Why I Write

610 words

This is always difficult to assess, but from this distance three different spear-points become discernible through the mist.

The first is an obvious desire for self-expression–yet, as always, the nihilism of Samuel Beckett needs to be avoided, where, during one part of the Trilogy, such as Molloy, he declares: nothing to express, no need to express, a blinding desire to stain the silence. I think that the aporia whereby post-modernism eats itself needs to be avoided.

Nonetheless, I believe that fantasy or the phantasia of the semi-conscious mind is the most important vector, aesthetically speaking. All of my fictional work comes out of the anima or that part of consciousness just beneath rationality. All of my texts–like Kratos or The Fanatical Pursuit of Purity, for example–are dreams.

But dreaming to what end? Well, the essential starting point is a desire to overcome dualism in the ethical sense. This imputes the following: that all of my characters, in a short story like Origami Bluebeard, are neither good or evil. They are–more fundamentally–a mixture of both and they feed upon each other like raptors within a world of the uncouth.

Nor is this a purely misanthropic vision either, in that heroic vigor is just the flip-side of negativism. Character, at least as posited in these stories, is biological, prior ordained, morphic, and predestined–it is primarily Augustinean in theological terms, in other words. But contrary to most Judaeo-Christian estimations of Kultur, this is not observed in a woe-begotten or morbid state. Instead of these dark threnodies, the heathen logic of Robert E. Howard is more applicable. The current estimation is very much that civilization and barbarism are mutually exclusive, but I believe that you cannot have the one without the other.

In these stories, plays, novellas and novels–even the non-fiction dialogue, Apocalypse TV–I have attempted to overcome dualism within a non-humanist motif. This means that the characters are dolls or puppets in terms of Artaud’s The Theatre of Cruelty, at one level, but they are also much more alive at another. In most contemporary liberal novels–Iris Murdoch’s The Philosopher’s Pupil by illustration–only the villainous, macabre or negative specimens have life. Whereas in my efforts–such as a tragic story like Napalm Blonde–all of the characters bite and rage; love is voltaic, unpronounced and beyond the remit of good and evil.

Why is this done? Merely to provide a template whereby the battle occurs betwixt the super-human and the sub-human, per se, and it exists across or between individuals. My view is that immersion in dream-like or solipsistic material that has a different rhythm or vibration will turn Caucasian wimps into cultured neanderthals. For what is required is an attitude to life which goes forward towards the great noontide, open-armed, in the manner of the sun-worship at the end of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game.

I am not preaching anti-intellectuality, but extolling the licentiousness and chthonian violence of re-integration. The affliction which Indo-Europeans suffer from is entirely mental and subjective; they are chronically afraid of their own shadow in Jungian terms. If the civilization which their ancestors created has any future at all then they must overcome their resistance to barbarism; they must o’erleap it on the altar of high culture. They must dispel the cloud and lay out a future where Arthur Butz’s credo doesn’t have to be true (or not).

Truthfully, in this age those with intellect have no courage and those with some modicum of physical courage have no intellect. If things are to alter during the next fifty years then we must re-embrace Byron’s ideal: the cultured thug.

JONATHAN BOWDEN