is inevitable that the ecstatic should undergo just such a defeat.
For this is the truth of the matter: the present vogue for self-destruction stems, not from an absence, but from a completeness, from a metaphysical prejudice which has lain hidden for twenty centuries in full view of even the least insightful of observers. This process, which readers of my previous essay will know under the term 'consanguinity, constitutes an exchange of ‘essences’, as in, for instance, the ritual of communion, or the Biblical myth of transfiguration; also possession, and, more immediately, the sensation which a tasteful aesthete might feel while under the spell of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen.
This is more than mere rhapsody, although rhapsody certainly has affinities with the feeling of consanguinity, being itself a minor key of the same basic piece. Quite briefly, it constitutes a tremendous collectivization of the individual; a consumption of the individual; a total and utter leaving-oneself-behind, and a losing oneself. It is madness, to be sure; but even the pious old parishoner who enjoys nothing more than hymn-singing experiences the trembling pleasures which accompany the sweet encroachment of the void.
We must take care here, however, not to interpret this in a Platonic sense, as Nietzsche did in his Birth of Tragedy (a mistake for which he continued to berate himself for a decade after the publication of that piece). The consanguineous act is not at all an experience of primal unity, either ‘higher’ or ‘carnal’, but rather a disintegration of both into a more basic substratum. For unity requires singularity - and singularity, ‘in-itselfness’, does not exist, at least for the ecstatic. It in fact cannot exist under such a condition.
Let us consider, for example, the self-consistent logic of religious possession. Regardless of the faith-system underlying such an event, there nevertheless remains in every instantiation of this motif a basic underlying substructure: the individual becomes displaced by the alien spirit, vacating itself (or, conversely, becoming subsumed by the alien spirit; it matters little), and is reduced to nothingness: but a nothingness which nevertheless remains a somethingness- Zerrissenheit, a pulling-apartness and multiplicity. Thus we have, for instance, the case of the Gaderene, whose demons, upon being exorcised, promptly fled from his body into a herd of pigs.
If one could transpose this logic onto an ontological plane, one would have grasped the core characteristic of the ecstatic, Bacchanalian experience: Being, viewed ‘from within’, seems to he who reaches this happy plateau a great multiplicity and Becoming. In this state pleasure and pain are themselves one and the same, and equally meaningless; neither pain nor pleasure suffice as an elevator by which one acquires such lofty inner vistas. Unfortunately, this requires feats of the synaptic system not likely attainable by nerves roughworn through years of cathode-ray abuse; such states are therefore unattainable for our poor, pale teenaged esotericist, who consoles himself with egoism and other such worthless soul-beliefs: that they are not sufficiently atheistic for such willful exertions is evidence; they retain the Christ-type.
(The animists of Africa do much better than our befuddled friend: by assigning to each degree of intensity an animal fetish, they thereby create a locus of sorts for each individuated state of feeling, subscribing to each a physical totem and thereby permitting easier recourse to memory in attaining any one of them; by the time the teenager learns this method, his feelings have deadened and he becomes satisfied with such imbecilities as statolatry and the national flag.)
What, really, does it require to effect such an inner-transformation? Nothing but courage, the courage to leave one’s self behind, in the sand, buried, forgotten. And courage, to our woe and misfortune, is much lacking in the present generation. In its place they have formulated their credo in a single word: depth. It is a tempting doctrine, one which promises many starry nights, but also a very erroneous one: even the least informed Heraclitean-at-heart knows that the world is shallow; and how could it be otherwise, when music carries us off (in the – spirit --) to such beautiful crevices and recesses of the mind? One either feels fleetly or not at all.
[b]III.[/b]
Now to say what I really feel.
The American teenager no longer knows how to: his feelings are ponderous and weighty, therefore immobile, therefore useless in inducing such joys as the emotional experience of life has to offer. He is inclined to rationalism, therefore inclined to dialectic, therefore inclined towards a transcendental view of things. This overall deadening, this slowing down of the processes which makes feeling possible, constitute an enormous blunder and a basic idiosyncrasy in his character. He has been bred, as it were, to look for signs and portents, to adduce a Messiah from a suffering lamb - and to heal himself by his own stripes.
How different it is for us spiritual foreigners! For those who would rather wear a crown of laurels than one of thorns, such prudery seems as alien as an affirmative nature does to the prude. For our war is, as ever, against prudery, against cultural Puritanism; these ‘powers of the air’ are pollutants, making everything dim and dark. It is especially murky in the Midwest, where long decades of mixed pastoral and populist sentiments have contributed heavily to an oppressive, regulatory air: it is as though everyone expects everyone else to grow in tune with the crops (and here soul-belief, which poisons everything, is among the most sacrosanct of doctrines, as is ‘human nature’, ‘egoism’, ‘unegoism’, ‘antiegoism’; in short, the entire gamut of untenabilities and insipidities which make up the totality of the religious worldview and which make men predictable find their place here). That individualism-which-is-not (“American individualism”: a contradictio in adjecto), that snide martyr-complex: the American teenager is Christian to the core.
Very well, then! Their world is rubbish; let us create our own. Let them have the heartlands. Ours is the ocean.
Finally, one would rightfully ask what all this matters in the proverbial ‘greater scheme’: “This, too, shall pass.”