The Rosy Crucifixion 2 - Plexus
Page 64
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 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 as 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 arterio-sclerosis 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 nine-pins. 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 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 mould. 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 stand-still.
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, Dostoievsky, 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; Dostoievsky the grand inquisitor; Faure the magician; Spengler the pattern-maker. 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 fibre 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 monniker 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 thon 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.
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