Counter-Currents
1,798 words
Translated by Michael O’Meara
The Revolution, despite appearances, is not a democratic phenomenon. There are good reasons why the birth of a world symbolizing the dawn of a new human era is born from a minority – and a minority not easily defined. For it’s the fringes that produce the cultures of the world, their symbolic oceans, Christ as well as the Red Flag.
The fringes feel the desire and the need for a new world, for continents situated in the setting sun, at the end of sea space, the end of frontiers, of violence, of crusades – and not death in the shroud of their routines, not revelry in fat buns or fine sushi. The fraternity and springtime of this world is situated somewhere between the poets and criminals – the cursed poets who break the law just by wanting to be poets – the force they need to feel, before even the words – as it was with the giant Mayakovsky.
Even Dante, Nietzsche, and Marx were relatively isolated, and suffered its consequences – in exile, in solitude, in poverty in London, revolutionary thought being even less of a collective phenomenon. Dante’s work was born in the medieval universities, in heresies, in the secret societies surrounding the reign of the Hohenstaufen Frederick II — son of the Apulia, magician, Emperor of the Apocalypse, excommunicated king of Jerusalem. Nietzsche was similarly born from a philological school, infant of the Renaissance and of the age of iron and fire that was the 19th century – as to Marxism, it senses still the perfume scent of smoke-filled halls.
The fringes, like Villon’s prodigal, are full of rage, full of the force of great flooded rivers, of volcanoes – Pasternak feeling small in face of Mayakovsky. But this rage, this power, can flounder – sinking into criminality, into madness, drugs, and alcohol – for rage is like the wolf, sister of the night. Self-destruction is common among such siblings, despair immense, urgent, the terror from the most profound depths of the soul, the tears shed without reason, startled by the slightest noise – and the melancholy and nostalgia of other, unknown worlds, thrown back into a depression, by a fool, on the subject of Barrès, for example.
Just as Saint Francis caressed the cruel wolf, man — this being who carries the night’s darkness in himself — soothes with his words the violence of his infinite love, the furor of his indecipherable desire, of his aspiration for the secret, unspeakable One. I speak from experience, the last of a May evening.
Such beings are often born deformed, impotent; they don’t know what to do with the power in themselves, which consumes them.
Life in the microcosm reflects the heavenly drama of the gnostic narrator. The Devil desperately seeks God’s love . . . and God particularly loves the Devil, like his prodigal son, who’s gone off over the horizon. The world born of Lights and Shadows collapses in their opposition, like the tension in the glistering sails of a great ship – both images of God, the Shadow containing the star, and the Light woven from a secret darkness.
The fringes are nothing without love – this word that has to be taken in the most secret sense, as one turns the ear toward it, like a child listening to a conch shell, concentrating, frowning, to hear the great secret it discloses – the secret implicit in the immensity of things foiled by time, death, and tears. There is no Master without Marguerite, such is the Vita Nuova. ‘????, ???? ???? !’ ‘Lily, love me!’ were the last words of Mayakovsky. And it’s love at the level of the microcosm that is the collective kairos – this ‘passing instance when an opening appears which must be driven through with force if success is to be had’ – as it was in Athens, or the Florence of Lorenzo the Magnificent.
Flamboyant Princes, or gifted chiefs, like Pericles, want to sculpture the face of the world with the noble grandeur of their fatherland, imagined as the celestial homeland. They search for the men who will raise their works and thoughts to the height of the sky.
The certainty and finesse of their taste and their refined sense of friendship enabled them to surround themselves with women and men — of power, of virtuality — who became the greatest of their time. But it would be wrong to think that they could be without him; or him without them. It’s the force that never can be vanquished; it’s the root of their fragility. It’s Arthur and his Round Table; the King and his Court . . . An immense thought of the esoteric meeting of men, based on the Kabbalah, and a flamboyant Prince surrounded by works, that even today, give off a splendid aurora — the child born to the realm, as Frederick II emerged as an Empire: This new Arthur to whom graciously submits, herald of the spring. The man with the eyes of a serpent, before whose laughter the most powerful lords bow their heads. Aristotle raised Alexander.
Men do not possess eternity, they must ceaselessly renew their Alliance with it, living at the dawn and spring of it – this eternity that lies in the highest instances of their lives and history. Happiness is there as the solar face of Time, daughter of the Night. Just as there is an original sense of the revolution, there’s an original, cosmological sense to this word happiness, whose significance is intimately and secretly linked to that of kairos.
The prince, as a figure, is the desired spring, the desired kairos. I repeat these luminous words of Bulatovic:
– “Without king, there is no realm nor philosophy. Nor poetry. Nor hierarchy!
– What, then, is the King?
– The man . . . whose sadness is immense . . . The king is an actual being, a state of soul, the only being in our age that expresses itself as a metaphor. The king is the dialectic!”
The man whose sadness is immense is the man of the fringes and of the horizons mentioned above. The king is also the dialectic, in the original sense of the term, the clash of opposites in the image of the world that is the Word, that brings forth a new creation — the power of a new world. In the dialectic of the spring, there was held the Alliance of men, the sermon of the round table, the gathering of the disciples, the formation of the court, of the schools, of friendships. Thus the figure of the King, the apostle, the knight, the courtier – related to the mastery of the Word and the formation of languages, to the always recurring Pentecost. Primordial friendship is a world’s foundation – friendship is the conviction and the world lived in the dialectic.
The poet is first of all the word of the true King – and the language is his language, in the image of Adam, himself the image of the primordial word. The Court of the Sun King, the founder of our language, mirrored this archetype.
It’s respect, it’s the experienced man, it’s the Prince, who makes possible the slow elaboration of thought full of sap — red, honeysuckle, long-vines of thoughts — incredible blossoms, delectable perfumes – it’s the slow, studied discussions that give birth to new worlds, in the aristocracies of the soul. The infinite urbanity and gaiety of the Platonic banquet, mother of Greece’s great descent. The gallant comity of the medieval courts of love, mother of joy and the gaya scienza, the subtle thought that is always new. It’s Castiglione’s courtier, and even the world of Classical France, to which the refinements of the 18th century were heir.
A strict respect for the rules of collegial discussion are the basis upon which a collective intelligence is born – and the essence of the superior civilization. This respect is the golden thread that runs through the history of thought and language. These rules within the cadre of closed discussions have nothing democratic about them. Ramana Maharshi, in his interviews, is both the Master and the figure of lasting, unaffected courtesy.
In spite of all the Word’s misuse, there is no practical way to prevent virtual banquets and salons from elaborating a thought powerful enough to lift the slab on Europe’s tomb, now covered in sediment and waste, that was set in 1933. The printing press and the postal carrier, starting out as powers of renewal, made the Enlightenment possible. The technical character of the tools created a void in which the technical character of ideology could be fought; it happens for a moment, but can’t be sustained. Reality is dialectical, the modern can kill modernity, just as time designates the elliptical orbits of stars. This is evident in fact – not in reason or in lamentations on the ruins of now lost worlds.
Refinement and the refusal of invective doesn’t imply weakness – the man of the 16th century, or the gallant knight, resorted to violence in ways to which we’ll never be able. They covered themselves in human blood, like Socrates in combat. Invective, simply, is a weakness. The latter implies that our words lack ontological consistency, that they vary in significance. This means the discussion can’t create a common world respecting our highest wishes or those of our common inner sun, as embodied in the Word — it leads only to the triumph of small egos — at the expense of Word and Truth.
Why do we try so hard to persuade ourselves that we can think about any subject and have the right to say anything about it? If words are mere noise, if what I say is without importance, if I don’t WANT to think, if it’s not important to say it – such is the last word, by the Last Man, on freedom of expression. It deserves no respect. But the wise man, in the image of the sacred labyrinths constructed from commentary, always adds something in the march toward the sky — for at least one man, for one day.
The modern incapacity to engage in fundamental discussion gives us one more image of the world’s inversion, when the Word and the desire for spring have been instrumentalized into a desire for egoistical power and the infantilization of the world.
It should be treated like a dried up fig tree. In abandoning it, I shake the dust from my feet.
I can’t accept the sacrifice of hope for the pleasure of insult. A discussion that doesn’t create is nothing, like a disturbed nest of spiders. The Word is a privilege, and a privilege is not to be humbled.
Long live death! And long live the Unconquerable Sun!
French original: “Florence ou Athènes, ou le Verbe comme tissage des mondes” (February 2, 2011), http://agedefer.blogspot.com/2011/02/florence-ou-athenes-ou-le-verbe-comme.html.
8 comments
It’s strange for me the infatuation of Lancelot with the soviet poet Mayakovsky. The deranged poet sung the rape of the European women by the tough Russian peasants in order to create a new world and a new better man. And this long before another “soviet intellectual and movie director” the deranged Ilya Ehrenburg.
Anyway, the last words of Mayakovky before committing suicide were more likely “don’t shoot me comrades” (an old joke from the Soviet era).
Dreaming about a benevolent Russian Savior is purely childish in my opinion.
Nobody wants to assess how much Sovietized are really the Russians or how much the communists borrowed from the Tsars’ regime. And how much the Russians are identifying themselves with their Jewish and Bolshevik tormentors. They experimented a lot (Pitesti Experiment is an example) and they know how to do it “scientifically.”
Today the Russians are demolishing a commemorative stone in Kishinev, Moldavia because the stone told about the Soviet invasion and about the hundreds of thousand of Romanians killed (including children from the Children’s Hospital in Kishinev thrown through the windows or with their heads smashed against walls) or deported by the Soviets (Jews and Russians alike). And all these “liberation” deeds done in only one year of occupation.
The West will decry Katyn but almost no one knows or remembers about Tatarka.
And finally blaming the Poles or the Romanians (pretending to forget that the Russians had no shame in breaking any treaty (as those of non aggression signed with both Poland and Romania).
We see what’s happening in Palestine but don’t want to see what’s happening in Moldova or Belarus. We don’t want to see what’s happening in the Caucasus because we pretend they are different. Moldova is not different. It’s just like Northern Ireland. Only under a more devilish and bloodthirsty master.
The Russian menace is what keeps NATO and EU in one piece.
I know white nationalism should supersede petty nationalism and everything is about love. Love for what? The imperial invader and its deranged heralds?
“Go on home Russian soldiers, go on home,
Have you no … home of your own?”
If I may.
Razvan,
This is not a completely successful piece — due more perhaps to the translator’s limitations than to the author’s. But two points:
1) I know you hate the Russians — for good historical reasons. But you should know that what the Russians did in your country cannot compare to what the English did in Ireland for nearly a thousand years (several times almost exterminating us as a people). My knowledge of English perfidy in Ireland is very personal, having come from my dear mother, and from hundreds of books I’ve read over the years. But I bear no hatred of the English. The old antagonisms are completely overshadowed by the prospect of European extinction. The English are also very closely akin — blood and spirit-wise — to We Irish. To reject them categorically would be to reject part of my Irish self. There are also things I admire in the English, though they are not my favorite people. But most of all, the English, for better or worse, are a kindred people and now allies in the common struggle against the non-Europeans hordes threatening our collective existence.
“Hang on tightly, let go lightly.” The old nationalist disputes among European people has got to become a thing of the past if we are to survive. If We Irish can do this, so too can you Romanians.
Alliance with Russia will be critical to any forthcoming renaissance of our peoples.
2) Secondly, the piece is not about Mayakovky, whose talents and life we obviously view differently; he’s just an example. “Lancelot,” whose larger historical view is not exactly my own, has nevertheless a wonderful insight about the great transformative movements of the past. The nature of language, of the men and women who sit at the Round Table, who struggle and collaborate on the fringes against the dead Winter of the existing order — these are all things we have to learn and assimilate if we are to throw off liberalism’s death-embrace and inaugurate a new age of European peace and order.
It’s on this point that the discussion should revolve, not the historic grievances that continue to divide us and make us weak before the enemy.
Michael, I don’t hate Russian. I never did. And I hope I won’t. My library is a proof. Almost a quarter of the titles are Russian classic writers.
But the problem is what they did and don’t recognize and what they are doing right now, today this very moment.
I also know what the English did in Ireland and what they are doing today this very moment. And when I am listening an Eire Ogg song it gives me goose bumps. Not Mayakovsky and his Tatar delirium.
Romanians faced extinction too. Induced famine, deportation, mass killings, mass bombardments, you name it. Moldavians shed their blood for the tars and for soviets. From Port Arthur to Afghanistan and Cecnia. And they were sent not to defeat an enemy but to be exterminated. Exactly as the Irish people.
I understand every word you are saying and I have the same feelings.
But the Russians have to change themselves and get rid of their imperial mentality. I’m afraid they don’t want to save anybody. They feel that they should get back their Empire and have hundreds of millions working for them. If the Morgenthau Plan was sinister the Valev Plan was equally sinister. And the last one is more recent – 1964.
Don’t make the mistakes that C.Z. Codreanu or Horia Sima or Ion Antonescu did (when dealing with the Germans). Don’t hope in a disinterested help. Because it will cost everybody dearly. A French or an American may hope something from the Russian, but it will be a cost. Payed by somebody. Who would be this guy?
This is what scares every patriotic politician. He understands everything, don’t like what’s happening but he’s scared by the alternative. In 1989 Russian agents killed many people in Bucharest in order to install their own stooges (many of them Jewish – in fact their agentura was almost entirely jewish). We the Romanians being caught in the middle but covered by the Russian propaganda and mystification. Ceausescu got killed by the hands of Russians because the Americans are letting down their friends every and each Administration.
Can somebody guarantee which the Russian or English behavior will be? Or how will look the future treatise?
No. You can’t. Nobody can.
So I can extrapolate how it will be based on my people history – including the very recent.
We’ll do our fight and when the conjuncture will be ripe, we’ll be occupied again.
Maybe there will be enough Europeans to be saved and not enslaved by the future Empire.
“Don’t shoot comrades”.
I don’t know if the American military historian Larry Watts published any book in US. But the last one published in Romania, ‘With Friends Like These: The Soviet Bloc’s Clandestine War against Romania’ is a best seller. He speaks from inside the problem.
As for me me I want all the best for every European people, including the Russians. I want that all European brotherhood.
But I say that everybody should make steps in that direction, including the Russians. Toppling a commemorative stone doesn’t make any good toward a minimum respect and trust. Not love, but a minimum respect.
Razvan,
I liked your response. We differ, I share your sentiments differently.
On my side, I support Putin’s post-Soviet Russian nationalism because it resists globalist assaults on her sovereignty and identity. Globalists — the USA foremost — I consider the source of all evil.
I know that every great power has an ugly, hateful side to it — it goes with being ‘great’, I suppose.
We small nations — Ireland, Flanders, the Swiss Cantons, maybe your own nation, which I know very little about — we can afford to be virtuous.
But those with former imperial aspirations — and having still a responsibility to look out for their geo-strategic interests (which together, perhaps, are Europe’s interests?) — well, they — we both well know — can be very unkind to small nations that get in their way.
In cases of conflict, I always go first with my family and my kind — Ireland, Catholic Europe, Orthodox Russia — in about that order — but my primal loyalty is to Europe — North and South, East and West — to that biocivilizational family of peoples, languages, and gene pools native to the ‘continent’ — to the books and cities and countrysides that have been cultivated for more than a thousand years, to the common Indo-European mythic structure of their mind, to their great Cathedrals, historic styles, roots deep in Greece and in Greco-Christianity, in all those things that make these closely related peoples into a distinct civilizational style.
Well, at least it did at one time. The old civilization, in fact, is almost dead. And what’s left is now killing us. It’s time to start again.
New myth: Toward the Fourth Age of European civilization.
Michael, I believe in the same things as you do. Including the Russians.
What I say instead, is that the problem is much more difficult. And that Putin looks to be an imperialist using the many soft spots of the globalist dystopia. That Putin will use any mean and weapon to weaken and exploit Europe. It will not be a military occupation but an economic one. He likes very much the Schroeder type because it gives him money and power. He has no incentive to change anything Europe.
Romania is already a study case. We are paying huge amounts of money (more than Germany) for oil and methane. We have a large swath of economy controlled by Jewish and Russian oligarchs – always helped by people with great power in Moscow. Putin is always trying to impose weak leaders, left leaning morons (Schroeder types).
It is happening in other countries too. You will be disappointed soon.
I agree. But I would rather be led/subjugated by the Russians than by the Americans.
This is the real problem. Why is there such a necessity?
Why the common interest represented by the white nationalist idea i.e. peace and prosperity for every people off European descent is not enough – everybody living peacefully in it’s ancestral home?
This idea is not incompatible with the universal nationalist idea – everybody living peacefully in it’s ancestral land.
My piece of land and home is what defines me. If I’ll be forced to go it is the same as killing me or at least the best part of me.
In fact the globalist idea is born from a distorted logic. Every Empire occupied some other nations and after that in order to survive the diversity started to homogenize the populations. As the homogenizing effort grew so the inter-ethnic strife grew until the Empire was blown in pieces.
Here resides a dangerous paradox. In order to defeat forever a people maybe you need a forces ratio of 10 to 1. In order to thrive an exploiter – the exploiter/exploited should be 1 to 10 at least.
This is why an Empire can not survive. He is not able to really conquer but always ready to exploit – no matter how crafty their words are. What America or Russia are trying right now is to overcome this historical paradox. I.e. eat the cake and have it too.
But the homogenizing effort will remain exactly the same.
I’ve read very carefully your American history articles – and I loved them. You can generalize from American history to world history pretty easily.
So for me the Enemy is not America or Russia. But the imperial idea. Doing wrong for everybody. Natives and invaders alike.
The American and British pilots bombed Dresden. How they were able to live with such a guilt? Especially after they eventually discovered the Truth. How long the lies and the booze were enough?
The Russian stole and raped half of Europe. How a rapist is going home to his wife and kids? How long the booze and the lies will calm the guilt?
But the anger and sorrow of the defeated? How will pass away?
This infernal cycle should be stopped. I think here comes the real Nationalist idea. Truth and respect not formidable Emperors.
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