The Great Weaver From Kashmir (18 page)

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 old 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.

Wife and harlot are two ghastly relics of the past, two waymarks on the same path pointing in the same direction, two congruent concepts. Both are products of a society that stands and falls with barbarian ideas of social order, condemned to have their loves turned into marketable commodities, of a society that has turned everything between Heaven and Earth into commercial wares, even the mercy of God and the boons of the virtuosos.

The harlot is the wife; the wife is the harlot. The one I buy for lifelong intercourse. All her life she receives beautiful clothing and food and drink at my table for being my whore. The other I buy for intercourse for one night, and on the next morning I give her one pound sterling so that she can get something to eat in an inexpensive teahouse and buy herself new shoes so that her feet won't get wet; for her feet are sensitive. What is the difference? One is hired by contract; the other sails in the wind; both give me the same thing. I am tied to one, and independent of the other. One is pretentious, the other content with little. One is fat, conceited, and stupid, like a
general or an archbishop, because she knows that she is in a secure position. The other is poor, penniless, and experienced in life, like an Icelandic poet. One is impudent, more hypocritical, and more vacillating; the other is meek, guileless, and unostentatious. One is highly esteemed in silly charitable clubs, and there does what she can in order to keep her little light burning in a society that turns half of mankind into slaves and paupers. The other is the image of self-denial, ever-sacrificing; she sacrifices her honor and happiness, body and soul, sacrifices her entire self to everyone, everywhere. One raises children that are later used as cannon fodder for the king, freedom, and the fatherland, or else that die of starvation and hardship. The other is a vagabond between the glass houses whence hypocrisy and hesitation cast stones, and where self-complacency grimaces in contempt.

It is nothing but invention when a woman, panting, throws her arms around the neck of her lover after he whispers a marriage proposal, and replies: “I am yours forever!” Such things never happen except in rotten poetry and fifty-aurar fairy tales written for maid-servants and the bourgeoisie.

When a man makes his marriage proposal the woman always gives the same answer: “What are you offering me? What will you pay me? Will I be given dining-room furniture, living-room furniture, and a piano? Will you feed me roasted chicken? Will you dress me up in ostrich feathers? Will you buy me a car?” Although I might only have the means to buy her an ordinary Ford, she would rather take the man who can give her a five-seater Fiat – and no woman can withstand a Rolls-Royce. If I don't feel like attending to her needs, she runs back home to her father's house. If I don't bring her a brace
of codlings tied by the tail for lunch and plucked fowl for dinner, she takes me to court. She loves me if I give her money, baubles, houses, musical instruments, expensive clothing, plenty to eat. And if I succeed in lying my way to the highest ranks in society, I become her best ornament. But if I offer her nothing but my love, nothing to eat, no perks, then it is hopeless to count on her fidelity. If I go abroad and stay away from home for five years, she stops loving me altogether. If I ask, “Why, though I love you, should I be obliged to support you?” then I am a scurvy rogue. But beyond everything else, she hates me and scorns me if my sexual organs are out of line. Although she might have promised me all her love with the most fervent words in the language, burning kisses, and glittering tears the day before the wedding, I can rely on the fact that she will let the first Don Juan that we meet on our honeymoon take her as his mistress. There are daredevils in the south who spend their lives in expensive hotels and have made it their sport and life's work to seduce newly wedded women on honeymoons. It is said that few men are more successful in their work than they are.

The older a man becomes, the more vain become the questions that he ponders, the more paltry the decisions that he makes. It is a rare exception to meet a man older than thirty who thinks. To grow older signifies a man's surrender to facts. He no longer changes water into wine, no longer gives orders, is no longer a creative philosopher. His
cleverness from this point on is confined to taking a position toward things as they are, settling himself down in such a way that the flaws he fought against most often in his youth cause him the least amount of trouble as possible. To grow older is to lose the nerve to try to untie the Gordian knot, to settle with whatever one wasn't able to conquer. The soul of a middle-aged man is solidified lava.

The time will come when I no longer contemplate pressing questions. I will be sucked into pittances and day-to-day quarrels, seated with professors, members of parliament, and other wretches, honorable-looking men with well-trimmed hair, probably mustaches, discussing in solemn tones “the way out of the straits,” considering myself important, and paying heed to no counsel but simmering.

The enigmas of life are stilled in my mind like water in a peat pit; they evaporate like standing water in the heat of summer. Those that never left me alone from morning till night and prevented me from sleeping at night – what are they now? The adventurous chapters in the first part of my autobiography and scarcely that, forgotten reveries. Instead my mind is filled with answers to questions that I never asked. In my youth I asked, What is God? In my old age I will write scholarly books on the details of court life in France during the reign of Louis XVI. I am quite satisfied to have forgotten the things that I wanted to know, and to know all sorts of things about which I never asked. My nervous system has reached a calmer ambit, the secretions of various of my glands have changed their function, my impulses have been stilled, the wavelengths of my thoughts curtailed.

Most pitiful is that this condition came over me bit by bit without my being aware of it. The spiritual hardening doesn't announce itself
soon enough to give me any opportunity to shoot a bullet through my head in time; my adult years inebriate me like Jesuitical wine. “Dear ladies and gentlemen!” say I, sweetly and idiotically. “I pray for understanding for the convulsions of my youth!”

The adult years that lock their necrotic claws onto a man's heart muscle appear to my eyes as the most fateful disgrace. It would be more fortunate to die than to be forced to take a seat on a bench with men who stitch up the rotten holes in society and urge the paupers to simmer their potatoes slowly.

“Good gentlemen!” I write, after I have become an adult. “We must all be thrifty and economize! The remedy for mankind's troubles is to simmer, simmer, simmer!”

And if I am diligent enough in preaching simmering, I may finally receive a medal of honor from the king for my “achievements in the service of the fatherland.” I will be granted the Order of the Falcon and the Dannebrog, the Order of Saint Olav, the Iron Cross and the Order of the Garter, until I clatter all over like a sea monster.

London, New Year, 1925. Dear sir. I have not yet reached the conclusion of the letter that I started last summer. Allow me to add a few words.

You think that I am a communist, a stubborn pursuer of political dreams. No, dear sir, I have given up. I couldn't damn well care less
about mankind. I am at my wit's end. I beg you to help me. I must be quartered – there is no other way.

Tell me, dear sir, what business does man have appearing in the light of day?

All winter long I have been struggling to nourish within me three inclinations that can overcome man: namely, homosexuality, drug addiction, and the desire to commit suicide. In these three passions I descry the highest ideals of mankind. Mankind cannot aspire to a higher ideal than to die out; life is the worst enemy of the living and “death is the victory over life,” as one of the sages of our time says.

It is a madman's rage to wish to struggle for the future or for the welfare of mankind.

And I would like to know, what comfort is it to me whether people live well? People matter nothing to me. People are completely different from me. It is nothing other than Christian blather, founded on faith in God the Father, that we ought to love our brothers and do them good. But I do not believe in God, and therefore it is entirely all the same to me whether mankind feels better or worse. The only thing that makes me feel content is to live for myself, not because I love myself, but rather because I despise myself and long to destroy myself. I despise people as I despise myself. I amuse myself with the idea of sticking my bayonet through children and breaking the teeth out of ravished Negresses with the heel of my shoe, like the European soldiers in Kattinou. I have the right to do all that I will. For to whom in Hell am I obligated if God does not exist? For what do I exist besides myself? If God does not exist, then it is a sin to live for anyone besides oneself.

A living being emerges into the light of day only to die. Why
should a man struggle to perpetuate his race when his only end is to die? A man is born into vanity and delusion; he suffers, endures, and fears for a few years, but each time the clock strikes, death has come nearer by one hour. My life is like a spark beneath a hoof. In one transient blink of the eye I appear on the surface of the Earth, and I am not even allowed to choose the color of the hair on my head. My heartbeats are measured, my breaths counted – just a few more times, and then it is all over. I am the husk where helplessness took up its abode, the quaking ghost in the faint glimmer between two endless darknesses, two sleeps. Why is man not commanded to cease from renewing his kin? Why this eternal work of Sisyphus, up and down the slope? A man sows but is never allowed to behold what he reaps, weaves and is clothed with derision!

Animals are of a dissimilar, higher nature than man; they are spiritless creatures, without investigative self-consciousness. What exists on our Earth that is higher, more perfect, and more holy than a snow-white sheep on a midsummer day? It is man's reward that he received as a cradle gift a tiny measure of passions that seek gratification. What should his goal be other than to gratify his passions and die?
“Il piacere é la sola virtù,”
“Self-gratification is the only virtue.”