Johohoe! Johohoe! Hojohe!
Traft ihr das Schiff im Meere an,
blutrot die Segel, schwarz der Mast?
Auf hohem Bord der bleiche Mann,
des Schiffes Herr, wacht ohne Rast!
Hui! – Wie saust der Wind! Johohe!
Hui! – Wie pfeift’s im Tau! Johohe!
Hui! – Wie ein Pfeil fliegt er hin,
ohne Ziel, ohne Rast, ohne Ruh!30
Sometimes I ponder the welfare of mankind and hate those who take an interest in anything else. Sometimes I ponder myself and the immeasurable inside myself, but despise mankind. Sometimes I thirst for nothing but the one true Almighty God and despise myself, but give not a single thought to mankind. When we spoke I mentioned a British friend and said that he was able to appreciate my gifts. But in the end I could no longer bear his presence. I suffer in the company of men who do not suffer. Now he is gone, this British bull, this colonial jackal, gone to Hell to preach to the souls in prison: the Indians in the rat trap of the British Empire; and he has entrusted to me the keeping of his residence in Hounslow near London. Now I am on a two-month gad around southern England in search of myself. I am going to try to collect myself. I am like jetsam scattered along a long beach.
Forgive me for writing to you. But I have no friends whom I trust. At home in the town where I was born I had several companions, but they are simpletons. They comb their hair. Everything is “cosmic” to them. The world is, in their eyes, a foreign magazine. I have not combed my hair once in two years. I have swallowed the entire world. I do not speak; I scream. I do not debate; I give orders. I am a wolf in the fold. I should be imprisoned like a dictator. I should be quartered. The scraps of my body should be scattered about to nourish the birds of the air. All of this I trust you will do.
34.
After I composed the twenty-eighth poem, I said “Basta!” I threw that rubbish out like a man on the street who eats nuts and spits the shells here and there; like the Lord of the universe, who shakes suns like ten-aurar coins out of his heavenly jester’s sleeves, absentmindedly and nonchalantly, not even to amuse himself, let alone others; or like a wagon driver who used to be the servant of his donkey and cart, but who now, after both donkey and cart have tumbled off a cliff, stands behind on the ledge, empty-handed, and celebrates his victory. But what do you think this Carrington did?
He stole the poems and took them to a printer without my knowledge, and has newspapers and magazines harp on them as masterpieces.
Of course they are masterpieces, but God does not lack masterpieces. God needs souls. Mankind does not need masterpieces. Mankind needs panem et circenses.31 Neither I nor others compose masterpieces for God or mankind. Delusion! Poets have never carried the people’s burdens. They are the enemies of the people. They are the harlots of the people. They howl at the people. They spit at the people. They cajole the people. They lie. They dress themselves up in sacred linen before the people like hellish sorcerers. They shriek like a woman in the pangs of childbirth. They swallow fire, turn somersaults and contort themselves before the people, all in the hope of subduing them, elbow their way onto the highest seats so that queens can anoint their feet with balsam and dry them with their hair. Their goal is like that of the Roman emperors, to be deified and worshipped in life. They are lovelorn men. The artist’s essential being is nothing but obsession du sexe. They’re oversexed. They think that they have special permission to break all the commandments of God and man at once. “The simplest form of art is love,” says André Breton. The one who understands this understands the entire hoax. In the future, artistic madness will be cured by a simple operation. The artist has no moral interests, says the preface to Dorian Gray. The artist is an immoral intellectual. Art is one of the indulgences of the intellectual. Art refuses to be one of the weapons that are used in the war over the values of life. Art for art’s sake is a settled question – and last but not least in favor of the artist. Art is the kingly dream of the peasant, the cocaine craze of the psychopath who lacks the fortitude to work, the tool of the man who sees in it his life’s goal of being published in the culture section of newspapers, like the weather forecasts.
Dear sir, I understand all of this now.
35.
The sage has three choices. He can choose whether he will live for himself, for God, or for men. I mull over these three choices. I examine them minutely under a microscope and take a determined stand toward each of them: which is to say, I take a stand toward none of them. I am the ass that dies between rows of drying hay.
I lack the coarseness of the old noblemen; no, I lack sufficient faith in myself to count myself a god and make people my slaves, like the superman. And I lack sufficient faith in God to be able to throw myself down in the mud beneath the cross. But I pity the people, not because they are created in God’s image, but because they are created in my image. It is of course a weakness to pity people, but it is also a weakness to implore the God of the weak. But the greatest weakness is to believe in oneself. That is a resort that either ends in madness or suicide. After Nietzsche lost his faith in the theory of evolution, and at the same time in the superman as a higher form of man, he counted himself a god and went mad. For what is man? Homo vanitati similis factus est: dies ejus sicut umbra prætereunt: man is like vanity; his days flit by as a shadow.32 Even a superman is a vain superstition. If a superman were conceivable, he would also be a prisoner of nature, a prisoner of his existence like a man, and his only reason for being born would be to die, like a man. All flesh is hay. A superman is situated just as far from the eternal absolute spirit as a man. The deeper that I delve into Nietzsche, the more dismal a mirage the superman becomes to me.
A similar case applies to the ordinary Lord. He has in fact never been real to me. He has at most been an ornament in my poems. If I were to repeat the story of my childhood thoughts, I could say that he appeared to me most often as a morbid phantasm. I also doubt that he had been anything but a morbid phantasm in the minds of the martyrs. They would never have endured martyrdom for their convictions, as they were called, if those convictions had been to them as unequivocal as the Earth upon which they stood or the air that they breathed. It would never cross anyone’s mind to let oneself be put to death for the conviction that one stands upon the Earth. Men let themselves be put to death for sick imaginations and lapses of reason, not for their convictions.
From my childhood my conception of God was nothing but a touch of mild hysteria that reappeared again and again in various forms, but might just as well have appeared as chronic gastritis or an inflammation of the gallbladder. My rebirths and reconversions were never anything other than lyrical disturbances of my mind.
If I presume, on the other hand, that God exists, then I can’t see that he and man could have anything to do with each other. It is nothing but bombast to say that men must struggle to become perfect because God is perfect. Spiritual superiority revealed in moral perfection never touches the plane of the notion of God. The ideal of perfection has its end and origin in the idea of man. If God were a perfect spirit, his control over the world would be the pinnacle of moral perfection. But if any God rules the world, he rules it with nothing but foolish caprice and infringement upon the underdog.
Powerful spirits come into the world to fight for human welfare, and they sacrifice everything. They love mankind; its prosperity is their wine and bread. But while these pioneers of perfection fight for the success of mankind, the Lord commands the seas to swallow the supporters of poor families and lets the wind blow the roofs off of orphans’ huts. He shakes Messina with earthquakes and in one night slaughters fourteen thousand innocent men who had no suspicion of danger. And he lets a million children die of starvation in Russia, Austria, and Germany during our own era. Why does he let a million children suffer starvation in Russia, Austria, and Germany? Why doesn’t he help those wailing wretches? What have they done to deserve it?
God is not a moral being. God is far beyond any su
ch thing. God is not moved. Man can become morally perfect. Man can sacrifice everything for the happiness of his brothers. God does not care about men’s happiness. I am what I am, says the Lord. When Christ asks God to be merciful, he chooses men as his model. He does not say let us forgive one another as God forgives us, but rather the opposite: forgive as we forgive.
How in the world can Christianity, a nineteen-hundred-year-old ghost story from Asia, be expected to have any influence on contemporary Europeans? The time has long since passed when men yearned to reach the Kingdom of Heaven. Men no longer sin; they make blunders. They conduct themselves foolishly and inadvisably because they make false calculations and are uneducated. They play blindly. They curse each other because they live in a society in which one man’s death is another man’s bread. They comport themselves ridiculously, lamentably, grotesquely, and piteously. But they do not sin.
Men live in reality, and there they are condemned to help themselves. God has sentenced man to help himself. God does not help him; that is evidenced everywhere. It is also evidenced everywhere that the more faith men put in God, the more liable they are to wallow in idiocy and penury, the less liable to rise up against their enemies, against lies and tyranny. In just a short time the holiest names of Christianity will not be seen upon anything other than fatted calves, lapdogs, soft drinks, and laundries.
36.
“Greif hinein ins volle Menschenleben!”33
A perfect man fights against the enemies of mankind. Perfect labor is a karmayogic philosophy. The philosophy of work for the sake of work is an opiate. It is suited to ascetics who lack the energy to fight in the war for the values of life. Perfect work is vanity, per se. The history of mankind is the history of war over the price of life, the value of life. On the one side are perfect men, on the other side the enemies of mankind. A man is worth precisely as much as the ideal that he proclaims to be the goal of his battle. That labor is most valuable which brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people, says Bentham. Labor that does not aim at achieving a valuable ideal is weed, no matter how beautiful it is.
The vintners of the generations are coming. Thousands wait only for the coming of the spiritual princes, who will eclipse the sun and the moon. And they are coming. They shout the slogan, and all throng to their weapons. Woe to those who try to rise up against the vintners of the generations and their troops! Woe to those who do not apprehend the time of their arrival, when the reappraisal of all value is at the door! “Brothers!” cries the apostle Paul. “You are limbs on the body of Christ!” And before one knows it every rascal has become a limb on the body of Christ and a powerful empire is founded on the back of one carpenter. Rousseau gives the order: “Return to nature!” And the people reply: “We shall return to nature!” and they start a revolution. Marx: “Workers of the world, unite!” And grimy coal men and exhausted dockworkers tear down emperors and gods, raise the land up and dump it over the sea.
The vintners of the generations are merciless tyrants who will not spare kings. They have only one goal, to lead thousands to a new settlement where all things look completely different, where man’s gifts can be nurtured under better conditions, and where the powers are exalted in concord. They all invite mankind to a greater and more beautiful feast. They hold bridal feasts and betroth mankind to its ideals. The enemies of mankind will be cast out into utter darkness.
Heaven help those who rule states and kingdoms! Heaven help those who dictated what war cries would be used during the years 1914–1918! Heaven help those condemned souls who turned the continent into a field of blood in the name of the king, the fatherland, and freedom. It is high time that the people came to understand thoroughly each and every slogan that was trumpeted in their ears during the World War. The people will learn that the king is a combination of a decoy and a sacrament, dangled by parliamentary democracy before them, a walking old wives’ tale, a historical addition to the menu at feasts, and that parliamentary democracy is a mask covering the despotism of a small group of adventurists who usurp the dividend of the fruits of the Earth. And it will come to know that the fatherland consists in reality of nothing other than these adventurists, groups of golden-toothed, balding potbellies who set up their industrial conglomerates and trading companies throughout the world and compete to dominate the global market. Freedom is the mud on the field of battle; it is mutilation; it is a shameful death on the champ d’honneur, the profligate arena of sabotage; it is unemployment when the soldiers come home maimed and insane; it is the hunger that sucks the marrow from their children’s bones; and finally it is a tiny buttonhole badge worth five aurar, distributed for free to those who make the greatest strides in killing the people from the other fatherland, raping the women, and burning the churches.
37.
I am one of those big strong men needed by the world to fight in the merciless battle against the enemies of mankind. And this is what tips the scales: I fully comprehend the manners of the age and know precisely what demands must be made of philanthropists who are ill-equipped to fight against a better-armed tyrannical power than any other that one could cite from the past, a power that fights with carefully cultivated hereditary lies or hereditary truths, a power that has usurped all the tools of information, schools, newspapers, and publishers, and places bribed orators in its advance guard, to distribute lies and deceptions in a hundred million different places every day, a power that has not only conquered the legislature, the police, and the courts, but also religion and the arts and sciences, and has a million soldiers like pathogenic bacteria stored in its back pocket to spread out over the masses if all else fails.
To me ideas mean action. I concern myself only with the conclusion of the contest, and not with the passage of arms. As a soldier I do not expect to wage honorable or valiant war, and I would certainly break any pact made with my enemies over the correct conduct of battle. I am a savage of the twentieth century: I have no other choice but to fight as a criminal for my freedom against those in whose hands every single branch of civilization becomes a deadly mistletoe.34 There are no means conceivable that I would fail to utilize if they would allow me to reach my goal. The ends justify the means, no matter what they are. Honorable war is a sport, a game, a swindle, a bluff. He who fights for life or death has the right to utilize all of his tricks: he is higher than all rights. Ruthlessness, effrontery, and impudence are the most unfailing weapons that an idealist of our time can use to gain and maintain control, and I have been endowed with these gifts in full measure.
In ages past men suffered martyrdom for their convictions. The martyrdom craze raged again and again like the plague. Men sprawled themselves out on the torture racks in lecherous joy. I despise those masochistic inclinations of the men of old; they are perverse, unnatural. I assure you, I will not let myself be butchered for my convictions. I would sooner tell five hundred lies and live than let a hysterical longing to prate about my convictions before some abject court, or on the streets and crossroads, be the cause of my death. He who is not as cunning as a serpent does not deserve to possess an ideal. Just as soon as some despot demands it of me, I shall take back everything today that I said yesterday; I would even have no scruples about asking for forgiveness. But I would start anew in all earnestness tomorrow, and begin where I had to stop before, only at a more suitable place, so that I could rest safely assured that my enemies were not able to profane my person. Woe to the man who claims to be fighting for an ideal in our time and does not know how to give a false impression of himself! He is defeated even before the duel begins.
I sail into the faces of my enemies under a false banner and lay my mines furtively under their fleet. I greet my enemies under an assumed name, grasp their hands sincerely, hold councils with them and look into their eyes frankly and boldly like a polite boy, accept their invitations for visits and discuss matters of the heart with their wives, innocent and holy like Rasputin or Cagliostro, while I work the whole time on gathering fiery ember
s over their heads. I come to them like a man of God with my dagger concealed in my crucifix.
I am ready to have every tenth man in the world beheaded if need be. If ten men stand against an ideal that otherwise would benefit ninety men, I would not hesitate to give my servants the order to take those ten men out and execute them. If the ideal is of more worth than those who oppose it, then it is plain that those who resist must die.
The personality, the magnetism of the iron will, this blessing that even sages were denied, this is my most precious cradle gift. The duty to mankind that was placed on my shoulders is to preserve my self-made mettle. I must not bend. I must never swear allegiance to anyone. Men like me commit deadly sins against mankind if they allow their mettle to be fouled by impurities. They are born to be pure and alone.
Of all the disciplines, chastity is the most powerful guardian spirit of the personality. To chastity I sing a hymn of praise. Nothing better fortifies a man’s spirit nor amplifies his psychological greatness, nothing hardens him better against pliancy nor softens him better against rigidity, nothing makes him more warlike nor more immune to hurt, nothing else endows him with a more irreconcilable power to face peril nor a more unfailing endurance in the prolonged battles, and no more intense savagery in exterminating dragons. Chastity is a guarantee that the intentions of great minds are pure, and stains fall neither onto the shield nor the ideals of the chaste man; he never fights for himself. When I hear about a man’s heroic deeds, the first thing I ask is: was he chaste? I have no confidence in the leadership of a man who is an intellectual being by day and a sexual being by night. Such a vacillatory spirit never runs the greatest risks. I do not trust leaders who wake at dawn to the sound of the war bugle with pins and needles in their limbs after a lukewarm night. Call me a dog if the woman, the butcher’s bills, and the family portraits do not make the threshold of his door into a nearly unscalable cliff. A married man is not just bound to his wife, since society is never so bad that he is not wed to it as well. “A wife is like thirty tyrants,” says the Tobacco Company of Iceland, Ltd.
The Great Weaver From Kashmir Page 12