Julius Evola- The Sufi of Rome

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Julius Evola- The Sufi of Rome Page 20

by Frank Gelli


  In a nihilistic and frankly idiotic mood, I told him that all that, despite all he had said, ugliness offended me. I would not have minded if the whole city of Rome had been destroyed, I said. Wiped out. Along with all the ugly people in it. Like Caligula, ‘I wished all the ugly people of Rome had only one throat, so that I could slit it.’

  I expected him to retort that Caligula was mad as a hatter but he knew better than that: ‘Caligula was saner than you imagine. He was trying to awaken the Romans from their decadent torpors. Making his own horse a senator was a way of telling the Roman senate how useless it had become, how low it had sunk....And I would not trust everything reported by the Roman historian Svetonius. He was an embittered bitch...Anyway, even the sight of physical beauty can pall in the end. If everyone in Rome was as beautiful as you demand, you would find it bored you, eventually. Beauty gets part of its charm, its allure, from its contrast with ugliness. Remove the latter and that allure is gone. No, I think you should be grateful for the presence of repulsive people. A negative benchmark is a logical necessity...’

  It is a pity I cannot recall all the many remarks he made on this subject. I like to wonder what would be his judgment on Osama Bin Laden’s face. The now defunct al-Qaeda leader was tall and handsome, no question about that. His pleasant, full-lipped and somewhat spiritual face has been compared to an imagined countenance of Christ. Of course, there is a tradition in Christianity of the devil being exceedingly handsome. Lucifer, the light-bringer. But Bin Laden’s deeds were atrocious. O Baron, where are you now? Why can I not have the benefit of your subversive wisdom on 9/11, the war on terror, Iraq, Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, Libya and all the rest? One of the terrorists who brought down the twin towers in New York was handsome, too... Well, Allah jamil will have to suffice. I thank you for leaving me with that.

  ZEN

  One morning, as I got out of bed, I saw a tiny insect on the wall. I squashed it there and then. Afterwards, while I was shaving, I was seized by a mild form of remorse. As it happens, the night before I had been delving in some Buddhist scriptures, learning about the Buddha’s respect for all forms of life and so on. All that came back to me. Was it right starting the day by obliterating a living being? Never mind if an insignificant insect. It was still alive.

  I saw Evola later in the day. Despite feeling a bit ridiculous, I shared my scruples with him. It made him digress a bit. ‘I suppose if you were a monk, a member of the Sangha, the monastic Buddhist order, you would have committed a sin. Your tiny fly still possessed consciousness, however dim. Its life force was part of the universal whole...it was part of you too. Schopenhauer would say you have killed part of yourself, metaphysically speaking. The source of all apparent diversity in the world as idea – die Welt als Vorstellung - the origin of all plurality for him is the principium individuationis, namely the categories of space time and causality. But such categories are part of the veil of Maya, illusion. They are not real. They prevent us from seeing the world aright. All living being are one. The will to live manifests itself in the insect as it is manifest in you...But, remember, it is a philosopher’s argument! And a peculiar philosopher at that...Not all Buddhists are squeamish about life. Zen monks are fine fighters. They shed blood like any Samurai. In the last war a Japanese officer could rely on Zen monks as the fiercest warriors...’

  ‘As I have always taught, you enter into a great tradition through some form of initiation. The method you follow depends on the type of person you are. The way of contemplation is that for ascetics, monks, some Sufis...St Bernard of Clairvaux was a supreme example of contemplative in the West. There are Buddhists who require abstention from the killing of all life – impossible in practice, of course, but it is an ideal. But in Zen you pursue both ways. Contemplation and action together. Like the early Jesuits. St Ignatius of Loyola was like that...’

  One Zen teacher Evola had no time for, I discovered, was someone called Bankei. Apparently the gist of Bankei’s teaching was that satori, the much sought-after experience of enlightenment, was something everyday, nothing special. ‘That shows the man was bogus, a pseudo-master’, Evola said, with venom. ‘Anyone who has attained to enlightenment would not say that. Unless, of course, this Bankei wanted to put off the vulgar, the uninitiated. But, from what I have read, I gathered that he really held the view attributed to him. What a fraud! Too bad...’

  What would Evola had said, I wonder, if he had known that years later I would be living in a Zen monastery in Alsace? I sincerely wrestled with the idea of becoming a Zen monk, until it became clear I had no vocation for it, it was only an ideal. I still remember the terrible pain in my legs, as I sat in za-zen, sitting meditation, in the dojo, hour after hour, days on end. The master was a hilarious Japanese fellow called Deshimaru. A cross between a true mystic and a holy clown. Deshimaru had read Evola’s Doctrine of Awakening but he refused to discuss it. Which was just as well, as his French was as awful as his English. To me, he sounded if he spoke Japanese all the time. Anyway, books he professed not too like at all. Instead, he concentrated on attention, action, living. I do not know what I got out of my Zen stint. Satori eluded me. I guess I was a bad student. Unless I was to fall back on Bankei and conclude that Zen is indeed nothing special. But then what would have been the point of the long hours sitting in that damned dojo, with the awful pain in my poor, martyred legs? No, honestly, I do not think I got much out of Zen. But the stillness was valuable. Besides, Zen led me eventually in Chiswick to come across interesting characters like Shahin, a genuinely Sufi type. Utterly crazy and disreputable and dangerous but still kind of holy.

  YOUTH BETRAYED

  ‘When I recall my times in Germany, one of the places that stand out is the city of Ansbach. A Queen of England came from there, I believe...The spot I have in mind is in the old town cemetery. There is, or was, a plain tombstone, bearing a simple epitaph to a youth called Kaspar Hauser. It speaks of his enigmatic, mysterious origins. Indeed. No one is sure of Kaspar’s true identity, even today...’

  ‘He was first thrown into the attention of the people of Germany when he emerged from woods near Nuremberg. His person bewildered people. Kaspar then spoke no language and did not even recognise fire. He could see in the dark like a cat. Mirrors frightened him. He could stand no food except bread and water. He could, however, write out his name: Kaspar Hauser.’

  ‘As soon as the boy was taught to communicate, the story he told was incredible. He had been confined to a small, box-like, dark cellar ever since he could remember. He never saw any human being – only a hand that daily gave him bread and water through an opening. Nonetheless, Kaspar was bright. He even learnt to play chess. It was also clear he was not of peasant origin. His physique was too dainty and delicate for that. Maybe that is what provoked the antipathy of many. Someone tried to kill him. But Kaspar also made friends. One was Lord Stanhope, an ambiguous English aristocrat who pretended to take a fancy to him, loaded him with gifts and, apparently, even promised to make him his heir. In fact, Stanhope was a spy and traitor to Kaspar. I suspect Stanhope to have been complicit in Kaspar’s early death, under the dagger of an assassin still unknown.’

  ‘Kaspar’s enemies claimed he was a fake, an impostor. But others believe him to have been a royal youth, a scion of the princely house of Baden, stolen from the cradle and criminally handled for dark, dynastic reasons. There is a fine book by a Jewish writer, Jakob Wasserman, it goes into all that. I have read it, it was enjoyable...but it is wrong. I do not believe that Kaspar Hauser belonged to the royalty of Baden. I think his mother was a minor aristocrat. My German friend, Count Von H., had a theory about that.’

  ‘Look, Kaspar Hauser is not so much a conundrum but a metaphor or an allegory. His tragedy mirrors that of our youth today. You see, Kaspar’s fabled high birth stands for our own origins – well, the best of us, the free spirits, the true aristoi. Yet, like Kaspar, our young people do not know, have been made to forget who they are, where they come from. Kaspar has lost his inh
eritance, his rightful nobility. So have the young of our time. It has been taken away from them...’ He said that with equanimity but also with an intensity...As if he felt the pain of our betrayed youth in his own flesh.

  ‘Through his inhuman captivity in the dark cellar Kaspar had been robbed of his memories, his identity. So has the youth of the West. Memories are crucial to knowing who you are. It was St Augustine, I think, who said that memory is the stomach of the mind. Augustine is not my kind of man but he was right in that. If memory is the stomach of the mind, the minds of Western young people are starved indeed. A rotten, vile, degrading educational system has done that. The confusion, the chaos they are in...’

  The Baron’s analogy between poor Kaspar Hauser’s plight and the wretched spiritual conditions of our young people was brilliant. Indeed, even more striking and apposite today than it was back in 1968. Since then, I have seen Werner Herzog’s movie and Peter Handke’s play, both about Kaspar. Herzog is too grimly Teutonic for my taste and Handke is too cerebral – I actually walked out halfway through his unwatchable play. So, the ill-luck that dogged the unfortunate boy throughout his life seems to pursue him beyond the grave.

  Anyway, Evola has been proved correct in guessing that Kaspar was not descended from the rulers of Baden. Later DNA examination of his remains seems to have proved that. Regardless, the strange boy’s bitter destiny still moves us. And the comparison with the wretched condition of our youth – I feel Evola got that absolutely right.

  THE LOST SON

  While he was telling me the story of Kaspar Hauser I noticed that he appeared moved. Tears, I am pretty certain, welled up in his eyes. That was totally unlike him. The Baron was like an icy mountain – how could he be so affected? When I saw him next time he put down a book he had been reading. It was something by Curzio Malaparte, a writer he had known as a young man. (Evola knew I was a big fan of Malaparte.) He began talking about his novels. Then, for no reason at all, he showed me a letter. The envelope looked old and torn. It bore a foreign stamp. It had reached him in Rome after the war, he said. It was from a woman he had met in Germany. After the war she had migrated to Argentina. Later she had written to him to let him know she had had a child from him. She had called him Hector. (The name stuck in my mind, because it happens to be one of my names.) ‘When I first received this letter, it did not please me at all. Indeed, it irritated me. How could I be sure the child was mine? The relationship we had was brief. I wished she had had got rid of him somehow. Anyway, she never wrote again and I never gave the matter a second thought.’ He looked hard at me. I do not know what he expected me to say. When a young man, I found the idea of children not at all attractive. I could not see what was so good about having kids. Indeed, one of the reasons I admired Evola was that he had kept aloof from the patriarchal style of life, wife and brood of children, then still so typical of Italians. Before I could think of anything to say, however, he put the letter away and went back to talk about Malaparte’s last book, his journeys to the Soviet Union and communist China, his last illness. He never mentioned the “lost son” again. But I did put two and two together - well, I tried to. His evident emotions in relating the story of Kaspar Hauser, the abandoned, unhappy boy, suggested that some inner chord had been struck. Was it that Kaspar had reminded him of his own lost son? A fatherless, solitary lad wandering in some dreary Latin American city? Or in the Argentine pampas? And the guilt issuing from it?

  I shall never know.

  WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

  “What is to be done?” wondered Lenin, years before his conquest of power. He had a good reason to ask because at the time it looked as if mass rebellion had failed to topple the Czar. The mood amongst revolutionaries was at a low ebb. So Lenin came up with his idea of a tightly organised party vanguard, a Bolshevik elite that would one day spearhead the final, lethal attack on the regime. History proved him right. Lenin’s strategy worked. The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating. And the Bolsheviks made a jolly good meal of it.

  “What ought we to do?” is the pressing question many young rebels also asked of the Baron. (I never did – I already knew.) It was a natural query, because those who had read and understood Revolt against the Modern World often confessed to a sense of disappointment. Pessimism, fatalism and resignation appear to pervade the book. The various stages in the never-ending cycles of civilisations have to be got through. It seems an almost deterministic mechanism is at work behind history. So, what is the point of doing anything? Of trying to resist? Not much. As King Canute showed, no one, not even a king, however clever and powerful, even holy, can stem a tide. The rhythms of civilisational changes appear to be as ineluctable, as inexorable as the movements of the tide, the waxing and waning of the moon.

  And yet, and yet...At times I had a distinct feeling that the Baron was not quite as fatalistic as that. I remember, for instance, a night when he peevishly cut Adriano short, precisely on this subject. ‘The restoration of the sacred is our task’, he asserted, quite sharply. Those words thrilled me. A cryptic remark. What did he mean by that? The year was 1970. By then, everybody thought he has given up the hope of a counter-revolution. And now there he was, seemingly suggesting the opposite: the dragon of modernity could be slain, after all!

  In a previous answer to the challenge, in Men amongst the Ruins Evola had striven to produce some guidelines for thoughtful traditionalists. There was something to be done, after all. It was not just a matter of sitting back and waiting for a few aeons, for millions of years to go by, and the next “solar age” to dawn.

  Whether his prescriptions actually had any realistic content or offered any hope on the political sphere is another matter. His allusions to members of the old European nobility as potential material for the counter-revolution strike me today as merely whimsical or quixotic. You might as well place your trust in the decadent, worthless bunch depicted in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Aristocrats worthy of the original meaning of the name may still exist, perhaps, but, if they do, they must be few and far between. Moreover, there is no sign that such Scarlet Pimpernels are waiting to be recruited to a traditionalist jihad. In that sense, no analogy can be drawn with Lenin’s recipe for a revolutionary party vanguard. Today the flags of both the revolution and its opposite limp flaccidly down, at half mast.

  What is to be done, then? I believe that Evola, were he still with us, would argue by re-stating what he had written and taught many times. The point of fighting is in the fight itself. A fighter by nature or vocation has to fight. He can do nothing less. Fighting is what he is for. His jihad, whether spiritual or material, is not something empirical, to be gauged by appeal to end results or upshots. Perhaps a hard teaching for a utilitarian and consequentialist age but one not devoid of value and point. Heroism and contemplation are both, to put it with my old friend Alan Watts, valid “ways of liberation”. They have their own self-justifying, intrinsic legitimacy. The ascetic, the genuine mystic in his cell does not seek to “achieve” anything in his meditation, in his prayer of strict adoration. He prays because he is the kind of person he is – a prayerful one. Likewise with the true warrior. I doubt the Japanese pilots and soldiers who fought to the death in the last days of WWII hoped for victory in a realistic sense. They must have known the war was lost. Yet, they fought. What else could they, as warriors and men of honour, do?

 

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