The Eldritch Evola & Others
Page 20
—a bit of a letdown, in comparison with passage at the beginning:
I have always been falling, falling, falling, but only lately have I had the opportunity to reject and utterly erase all of the faux-scenery in my sight that ever led me to assume the existence of a ground under my feet. I am now a burning, falling man, hurtling through a heartless void, but falling is no different from flying when there’s nothing substantial beneath you. To be aware that one is sinking forever may be a disconcerting feeling at first, but it soon becomes a pleasant, even a blissful condition. To float into eternal nothingness is to be truly free. (p. 9)
It’s a really remarkable image, recalling, perhaps, one more cinematic analogue: the bravura opening of Scorsese’s Casino (and recently reprised by the opening of Mad Men): Robert De Niro as Ace Rothstein, falling endlessly through a blaze of light composed of the flames of a car bomb, Las Vegas neon and Hellfire.
Nowicki’s “hero” presumably dies, but the world goes on without him (quick, name one of the 9/11 terrorists) while Rothstein improbably survives—his kind always land on their feet—but it is a living death; everything he loves, from his wife to Vegas itself, having died already.
For Nowicki, as for the producers of Mad Men, this is probably the best we can hope for. At this stage of the Kali Yuga there aren’t even any tigers to ride; perhaps we can convince ourselves that our falling is really flying after all.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
January 23, 2011
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James J. O’Meara was born in Detroit, educated in Canada, and now lives in an abandoned glove factory in America’s Rust Belt. From atop this crumbling remnant of America’s industrial might, he broods with morose delectation over the inevitable reappearance of the hordes of White youth known to history as the Männerbünde, or Wild Boys. His periodic bulletins on their activities appear on his blog, Where the Wild Boys Are (http://jamesjomeara.blogspot.com/). He is the author of The Homo and the Negro: Masculinist Meditations on Politics and Popular Culture, ed. Greg Johnson (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2012). His articles and review have also been published by Counter-Currents/North American New Right, Alexandria, FringeWare Review, Aristokratia, and Judaic Book News.
Notes
[←1]
Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, trans. Guido Stucco (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1995). See also Evola’s “My Explorations of Origins and Tradition,” The Path of Cinnabar: The Intellectual Autobiography of Julius Evola, trans. Sergio Knipe (London: Arktos, 2009).
[←2]
Thomas F. Bertonneau, “Against Nihilism: Julius Evola’s ‘Traditionalist’ Critique of Modernity,” http://www.counter-currents.com /2010/12/against-nihilism-julius-evolas-traditionalist-critique-of-modernity/
[←3]
H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu.”
[←4]
Michel Houellebecq, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life
, trans. Dorna Khazeni, introduction by Stephen King (London: Gollancz, 2008).
[←5]
W. H. Müller, Polaria: The Gift of the White Stone (Las Vegas: Brotherhood of Life Books, 1997).
[←6]
http://hermetic.com/bkwyrm/readone.php?recordID=00124.004
[←7]
http://hermetic.com/bkwyrm/readone.php?recordID=00124.004
[←8]
Müller, Polaria, p. 113.
[←9]
Müller, Polaria, p. 113.
[←10]
Alisdair Clarke, “Ego Death, Destiny and Serpents in Germanic Mythology,” http://aryanfuturism.blogspot.com/2006/11/ego-death- destiny-and-serpents-in.html
[←11]
Kerry Bolton, “Lovecraft’s Politics,” http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/08/lovecrafts-politics/
[←12]
Alisdair Clarke, “Fascism and the Meaning of Life,” http://aryanfuturism.blogspot.com/search?q=Fascism+and+the+Meaning+of+Life
[←13]
Erik Davis, “Calling Cthulhu: H. P. Lovecraft’s Magickal Realism,” in his Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (Portland, Or.: Yeti, 2010), http://www.levity.com/figment/lovecraft.html
[←14]
Erik Davis, “Cthulhu is not Cute!,” http://www.techgnosis. com/chunkshow-single.php?chunk=chunkfrom-2010-05-03-1521-0.txt
[←15]
The Portable Henry James, ed. John Auchard (New York: Penguin, 2003).
[←16]
The Portable Faulkner, ed. Malcolm Cowley, rev. and expanded ed. (New York: Penguin, 2003).
[←17]
The Portable Jack Kerouac, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Penguin, 2007).
[←18]
Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts, trans. H. E. Musson (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1995).
[←19]
H. P. Lovecraft Letter to Farnsworth Wright (July 27, 1927), in Selected Letters 1925–1929 (Sauk City, Wis.: Arkham House, 1968), p.150.
[←20]
http://www.heymiller.com/2010/08/h-p-lovecraft/
[←21]
http://www.gornahoor.net/?p=624
[←22]
H. Stuart Hughes, Oswald Spengler, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1992), p. 71.
[←23]
Supernatural Horror in Literature, Chapter VIII.
[←24]
S. T. Joshi, “Introduction” to H. P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2008).
[←25]
Published in England as Henry James and His Cult (London: Chatto and Windus, 1964).
[←26]
H. P. Lovecraft, Lord of Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters, ed. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2000), p. 179.
[←27]
H. P. Lovecraft, From The Pest Zone: Stories From New York, edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2003).
[←28]
Michel Houellebeq, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (New York: McSweeney’s, 2005), p. 32.
[←29]
Houellebeq, p. 37.
[←30]
Henry James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces with an introduction by R. P. Blackmur (New York: Scribner’s, 1934), pp. 59–61, 61–62.
[←31]
See the letters collected by A. Trumbo as “The Racial Worldview of H. P. Lovecraft” in three parts at Counter-Currents:
Part One: http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/09/the-racial-worldview-of-h-p-lovecraft-part-1/
Part Two: http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/09/the-racial-worldview-of-h-p-lovecraft-part-2/
Part Three: http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/09/the-racial-worldview-of-h-p-lovecraft-part-3/
[←32]
Lin Carter, Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), p. 45.
[←33]
Lovecraft, Lord of Visible World, p. 176.
[←34]
Lovecraft, Lord of Visible World, p. 198.
[←35]
Henry James, The American Scene (London, Chapman & Hall, 1907), pp. 85–86, 125.
[←36]
Henry James, The American Scene, pp. 131–32.
[←37]
Henry James, The American Scene, p. 135.
[←38]
Maxwell Geismar, Rebels and Ancestors: The American Novel 1890–1915 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953).
[←39]
H. P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction, p. 332.
[←40]
S. T. Joshi, A Dreamer and a Visionary: H. P. Lovecraft in his Time (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2001) p. 224.
[←41]
“Oriental Metaphysics”
[←42]
Letter to August Derleth (21 November 1930)
[←43]
Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop (New York: Harper & Brothers
, 1944).
[←44]
Henry James, The American Scene (London, Chapman & Hall, 1907), p. 86.
[←45]
And what greater irony than that the real nob, James, could make a living as a writer, while the impoverished Lovecraft sabotaged his career over and over again in order to keep up the pretense of being a “gentleman” amateur; one recalls more recently the uber-WASP John Cheever, who at age eleven “promised his proud Yankee parents never to seek fame or wealth with his literary career;” see Blake Bailey, Cheever: A life (New York: Knopf, 2009), p. 596.
[←46]
Quoted from Michael Anesko, Monopolizing the Master: Henry James and the Politics of Modern Literary Scholarship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), p. 42.
[←47]
1908, with countless reprints. I am using the one on pp. 337-370 of American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps, edited by Peter Straub (New York: Library of America, 2009).
[←48]
Ibid, p. 43.
[←49]
There is in fact a curious contemporary photo of J. P. Morgan which James may have seen while consulting over the illustrations in the recent New York Edition of his works, where Morgan seems to be about to gut the viewer with a hand, like that of the spectre in James’ tale, that indeed is missing two fingers. See Adeline R. Tinter: The twentieth-century world of Henry James: changes in his work after 1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), pp. 44ff.
[←50]
Again, Lovecraft, unlike the confirmed bachelor Brydon, actually had a wife, the Russian-born Brooklyn Jewess, Sonia Greene, who, unlike Harry James, was unsuccessful in business and left Lovecraft in New York, not with Brydon’s choice of buildings, one to remodel, (on Irving Place, not tenements for Syrian immigrants and the impecunious Lovecraft, surely, but for the declining remnants of Old New York) the other to indulge in nocturnal ghost hunts, but with a succession of tenements where Lovecraft would stint and starve while tormented by the “mad piping” not of Elder Gods but of Syrian immigrants.
[←51]
If not a knight, then the Fisher King, who was punished for his pride in combat with an unmanning wound, like James, or the mutilated fingers of the spectre. See Julius Evola, The Mystery of the Grail (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1996; Chapter 16: “The Test of Pride.”
[←52]
See, for example, Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines (Introduction générale à l’étude des doctrines hindoues, 1921); Man and His Becoming according to the Vedânta (L’homme et son devenir selon le Vêdânta, 1925); Symbolism of the Cross (Le symbolisme de la croix, 1931); and The Multiple States of the Being (Les états multiples de l’Être, 1932), all of which exist in excellent English editions produced and kept in print by the estimable James Wetmore and his press, Sophia Perennis, in Ghent, New York.
[←53]
See, for example, Ananda Coomaraswamy, The Door in the Sky (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
[←54]
See Julius Evola, The Hermetic Tradition, Chapter 1, “The Tree, The Serpent and the Titans.”
[←55]
See Man and His Becoming according to the Vedânta.
[←56]
Brydon’s egocentrism is to be entirely distinguished from the idea of the Absolute Ego which Evola had developed as a philosophical concept long before encountering Guénon. “In his full possession of power, man reaches absolute indifference, so that it makes no sense for him to act any more” [Evola, quoted by H. T. Hansen in his “Introduction” to Men Among the Ruins (Inner Traditions, 2002, p. 30). The latter needs nothing, from a feeling of already having enough, of being, indeed, above both fullness and lack, indifferent to both, while Brydon continually needs the approval of the world—“I am good, aren’t I.” He is dedicated to “preserve his good name,” while as Coomaraswamy observes, “Blessed is the man on whose tomb can be written Hic jacet nemo” [Here lies no one]. (A. K. Coomaraswamy, Hinduism and Buddhism [New York: Philosophical Library, n.d.], p. 30).
[←57]
In Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 616.
[←58]
The relevant chapter on Bartleby from his out of print monograph, The Wake of the Gods: Melville’s Mythology can be found along with the story in Melville’s Short Novels (New York: Norton, 2002).
[←59]
Men Among the Ruins, p. 220.
[←60]
See Guénon’s King of the World (Ghent, N.Y.: Sophia Perennis, 2005).
[←61]
As Evola notes, the philistine thinks that the realized man, the Magus, would be rich and exercise all kinds of magic powers, being incapable of understanding either that a disinterest in all such frivolity is a prerequisite for spiritual progress—“I would prefer not to”—as well as the “boomerang” effect of actions in the subtle realm having untoward results in this world; see Hermetic Tradition, Chapter 51, “The Invisible Masters”
[←62]
Readers of William Burroughs will recall that Bartleby’s prison was even then known colloquially as “The Tombs.” It’s true, that our last glimpse of Bartleby is lying in the prison yard, but again, the principle of inversion is at work here; the employer’s limited perspective can only grasp Bartleby’s position in a distorted way—Guénon, in Man and His Becoming, has some curious speculations about how the “delivered man” [the mukta] would seem to vanish from out three-dimensional vision—while also paralleling Brydon’s opposite movement, from his failed trial to lying on the floor, snugly cradled in Alice’s lap.
[←63]
On such “private associations” see Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, (New York: Holt, 1969), pp. 70–71.
[←64]
Whose biographer, Greg Johnson, is not to be confused with our own Greg Johnson here at Counter Currents—I think. For the fictionalized Hilberry see The Hungry Ghosts: Seven Allusive Comedies (Boston: Black Sparrow Press, 1974). Allusive—there’s that idea again!
[←65]
Did they succeed? Judge for yourself: Thomas Moore: Care of the Soul: Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992).
[←66]
Eventually he would sink so low as to teach “everyday reasoning” to freshman lunkheads.
[←67]
See Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Doktor Faustus, respectively.
[←68]
The hero of this vindication of Rhetoric over Dialectic turns out to be . . . McLuhan! The medium is the message—don’t be hypnotized by the content, take a look at the all-important effects of the context. I’ve suggested before that my own work be seen, like McLuhan’s, less as dogmatic theses to be defended or refuted (dogmatism is for Harman the great sin of worshipping mere content) but rather as a series of probes for revealing new contexts for old ideas.
See my Counter-Currents Interview in The Homo and the Negro as well as my earlier “You Mean My Whole Fallacy Is Wrong!” (http://jamesjomeara.blogspot.com/2011/03/youve-misunderstood-my-whole-fallacy-i.html). Once more, we find that education at a Catholic college in the Canadian boondocks is the best preparation for grasping post-modernism, no doubt because it reproduces the background of Brentano and Heidegger. It was Canadian before it was cool!
[←69]
The Wilson treatment is on display whenever some Judeo-con or Evangelical quotes passages from some alien religious work—usually the Koran these days—to show how stupid or bloodthirsty the natives are, while ignoring similar or identical passages in his own Holy Book. So-called “scholars” play the same game, questioning the authenticity of some newly discovered Gnostic work like the Gospel of Judas for containing, “absurdities” and “silliness” while finding nothing odd about the reanimated corpses—reminiscent of Lovecraft’s genuinely pulp hackwork Herbert West, Reaminator—of the “orthodox” writings. Indeed, some have sug
gested that Lovecraft’s Necronomicon is itself a parody of The Bible, its supposed Arab authorship a mere screen. This typically Semitic strategy of deliberately ignoring the allusive context of your opponent’s words while retaining your own was diagnosed by the Aryan Christ, in such well-known fulminations against the Pharisees as Matthew 23:24 : “You strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel” or Matthew 7:3: “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”
[←70]
Bad sci/fi hits rock bottom in the content-oriented department with the ubiquitous employment of the “space” prefix: space-food, space-pirates, space-justice, etc., frequently mocked on MST3K. David Bowie’s space-rock ode “Moonage Daydream” contains the cringe-worthy “Press your space face close to mine” but this is arguably a deliberate parody, while the rest of the song brilliantly exploits the Lovecraftian allusive/contextual mode of horror, moving from its straight-faced opening—“I’m an alligator”—through a series of Cthulhuian composites—“Squawking like a pink monkey bird”—ultimately veering into Harman’s weird porn mode—“I’m a momma-poppa coming for you.” Deviant sex and cut-up lyrics—another context-shredding technique—clearly points to the influence of William Burroughs, who created subversive texts based on various genres of boys’ books ranging from sci/fi (Nova Express) to detective (Cities of Red Night: “The name is Clyde Williamson Snide. I am a private asshole.”) to his alt-Western masterpiece The Western Lands trilogy.