The chaste man is married to his ideals. He is married to the battle for the welfare of mankind. He eats dry bread and has no roof over his head except when the state throws him into prison. Everything that makes war against the freedom of his soul is his enemy; the upkeep of his body is only cruel necessity. He is a manifestation of a higher manhood, of the free and perfect reality, an independent intellectual being, higher than good and evil, a mystic phenomenon, a Buddha with ten thousand women in his belly, a god with the trembling prayers of entire nations in the grip of his omnipotent hands. He is solitary and alone, but solitude is the mother of power. He has no friends, no one that he loves, except for mankind.
38.
I discovered early that woman appealed only to what was evil in my being. Everything that I could conceive of was evil insofar as my mind was directed toward her. Every one of my thoughts about woman is a stain on my soul. To the angel in my being nothing exists that is called “woman.” The man in my being is repelled by woman as by a disgusting beggar. The beast in my being sees its most desired soul mate in her. My Satan nature relishes woman with eager joy.
It beseems no thinker to avoid such a serious concept, like an unsolved puzzle.
It is true: woman is a strange sphinx of the desert. And it is also true that the face of the lion-maiden is concealed by a veil that few succeed in lifting, and none is better for doing so. It is not too far from the truth to say that most men die who dare to lift the veil from the face of Isis, just as those who behold the face of Yahweh. At least no one who has lifted the veil from the face of Isis remains unchanged.
I have seen through the web of deception. Woman in all of her glory no longer has any effect on me. When I was a child she was a mirror and a puzzle to me. Her glance flashed over my body like lightning over a lightning rod. The gleam from her flesh slew my soul with magic spells. I looked at woman with similar eyes as I did the Bible or fairy tales and I quivered before this mystery: woman, so entirely cabalistic in her manner of being, was my dreamland. But the deeper that I dug into the hiding places of mortal nature, the more barren became the mysterious land of my dreams; finally nothing else appeared to me but the bare mountains of the moon, which glow like red-hot showers of iron smelting in the fires of the sun. Whereas woman had at first appeared to me as the Bible, I discovered now that she was nothing but a textbook on homeopathy. A woman’s beauty was no longer a supernatural fairy gleam, but the external skin of the life of her passions: her attractiveness stands in direct proportion to her nymphomania. The puzzle had become a petty card trick, the mystery a ballad whistled in public squares.
Women have appeared to me in visions as I sat there by The Way, meditating. They came in huge groups and long caravans, came laughing, came singing, and took their places on the road before the eyes of the sage. There they spun on their heels and stopped in the midst of the dance, with one foot on the ground and the other in the air in pose orridamente oscene. I have seen them all and know them all. I have seen the first Eve and the last, the women who lived before the Flood and after the Flood, women from the east, women from the west, women in Paris, women in Rome, thousands of women, tens of thousands of women, all the women in the world. Women are the same everywhere. I have seen young women who were so succulent from love and fertility that one’s hands became damp by touching them; they were wondrous like the fog in Laugardalsskógur on a warm spring morning. I have seen other women who were as elegant as amber, woven of moonlight and algal gloss, who understood before any words were spoken and saw before anything was shown; women who were attuned to my most hidden thoughts like magnetic currents and quivered before my glance like young deer shying at a whistling in the forest. I have seen women who were sinewy, strong, and nimble, like wild beasts from primeval jungles, their hands like tongues of fire, long, slender, and poisonous, as if they were made to claw deeply into the flesh of martyrs and saints. I have seen women with gentle smiles, calm and dreamy like summer-green valleys in the mountains, replete with luxurious growth like sedge-grown meadows in midsummer; their fire burned mildly and tranquilly, like light over a baby’s cradle on the feast of Saint Þorlákur, the day before Christmas. I have seen women who raged like prairie fires, supple women and women deranged, fleet like gazelles, dressed to kill, hot and fuming like mares pulling the Pharaoh’s wagon, their Venus breasts laden with lustful terrestrial power. I have seen women who were plump like loaded trawl nets; their bodies glossy like soft-paste porcelain, the folds of their skin hiding layers of fat five fingers thick, like porkers; in their drowsy glance there appeared abominable, slothful aphrodisiac dreams; they could have been roasted and eaten. And I have seen a four-thousand-year-old maiden from Egypt; she is housed in the British Museum, sits there unmoving, completely naked, on display for one and all to see. Her breasts are like moldy raisins, her hair most like the hurds on a twenty-five-aurar doll, her mouth a black rift like a crack in tree bark; her nose has fallen off, her eyes are two black hollows, her skin resembles a strung-up, soot-strewn liverwurst wrapping.
39.
What especially captured my attention when I walked for the first time into the chief cathedral of the Christians, Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, was when I read those ludicrous warnings on the doors, written in four languages: “Vietato l’ingresso alle signore indecentemente vestite,” “Immodestly dressed women refused entrance.”
The inscription “Jesus Nazarenus Rex Judæorum” was only written in three languages, I thought.
Posted on the cathedral door in Florence is a detailed set of regulations concerning how female visitors there are obliged to conceal their flesh. They may not be bareheaded. Bareheaded women, garçonnes,35 customarily borrow the hats of the men accompanying them before they enter the church. Women’s dresses must reach some distance below the knees – anything higher than that comes from the Devil. They may not be cut lower than two inches below the neck, so as to remind no one of the Rococo period. The sleeves must reach at least midway between the wrists and the elbows. Finally a woman must not be clothed in anything transparent – otherwise the regulations would be worth little!
But when I started to think about it more carefully, I realized that it is not a question of vanity that a woman is obliged to conceal her flesh as carefully as possible if she would dare to enter the temple of God. A woman is, namely, neither more nor less than the most dangerous rival of God and competitor in the contest for a man’s soul. There are two divine powers in our earthly existence, and both are engaged in a tug-of-war over a man’s soul. On the one hand is God, as he is called, the limit of man’s spiritual desire; on the other hand is a woman’s flesh. Both love man in their own way; neither wants to be a spare horseshoe; both demand to possess him entirely, possess him in body and soul. More correctly put, man has only two choices when the time comes for him to choose: God or woman. There are no other roads than the broad one that leads to Hell, as Jesus Christ worded it so delectably and so ruthlessly, and the narrow one that leads to perfection.
If he makes woman his reality, God will become to him an unreal poetic fancy, at the most a Bible bound in sharkskin, something showy that he moves along with his clock into the temple that he has built for his woman and that he names his home. If he chooses God, woman becomes for him an image of the perishable world; he views her as an emissary of vanity, a personification of the illusion.
Most of the songs in the world have been sung to these two lords of Heaven and Earth. There are various opinions concerning which were more beautiful, but certainly those that were sung to God are fadingly few in comparison to the enormous quantities that have been sung to woman. Every seventh day men go before the Lord, worship him like a magnificent but unreal poetic vision; for the other six days they lay their offerings at the altar of woman. Very few men sacrifice one night of their lives to keep vigil in the sight of the Lord; most offer woman all the nights of their human existence.
In my childhood I roamed throughout my father’s house, f
ull of mystic inspirations and love poems. Here and there throughout my native city I had my own sanctuaries, at least twelve as sacred as the Stations of the Cross are to the faithful, on streets where my beloved darlings had their homes. I composed verses about the chimneys on their houses, and the poor people in the cellars of those houses became more remarkable than other folk for living under the same roof as my Hallas, Huldas, and Svafas. Man is a polygamous animal. The love poem that I composed for one was intended for all.
I gave devout consideration to the type of reverence accorded to women. Men kissed her hand when they greeted her. In her ears they whispered the best things they could think of, the most beautiful things they knew. Men took care not to contradict her and paid more attention to what she said than to their own male kindred, even if what she said was pure nonsense. The more beautiful she was the more greedily men accepted every scatterbrained remark that blew from her lips. Men took her by the hand and helped her out of the car, led her up the steps and opened the door for her, sought to become her servants – even the wisest men. Men presented her with the most precious gifts, diamonds, ivory, feathers and furs, gold, incense, and myrrh. Men built houses and palaces for her and planted fruit trees in her gardens; men swamped her with beautifully veneered furniture, costly instruments, artists’ masterpieces, tableware of porcelain and precious metals, Oriental rugs, antique silver, terra-cotta pitchers. And the poets sang for her their fairest odes; they adored her far beyond the Lord, yes, beyond Dionysus himself, raised her above the clouds, beat their breasts before her, paraded in front of her in sackcloth and ashes, tore out their hair, turned somersaults to her glory, and contorted themselves like the burlesque clown before the Virgin Mary in Anatole France.
It is a pitiable man who cannot content himself with any illusion, because he is much too strong to live among men. I am one of those strong, pitiable men: the hymns that have been sung to love are nothing but lies, hypocrisy, cant, baby talk, dupery, swindle, and bluff. Poetry, courtesy, all of this adoration, all of this creeping before a woman’s feet: flowery obscenity, obsession du sexe. The poems and blandishments, kisses on the hand and bowing before her, all of this is for only one goal.
Love is so bound to a man’s genitalia that a castrated man cannot feel it, a phenomenon so dependent on nutrition that a man who fasts is independent of its movements. It has been scientifically proven that a man and a woman who pledged each other their love for life will hate each other like devils after being starved in the same little room for half a month. It is the same story that Jóhann Sigurjónsson tells in the play about Fjalla-Eyvindur and his wife, the most profound drama written in a Nordic language.36
For some time I tried to imagine that there did in fact exist the thing that lyrical souls name Platonic love. But I have also seen to the bottom of the clamor about that.
It is true: easily awoken in men is admiration and enthusiasm for things that reveal to him spiritual beauty and higher dignity; noble love exists, love for God and men, ideals, and a better world. And spiritual sympathy exists between two souls who share the same God. But love is limited by sex. It is impossible to raise love above nature. On the other hand it might be said, concerning Platonic love, that it certainly exists – except between a man and woman. It is possible to love the Virgin Mary or Mona Lisa in a platonic way, like the thief who stole the latter from the Louvre one year, because Lisa is a picture and Mary a fairy tale. Those men are conceivable who fall in love with the “the idea of girlishness,” which is a phrase that has been applied to one of Marcel Proust’s characters,37 who worship female portraits in fashion papers, even love flies, in one type of scarcely definable zoophytical eroticism, like the man in the story by Hamsun. It must be possible to love a telephone pole in a Platonic way – a woman never. A man loves and will love a woman because of her physical form, as Dr. Weininger puts it in one place in a more candid and coarse way than I care to repeat.
40.
In the kingdom of the lie and hypocrisy there is certainly no more heinous crime than to speak of love and woman without beating around the bush. Whoever has the nerve to speak of love and woman in any other language than lyrical gibberish “spoils youth,” “sets fire to the foundation of society,” is a “wolf in the fold, an obscene rogue, a misanthrope,” and is either accused of indecency or declared insane, because one of the chief pillars of this kingdom is formed of the lies inherited from savagedom concerning the relationship between the sexes. If someone accuses society of having, as far as laws against exposure of children are concerned, no other goal than to produce cannon fodder for the enemies of mankind, encourages women to sublimate their femininity, and considers childbearing justifiable when the child is deposited like living payment in a welfare fund of the aggregate, then all of the world’s hereditary lies go into a kind of bovine rut and savagedom devours that person with its fiery red jaws. The man who demands that women be something other than and more than sexual beings and childbearing machines is a pervert and a lunatic!
Ownership of women is the basis of all ownership.
Society is founded upon relics of tribal organization: the home, the family, and, as the cornerstone, man’s ownership of women. And it is for this petty kingdom of his, built around his idol, woman, that a man fights. During times of peace one competes against all and all against one, and society is a bubbling witches’ brew of “free-market competition,” but during times of war those who profit from the ordering of society, the power-holders, trumpet the call of the fatherland, and the citizen sets out for the field of battle, filled with false hopes of conquest, fame, spoils, and every other conceivable emolument that he can lay on the altar of his wife.
But the World War was a great blessing, although a costly one. Nothing has focused man’s critical faculties so much upon the millenial lies and deceptions of white society. The war taught men, among other things, how to live without women for four years, and to stare death in the face. Men took deep, long looks at themselves during those years.
It is proven better with each passing day that the school of the war was not worthless. Contemporary man no longer worships woman in the same blasphemous way as before; the basis of bourgeois society, ownership of women and the home, has lost validity in his eyes. His understanding of society has matured more in four years than it ever did in four centuries – in the direction of a socialist ideal. He has come to understand little by little that the health of the multitude is of far more value than the middle-class hearth, the value of culture higher than the value of women. And women will be forced to make one choice: to wake from their sexual giddiness, to rise against the spirit of the past that has pricked them with sleep-thorns, to dedicate their lives to the cultural values of the new world. Children are no longer raised under sooty rafters as soldiers of a petty kingdom; the children of modern man are raised by the great aggregate household; on the ruins of family life the communist state builds its magnificent nurturing sanctuary, where the child’s soul gains the chance to connect itself to the collective soul of mankind, the brotherhood.
We squatted in the trenches for four years, say veterans of the Great War. The mud reached up to our knees, rockets whined relentlessly over our heads, we suffered more torments than the condemned in Hell, and we thought of our women back home. We blessed those women who guarded our hearths, commending us to God in their prayers. We fight for you who endure at home, we thought. For your sake we long to become heroes; for your sake we undertake the most terrifying mortal trials.
We consoled ourselves by thinking that they were taking part in our lot in their thoughts; that they waited expectantly for all the news of the war, were sincerely grateful to us for our willingness to sacrifice. We were eager for the reunions, for the moments when they would lay their heads under our cheeks and would listen in blessed love-filled devotion to our stories of feats of prowess, as faithful as Odysseus’ wife.
But what really happened?
We came home exhausted like ol
d jades, with slackened vitality, shattered nerves, distraught dispositions. And do you think then that the women cared to sit at our knees to hear about the war? No, good fellows, they didn’t care a bit about our recent sorrows; they yawned sullenly as soon as we recounted our adventures at Marne or Verdun; they wanted for Heaven’s sake not to hear about our victories or defeats, let alone the terrors that we had faced day and night for four years while they sat idle by the fireside at home. Is anyone such a child as to believe what the great poets of the fatherland have written in books, that they blanketed us with tender passion and comforting affection? No, good gentlemen, they wanted to drink and dance. They asked us for new dresses and made us take them to glitzy nightclubs where existence was crystallized in the shimmy and the fox-trot. And there they introduced us to young gallants with monocles, waxed hair, and manicured nails. These were the lovers whom they had taken while we were abroad, while we danced with the Devil in the mud on the champ d’honneur. Before we left we forgot to girdle their thighs with chastity belts, as men did during the Crusades.
The Great Weaver From Kashmir Page 13